BFNow Self-Study Orientation
Your guide to the BFNow content and process
Introduction
The Bright Future Now material has many dimensions, combining intellect with emotions, individual growth with leadership and group skills, frameworks with practices, compassion with results-oriented creativity. Yet the experience of it has a wholeness, like coming home to a world that a deep part of you recognizes. It's designed to free you from the things that hold you back – both inner and outer constraints.
"This course is like that map you've been looking for. It touches on so much, so concisely. It's like this simplicity on the other side of the messy complexity."
It does this by helping you see past the limitations and blindspots in modern cultures that we've all internalized. It helps you meet the challenges of today’s world while preparing you to thrive in the world that's emerging.
We called the original course an adventure tour into a new culture. The participants were Explorers and the content provided Explorations. We're continuing that spirit in this self-study program.
There, each module was covered in a week, with five Morning Emails sent out Monday through Friday, plus supplemental material posted in the course's online forum.
Here in the BFNow self-study version, the Morning Emails have become exploration pages. Each module has the same five plus the supplemental material, but you can go at your own pace.
The first part of each exploration page provides conceptual background. The second part provides experiential practices that weave the concepts into everyday life plus, in some pages, additional material for more depth. You will get good value if you simply read the exploration pages but you will get a whole new level of value if you do the experientials.
Content
The Modules
The modules move from a more inward focus to a more outward focus but they all work together as a system.
"The genius of the course is the way it uses the self as a reference point for a
complex system. I found that this focus made the material personal, real, and meaningful to me. The mood of the course is deeply optimistic and for me that in itself feels nourishing and new."
Module 1: Self-Awareness and Self-Compassion (available) – We begin with the most fundamental of relationships: how you relate to yourself. Explore your inner territory with Optimal Zone Hygiene tools that lead you to a deeper self-awareness and inner harmony.
Module 2: Objects, Categories, Territories and Maps (available) – We turn next to how we perceive the world around us and how we think. Discover how to see systems rather than just collections of objects. Learn to move beyond the limits of categorical thinking and step into more diverse modes of cognition. Become aware of cultural blindspots and how these new modes of perceiving and thinking open up opportunities for meaningful change.
Module 3: Child Development and Adult Character (coming soon) – We all carry chronic psychological defense patterns. Many of these emerge from commonplace but traumatizing child-raising practices inherited from the Empire Era and passed from generation to generation through our cultures and families. We think of these defense patterns as "normal" behavior, yet they aren't. Gain a deeper understanding of yourself and others, and learn how to recognize and start to heal these patterns.
Module 4: Systems and Habits (coming soon) – Explore the tools of systems thinking to bring understanding, tame complexity and discover skillful interventions in all levels of the world around us. Develop effective habit-change skills by focussing on a personal habit as a system, knowing that if we can learn to change our own habits we will likely be more successful in changing the habits and behaviors of larger systems like organizations and cultures.
Module 5: Collaboration (coming soon) – Real-world effectiveness often requires skillful collaboration. Explore new dimensions of essential collaborative skills, decision-making and leadership using the perspectives from the preceding modules.
Module 6: How Change Works (coming soon) – Dive into the world of complex adaptive systems and how they evolve, looking at cultures, human groups and even each of us as individuals as examples. Explore the tools and understandings that can enable us to be conscious co-evolvers in the great flow of life.
Module 7: Vision to Reality (coming soon) – This is the "how to create an effective project" module. Put all the pieces together so that you can turn your visions for a bright future into successful new cultural DNA now.
The Supporting Context
The modules rest on the Foundational Literacies. These systems-level presentations will add depth and dimension to your Self-Study and introduce you to the first 3 of the Foundational Keys:
What Time Is It? (About cultural evolution)
Process
Be cautious of seeing some concepts you've seen in other settings and immediately concluding "I know this stuff." This program is a system and the relationships between the parts are as important as the parts themselves. Those relationships take time to become apparent. One of our graduates likes to describe the program as "time-release medicine."
Also, an intellectual understanding of the concepts is just the start. The real question is, are you living those concepts? Are they reflected in your habits and behavior as deeply as you would like them to? Regardless of how much you know when you start the program, use the course as a support for moving your lived behavior even further in the direction you would like.
The Self-Study material is valuable for individual use and is also of long-term mutual benefit when used by a small group, such as co-workers, partners, community-project participants or friends.
As an individual
Take your time. Take at least a day for each of the exploration pages. They were designed to be used that way, to give you time to absorb the concepts and notice how they reverberate throughout your day, your relationships and your life.
Do the modules and the explorations in sequence. They often build on each other.
Use a journal or have someone to talk to about your experience as you go through it. That will help you anchor and assimilate it all more easily and fully.
As a group
If you choose to explore BFNow with a group, I recommend that you still work with each exploration on your own first. That way you get to have your own experience without it being initially influenced by others.
Meeting or communicating regularly as a group, ideally at the end of each module, to share reflections on your experience can significantly enhance the value of the program.
The original interactive version of BFNow had these reflection meetings at the end of every week and they allowed each person to see the material through the eyes of others. It was always fascinating and illuminating, deepening the learning for everyone.