Author your Past, Present, & Future.

It is difficult to know who you are, where you should go, or how you should get there, unless you know where you came from. The Past Authoring Program has therefore been designed to help you write a structured autobiography. The program will help you:

• Divide your life into seven different time periods or epochs.
• Identify the most significant events that occurred during each epoch.
• Describe how each of those experiences has shaped who you are today.

It would be particularly useful to complete the Past Authoring Program if you have memories that are more than about eighteen months old that still intrude upon your thoughts, or that still evoke emotion such as fear, regret, shame or confusion. If this is happening, it means that your mind has not yet been able to fully process your past experiences, and that the brain areas associated with negative emotion still regard the past events in question as unresolved threats.

This course has been designed to allow you to do an in-depth analysis of the negative and positive elements of your personality, that is, your faults and your virtues, respectively. The exercise is structured around the Big Five Personality Model. The Big Five model is an empirically derived measurement model of personality that assesses variation in:

• Extraversion or positive emotion, dominance and enthusiasm
• Openness to Experience or creativity, artistic sensibility, and philosophical-mindedness
• Emotional Stability or the absence of negative emotion (anxiety, emotional pain, shame and guilt)
• Conscientiousness or orderliness and persistence
• Agreeableness or warmth, empathy and tender-mindedness (versus assertiveness and aggression)

The Future Authoring Program is designed to help you imagine your ideal future, three to five years down the road. What would your life be like if you could set it up in the manner that would be best for you? You will be asked to consider the people you admire, things you could do better, your educational and career goals, what habits you would like to improve, your family life, your social network, and your leisure activities.

Then you will be asked to write freely about your ideal future, without regard for grammar or spelling, for 15-20 minutes. It is best to use your imagination, to daydream, during this process. After that, you will be taken through a series of exercises that will help you specify, in detail, your ideal future, by summarizing, titling and prioritizing your goals, evaluating your motives, considering their personal and social impact, strategizing for their attainment, identifying potential obstacles and their solutions, monitoring your progress, and evaluating your decisions.

Future Authoring has been used by over 10,000 people and has shown to help them achieve more, while alleviating anxiety about the future through a feeling of clarity of purpose and direction. While most Future Authoring participants feel better about their future and generally achieve more towards their goals, there have been academic studies performed to demonstrate the effect of the Future Authoring program:

Four hundred students completed an abbreviated version of the Future Authoring program during freshman orientation at an undergraduate college. By the second semester, 27% of the class had dropped out, while only 14% of the group that had used Future Authoring had left the college. Other university studies have shown that not only does Future Authoring help students avoid dropping out, but it also improves their performance in terms of grade point average and the number of credits earned.

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In what order should I write the programs?

Our users each have their own experiences, circumstances, and needs. Some people benefit from doing the Past Authoring exercise first. One approach is to do the Present Authoring Faults exercise first, to sharpen your sense of self criticism, the Future Authoring exercise next, to formulate a plan, then the Present Authoring Virtues exercise, to think about capitalizing on your strengths, and finally the Past Authoring exercise. However, if you have significant issues in your past that are still causing you some trouble, you might consider starting with the Past Authoring exercise. You should do it in the order that you think will benefit you the most.

Can I download the program or write it offline?

At this time there is no option to download the Self Authoring programs and complete them offline. Some people choose to complete the program in a word-processor, or by hand, and put some filler text in the program.

Another thing to be aware of is that the programs are designed to keep track of your word count and to have time limits. This is to keep answers below a certain length, and so people don’t spend too much time on a particular answer.

Can I write the program in any language?

The programs are most effective when the writer is working in their most fluent language, so it is encouraged.

Does the program have an expiration after I purchase it?

It does not expire, so you can take as long as you’d like to complete the programs. Remember that you can return to your work at any time. You do not have to complete the programs in one sitting. In fact, sleeping between periods of work likely helps the process produce the changes in outlook and memory reorganization that it is designed to produce.

Approximately how long does a single program take?

Each program usually takes 4-5 hours, but we recommend you divide this time up over multiple sessions and beginning each session with a refreshed, and well-rested mind.