Today, I’m sharing a conversation I had with Dr. Anna Roth in which we break down how to think about the future. We designed the conversation around helping you find ways to reflect on where you’ve been, where you’re going, and what you want for the future by learning how to manifest.

In the episode, we talk about how to process the surprise, disappointment, or confusion that happens when we reflect on time. Then we pivot into how we can begin to envision a future self in this new decade that leaves us open to possibility and open to allowing life, versus holding onto the idea of who we are so tightly. Read an excerpt from our interview below, and listen to the entire episode on The Wit & Delight Podcast!

Enjoy hearing from Dr. Anna Roth? You can listen to our first episode with Dr. Anna Roth here, where we discuss the topic of therapy, our second episode here, where we discuss the topic of natural beauty, our third episode here, where we discuss the topic of ADHD, and our fourth episode here, where we discuss gratitude, difficult relationships, and the holiday season.

Name: Dr. Anna Roth
Occupation: Holistic PhD Psychologist and Registered Yoga Teacher
Website: Dr. Anna Roth
Instagram: @drannaroth
About Anna: Dr. Anna Roth is passionate about integrative and embodied treatment approaches to mental health. She thrives at identifying root causes and providing strategic intervention that is as multidimensional as the humans she helps. She is currently working in private practice in Minneapolis and accepting new clients both in-person and online. To learn more about her modern mental health program for women, click here.

If you are interested in connecting with Dr. Anna Roth, please learn more about her Truth Tellers Program. Dr. Anna is offering an exclusive discount to W&D readers and podcast listeners for the Truth Tellers Program

• First month free for the online program using code: W&D
• $50 off the in-person offering using code: W&D1

I think we crave benchmarks or something to judge our progress against. But what’s to say that where you’re at right now isn’t exactly where you’re supposed to be? Because you’re gonna zip past other things where other people took their time. How do we come to peace with where we’re at?

Dr. Anna Roth: Where I go with that question is that we can either run from stuff or face it. I could imagine myself answering that question in my twenties. I was filling my life with grad school and moving to all these different cities and doing all of this different stuff. But I was not dealing with some really core losses and I was relying on relationships to provide a sense of security. I wasn’t really facing myself.

So I think the question I ask is, to what degree are you facing yourself? To what degree are you intimate with what’s going on with you on a deep level? And that’s the important question versus what’s happening on the outside.

It’s a lot more comfortable to evaluate where I’m at compared to benchmarks that I know are acceptable versus looking at what’s within. That internal conversation is uncomfortable for me, you know?

Dr. Anna Roth: Yeah! It is for everyone. I’ve never met a client who doesn’t feel that way, and that’s been my experience, too. But I think my number one wish for anyone listening is that if you think about this coming decade, you ask yourself what you want to manifest—your house and your job and your dream relationship. And if you don’t have that security, that secure attachment, that secure base within yourself, it all feels shaky.

What does it feel like to manifest in a way that opens yourself up for possibility?

Dr. Anna Roth: Something that I was thinking as I was preparing to talk about this is about the importance of first making the space to reflect. To even start to tinker with these things, we need to slow down enough. We need to carve out some space to reflect. And I think many of us don’t even have that time. And I think that that’s one of the gifts of therapy is it forces you to sit down and reflect and connect and think about your past and make new connections.

Carve out some time to journal and reflect on this last decade. What went well and what didn’t go so well? What are you really proud of? What are you ashamed about? And see where it goes.

So I think that’s a good recommendation for you, wherever you’re listening to this, is to carve out some time to journal and reflect on this last decade. What went well and what didn’t go so well? What are you really proud of? What are you ashamed about? And see where it goes.

Yeah. I think that’s real. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t need to be a whole night. And it might feel uncomfortable, which is why it seems like a big task, but the act of scheduling it in probably doesn’t require too much.

Dr. Anna Roth: Right. And in terms of how we manifest, sometimes I have a conflicted relationship with that idea and that thought because sometimes I think people bypass themselves in this idea of manifesting. They believe they should just think themselves into it or just make it happen. But they skip their vulnerabilities or their unique struggles or their pain, and because they skip over that, they don’t manifest it and then they beat themselves up.

For me, I do know that there’s a sense of conflict with getting to this point in my life and having some nebulous idea of what it should have been that I can’t even put my finger on it. All it is is just discourse.

Dr. Anna Roth: It’s complicated, right? You have so many different feeders. One of the things I think is helpful for people to know about is this idea of cognitive schemas. It’s essentially the glasses we wear that are influenced by our previous experiences, by memories—usually schemas are persistent experiences that tend to color our experience of the world in patterned ways.

And we probably like to find those glasses because it helps us make sense of things.

Dr. Anna Roth: Well I’ll share with you what the domains are, because usually they’re not very enjoyable. One of the big ones is rejection—the glasses of rejection. So you are feeling defective, alienated, or mistrusting. You tend to see things that way related to performance, so you commonly feel like a failure or incompetent. A second is impaired limits, so maybe you don’t have good self-control or you feel entitled. Another is other-directedness, so you maybe are submissive, self-sacrificing, approval seeking, or recognition seeking. And then hypervigilance or inhibition, and that could be pessimism, emotional inhibition, or being hypercritical.

Yes! And I always found I was proud of those things, because I was going to look at every way something could go wrong so I could avoid it. But then that became my view of things, and I would almost view being optimistic as a negative thing, even though it’s directly related to being open to things in your life.

Dr. Anna Roth: But the thing is, we develop this tint of glasses for a reason. If you have pervasive experiences of being rejected or if you had to self sacrifice your needs all the time due to a mentally ill parent, or whatever the thing might be—there’s a reason they developed. But if it’s not unchecked and you continue to see the world in that way, you will not manifest what you want or you will not manifest something that challenges that because all you’re seeing is what confirms it.

Hear more of our conversation with Dr. Anna Roth here:

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Kate Arends

Kate is the founder of Wit & Delight. She is currently learning how to play tennis and is forever testing the boundaries of her creative muscle. Follow her on Instagram at @witanddelight_.