You asked for some ideas on how to make the identity change from "struggling to get there" to "being a top salesperson"...

When I was younger, I didn't have so many friends around, and to keep myself amused I had to pretend. Now in a sense, as a child, you might remember doing very similar things. I would pretend I was a great magician, able to create powerful change in anything I saw. And after a time I began to forget, and everyone does, just what I was pretending I was and what I was pretending I wasn't. And sometimes I'd try to remember what I was pretending I wasn't and what I wasn't pretending I was. Until the changed I saw became more blurred and began to realise what was really going on.

I used to sleep a lot as a child (and even now, I devote at least a third of my life to it), and I dreamt. I dreamt as only a child can and in my dreams I slept and was dreaming anew. Life as I knew it was changing, and even when I awoke I was living the lives of my heroes. I knew deep inside that I was as they were until it was as if I had a whole new past, and my present now was full of fresh possibilities. I awoke again, and my vision began to clear.

Have you ever awoken from a dream, a dream that seemed incredibly real, and felt as if you'd just lived a whole new life? When I was younger I had a dream that I was dying of cancer. Luckily a stereotypically large black male nurse helped me along, until I'd completely accepted what was going on, and was happy to live with who I was. I woke to find that I didn't have cancer, and moreover my life was amazingly rich. The post that morning included a request for a donation for nurses for cancer. You should have seen how quick I wrote the cheque! I was still living out of my past from the dream.

Well, now. You might find deep trance identification a very useful effect to use to effect the kind of processes you're talking about here. You say "under what conditions would our salesperson naturally step into their potential", and the your "struggling" salesperson has the potential to be "a top salesperson". Well, how about simply allowing him to review every time that his unconscious has seen or heard a powerful salesperson at work. You can even get some kinaesthetics in there - you don't have to mention specifically what it might be! (seduction comes to mind). And give him a short time to allow his unconscious to review the material in detail a number of times and start to integrate the essential parts of it.

Then get him to practice. Yup, open eyes, out of seat, and _be_ that top salesman (it's only pretend). Really test, then go back into trance, and go over it again. Do it as many times as you need to.

In trance, build up a past that the powerful salesman has. Give him specific times when he realised how powerful he really was. If it's ecological OK, put in times from his childhood. Give him the beliefs (not just in himself) that he needs. I'm not suggesting completely erasing his life and giving him a new one, but merely nudging a few pieces of the puzzle here and there. An extra memory here, a new belief there. Now, the choice of whether to be a powerful salesman or not is real one.

For me, the key to deep trance identification is to give the subject time and space to _be_ that person. Not just act as if, but give them something where they can really be, without being embarrassed.

You also asked how someone could discover and then set a great future. To a discover a great future, you have an incredible wide range of options available to you. Just a couple:

• Setup a really positive anchor. For instance, put in joy, confidence, the feeling of being loved, and freedom to be. Stack them all together then use submodalities and anything else to really crank up the volume. Test.
• Do a future progression, e.g. do a guided visualisation into trance, finding a way of getting into the future (a guide, a machine, a path, anything), let them take themselves into the future, fire off the anchor, and ask them what's going on. Go through their dominant rep system overlapping to all the others. Get them to collect their learnings, return to the now, and integrate the learnings (via a swish, collapsing anchors anything you like).

To help set the future:

• Use a timeline
• Insert content: place a distant goal, and build in intermediate milestones
• Change process: change the submodalities of the the timeline
• Hose good feelings over timeline. Use the anchor to spray the good feelings all through the future (my personal favourite)
• Do a future progression, but give suggestions to set, rather than get, this new reality.

We're all reincarnated into the past anyway - all your past lives are in the future. To live longer you have to die late, to realise, to internalise all the things you enjoy and do them more.

Last updated: 25 September 1997