It is the start of a new year and a new decade. I thought of writing something about building the future, which will help you succeed in achieving the goals. I know most of you your new year resolutions in place. Also, this write-up will help deal with Anxiety which exists because of a lack of clarity. Once you take care of these aspects and future pace yourself, you are at a better place in your mind.

Okay, let me first tell you the concept of Timelines and then I will come to the main part. And I will do this in the form of a story.

Story | Five Minutes is never Five Minutes

This happens almost every weekend. Whenever I go out with my wife on weekends for an evening dinner, I get ready in 5 minutes, and I call out to her if she is ready to go. She responds from the room above, “Just 5 minutes”. My son and I look at each other and start watching our favorite show on Netflix. We finish one and a half episodes easily till the time my wife comes down ‘ready’. I am always shocked looking at her once she is ready because nothing really has changed in her appearance. It is a good thing she doesn’t ask me how she looks. I wouldn’t know what to comment on as she looks just the same as she always does. It’s a guy thing, I guess.

But the point I am making is, my wife is ‘in the moment’ person. Whenever she is doing something, she loses track of time. I, on the other hand, hate going late anywhere. I plan my day quite well so that I can do justice to all the tasks I am committed to. This is one point where both of us have intense arguments, and then I leave it because I live my life believing and following the first two presuppositions of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Everyone has a unique model of the world, and one should respect (if not agree) to the other person’s model of the world.

But I know why this happens with my wife. Long ago, when I had just learned NLP, I had asked my wife about where she points when she has to indicate the past. For example, if she wants to tell someone some old story, how does she start with the story? She said, “I just say, this is an old story when I was in college (or whatever the timeline is)”. When she said this, she made a hand gesture that looked like pointing backward, i.e. behind her. Then I asked her about how she expresses her future plans. Like, something that is going to happen next week, how does she go about communicating? She made an interesting gesture again. She looked in front of her and flipped her hand as if the hand was somersaulting the present to the future and said, “Next week I will be going to my mom’s place”. “Really”, I shouted being ecstatic. That ecstasy was followed by a lot of other things but let us not go into that. The important thing was my wife points at the back to indicate the past and points in the front to show the future. Her timeline is an In-time timeline. This timeline passes through the body. Remember this term as we will be using it in this chapter when we discuss the interventions.

My mother, on the other hand, points to the left when she refers to the past and right when she refers to the future. This timeline doesn’t pass through the body but in front of it. Sameekshya, another friend of mine, point front left at a 45-degree angle to refer to the past and front right at a 45-degree angle to refer to the future. It is like a V. Both, my mother’s and Sameekshya’s timeline are called Through-time timelines. You must be wondering; you have been doing this since childhood but never thought of why you have these gestures. It seems there is no explanation for the gestures. But there is.

A significant application of Time Line Therapy is in the area of dealing with negative emotions such as anger, sadness, guilt, and fear. The brain has its way of coding time, and it is different for different people. Some might have an In-time timeline, and some might have a Through-time timeline. As mentioned earlier, Through-time timelines can be a line passing in front of you with the past on the left and future on the right. They can also be the V-shaped timelines, sometimes U shaped. But in any case, through-time timelines don’t pass through your body.

So, coming back to my story, I realized that my wife was an ‘in-the-moment’ person. She loses track of time when she is doing something, especially if she is doing something that interests her. This is one of the characteristics of people who have In-time timelines. My mother, on the other hand, is an ‘organizer’. She can ‘see’ what she needs to do in the day and plans her work accordingly. It is like, she dissociates herself from the pile of tasks, looks at them from a distance and prioritizes them. It is like looking at the timeline which lies in front of you. You can see various things to be done in the future as well as pending tasks from the past. And because the Through-time timeline people are not ‘in-the-moment’ people, they seem to be able to keep track of time. Most of the time, you will find these people to be more rational, practical, analytical and logical. Sameekshya is pretty much like that. She has a V-shaped timeline.

This is the simplest method of Eliciting your Timeline. Your internal representation reflects in your language; verbal and non-verbal. So, your gestures pretty much give away your brain’s style of coding time.

Test Drive on your Timeline:
Before we begin any therapeutic work on the timeline, it will be useful if you can ‘experience’ it. The script is given below. You can choose to read it first and then take a test drive by closing your eyes, or you can do it simultaneously.

1. We have just elicited your timeline. Notice your timeline and see what characteristics it has in terms of color if it has any sounds if you feel any temperature, pressure or vibration. Check for all characteristics.
2. Look towards the future where you can see future events happening in your life at a distance. Look towards the past to see the events that have happened today, yesterday, last week, last month, and so on.
3. Now, rise above your timeline, take yourself further up, and you will see your timeline below. You are above the present moment.
4. Float towards the past and see all the events which happened today, yesterday, the day before yesterday, last week, last month, this time last year, five years ago, ten years ago and so on. You are looking at yourself on the timeline as a part of the events. You are dissociated because you are floating above the timeline, and you can see yourself on the timeline experiencing the events.
5. Now float towards the present and keep seeing events on the timeline as you approach the present. Pass the present moment and go into the future. See all the planned activities for today, tomorrow, the day after, next week, next month and next year. Where do you see yourself in the next one year, two years or three years? How do you visualize your life?
6. Now float back towards the present and once you are above the ‘now’, float down into the present. If you have done this with your eyes closed, open your eyes.

Now you have a good experience of what your timeline is. We will be using this experience when we learn about the Building your Future and dealing with Anxiety.

Dealing with Anxiety and building your Future:
You may be unclear about any aspect of your future; career, relationships, etc. I will be using an example of starting an enterprise because I see a lot of people around me wanting to start their organization. But they aren’t taking that jump because of lack of clarity or roadmap.

Story | “Starting your enterprise.”

I was always told since childhood to stay salaried and to not venture into having a business of my own. When I was born, my parents had created my horoscope through some Godman, and this is what he precisely told my parents. It is incredible how you form strong beliefs when you hear something from a person that you think is credible. That belief was passed on to me all my life, and I realized it was a limiting belief when I grew up. I had this thought from somewhere that I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself on my death bed for not even trying to build my enterprise.

So, I decided that I will start my organization that would specialize in Cognitive Wellness and would provide psychology-based training, coaching, psychometric assessments and counseling. The year was 2017, and I was highly motivated to make a mark in this domain. But the clarity was missing. How would my office look? What will I call my organization, and how would the logo be? What would be my business model, and how would I reach out to the people? How will I have the right balance between making money and giving back something to the society, the nation, and humanity? By then, I was well aware of all the NLP techniques that would help me get this clarity through visualizing. Visualization has excellent potential. You can instantly motivate yourself, get clarity on what you are doing wrong, make changes in your plan so that the ecology is not hurt.

On my timeline in the future, which was precisely after six months, I could see a website that is a dynamic one with all the pages and what they would contain. I could also see myself training minds to be more agile and to be able to be in control of their lives proactively. ‘Training minds to be Agile’. Agile Neuro! I got the name of my enterprise, and it went perfectly well with the theme of my endeavor. I could then see the website URL, which is www.agileneuro.com along with the color scheme and architecture. I saw Agile Neuro’s handles on various social media channels and how these handles were containing blogs and videos. This, and many more things. I got all the clarity of what I wanted to build.

Now the only thing remaining was, working towards achieving it. But I did things differently. On the timeline, I started backtracking to see what I would need to do before I reached any particular aspect of my goal. For example, what would I need to do to get my website done? I would need to connect with a few web developers and tell them my exact idea. I would also need to get the optimization in place so that I could be ‘searchable’. Before that, I would need to get my logo done from a graphic designer. Likewise, I started backtracking and finally reached a point where I knew what the first thing is which I need to do now. I had completed my reverse engineering and wrapped up the entire roadmap.

Anxiety is a direct outcome of a lack of clarity. Same with overthinking. You can use the timeline to get clarity about anything in the future. Emotions are action signals. A negative emotion demands some action from your end to change things or make them better. If you are concerned about an event in the future, about how successful you will be, float on your timeline, go into the future just after the time the event is over. See yourself being successful in that event and start backtracking to get the clarity of the roadmap. Things would get much better on the emotions front as well as on the results front.

This is one of the best ways you can build your future. Of course, sometimes things may not go as planned, but I hope by now you have integrated the presuppositions in your muscle. Every procedure must be designed to create options. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss anything specific. I would be glad to help you build your future.