Here’s a quick activity that you can try: Imagine yourself tomorrow, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, 10 years from now, or any other future date of your choice. Imagine how you would like to be. Imagine yourself somewhere you’ve never been. Imagine yourself in any way you like, some time in the future.
Now create a self portrait that reflects how you see yourself in the future. For this exercise, let’s go with a drawing or painting. If you don’t have those materials readily available, then use anything you do have readily available…maybe it’s a collage from magazines or other materials. The idea is to create something relatively quickly (within hours or a day). Feel free to create more than one future self portrait. You could create one for each day of the week or one for each month of the year, or one for each of your favorite holidays. Place the date on your finished future self portrait.
What you have now is something you can put on your fridge, wall, mirror, etc. as a reminder of how you want to be in the future. Use this as a way to jump start your path to becoming who you want to be in the future.
This would be a great activity to use with Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, to help the client imagine how things will be different when their problem is solved and specifically what they will be doing differently, how others will react to them, etc. Rather than just verbally talking about what the future will look like, the client can become involved in creating a visual of the expected change.
I plan to use this activity for a presentaion in a counseling class on creative therapies and I believe it will help illustrate how creating a visual representation of the clients desired changes will help propel them to change. I also hope to raise the students levels of awareness about the use of art in therapy and how it can be integrated in through multiple theoretical applications to move the clients to tell their stories and take ownership in creating their new story.
~Appreciative Graduate student
@Kelly Wonderful…thanks for sharing and I hope the presentation went well!