CHAPTER 9
FUTURE PACING
How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world.
— ANNE FRANK
At the start of the One Hundred Tenth Congress, newly elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faced a significant communication challenge. The Democrats had won the House by a wide margin in large part because of popular opposition to the ongoing war in Iraq. Pelosi herself represented a San Francisco district adamantly opposed to the war. Yet instead of looking for ways out of war, President Bush had just announced a troop surge. Republican members of Congress were torn between the powerful symbolism of supporting a president during wartime and representing the 60 percent of the American people who opposed the war.
Antiwar protestors from Pelosi’s district immediately called on the new Speaker to put forward a resolution defunding the war.1 Yet it was clear that the Democratic majority in the House was not ready for that step, let alone their Republican colleagues. Without bipartisan support any resolution on the war ran the risk of looking as if it was about partisanship rather than a real effort to change the country’s direction. To have a real effect on the president’s policies, Pelosi couldn’t just communicate the country’s dismay over the war; she needed to communicate it in such a way that it would get a sympathetic response from Republicans in Congress and, if possible, from the president himself.
We never fully know in advance what response we’ll get from a communication because we can never know what is really going on inside another person or an audience. But the communication code contains a variety of tools that will make it much more likely you’ll get the response you want. One of those tools is future pacing. And that’s the tool Nancy Pelosi used to move Republican members of Congress away from supporting the president’s war.
Future pacing is a tool that allows you to change people’s present-time point of view by projecting them into the future and then bringing them back to present time. Particularly useful when someone seems fixed in his current ideas and beliefs, future pacing is a powerful tool to shake that person’s decision-making process and move him toward a different set of feelings and beliefs.
THE CIGAR CODE
We’ll get back to Nancy Pelosi later in this chapter. But let me tell you a story that is unrelated to politics to show how future pacing works. I usually am pretty careful about when I use this tool, but in this case I used it to change the behavior of someone whom I found frankly offensive.
This was about fifteen years ago. I was doing marketing and brand consulting at the time, mostly for large corporations and government agencies. In that line of work, one travels a lot; I probably spent thirty weeks per year on the road.
This story takes place on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year. I was trying to get back home to Atlanta from the West Coast, but I was stuck at the Cincinnati airport because a massive snowstorm was slamming the United States from the Rocky Mountains all the way through the central and eastern Midwest.
Because I flew a lot, I was a member of the Delta Airlines Crown Room Club. Those clubs are very comfortable if you have a long wait—and it looked like my wait was going to be about five hours. I walked into the clubroom and went to the no-smoking area (in those days there were still segregated smoking areas) and looked for a seat. Almost every seat was taken except for a single chair opposite a sofa with a half-dozen other occupied chairs forming a circle around a coffee table.
Sitting in the middle of the sofa in the no-smoking section was a big Texas guy—he had the silver belt buckle, the lizard-skin boots under boot-cut blue denim jeans, the whole outfit—smoking a huge and smelly cigar. His cowboy boots were up on the table, and he was puffing away with a studied obliviousness to everyone around him.
The people who were seating near this guy were clearly discomforted by the cigar. There was a sign when you entered the club that said, very clearly, “No pipe or cigar smoking; cigarette smoking only in designated areas.” And the designated smoking area was way over on the other side of the club.
I sat down in that empty chair right opposite this guy because it was the only empty chair in the place. I didn’t like what he was doing, but I wasn’t that bothered by the smoke myself, so I wasn’t planning to do anything about it. A few minutes later, though, a woman sitting a couple of chairs away from him started to cough pretty badly. And she said to him, “Sir, your cigar.” She added, “I have asthma, and that smoke is really hurting me. Would you please stop, or at least move to the smoking section?”
He looked at her for a long minute as if she were an insect he’d just noticed, took a long puff on his cigar, and blew smoke at her. Then he just looked off in space, being Mr. Cool.
After a minute or two, the woman got up, went over to the counter, and started a conversation with the woman running the Crown Room Club. I couldn’t hear what she said, but we all knew what it was. A few minutes later, the employee, who was very busy helping customers who were trying to change their flights and so forth, left her counter and walked over to Mr. Texan, with a pack of Marlboros in her hand.
“Sir,” she said, “I’ve got a pack of cigarettes for you. If you could, please move over to the smoking section. We don’t allow cigar smoking, and you can’t smoke here in the no-smoking section.”
He stared her down for a minute and took another puff of his cigar. He blew it in her direction, and said, slowly and clearly in a voice dripping with disdain, “Call a cop, lady.” She stood there, looking rather shocked, and then looked back at the long line of people waiting for her and decided, obviously, that this was not a fight worth having. She turned around, went back to her work, and he resumed being Mr. Smug.
This is a guy who was not going to be easy to persuade. He was not going to be open to listening or seeing or feeling much of anything coming from someone else, no matter what modality I used.
So I leaned across the table, and said to this guy, “I’ll bet you know something that I’ve always wondered about.”
I said it in a friendly way. And he looked at me like, Huh? So I leaned forward again and said, “I’ll bet you know something I’ve wondered about ever since I was in high school, and that I’d bet most people wonder about, and I bet you know the answer. I bet you could tell me the answer.”
He was engaged, so I continued. “In fact,” I said, “I’ll bet that not only do you know the answer, but pretty much everywhere you go, people know that you know the answer. All they have to do is take one look at you, and they know you know the answer. In the future, whenever and wherever you’re walking down the street, I’ll bet people will always take a look at you and know that you know the answer.”
This is future pacing. I was throwing him into the future, getting him to imagine what the future would be like, in this case, a future in which people were looking at him and knowing he’d know the answer to a question I hadn’t yet posed.
He looked at me and he said—so now I’d got him, he was hooked— “Okay, what’s the question?”
And I said, “Well, you know, we all learn, in high school, in elementary psychology, everyone knows this, everyone whom you see walking down the street, everyone who sees you in a restaurant, or who comes into this Club…”
I was drawing this thing out, throwing him into the future some more, so that he’d really imagine people thinking about this question and answer everywhere in the future. Then I went in for the kill.
“Everyone” I said, “knows that back in the 1890s, Sigmund Freud said, ‘the larger the cigar, the smaller the penis.’ So I’m wondering, is that true?”
He took his cigar out of his mouth, this giant dark brown cigar, and he looked at it, and he looked at me. It looked like he was trying to decide whether to punch me or put the cigar out in my face, and I was quickly shedding the pleasant haze of the wine they’d served me on the flight, quickly calculating which way would get me fastest to the door. Then he just stood up, and walked out of the club, his cigar in his hand, only now held close to his body as though he were trying to conceal it. The people sitting in the circle around the coffee table erupted into applause, and the man sitting to my right offered to buy me a beer.
After his performance with the asthmatic woman, I didn’t just want to get him to leave the club—I was angry enough at this guy that I wanted to make sure that anytime in the future that he pulled out a cigar, he’d start looking around at all the people wherever he was and imagining that they were all wondering whether or not he had a small penis. My rationalization—and that’s frankly all it is, a rationalization for what was really psychological aggression on my part—was that maybe it would encourage him to quit smoking.
In any case, that’s future pacing.
A Transcript from the Thom Hartmann Program January 19, 2007
The caller is Barry in Bellingham, Washington.
BARRY: I really love that anecdote you just told about the cigar-smoking Texan, you know, defying everybody.
THOM: He was like out of central casting. I mean, this guy was so into his…well, don’t get me started.
BARRY: Yeah, anyway, as you were talking about this guy, it just flashed on me that [George W.] Bush is like this guy on a large scale.
THOM: How?
BARRY: Here he is, defying the American public who voted in a Democratic-controlled Congress, and defying Congress, you know, in our desire to bring our troops back from Iraq and end this mess over there. You know, just sort of blowing his smoke in everybody’s face.
THOM: Without getting too psycho-babbly, maybe what we’re seeing here is George’s feelings of incompetence and impotence throughout his life being acted out as the big bully war maker.
BARRY: Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. I was thinking maybe somebody should approach him and ask him about the size of his cigar.
HOW TO MODIFY THE FUTURE
When Nancy Pelosi needed to elicit a particular response to the Iraq war, she used future pacing. She began as soon as she was elected Speaker. Here’s what she said to the Washington Post about the Iraq war:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said yesterday that Democrats should not seek a unified position on an exit strategy in Iraq, calling the war a matter of individual conscience and saying differing positions within the caucus are a source of strength for the party.2
Pelosi started by looking around at the present. In December 2006, when she was named Speaker, the Democrats themselves were divided on where they wanted to go. Pelosi began by acknowledging these differences in the present, and even reframing them as a strength.
Soon, however, she started looking down the line from present to future. In an interview with CBS News in response to President Bush’s troop surge,
Pelosi made it clear the issue was the essential backdrop in Washington for the foreseeable future, however much Bush wants to talk about domestic issues. “We have an 800-pound gorilla in the room and it’s called Iraq,” she said. “That, to me, is the primary issue facing the Congress and the president in terms of some place that we have to work together.” 3
Notice how Pelosi was throwing Congress and the country into the future—no matter what happened down the line, she was saying, Iraq will be the issue. Subtly in this interview, and more forcefully behind the scenes, Pelosi was reminding members of Congress that their constituents would be looking at the situation in Iraq in the elections of 2008.
Whenever Pelosi talked publicly about the war resolution, she always used future tense, portraying a future in which members of Congress had already voted against the president. Here’s what she said to Barbara Walters:
It is, I think, very difficult for the president to sustain a war of this magnitude without the support of the American people and without the support of the Congress of the United States. That’s why Congress will vote to oppose the president’s escalation, from the standpoint of policy. We will have our disagreement.4
Members of Congress care a lot about whether they will be elected again. As the discussion heated up, Pelosi reminded them again that in 2008 the American people would remember how representatives voted: “Friday’s vote will signal whether the House has heard the American people: No more blank checks for President Bush on Iraq,” said Pelosi.5
If Pelosi had stayed only in the future, however, she might not have won in Congress. For future pacing to work, you must not only see yourself in the future, but also be able to see how you are going to get there. You stand at the future and walk backward to the present, noticing all the steps it will take to get from where you are to where you want to go. Pelosi took that walk in a speech to the House as they were debating the resolution she had put forward, moving from the future to the present:
There is one proposition on which we all agree: our troops have performed excellently in Iraq. They have done everything asked of them. As the resolution states, “Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq.
We owe our troops a debt of gratitude, for their patriotism, courage, and service. As a sign of respect for them, particularly those who have lost their lives in the war, and for their families, I request that we observe a moment of silence.
Pelosi here is first describing the war in Iraq as if it is over and the troops are already on their way home. They have been patriotic, they have been courageous, they have served, and they are coming back—that is the future she was trying to persuade her colleagues to embrace. Then she starts to walk backward. How do they get to that moment—which they have just observed—when the war is over and they can thank the troops? They will have to have taken a new course of action.
We owe our troops a course of action in Iraq that is worthy of their sacrifice. Today we set the state for a New Direction on Iraq by passing a resolution of fewer than 100 words which supports our troops but disapproves of the President’s escalation proposal.
Pelosi in this paragraph just stepped backward from the far future to the near future. Troops will be thanked in the far future, she suggests, if the House will pass this bill in the near future. Then she goes back even farther in time:
One year ago Senate majority Leader Harry Reid and I stood with House and Senate Democrats to propose our agenda for Real Security—to project our power and values to protect the American people.
Democrats already began walking toward that far future over a year ago. In fact, Democrats, as she says below, had already done quite a bit along that path:
Consistent with our Real Security agenda, Democrats have sent the President four letters, the first last July and most recently in January, urging him to adopt a strategy for success for Iraq containing these elements:
Change of mission
Redeployment of troops
Build political consensus
Diplomacy
Reform reconstruction
Refocus on the War on Terror
With this speech Pelosi moved backward from a time in the future when the troops would come home, to the present challenge, then back to the time in the future when the House would pass the resolution, then back to a time in the past when Democrats had already sent the president four letters outlining this plan.
By moving back and forth along this pathway, Pelosi made it seem inevitable—etching the groove of this course of action over and over in the mind’s timeline—and that is one reason why she won with a bipartisan vote of 246 to 182. She had taken the next step along the path to persuading Republicans in Congress to work with her to end the war.
WHAT FUTURE DO WE WANT?
Republican strategists have certainly mastered future pacing. They tell a story about the future that matches their core conservative story: they try to throw us into a frightening world in which we are attacked from all sides by terrorists, our money is taken from us by the government, and our families are broken apart by abortion-loving gay atheists.
It’s far more ecological to use future pacing to tell a story about a world that is more peaceful and harmonious, in which we invest in each other and work together toward the future. This was the core future story held by the Founders of this nation. When future pacing is used well, it enhances the core story the communicator believes and it conveys that core story to listeners.
Here’s an example of positive future pacing about the economy, taken from a speech John Edwards made to the National Press Club on June 22, 2006. The whole speech is a great example of future pacing, but because it’s very long I’ve taken out parts of it and added comments in brackets to illustrate how Edwards is using the future-pacing tool:
What kind of America do we want, [kinesthetic] not just today, but twenty years from now, and how do we think [visual] we can get there from here? [drawing the line from present to future] The founders of this country created the country we have today because they dreamed large. [taking us back to the past] They knew there were obstacles, but those obstacles didn’t mean that they decided a less perfect union would be a good compromise. We will never get what we don’t reach for. [future] So in 2006 [present] and the decades to come, [future] for what should we reach?…
On the America we want to achieve in the next twenty years, [future] I don’t think the picture is hard to draw. [visual and kinesthetic] It is an America where we are well on our way to ending poverty. It is an America where every American has health-care coverage—not access to health insurance or other wiggle-word ways we try to describe something less than health coverage for every American. It is an America where businesses and working people thrive in a competitive and fair international marketplace. It is an America where everyone can join the middle class and everyone can build a better future than their parents had. [all of these are in the future, and each evokes a story, a picture, and a feeling]…
You’ve heard me talk about the Two Americas? [present/past] One for those families who have everything they need, and then one for everybody else. Katrina showed us the Two Americas. Those images [visual past] of men and women at the Super-dome stranded without food, water or hope—simply because they didn’t have a car or the cash to escape. [kinesthetic] Those images are something we’ll never forget. [bringing to the present and projecting into the future]
They’ve become the face of poverty in America—a symbol of the poor and forgotten families that live in big cities like New Orleans and in small towns and rural America too. [visual present]…
In order to get the country on the path [kinesthetic] to eliminating poverty, we must build [kinesthetic] a “Working Society,” [story/auditory] which builds on the lessons of the past to create solutions for the future. [steps from present to future]
At the heart [kinesthetic] of the Working Society is the value [anchor] of work. Work is not only a source of a paycheck but also a source of dignity and independence and self-respect. [kinesthetic/anchors]…
We need to get involved when our neighbors need us. [kinesthetic future]
We need to speak up when we know something’s wrong. [auditory future]
And we need to step forward to meet the challenges we all face. [visual future]…
There was a woman—an extraordinary activist—who would end her speeches by saying, “You know, the leaders we have been waiting for are us.” [STORY!]
She’s exactly right. Poverty is our challenge. It’s time for us to lead. [pulling it all together with a call to action, a story summary, an anchor in the present, and projecting into the future]
Notice how Edwards, through the course of this speech, follows the technique of future pacing, moving from the present to the future, going back to the present, and then, standing in the present, visualizing the steps we would need to take to get to that future. What’s particularly persuasive about this speech is that it ends with a story. The story is only two sentences—about an activist and her speeches—but it echoes Edwards’s point that we don’t need to wait any longer to move toward a better future.
The techniques discussed earlier in this book—submodalities, anchoring, embedding, using stories—are effective means of communication. They will get a response. But future pacing is the booster rocket that takes them all into orbit. When paired with proper framing, it is very, very persuasive.