4.3 Assignment. Best-Possible-Self Exercise
Getting Started
If you were in a sales-oriented profession, you would likely have a product of some type to promote. The best salespeople know their product inside and out and how it can benefit their target audience. Those benefits become their core selling points.
But you’ve chosen the specialization of life coaching and positive psychology, where you don’t have a “product” per se, but instead offer a service. Your service will be your knowledge base and accrued experience that you will leverage to help others better manage one or more aspects of their personal and/or professional lives. When you look at it this way, you could say that you are your product. How well you understand yourself could be your greatest asset for helping another person better understand themselves.
In this assignment, you will have the opportunity to learn more about yourself by doing a self-assessment that is also a common coaching exercise called “The Best Possible Self.” It is frequently used in coaching to help increase a person’s optimism about how they are living and where they are heading in life. The exercise requires you to envision an imaginary future where everything has turned out exactly as you would have liked. Your responses provide insight into your values and your potential choices as you look into the future. You get a glimpse into your intentions, dreams, and possibilities and begin to think of how you might pursue them. This exercise has been shown in several studies to improve a person’s mood and well-being.
Not only does this self-assessment heighten your own awareness, but it also enables you to become familiar with a useful coaching tool that you can use when coaching others. In fact, you will use a modified version of this tool in the next workshop when you will conduct a practice coaching session with the person you secured for the practice session back in Workshop Two.
To get the most out of this exercise, keep a few things in mind as you do it. Think about your life right now in terms of your work, relationships, health, finances, living situation, and overall level of contentedness. Then, as you think about your future, ask yourself what you want to change. What would the ideal future look like in these realms? Be realistic, but also be willing to dream beyond the natural limitations. For example, if your future self would like to travel extensively but your current financial situation makes that dream seem impossible, go ahead and write it down. Dreams are encouraged in this exercise because the process of dreaming about a better future may lead you to solutions that would enable you to achieve those dreams. That’s where the optimism takes hold.
Write out all of your ideas without self-editing them and then go over your list to sift out those that seem most important to you. Once you have that list in place, you will do some analysis of your findings in a paper that includes an action plan and some integration with coaching and a biblical worldview.
Upon successful completion of this assignment, you will be able to:
· Apply a coaching method for enhanced self-awareness.
Background Information
The instructions for this exercise suggest that you write out your ideas in a stream-of-consciousness format. Though it may be tempting to skip this step, the process of writing down your ideas is central to the self-examination process. Writing in stream-of-consciousness means you don’t stop and edit your thoughts. You ignore misspelled words, missing punctuation, crossed-out words, etc. The idea is to focus on getting your thoughts on paper. Then, after you’ve done that, go back over what you’ve written and highlight the most important points to give them a leading place in your analysis of what you’ve learned.
Instructions
1. Read Chapter 8, “Applying Positive Psychology for Productivity and Well-Being at Work” in your textbook Positive Psychology in Coaching: Applying Science to Executive and Personal Coaching.
2. Complete the self-assessment called “The Best Possible Self.” To do this exercise, follow these instructions:
a. Spend a couple of undistracted minutes thinking about your best possible future self. Imagine your life as you would ideally like it to be. But be realistic. For example, saying you want to win the lottery or own your personal island may not be realistic. Envision what your actual talents, skills, and abilities are, what you want out of life, and who you would have to be or become in order to make that happen. For starters, you might focus on your future job, the scope of your influence, your ability to help others, your family, etc. Be sure to include insights from your character strengths and well-being surveys in this review. Remember, focus on the future, not on the present.
b. Write out your ideas in a stream-of-consciousness format. Don’t worry about misspelled words, punctuation, etc. Just get the thoughts out of your head onto paper. Be as specific as possible. This will enable you to get the most out of this exercise. Write continuously for 10–15 minutes.
c. Reflect on what you’ve written by rereading the entire script. As you read, highlight important points by circling, underlining, or using a highlighter to mark those points that seem more important to you.
3. Once you’ve finished your reflection, write a four- to five-page paper in response to the following:
a. Describe the emotion you felt as you streamed out your thoughts on your best possible self. What do you think this emotion is saying about your ideas and the future you envision for yourself?
b. How does your future self differ from your present self?
c. What might be keeping your present self from realizing some of your most sought-after future self’s ambitions? Be specific.
d. What specific changes would you want to implement in the next few weeks that would move you in the direction of your future self? Mention at least one that relates to well-being and one that relates to strength-based characteristics, based on the assessments you took in Workshop Two.
e. Which of the three coaching methods—problem-solving, values, or growth—did you naturally gravitate toward in this exercise? Explain.
f. Suggest at least one way that this Best Possible Self exercise could be used in a life coaching context. Explain the potential benefit(s).
g. How can you pursue your best possible self while keeping yourself grounded in true biblical humility? What does a scriptural view of self look like? Explain.
4. Be specific in your responses and use concrete examples from the textbook, supplemental readings, outside sources, and personal experiences to frame your writing.
5. Write your papers in APA Style or navigate to the APA Style Page(new tab) and scroll down to the APA 7th Edition Paper Template.
6. Use at least two scholarly resources in addition to the readings assigned in this workshop.
a. Use in-text citations and APA format for direct quotations and references to the readings.
