A Future Self Has to Feel Possible, Not Just Positive

If your teenager feels hopeful about the future, is that enough?

It is a fair question, and most of us want the answer to be yes. Hope is a gift, and I would never talk a young person out of it. But the research on future selves points somewhere more demanding. A hopeful picture of tomorrow, on its own, does surprisingly little for what a teen does today. What moves them is a future that feels reachable from where they stand, with steps they can actually see.

I have written about the future self before. In The Best Screen-Time Limit Is a Future Self, the subject was attention, and what pulls a teen away from the person they hope to become. This piece leaves screens aside. It is about how a future self gets built in the first place, and who is holding the pencil.

Optimism Didn't Predict Grades. Plans Did.

Daphna Oyserman, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, has spent much of her career studying how young people's images of who they might become shape what they do now. In a 2022 study in the Journal of Adolescence, she and lead author O'Donnell analyzed data from two groups of Colorado students, 602 and 540 teens around 14 and a half years old, and then tested what they found on 247 students from high-poverty communities near Chicago.

What mattered was whether a teen's school-related future self was plausible, meaning it came with concrete strategies attached. Those students went on to earn higher grades at the end of the year, with a correlation of .23. Students who simply expected good things for themselves did not, with a correlation of .08 that was not statistically meaningful.

Neither number is large, and this was not an experiment, so it can't tell us that plans cause better grades. But the contrast is worth sitting with. Optimism alone predicted very little. Optimism with a next step attached went with better results.

Picture the difference in your own house. "I want to work in medicine" is a positive future self. "I want to work in medicine, so I'm asking my chemistry teacher to go over this unit before the test" is a possible one. The second version reaches back into this week.

A Promising Trial, and an Honest Follow-Up

Oyserman also tested the idea directly. In a randomized study she published with Bybee and Terry in 2006, 264 eighth graders in three Detroit middle schools were assigned either to a short program built around future selves or to their usual school day. Among the students who took part, estimated ninth-grade GPA was 1.64 for the program group and 1.36 for the comparison group.

Fairness requires the rest of the story. When a newer, teacher-led version of her program, called Pathways-to-Success, was put through a separate, federally funded randomized trial, evaluated by Lai, in Colorado that analyzed 1,287 students in grades 7 to 10, researchers found no significant effects on grades, engagement or test scores. Oyserman's later work points to how faithfully a program is delivered as one reason results vary. Skeptics of brief school programs read results like this as a sign that early effects may not carry over at scale. Both readings deserve a hearing.

My own takeaway is narrower. A program can invite a future self, but it can't install one. The teen has to construct it, with adults close enough to notice what they are reaching for.

Whose Future Are They Rehearsing?

This is where parents have the most influence and carry the most risk. Teenagers absorb the futures we describe for them, and we describe them with love: the steady career, the right college, the path that worked for someone we know. Those futures are positive. But if a teen didn't help draw them, they rarely feel possible, because the steps belong to someone else. A young person can recite a borrowed future for years without ever believing they can reach it.

Nancy Hill of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her colleagues, in a study led by Do, followed 645 racially and ethnically diverse U.S. high school students for three years. Teens who reported early support from their parents, and who were satisfied with their school counselors, had a stronger sense of purpose a year later. That sense of purpose in turn predicted more confidence and action aimed at the future in the last years of high school. Positive relationships with teachers did not predict purpose in this study. The data are self-reported and correlational, so they show what went together, not what caused what. Still, the pattern fits adults who help a teen aim, rather than adults who aim for them.

Oyserman's work adds one more piece I find useful. In a study of 818 students in China, led by Burbidge, moving from primary to secondary school, those who read difficulty as a sign that something matters later felt more certain about who they could become, and the link ran in both directions. How a teen interprets struggle shapes whether a future feels open or closed to them.

Turning Someday Into Next Week

Ask what your teen wants to get good at, not only what they want to be. Then ask what one step this week would look like.

When something gets hard, say out loud that hard can mean important. Resist rescuing them from the very struggle that makes a future feel earned.

Listen for your own voice in their answer. If their plan sounds exactly like yours, ask again, and leave a longer silence before you fill it.

Let the picture change. What people come to a young person for keeps evolving as they grow, and a future self that can't move with them stops being theirs.

Conviction is built in small, specific steps toward a future you chose, long before anyone can promise it will work out.

So tonight, skip "What do you want to be?" Try "What's one thing you'd like to be better at by spring, and what would the first step be?" Then let your teen do the answering.

Research cited

O'Donnell, S. C., & Oyserman, D. (2022). Apt and actionable possible identities matter: The case of academic outcomes. Journal of Adolescence.

Oyserman, D., Bybee, D., & Terry, K. (2006). Possible selves and academic outcomes: How and when possible selves impel action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Lai, M. H. C. (2021). Investing in Innovation Pathways to Success. Grantee submission reviewed by the What Works Clearinghouse, Institute of Education Sciences.

Do, M. H., et al. (2025). Adolescent self-efficacy and orientation about the future: Longitudinal associations with family/school support and sense of purpose. Journal of Research on Adolescence.

Burbidge, A., et al. (2024). Believing that difficulty signals importance improves school outcomes by bolstering academic possible identities: A recursive analysis. PLOS ONE.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.