our mind already knows how to move through time — NLP simply helps you use it consciously. By stepping into your future self, you can plan with clarity, confidence, and purpose. By revisiting your past, with resources from your future, you can release what no longer serves you.
NLP Timeline Therapy unites both — building a future worth living and freeing you from the patterns that hold you back.
Create a timeline by starting in the future and working back.
A helpful rule of thumb is that to create significant change, we should start our plans from the future we want and work backwards to the present. Then, when we’ve created our plan, check that it also works moving forward from the present.
Starting in the future, we want to help us access better states, giving us better internal resources and thus help us create better plans.
If we start from the present and plan forward, we usually end up with an incremental or ‘small chunk’ plan. We’ll likely be less creative and ambitious, and this approach works better for management rather than leadership. However, it may be the best approach to solve an immediate problem.
Everything from the past can be a resource
We can learn from all and any experiences.
- Good memories give us functional states that we can use in the future.
- Bad experiences teach us important lessons and are often critical for our development.
The trick with bad experiences is discarding the emotional baggage whilst extracting their lessons. Sometimes, it’s worth impartially looking at our past actions and asking what we’ve gained from that experience. We can focus on using what we’ve learnt rather than the experience itself.
NLP Timeline Exercises
We find three particular types of timeline exercises beneficial. 1) Milestone and end goal timeline 2) Timeline to bring empowering resources from the past to the present and future 3) Timeline to heal time-traps
Milestone and end goal timeline
- Think about what you want to achieve long-term and identify two milestones along the route
- Imagine your future as a line in front of you.
- Imagine moving forward in time until you’ve well reached the first milestone. What does it feel like to have achieved it?
- Imagine moving forward in time until you’ve well achieved your second milestone. What does it feel like to have achieved it?
- Imagine continuing to move forward until you’ve well achieved your end goal. What does it feel like to have achieved it?
- Imagine continuing to move forward until you’ve started to get real value from having achieved your end goal and know that you can maintain having achieved it. What does that feel like?
- Imagine taking your time to come to the present and, as you do, noticing what you did to enable you to achieve your milestones and end goal.
- Only return to the present when you’ve learnt something useful from this exercise.
- When you’ve returned to the present, open your eyes (if closed) and say, with total honesty, what you’re feeling and thinking.
Timeline to bring empowering resources from the past to the present and future
- Think about what you want to achieve in the long term and some emotional resources that will help you achieve whatever it is more quickly and easily.
- Imagine your past is on a line 45 degrees behind you.
- Travel back into your past until you find three experiences where you succeeded in complex challenges (particularly when you didn’t think you would succeed). Create a representation of how you felt as you succeeded in each case. These representations will become resources for the future.
- Returning to the present, and remember the resources you’ve acquired.
- Imagine you’re moving forward in the future towards your end goal. When you come to any challenge, use any resources you’ve uncovered to help you resolve the challenge.
- Imagine continuing to move forward until you’ve well achieved your end goal. What does it feel like to have achieved it?
- Imagine continuing to move forward until you’ve started to get real value from having achieved your end goal and know that you can maintain having achieved it. What does that feel like?
- Imagine taking your time to come to the present and, as you do, noticing what you did to enable you to achieve your milestones and end goal.
- Only come back to the present when you’ve learnt something genuinely useful from this exercise.
- When you’ve come back to the present, open your eyes (if closed), and say, with total honesty, what you’re feeling and what you’re thinking.
Timeline to heal time-traps
What is a time trap?
“A lifetrap is a pattern that starts in childhood and reverberates throughout life. It began with something done to us by our families or other children. We were abandoned, criticized, overprotected, abused, excluded, or deprived—we were damaged in some way.
Eventually, the lifetrap becomes part of us. Long after we leave the home we grew up in, we continue to create situations in which we are mistreated, ignored, put down, or controlled and in which we fail to reach our most desired goals. Lifetraps determine how we think, feel, act, and relate to others. They trigger intense feelings such as anger, sadness, and anxiety.
Even when we appear to have everything—social status, an ideal marriage, the respect of people close to us, career success—we are often unable to savour life or believe in our accomplishments.”
E. Young, Jeffrey; S. Klosko, Janet. Reinventing Your Life (pp. 1-2). Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. Kindle Edition.
We have a timeline approach that is very powerful for ‘time-traps’ however this appproach needs at least a minimum level of experience, as it can release a significant of emotion. Only use this technique if you’re competent working with clients while they experience very powerful emotions.
It can be useful to develop your own ‘process language scripts’ such as:
“You’re experiencing very powerful emotions; however, you would only experience this if you’re ready to let go of something significant that has been holding you back in the past. As that emotional wave rises and falls, you’ll begin to notice that you’re starting to heal at a fundamental level, and this will continue over the next few days.”
“And you’ll begin to become to be surprised and delighted as you begin to find your body seems to relax more naturally, and at the time, your energy levels increase.”
Time trap exercise
- Explore situations in the past that you want to heal, and choose a specific example and the characters involved.
- Anchor a positive state for the session so you can access it at any time during the session.
- Create two lines, one going straight back, the other at 45 degrees. You will explore your past and associated, using the 45-degree line as a guide to access all your current resources easily. On the straight back line, a dissociated version of you gets younger as you travel back into the past.
- From the associated position, watch yourself getting younger and go back to just before the example you want to explore.
- The associated you develop a set of words of encouragement and a positive energy stream to the younger you.
- Associate with the younger you and accept the advice and energy from the more experienced you. How do you feel about those additional resources?
- The (newly) associated you, being aware that the disassociated you is always available for advice, energy and support,
- With your extra resources, move forward to the present at whatever speed works and clear up any time traps on the route.
- Fully integrated into the present, taking any new learning and letting go of less-than-useful emotions. Focus on what you’ve learnt that will be useful to you.
- When you’ve returned to the present, open your eyes (if closed) and say, with total honesty, what you’re feeling and thinking.
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NLP Techniques – NLP Strategies: FAQs
Q: What is NLP Timeline Therapy?
A: NLP Timeline Therapy is a method for reprogramming how you perceive time, enabling you to plan from a successful future and release emotional blocks from the past.
Q: How does NLP Timeline Therapy help create a better future?
A: It allows you to imagine your future self achieving your direction/end goals, then work backwards to the present to identify the steps and mindset that made it possible.
Q: How does NLP Timeline Therapy remove blocks?
By revisiting past experiences from a position of safety and insight, you can let go of limiting emotions and beliefs that have influenced your present decisions.
Q: What are the benefits of NLP Timeline work?
You develop forward-focused clarity, emotional freedom, and a powerful ability to align action with vision — all by reframing how you experience time.