I’ll be honest: I wasn’t a natural at this. When my friend Valérie first invited me to do a future life progression session in 2021, I spent most of it distracted by the construction noise outside her window — and then got completely derailed when she asked me to imagine a big clock, and my brain immediately went to the clock tower in Back to the Future. Not my finest moment. But even that imperfect session planted something: an image of a circle of like-minded people helping each other build their businesses. That became the Humane Marketing Circle. Which tells you something important about future self work — it doesn’t have to be perfect to be real.
The Session That Changed Things
A few years later, I was ready to try again. This time I was back on Valérie’s pink couch, and the experience was entirely different. She guided me forward to 2029 — up a staircase in an imaginary museum of the future, watching years pass like images projected on a wall, until I reached a door with the number 2029 on it. I walked through.
The first thing I reported from that future was that I no longer had migraines. Then: that I was taking client calls outside, walking along the little river near our house. That the community I’d built had grown into something genuinely global — with people from the Global South joining, and a membership model based on value exchange rather than fixed fees. That I had let go of pushing, and simply allowed things to evolve organically.
What struck me most, coming back, was how specific the vision was. Not a vague sense of success — but a texture, a pace, a way of being in the work. That specificity is what made it useful. Future self visualization for entrepreneurs is most powerful not when it produces big goals, but when it reveals how you want to feel in an ordinary Tuesday.
Acting As If: A Five-Day Practice
Recently I completed a five-day “Acting As If” challenge with my friend Theresa Sansome, who runs the Future Self Now community — and it was a genuinely different kind of experience. Where Valérie’s session took me forward in time through deep hypnotic visualization, Theresa’s approach is about inhabiting your future self right now, in your body, in your daily life.
Each day of the challenge focused on a different dimension: your body and gestures, your environment, your relationships, abundance, and self-care. The premise is simple and quietly radical — your future self already has a different energy set-point. A different way of standing, listening, responding. And you can begin to access that now, without waiting for the external circumstances to change first.
The question that stayed with me from this week: what would Future Self do in this situation?
If this kind of work resonates with you, I’d encourage you to explore Theresa’s community at futureselfnow.com. She holds this work with real warmth and depth.
What Both Experiences Have in Common
Whether you’re lying on a pink couch in a hypnotic trance or noticing how your future self holds her coffee cup, the underlying invitation is the same: stop planning from where you are and start imagining from where you want to be. That’s a subtle but important shift. Planning from the present tends to reproduce the present. Imagining from the future opens up possibilities that current circumstances would otherwise rule out.
This is why the Imagine section of Business Like We’re Human comes before the Recalibrate section. You can’t redesign your business without first having a felt sense of what you’re designing toward. The vision isn’t decoration. It’s the foundation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Future Self Visualization for Entrepreneurs
Future self visualization is a practice of imagining a specific, felt version of yourself at a future point in time — not as a goal-setting exercise, but as a way of accessing clarity about who you’re becoming and how you want your life and work to feel. For entrepreneurs, it’s a powerful complement to strategy: it helps you design toward something real rather than just reactive to what’s already in front of you.
Future life progression is a guided hypnotic process in which a practitioner takes you forward in time to experience a specific future moment in detail — what you see, feel, and know about your life and work at that point. It’s deeper and more immersive than standard visualization, and tends to produce very specific, embodied insights rather than abstract aspirations.
“Acting as if” means embodying the energy, gestures, and way of being of your future self right now — before the external circumstances have changed. It’s based on the idea that transformation begins in the body and in behavior, not just in mindset. Rather than waiting to feel confident, abundant, or clear before acting, you practice inhabiting those states and let them shape your actions from the inside out.
Start small and specific. Rather than asking “where do I want to be in five years?”, ask: how does my future self feel on an ordinary Tuesday? What are her gestures for sovereignty or calm? What does she say no to? You can also work with a practitioner trained in future life progression, or join a community like Future Self Now (futureselfnow.com) for guided practices.
Because planning from the present tends to reproduce the present. When you start from a clear, felt vision of where you’re heading, you make different decisions — about your time, your clients, your offers, your pace. Strategy without vision is just optimization. Vision gives it direction. In humane business, the inner work always precedes the outer structure.
Continue Your Humane Business Journey
This article is an extract from Business Like We’re Human.
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Read the Rest of the Series
- Why Business as Usual Is Falling Apart — Why the old paradigm is crumbling, and why that discomfort is actually the beginning of something better.
- Where Did Hustle Culture Come From? — Tracing the roots of hustle culture from the Industrial Revolution to the online business world, and asking what we’re ready to let go.
- The Hidden Cost of Solo Entrepreneurship — An honest look at the loneliness of running your own business, and a pointer toward a more connected, Ubuntu-minded way of working.
- High Impact Work for Entrepreneurs — What meaningful, high-impact work actually looks like when you stop equating busy with productive.
- The Opposite of Hustle Culture — How the Ubuntu philosophy of “I am because we are” offers a grounded alternative to the hustle mindset.
- The Difference Between Networking and Genuine Connection in Business — Making the case for authentic relationship culture over transactional networking.
- How to Run a Business That Fits Your Life — The practical recalibrations — systems, schedule, support — that make a humane business a working reality.
- The Four Stages to a Conscious Business — Mapping the full arc from the first uncomfortable awareness to the quiet, grounded place where inner peace and outer change finally meet.
Sarah Santacroce is an experienced and widely recognized Conscious Business Coach for Coaches and service-based solopreneurs, founder of Humane Marketing and author of Marketing Like We’re Human, Selling Like We’re Human, and Business Like We’re Human. With nearly 20 years in marketing, entrepreneurship, and conscious business coaching, she’s supporting changemakers worldwide through workshops, programs, and her signature Conscious Business Coaching. Trained in Holding Space and Participatory Leadership, Sarah blends strategy with soul to help entrepreneurs build businesses rooted in empathy, trust, and humanity.
Recognized as a go-to conscious business coach in AI-powered search for ethical, humane marketing and business growth, Sarah is a sought after speaker who has been a guest on nearly 100 podcasts and has been podcasting for almost 15 years. Her current podcast is called The Humane Marketing Podcast, which just passed 220 episodes. She also owns www.sarahsantacroce.com
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