How to Manifest Your Future Self, According to This Transformation Expert Who Went from $8 to Millions

It’s June, which means we’re officially deep enough into 2025 to have abandoned most of our New Year’s resolutions. If you’re feeling behind on your goals—or like you’ve somehow already lost the year—Mimi Bouchard has news for you: You haven’t lost the race. You can move toward your best self with activations.

Bouchard, a transformation expert and founder of Activations, an audio app designed to help you “activate your future self,” joined Rayna Greenberg and Ashley Hesseltine on Girls Gotta Eat to discuss how to manifest money, love, and the life you’ve always imagined and activate your best self.

“If you really want to change your life, you should get emotional about the fact that we don’t have that much time to live,” Bouchard says. “We get one chance at being alive. Activations help you live your future now in this beautiful precious moment. You can live the life you want to have now.”

It’s a bold claim, but Bouchard’s backstory gives her words weight. She’s written a book on the subject—Activate Your Future Self—and her app amassed tens of thousands of subscribers in just two years. On Girls Gotta Eat, she shares why she created her app, wisdom on living a present life, and how to act like your future self.

Activations for Your Future Self and Feel More Alive Now

You’re not meditating but activating 

Eight years ago, Bouchard was living what she describes as a completely different life: unhappy with her body, doing drugs, living paycheck to paycheck with just $8 in her bank account. She was depressed, anxious, and struggling deeply with what she saw in the mirror. 

Her transformation didn’t happen overnight. She started with self-help books and personal development work. The usual suspects. Progress was incremental. Then, a few years in, something shifted. Bouchard intuitively stopped meditating and started activating. She began recording voice memos on her phone to describe the future she was creating—having millions of dollars in her bank account, being in a healthy relationship, being in a healthy body. 

After recording her first activation, she started recording hundreds of them, and the results, according to Bouchard, were dramatic. Very quickly, her transformation went from zero to 100. Within a few years, she started making an incredible amount of money. The day after she described her ideal partner in an activation, she met her now-fiancé. 

So what exactly separates activations from meditations? According to Bouchard, meditations are great if you want to calm down, but activations change your energy. Bouchard says, “When your energy changes, everything else changes. Your self-image, your beliefs, your thoughts change. Everything changes when you change how you feel.”

Where meditation focuses on acceptance and presence, activation is about moving forward. You’re not just sitting with what is; you’re rehearsing what could be. 

Living your future self now

If the concept still sounds abstract, Bouchard breaks it down even further. The key, she says, is getting specific about who you want to become right now. The clearer the vision, the more  you’ll see the opportunities right in front of you. You’ll also naturally start making choices that your future self would make.

Bouchard emphasizes that change does not have to be that hard. It takes effort, of course, but Bouchard says transformation starts with how you see yourself, not your circumstances. “It’s not this far, distant goal in the future—this life that you want. You can live it now, while it’s happening,” she says.

Numbness versus feeling alive

Bouchard has a life theory: If you do the things that numb you, you are directly less alive. In her view, these are the only two states available to us—and we’re constantly choosing between them. Numbness quickens time, but feeling alive slows it down. 

She explains, “If you do numbing activities, you are missing your life. You are wasting your life, and one day, you are going to blink, and it’s gone.”

You can probably guess what numbing activities might look like for you, and the antidotes are equally recognizable but somehow harder to prioritize: deep conversation, being present, that post-workout high.

How to turn your life around 

Bouchard offers four simple ways to audit your life and become your future self. The best part is that it costs nothing. 

Do a life audit. Evaluating the people in your life. Bouchard had to cut many people out of her life during her transformation. “I realized that I’d rather be alone than with people who were not aligned with where I was going,” she says. “I phased out these people, and I immediately noticed direct changes.”

Adopt a quick bounce back rate. This is the speed at which you bounce back into the person you want to be after a setback or off day. The faster you can recalibrate, the more momentum you maintain. 

Act as if you’re already your future self. Bouchard says, “You don’t need to be in the perfect situation, the perfect time, or the perfect mindset, to act like your future self. You just have to do it in everyday moments.”

Reduce your time staring at a screen. Cut mindless scrolling out of your life. Science shows that endless scrolling causes your brain to disassociate. Instead, Bouchard says to limit screen time and focus on being present.

For more advice on how to transform your life, follow Bouchard on Instagram, listen to her podcast, ACTIVATE, and order her book.