Have you ever wished you were better counsel for yourself? Have you ever found it easier to give advice to someone else than to know what to do with your own problems?
You are not alone.
I recently watched two movies that illustrated for me the importance of self-coaching, self-compassion, and creating a little emotional distance from our problems. Both movies made me cry.
They are The Adam Project and My Old Ass.
Let me explain.
The Adam Project (2022)
Ryan Reynolds stars as Adam Reed, a time-traveling fighter pilot who accidentally crash-lands in 2022 and encounters his 12-year-old self. Forced to work together, the two Adams embark on a dangerous mission involving time travel, Adam’s estranged father, and a powerful technology that could alter the future.
Beneath the action and humor, however, the film becomes a surprisingly tender story about grief, regret, family, and learning to make peace with the life you have rather than the life you wish you had.
My Old Ass (2024)
On the verge of leaving home for college, 18-year-old Elliott spends a night experimenting with mushrooms and unexpectedly encounters her 39-year-old future self.
Future Elliott begins offering advice about what to avoid and how to navigate adulthood. But one instruction stands out: stay away from a boy named Chad.
As Elliott tries to follow her older self’s advice, she begins to see her family, her hometown, and the ordinary life she is about to leave behind in a new way.
What begins as a quirky time-travel comedy becomes a warm, bittersweet meditation on growing up, appreciating the present, and realizing that the life you’re eager to leave may be the very life you’ll one day long to return to.
The Shared Lesson
Each movie, in its own unique way, has a protagonist receive coaching, mentoring, guidance, and care from an older version of themselves.
And that reminded me of some advice I have both been given and frequently offer to others:
Sometimes, when we’re going through a difficult time, it helps to coach ourselves as though we were coaching someone we deeply love.
One way to do this is to imagine that you are speaking to your eleven-year-old self.
Ask yourself:
What would I say to my eleven-year-old self if they were facing the same trial or feeling the same things I am feeling?
What compassion would I show to myself—or to another child—in this situation?
How would I reframe my circumstances if I could create just a little emotional distance from them?
What would I want that younger version of myself to know right now?
You may not have heard of Solomon’s Paradox, a psychological phenomenon describing our tendency to give better advice to other people than we apply to our own lives.
But you probably know the experience!!
We can see someone else’s situation with remarkable clarity. We can recognize their options. We can offer them compassion. We can even see the ways their fears or assumptions are distorting their perspective. Then something happens in our own lives, and suddenly all that wisdom disappears. Part of the reason, psychologists suggest, is emotional distance.
When we are advising someone else, we aren’t quite as emotionally entangled in the situation. We can see things more objectively. We have enough distance to ask better questions and imagine possibilities that are harder to see when we are the ones hurting.
I have found that I can sometimes create that same distance by imagining that I am coaching my younger self.
I picture myself taking that eleven-year-old boy aside, without shame. And I don’t tell him that he should have figured things out already. Nor do I tell him to work harder, optimize better, or get his act together. I simply sit beside him, and I listen…with curiosity, then I ask:
What would you say to this kid if you really loved him?
Usually, the answer is different from the voice I have been using with myself. It is gentler, patient, compassionate, and, strangely enough, often wiser. Perhaps that’s because we are sometimes better at extending grace to the person we once were than to the person we are today.
Both The Adam Project and My Old Ass illustrate this idea in rather fantastical ways. Neither of us is likely to receive a phone call from our future self—or crash into our past self in the middle of a time-travel adventure.
But we can do something similar. We can create a little distance from ourselves. We can imagine the person we love who is going through exactly what we are going through. And then we can offer that person the advice, patience, courage, and compassion we might otherwise withhold from ourselves.
Sometimes the person who needs your best advice is you.
And sometimes the best way to give it is to imagine you’re talking to the eleven-year-old version of yourself.