It’s mid-January, and New Year’s resolutions are starting to melt like snowmen. Reality begins to bite after the lovely winter time-off with the start of a new quarter. So what are we to do about losing our way? Recently a couple articles inspired me to get back on track by connecting one of a PM’s top skills, customer empathy, with setting and achieving personal goals.
First, The Atlantic published “Self-Control is Just Empathy With Your Future Self.” The article discusses the neuroscience between self-control and empathy for others. I found the analogy between our future selves and others to be fascinating as both are just as unknowable. If we treat our future like a potential customer, there’s a lot we can do to make sure we convert our future to a reality.
The New York Magazine also has a series “How People Change” with “To Change Your Life, Learn How to Trust Your Future Self.” This goes a step further by saying that not only do we have to listen and empathize with our future selves, we have to trust them. Make decisions that may have short term pain for increased gain for our future selves.
So, how can we take advantage of this connection between empathy for others and ourselves? We can leverage the tools we use to gain customer empathy, like an Empathy Map, and use them on a projection of our future selves. Make a vision for what you want the future to look like, and how you’ll feel when you realize those goals, to inspire yourself to make hard decisions today.
Another way is to build on the popular mantra of setting just three goals each day, and make them serve your future selves. For instance, each day you could:
- Do something that will help you tomorrow
- Do something that will help you next week
- Do something that will help you next month
Of course, you can tweak the horizon for each item to fit your goals, even going out to a year. The advantage is to make a simple way to set goals to incrementally progress to your future self. By thinking concretely about what you want your future self to feel for each time horizon, you can more easily make concrete steps to get there.
If you’re training a new Product Manager, you can help them set their first personal goals by creating empathy for the Product Manager they want to be, and then deconstructing that vision into actions that help them get there one day, week, and month at a time. Hopefully you also get inspired to set your own goals, or get your New Year’s resolutions back on track!