Counselling activity: the future-self interview

One of the most transformative shifts in my career as a high-school guidance counsellor came when I stopped asking students “What do you want to be?” and started asking “Who are you already becoming?”

That reframe, deceptively simple, sits at the heart of the technique I want to share here: the future-self interview.

Drawn from narrative therapy, positive psychology and career-construction theory (Mark Savickas’ foundational work on career adaptability), this approach has become one of my most reliable tools, particularly with students who arrive at my office feeling paralysed by choice, disconnected from ambition or convinced that “people like them” don’t get certain futures.

What is the future-self interview?

The future-self interview is a structured, conversational activity in which the counsellor invites students to imaginatively “become” their future self, typically 10 to 15 years from now. Then they interview that future self as if they were a real person. The counsellor plays the journalist; the student plays their own future.

This is not visualisation for its own sake. It is a structured elicitation technique designed to surface career-relevant values, motivations and self-concept narratives that conventional aptitude testing or interest inventories rarely access.

As Savickas notes, careers are stories people tell about their lives. And the future-self interview gives students permission to author a chapter before they feel ready.

The future-self interview: a step-by-step guide for counsellors

Step 1: set the scene (five minutes)

Explain to students that you’re going to do something a little different. Normalise the exercise by framing it lightly: “This isn’t about predicting the future – it’s about exploring what matters to you right now.”

Ask students to close their eyes briefly and imagine themselves 10-15 years from now, somewhere they feel settled, purposeful and like themselves. Give them 60 seconds of silence.

Step 2: conduct the interview (15–20 minutes)

Using warm, open-ended questions, interview the student as their future self. Useful prompts include:

• “Tell me about a typical Tuesday. What does your day look like?”
• “What problem does your work solve? Who does it help?”
• “What did you have to learn or unlearn to get here?”
• “What would surprise the 16-year-old version of you most about this life?”
• “What do the people around you say you’re known for?”

Critically, do not correct or redirect. If a Year 10 student says their future self is a marine biologist working in the Maldives, that’s data, not a fantasy to be managed.

Step 3: debrief and decode (10 minutes)

This is where the real counselling work happens. Invite the student to step out of the future-self role and reflect. Listen for themes, not job titles.

A student whose future self “helps people navigate systems they didn’t build” might be expressing values that fit social work, law, community development, UX design or advocacy. Label the themes back to them: “I notice you kept coming back to impact and fairness. What does that tell you about what matters to you?”

Step 4: connect to action (five minutes)

Link the themes to one concrete next step, not a five-year plan. This might be a subject choice, a conversation with someone in a field of interest or simply the language to use when filling in post-secondary applications. Career readiness is built through incremental, well-supported transitions, not single pivotal decisions.

From my practice: a real example

I first used this technique with a Year 11 student I’ll call Priya, who had been referred to me because she refused to commit to anything during subject selection. Her parents wanted medicine. She was drawn to drama. Every conventional conversation had stalled in the gap between the two.

During the future-self interview, Priya saw herself working in health communication. She described producing documentaries that explained complex medical issues to ordinary people. Neither medicine nor drama, and yet both. The insight unlocked three subject choices (biology, media studies, English), a work-experience placement at a health NGO – and, more importantly, a story she could tell herself about why her interests were coherent rather than contradictory.

No aptitude test would have revealed that. The narrative did.

Advice for counsellors using this technique

Hold the silence. Students need space to inhabit the exercise. Resist filling it.

Don’t anchor to job titles. “Doctor” or “engineer” are outcomes; probe for the values underneath.

Use it as a complement to formal assessments, not a replacement. Pair it with tools like the Holland Code or a values card sort to triangulate themes.

It works especially well with students from communities where career aspiration has been historically constrained – because it bypasses the question of permission and goes straight to identity.

Keep your notes and revisit them across sessions. Future-self narratives evolve, and tracking that evolution is itself meaningful counselling data.

A note on sharing this work

Career guidance is a profession strengthened by collective generosity. The future-self interview is not a proprietary technique – it belongs to any counsellor willing to set aside the checklist and sit with a student in the genuinely open question of who they are becoming.

I encourage colleagues to adapt it, improve it and share what they find. Our students deserve a counselling community that keeps growing and developing.