“If you could give your future-self any advice, what would it be?”
Right now, Clinique is challenging millenials to ask themselves a question: “If you could give your future-self any advice, what would it be?”
The #FaceForward campaign flips the usual conversation (“what advice would you give your past self?”) and encourages women to break boundaries, challenge themselves, and reach their goals. To #FaceForward toward the future, if you will ;)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this question recently, and I think that if I could only give my future self one piece of advice, it would be this:
Keep saying YES.
Keep saying yes is the mantra that I’ve been operating on since the summer (paired with my old standby, GO HARD), and it has inspired and encouraged me every single day since then. To me, it means be better than you are — not to be better than your peers, but to be better tomorrow than you are today. It means saying yes to new opportunities and challenges, no matter how scary, and operating in a way that would make your past self proud.
Together, “keep saying yes” and “go hard” are a way to conduct yourself that leaves you always striving: if, at any given point, your very best is the comparison point for not good enough, then there’s always something pushing you.
It was easy to keep saying yes while I was away, but it’s more difficult now that the summer is over. When you’re no longer surrounded by creatives and cityscapes and beauty left and right, staying on track is like trying to get your six glasses of water a day: hard, likely to make you pee a lot, and as gruelling as it is rewarding.
Here on the prairies, everything is so far, and the ground beneath my feet never feels quite like home. I find that I struggle to stay inspired, but I’ve been keeping my little #FaceForward on my desk to remind myself to look to the future and keep saying yes.
And you know what? I think it’s helping.
