“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

I had this saying wrong. I thought it was: “The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best time is now”. But it came in very handy when I was explaining the importance of the quote. Even though I got it wrong (which makes me feel like my mother.)

The benefit of getting it wrong actually helped me to understand the real crux of the quote.

When you fuck up. As we do. Often. And you wake up from a 10 year drug / drunken filled haze, full of regret, sorrow, self-pity and repeats of ‘why have I wasted so much time??!!’ (Fill in your own regret / moment of realisation above.)

Stop.

Because although the best time to start getting your shit together was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.

We all think and perhaps even daydream about our future – how it all might look – and try to hope for the best. Many times we can’t see a clear path from now to that gleaming future.

The ‘Best Possible Self’ exercise was developed to help us visualize what we might be in the future and through increasing optimism and improving mood, help us get there. The best possible self is a researched and studied approach to changing our mindset, improving coping skills and elevating levels of happiness.

To understand how to implement the Best Possible Self Exercise in our daily routine, we will first discuss the origin of this approach and then move on to the instructions and step-by-step guide.