Rewire Beliefs with Future Pacing Magic
Future pacing is a tool that allows you to change people’s present-time point of view by projecting them into the future and then bringing them back to present time.
How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start
now, start slowly changing the world.
— Anne Frank
We never fully know in advance what response we’ll get from a communication because we can never know what is really going on inside another person or an audience. But the communication code contains a variety of tools that will make it much more likely you’ll get the response you want. One of those tools is future pacing.
Future pacing is a tool that allows you to change people’s (or your own) present-time point of view by projecting them into the future and then bringing them back to present time.
Particularly useful when someone seems fixed in their current ideas and beliefs, future pacing is a powerful tool to shake that person’s decision-making process and move them toward a different set of feelings and beliefs.
The Cigar Code
Let me tell you a story to show how future pacing works. I usually am pretty careful about when I use this tool, but in this case I used it to change the behavior of someone whom I found frankly offensive.
This was about forty years ago, in the 1980s. I was doing marketing and brand consulting at the time, mostly for large corporations and government agencies. In that line of work, one travels a lot; I probably spent thirty weeks per year on the road.
This story takes place on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year. I was trying to get back home to Atlanta from the West Coast, but I was stuck at the Cincinnati airport because a massive snowstorm was slamming the United States from the Rocky Mountains all the way through the central and eastern Midwest.
Because I flew a lot, I was a member of the Delta Airlines Crown Room Club. Those clubs are very comfortable if you have a long wait — and it looked like my wait was going to be about five hours. I walked into the club room and went to the no-smoking area (in those days there were still segregated smoking areas) and looked for a seat. Almost every seat was taken except for a single chair opposite a sofa with a half-dozen other occupied chairs forming a circle around a coffee table.
Sitting in the middle of the sofa in the no-smoking section was a big Texas guy — he had the silver belt buckle, the lizard-skin boots under boot-cut blue denim jeans, the whole outfit — smoking a huge and smelly cigar. His cowboy boots were up on the table, and he was puffing away with a studied obliviousness to everyone around him.
The people who were seated near this guy were clearly discomforted by the cigar. There was a sign when you entered the club that said, very clearly, “No pipe or cigar smoking; cigarette smoking only in designated areas.” And the designated smoking area was way over on the other side of the club.
I sat down in that empty chair right opposite this guy because it was the only empty chair in the place. I didn’t like what he was doing, but I wasn’t that bothered by the smoke myself, so I wasn’t planning to do anything about it. A few minutes later, though, a woman sitting a couple of chairs away from him started to cough pretty badly. And she said to him, “Sir, your cigar.” She added, “I have asthma, and that smoke is really hurting me. Would you please stop, or at least move to the smoking section?”
He looked at her for a long minute as if she were an insect he’d just noticed, took a long puff on his cigar, and blew smoke at her. Then he just looked off in space, being Mr. Cool.
After a minute or two, the woman got up, went over to the counter, and started a conversation with the woman running the Crown Room Club. I couldn’t hear what she said, but we all knew what it was. A few minutes later, the employee, who was very busy helping customers who were trying to change their flights and so forth, left her counter and walked over to Mr. Texan, with a pack of Marlboros in her hand.
“Sir,” she said, “I’ve got a pack of cigarettes for you. If you could, please move over to the smoking section. We don’t allow cigar smoking, and you can’t smoke here in the no-smoking section.”
He stared her down for a minute and took another puff of his cigar. He blew it in her direction, and said, slowly and clearly in a voice dripping with disdain, “Call a cop, lady.” She stood there, looking rather shocked, and then looked back at the long line of people waiting for her and decided, obviously, that this was not a fight worth having. She turned around, went back to her work, and he resumed being Mr. Smug.
This is a guy who was not going to be easy to persuade. He was not going to be open to listening or seeing or feeling much of anything coming from someone else, no matter what modality I used.
So I leaned across the table, and said to this guy, “I’ll bet you know something that I’ve always wondered about.”
I said it in a friendly way. And he looked at me like, Huh? So I leaned forward again and said, “I’ll bet you know something I’ve wondered about ever since I was in high school, and that I’d bet most people wonder about, and I bet you know the answer. I bet you could tell me the answer.”
He was engaged, so I continued. “In fact,” I said, “I’ll bet that not only do you know the answer, but pretty much everywhere you go, people know that you know the answer. All they have to do is take one look at you, and they know you know the answer. In the future, whenever and wherever you’re walking down the street, I’ll bet people will always take a look at you and know that you know the answer.”
This is future pacing. I was throwing him into the future, getting him to imagine what the future would be like, in this case, a future in which people were looking at him and knowing he’d know the answer to a question I hadn’t yet posed.
He looked at me and he said — so now I’d got him, he was hooked — “Okay, what’s the question?”
And I said, “Well, you know, we all learn, in high school, in elementary psychology, everyone knows this, everyone whom you see walking down the street, everyone who sees you in a restaurant, or who comes into this Club…”
I was drawing this thing out, throwing him into the future some more, so that he’d really imagine people thinking about this question and answer everywhere in the future. Then I went in for the kill.
“Everyone,” I said, “knows that back in the 1890s, Sigmund Freud said, ‘the larger the cigar, the smaller the penis.’ So I’m just wondering, is that true?”
He took his cigar out of his mouth, this giant dark brown cigar, and he looked at it, and he looked at me. It looked like he was trying to decide whether to punch me or put the cigar out in my face, and I was quickly shedding the pleasant haze of the wine they’d served me on the flight, quickly calculating which way would get me fastest to the door.
Then he just stood up, and walked out of the club, his cigar in his hand, only now held close to his body as though he were trying to conceal it. The people sitting in the circle around the coffee table erupted into applause, and the man sitting to my right offered to buy me a beer.
After his performance with the asthmatic woman, I didn’t just want to get him to leave the club — I was angry enough at this guy that I wanted to make sure that anytime in the future that he pulled out a cigar, he’d start looking around at all the people wherever he was and imagining that they were all wondering whether or not he had a small penis.
My rationalization—and that’s frankly all it is, a rationalization for what was really psychological aggression on my part — was that maybe it would encourage him to quit smoking.
In any case, that’s future pacing 101.
Another example was a woman who came to a conference where I was doing a demonstration of NLP techniques for healthcare professionals. She had her four-year-old son with her, and I noticed he was sucking his thumb.
When I asked if anybody wanted to volunteer for a future pacing demonstration or had any questions, she raised her hand and said, half in jest, “Any suggestions for four-year-old thumbsuckers?”
I brought the two of them up on stage and sat down next to the little boy. I asked him a few questions about what he wanted to do when he grew up, to get him into a future state of mind, and listen carefully to the answers, commenting on them and engaging him.
Then I kind of slid into the conversation, without highlighting it, “I wonder how good it will feel when you’re bigger and no longer suck your thumb. I wonder if you’ll even grow up that much in the next few weeks?”
I could see that his mind took it in as his eyes went up, indicating he was imagining something visually. I continued with a few more sentences about how we build our futures and that sort of thing, so the thumb sucking comment didn’t draw a lot of attention and thus much resistance.
Then I thanked him and his mom and sent them back to their seats. At the end of the presentation, as people were leaving, I gave her my phone number and asked her to call me in a month and let me know how he was doing.
She called me two weeks later and said that he had just spontaneously stopped sucking his thumb about four days after the conference. She was a psychotherapist and had tried everything she could think of on him, and this completely shocked her.
The technique is simple, and is grounded in Ericksonian hypnosis. Get a person thinking about the future in a positive context, and then just ask a question — which is the least threatening way to convey information and the most likely not to be resisted by the unconscious — that embeds the desired future outcome.
Enjoy…