How many of you didn't have any future examples? About 3/4. And what happened when you added some in?
Ann: It was great! When I put future examples in, it changed my pres-ent. It just changed everything.
Can you be a little more vague?
Ann: Clearer. Everything I saw was clearer, and I could hear more clearly; it was more detailed, and associated.
Did that aspect of yourself seem more real when you had future examples?
Ann: Oh yes!
Does that fit for the rest of you? It gave it more juice, right?
Ann: More confidence, yes. More solidity.
When you imagine having a certain quality in the future, that is essen-tially the same process as what is often called "future-pacing," a way of pro-gramming a desired response into a future context.
Fred: I didn't find that future examples made any difference for my quality. I already felt so sure about it that future examples seemed kind of irrelevant. And then I thought, "What if I future-pace this into a different context where I don't normally think about having that quality?" When I did that, I got more confident in that context.
Great. Some of you had future-paced examples already. What hap-pened when you took them out?
Lori: Terrible. My future was empty. I felt as if I couldn't have that qual-ity in the future.
Bill: When I took away my future representations, my auditory thought went from, "I am this" to "I did that once."
Yeah. "I used to do it." If you only have past examples, the quality is likely to remain in the past, and not occur in the future. Future-paced exam-ples carry the quality into the future and at the same time they add to the variety of your examples, and give you more data.
Rich: After checking my future examples, I flipped it and went into the past. I went to one of my earliest memories, and Al kept saying, "And what about the time before that?" And I went back and back until it was preverbal. At first I was an adult going for positive states, so I kind of ignored the earlier childhood examples. But then I realized those were even more important than my adult examples, because they show that I was curi-ous right from the start, before socialization and all that. I am an enthusi-astically curious person. Now if you give me feedback to the contrary, that is going to be good for adjusting my behavior, but I know that I am and I was and I will be, because it is obvious that I'm always the same. I am a curious person. If I get feedback, that is just about something I did, but it has nothing to do with who I am.
Right. The stability of that quality of your self-concept is enhanced by additional examples that are distributed widely in both the past and future.
Many people think that a certain quality is only for people at a certain stage of life, so they discount ("not count") examples that are in different time frames. So it can be very useful to notice examples that the person rejects for some reason, and then explore their criteria for rejecting them, to see if they make sense or not. When people dismiss experiences, they often make hand gestures as if throwing something away, or pushing it aside, so watch-ing for those nonverbal gestures can be a big help in noticwatch-ing when this is happening.
One very important aspect of the self-concept is that it provides a sense of continuity of identity through time. By exploring these aspects of time, we can discover exactly how this continuity is created, and how you can enhance it. With this solid sense of knowing who you are, any information about a behavior that doesn't fit is only about something you did, not about who you are. You don't have to be defensive, so you can be open to the feedback, and perhaps even welcome it, since it is an opportunity to develop even more of the quality.
This distinction between self and behavior has been an important part of NLP for many years. When someone is struggling with a problem, it can help a lot to say, "Look, this isn't about you, or about who you are, it's only about a particular behavior that you have done, and want to change." How-ever, there is a huge difference between saying those words to someone,
Changing Time 69 and helping them develop their internal database in ways that make this dis-tinction clearly, and at a totally unconscious level, so that the person pre-supposes it. What you are describing, Rich, is knowing this distinction internally, so you don't need someone else to remind you of it.
In one sense the distinction between self and behavior is a bit artifi-cial, because as far as I know, your "self" is really the sum total of all your behaviors and responses, and a quality is a way of describing a certain set of those behaviors. If a person had no behavior, we'd have no way of know-ing what his attitudes or qualities were. It might be more accurate to say that at least 99.99% of the person's behaviors are working fine, so that pro-vides a solid foundation for working on the .01% that is a problem for them at the moment. But for most people it is much simpler and more under-standable to make the distinction between self and behavior.
Rich: Nothing changes now. It's way beyond behavior.
Yes, that's what identity is; it's something that is you. It is a state of being that you can exhibit in different behaviors and in different contexts, but it is a quality that you carry through time, independent of behavior or con-text. The more you have examples widely distributed in lots of different time frames and lots of different contexts, the more you can feel that this quality is an inherent part of yourself that is independent of outside circumstances.
Future examples are very powerful in making your self-concept much more solid and durable. That stability is a great basis for feeling undefen-sive and willing to accept feedback. However, you could be very open and willing to get feedback and still not notice it. I want to ask a slightly dif-ferent question. How will future examples actually make people more sen-sitive to feedback—not just more willing to notice it, but more able to notice it?
Sue: Well, I always want to do things better. I want to refine my abil-ities and behaviors to be more appropriate to who I am, so I'm always look-ing for how I can do that.
OK. So one of your values is to continually improve, and this alerts you to how you could do things better. I assume that might work by exam-ining something you did, and then perhaps making images of how it could be better next time, and then putting those better ones into the future.
But this is still not quite what I asked about. Even if you didn't have the desire to be better, how does the very fact of making future images affect your sensitivity to feedback information? When you create a future exam-ple of a satisfying attitude or quality, and put it into your future, that pro-grams you to respond in the future, just the way any other future-pacing does. That makes it more likely that you will actually be that way when that future time arrives. It also adds to your database and makes it more solid,
giving you a sense that this quality is part of who you are, throughout all time frames, as we have discussed.
However, a future example is also a prediction about how you will be:
"This is what is going to happen." A prediction sensitizes you, and makes it more likely that you will notice whether it actually happens or not when the time comes.
To take a simple example, let's say that you tell someone that you will drop by their house today at 5:05 PM. You are much more likely to notice what time you actually arrive than if you had made no prediction. If you had made a more vague prediction that you would drop by sometime dur-ing the week, you might notice if you didn't arrive until sometime the fol-lowing week, but you probably wouldn't notice the time of day. The very act of creating a future example makes it more likely that you will notice whether or not your behavior matches what you had planned. The more specific and detailed your prediction is, the more you will notice small dif-ferences in what actually happens, and the better your feedback will be.
Sid: I have future possibilities of everything, including the fact that this quality of myself may cease to be important to me at some point in the future. If I do a full future-pace of this piece, I feel limited and stuck, because I am committed to something that I don't have the flexibility to change any more.
This is very curious. You started speaking of "future possibilities," and that the importance of a quality might change. Then at some point you decided that you were committed to these "future possibilities" and couldn't change them anymore! I assume you can also change your future examples any time you want to.
When I create a future-paced example, this is only a plan that I make now, in this moment, for what I believe I want to have happen. At any future time, including a moment from now, I can always revise it. Making a firm vow at any moment in time means that you think you are smarter now than you will be in the future—either you expect to learn nothing in the future, or you expect to be dumber! Hopefully that's not true, and you will keep learning more as time goes on, and when you do, you can change your forecasts at any time. It doesn't lock you into anything; it just directs your attention to what you want to happen.
My future is simply my best idea, at any particular time, of what is likely to happen, and how I want to be, and do, and respond to events. That is always adjustable. Is there anyone here who has never adjusted a plan when new information came in, or your desires changed, or something un-expected happened? Future examples simply give me some degree of con-trol over what happens in the future by directing and guiding my attention
Changing Time 71 and behavior. Given that I want to be a certain kind of person in the future, future examples help me be that way. I think it was Alan Kay who said,
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
Al: I did something related to that. As I went into the future, I spotted pieces of it that I could adjust to make it better than it was.
So in the process of building some new future-paced representations, you reviewed the images that were already there, and identified some that you want to improve on to make sure that they would have this quality.
Lori: When I first put in future examples they didn't seem real until I juiced up the submodalities to make them more compelling.
Fred: I went into the future and then looked back to see what I had done. I noticed different things that I had changed to adjust the situation earlier, in order to get to where I was.
So you went into the future, what Milton Erickson called "reorienta-tion in time," and then looked back to see what you had done in order to get there. Many changes appear to be difficult when we think about doing them in the future, because of all the work we will have to do to get there.
However, from the vantage point of already being different in the future and looking back on the necessary changes as having already happened, it appears to be much easier. "Here I am in the future, where I wanted to be.
What did I have to do in order to get here?" That's a great piece that many people can use.
Fran: I future-paced that I would like to encourage people. And then when I future-paced it, I noticed I wasn't necessarily compelled to encour-age, but I was much more cautious and attentive to what I was encourag-ing, as well as how I delivered that encouragement. I was also more willing to receive feedback and adjust.
It sounds great to be more attentive as you are encouraging someone.
So if you say something like, "Yeah, you can do it," you are paying more attention to their responses and also to the quality of your own behavior—
your tone of voice or how strong it was, or how intense, etc.? Is that what you are talking about?
Fran: Yes. More attentive to the whole situation.
That is what the future is for—to envision how you want to be, and noticing how you may want to change any parts of it that you're not satis-fied with. Those are all nice ways to be sure that envisioning and revising the future is an ongoing process for you.
It can be useful to remember that the "future" is just a prediction that we make in the present. Most animals probably have no future in the sense that we do. They behave in ways that affect their future, but as far as we know it seems unlikely that they have any consciousness of how those
behaviors are future-oriented, or how to systematically change those behav-iors in relation to the future.
There is another nice piece that can add to this. If you only project into the future what you have already done in the past, that could restrict you to what you have done before. When you make future examples, you can always change them in the ways that we have discussed. But you can also build a creativity generator. You can add in a few somewhat vague exam-ples in which you are pleasantly surprised by exhibiting your quality in a new way, or in an unexpected context, or with someone that you previously thought it wouldn't be appropriate with, or whatever. This lays a founda-tion for what a friend of mine calls the "vuja de" experience—the sudden realization that you are doing something for the first time. That builds in opportunities to stretch whatever conscious or unconscious boundaries you have put around how you express that quality.