Use the eulogy / future-self lens
Imagine how you’d want to be remembered to reveal the values you’d defend most.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Imagine how you’d want to be remembered to reveal the values you’d defend most.
- Why it works: Picturing your eulogy or your eighty-year-old self collapses short-term noise and surfaces what you’d actually want to have stood for. The long view strips out status games and momentary wants, exposing the values that survive distance. What you’d want said about you is a clean signal of what you most deeply value.
- Evidence: Practitioner experience / self-report; no formal study.
- Avoid: Listing values that sound admirable to others rather than the ones you’d genuinely want to be true of you — the exercise only works if you answer honestly.
Why it works
Picturing your eulogy or your eighty-year-old self collapses short-term noise and surfaces what you’d actually want to have stood for. The long view strips out status games and momentary wants, exposing the values that survive distance. What you’d want said about you is a clean signal of what you most deeply value.
How to do it
- 1Imagine someone who knew you well describing how you lived — what would you want them to truthfully say?
- 2Note the qualities and priorities that appear; those point to core values.
- 3Compare them to how you currently spend your days and mark the gaps.
What the evidence says
AnecdotalPerspective-broadening and future-self exercises appear across reflective and clinical practice as elicitation tools. This is a structured reflection method, not an intervention with its own outcome trials.
Honest caveat: A useful elicitation device drawn from practice; no specific evidence that the eulogy framing outperforms other ways of surfacing values.
Common mistake
Listing values that sound admirable to others rather than the ones you’d genuinely want to be true of you — the exercise only works if you answer honestly.
IX Coach guides the long-view reflection and then holds the gap between the values it surfaces and how you actually spend your week.
Practice this with IX Coach →