What sharing future gives us

Brendon Burchard, motivational speaker and coach, says “Problem marketing was a great technique until 2005, but the culture changed, the world changed. We moved away from a pain-oriented society into an aspirational-society.”

Aspirations exist in the future, and the future doesn’t exist at all (yet). With no ‘reality’ to hold it down, the future makes it a great space for raising ambition:

  1. Emotional investment. A journey into the future starts in the present. If we like the sound of where it’s going, it becomes part of our own vision for the future. We want the future to be bright, don’t we?
  2. A vision you belong to. Because the vision is ‘ours’, our bias stretches beyond acceptance to advocacy. We want our own vision to come true, don’t we?
  3. Permission to raise our ambition. By advocating for this shared future–a bigger future–its failure would mean the undoing of the very world we hope to live in. We can’t sit idly by and let that happen, can we?

It could be a shared future of better smartphone photography (to take better images of your family). It could be one where a type of crime no longer exists (making a safer world for your children). Whatever it is, sharing future gives us a powerful place to end a message and set the sights of our audience in the right direction.