NLP Course Lesson 9: Create Your Future (Vision, Future Pacing & WOOP)

Free NLP Course for Business Owners · Lesson 9 of 11

About 5 minutes to read · 30-minute notebook exercise

Picturing success feels great, but on its own it can drain the energy you need to get there. This lesson combines NLP's future pacing and timeline planning with WOOP, a research-backed method, to turn a vision into a plan you'll actually follow.

The problem with "just visualize it"

Remember the movie on the Start Here homework list, The Secret? Its message is that picturing what you want helps bring it to you. NYU psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has spent decades studying what positive fantasies actually do. In several of her studies, people who fantasized most positively about a goal, such as landing a job or recovering from surgery, tended to put in less effort and achieve less than people with more realistic views of the road ahead. In one set of experiments, people asked to imagine an idealized future showed lower energy afterward than people who imagined a more realistic one.

The answer isn't to stop dreaming. It's to dream, and then look straight at the obstacle.

Step 1: Write your future, 12 months out

Write one page dated twelve months from today, in the present tense, as if it has already happened. Where is the business? What are the numbers: sales, profit, customers, hours? What does an ordinary Tuesday look like? Who works with you? What do customers say about you? Make it sensory and specific, like the well-formed outcome from Lesson 2: what do you see, hear and feel?

Step 2: Place it on your timeline and look back

Picture your timeline from Lessons 1 and 5. Imagine floating above it, out into the future, to the date twelve months from now, and setting your future page down on the line like a pin on a map. Then turn around and look back toward today from that future point. Ask:

• What were the three big steps I took to get here?
• What did I stop doing?
• Who helped me?

Write the answers down. Planning backward from a finished future is often easier than planning forward from a blank page.

Step 3: WOOP it

WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Oettingen built it from two research findings: mental contrasting (imagining the wish and then the obstacle) and implementation intentions (if-then plans, which you met in Lesson 2).

Step 4: Build the 90-day bridge

1. Pick three milestones for the next 90 days that move you toward your 12-month page.
2. Give each milestone one to three weekly actions.
3. Put the very first action in your calendar with a day, time and place.

Step 5: Future pace it

Close your eyes and run a short movie of next Monday: you at your desk doing step one, the obstacle showing up, and you using your if-then plan. Watch it go well. NLP calls this future pacing: rehearsing the new behavior in the exact situation where you'll need it, so it's ready when the moment arrives.