Chapter 2: Millennials & The Unknown Future

Uncertain about the future? Worried about lack of direction?

This is a common problem experienced in our society today.

What’s the fastest way to regain certainty?

The ability to make decisions quickly and take action to make those decisions happen. Easily said, but is it just as easy to get it done, as well?

Everything is changing around us, and it can feel like we are walking on moving sands. Nothing we knew for sure is there anymore, or at the very least is shaken up dramatically. In fact, the only certain thing is that everything is uncertain. This affects our ability to make decisions for the future. We don’t know in which direction to go.

We are trying to run so many possible scenarios through the mind that:

1. You have no comparison from past experiences to match what could happen, or

2. You compare it to “the last time” you weren’t sure what to do.

Both scenarios don’t work well and lead to anxiety and stress.

Traditionally, you will hear a lot of explanations about the flight-or-flight stress response (keep in mind this happens in the moment, and anxiety and worry are about the future), negative beliefs about intolerance of uncertainty, needing to let go and focus on things you can’t control and that accepting uncertainty is much healthier for your mind, or other similar advice. Focusing on the positive—on love, peace, prosperity, and safety seems like a good advice…and yet, you’re still worrying.

What you do in your mind is to consider all the possible threats to your well-being, safety, money-making ability, job security, your relationships, and good health forgetting that the future has not happened yet. Even more, much of the “bad stuff” you imagine never happens (check with your own experience about how many times you imagined something going on badly and it didn’t). Yet, you don’t seem to stop worrying. How do you do that?

There are several things here that you need to be aware of if you are to get out from under anxiety and stress and make the correct decisions.

NLP and Time Line Therapy® have the missing piece. They have the HOW TO. HOW to change all that so you gain conscious control over that part of your mind that does not seem to stop from making those “scary movies.” In NLP, these are called strategies - a step by step process or arriving at a certain result. These strategies are different from person to person, and even if the end result is similar, like anxiety and worry, they are not the same for each person.

In general, NLP and in Time Line Therapy® have you discover how to use your future Time Line for goals and objectives in a way which makes them happen. This is not simply visualization, but a clear and concise process that is easy to learn.

From the Time Line Therapy® point of view, worries are a result of a certain internal mind process and focus. Once you discover how you do it, you can then change it. HOW do you do the process of stressing out is more important than what are you stressing out about since you use the same method (in your mind) for anything you worry or stress about. Once you discover what it is and how you do it, and then change it, you’re in control mentally and emotionally. You’re solid and confident and ready to make split-decisions that make a difference between success or failure.

NLP and especially Time Line Therapy® deal with the issue differently. Here you learn an easy process which allows the negative emotions of the future (like worries and anxiety) to disappear. In a nutshell, they both allow you to discover how to be free of anxiety and worries.

Once the mind is out of stress and anxiety mode, you can discover your decision-making strategy – how you make good and quick decisions (which is another technique in NLP). There are people capable of making decisions fast who stick with their decisions – for the people who know these, the future is something they create and make happen efficiently, and can navigate with certainty an uncertain future of massive change.

You mind uses imagination to create the scary movies for the future. Are those possible? Anything is possible. But at the same time, are good things possible? The answer is also yes. In Time Line Therapy® we learn how to tell the difference and choose to avoid the scary movies and create only positive outcomes and happy movies for ourselves with a resounding YES. This is the only way in which we can move into an uncertain future, but create the future we want and deserve. The future hasn’t happened yet; it is for us to create it.