Category: Stress Management

Stress Management

Future Pacing

| ArtLeidecker

What is Future Pacing?

FUTURE PACING – A better way to visualize the future and make  challenging decisions.

Ever hesitate in making a decision because you simply just didn’t know how it would turn out? Do you fear possible failure, or even success? Well, future pacing can bring you comfort and enhance your self-confidence. 

Here’s the procedure:

  1. Select a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. My favorite place is in my car while parked, overlooking the river near my home.
  2. Take a deep breath, and as you exhale, close your eyes and let go of all the busy thoughts on your mind. Know that you won’t forget anything you need to do, and that it all can wait for you for a little while until you’re finished.
  3. Consider your issue and determine which choices you are struggling between (I suggest you only work with two, initially.)
  4. Take your first choice and allow your mind to meander through what it would most likely be like once that choice was put into action. Consider all the people, places and things. Visualize how it would appear to others involved or observing the situation. Experience, as best you can, the way you will feel once that decision is put in place and the results begin developing. Experience yourself explaining your decision to whomever is affected.  Once you’ve completed this exercise, immediately write yourself about your experience and how you feel about that decision.
  5. Then take your second choice and allow your mind to meander through what it would most likely be like once that choice was put into action. Consider all the people, places and things. Visualize how it would appear to others involved or observing the situation. Experience, as best you can, the way you will feel once that decision is put in place and the results begin developing. Consider how you would explain your decision to others. Experience yourself explaining your decision to whomever is affected. 
  6. Once you’ve completed this final part of your exercise, immediately write yourself about your experience and how you feel about that decision.

Initially, only visualize or imagine for five years into the future. After you’ve become familiar and comfortable with the process, first do five years with each scenario, and then follow immediately with another five years. 

As you become comfortable with the process and it’s becoming more and more beneficial for you, you can move ahead further into the future.

Each time you want to participate in future pacing, you should start from that day and not from the last session. Reason: New information and observations can enhance your visualization or imaginings, therefore beneficially altering your decision.

Motivation, Stress Management

A Proven Formula to Health, Wealth, and Happiness

| ArtLeidecker

Due to the tremendous successes I’ve experienced with his book, I felt a strong need to bring attention to Emile Coué’s method of auto-suggestion. It is, in my opinion, incredibly brilliant in its simplicity.

Having heard the phrase, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” many people have sought to improve on it. However if they had read his book, they would truly understand Coué’s method and realize why it is important to not attempt to improve it by adding specifics wants or needs.

Even Josè Sylva of the world famous Sylva Method, in his attempt to personalize the phrase, only added an extra “better” to it.

The subconscious mind, or our higher self if you prefer, knows what we need. There is no need, in fact it is inadvisable, to add specifics to our auto-suggestion. The awesome power of the subconscious mind enables it to know far better than we consciously do, exactly what our needs are. Why then should we get in its way? There may very well be needs that must first be met, before we can even begin to work on the needs that we’re aware of.

During a particularly troubling period in my life I kept a journal, faithfully entering my thoughts into it every night. I entered the bad occurrences as well as the good things. I got into the habit of every now and then, reading back into the pages of my prior week’s entries. Soon it became very evident to me that many of the “bad” events I wrote about, had triggered “good” things. In fact, many of the good things I wrote about could never have happened if the bad event hadn’t occurred first. In no time at all, I became convinced that I didn’t really know what was good for me, or what was bad for me.

What then should I meditate about – or pray for? If I don’t really know what’s good for me, what then should my goals be? Someone much smarter than me advised, “Just ask for knowledge of what is best for you, and as that knowledge becomes apparent or available, try to act accordingly.” Then they said, “Just keep doing the next right thing.”

In that light, Coué’s statement makes all the sense in the world. Even though we may not know exactly what we need most, our subconscious, or higher self knows, and we can use that knowledge by keeping the statement simple, and trusting our subconscious for the results.

Some hypnotists say that our subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between a real or an imagined experience. I don’t even begin to buy that theory. I think our subconscious mind can operate in dimensions that we haven’t yet been able to wrap our minds around. We don’t know exactly how it works, but we have begun to know a little about how to use it. Some have even said that it doesn’t respond to negative suggestions – then turn around and do “regression to cause” therapy to remove the effects of past negative impressions, in direct contradiction of themselves.

Well then, what is your subconscious mind? Smart – or dumb? I believe it’s powerful and awesome, and a long time ago Coué found a good way to use it.

Emile Coue’s book is available for free. Just click on the download link on the front page of my website. It’s a quick, fun, and easy read.

Read it, practice it, and watch your dreams begin to happen; it costs you nothing.