Chapter 20: Making Change Easier 331
Future pacing
Even when you’ve chosen to introduce some change into your life, you may
at times find that your resolve wavers. A useful exercise for staying on track
is to mentally take yourself into the future to the time when you’ve achieved
your goal to remind yourself of what you want to achieve. This technique
is particularly good when you start a programme of healthy eating and are
being tempted by a chocolate bar whispering your name. You can use this
process to break the unhelpful strategy (turn to Chapter 12 to discover more
on breaking habits) of instant gratification by building an extra step into
developing a strategy for developing awareness of what you eat; in fact, being
mindful of all your actions.
Planning the road map
As Billy Wilder is reputed to have said, ‘Hindsight is always twenty–twenty.’
One way of achieving your goals is to know where you’re at, where you want
to go, and then logically work out the steps you have to take to get to your
goal. An even better way to do this is to pretend ‘as if’ you’ve achieved your
goal and work backwards, with hindsight, following the steps in this exercise
(see Chapter 14 for more about ‘as-if reframing’). Chapter 13 tells you in
detail how to ‘time travel’.
This exercise is a variation on the ‘Getting rid of anxiety’ exercise in
Chapter 13 and can show you a different way of using time lines:
- Find yourself somewhere safe and quiet to relax deeply and think
about your goal.
- Draw a line and write down the starting point and endpoints for your
goal at each end of the line.
- Think about what the steps are for getting you from start to finish and
jot these down on the line.
- Float way above your time line so that you can see your past and your
future stretching below you.
- Still above your time line, float forward along your time line until
you’re above the time where you have successfully achieved your
goal.
