Tom Meyers, in his new book The Futures Effect, provides an engaging and highly practical approach to transforming your consciousness and your way of life. Written in a clear, direct, and easily understandable style, Meyers’ book highlights the critical importance of understanding and guiding your life from the perspective of your envisioned future. Instead of following the habits and mindsets of the past, the key to a better life is to become more conscious of the future and its possibilities and opportunities—to infuse the future into the present. For Meyers, the future should become a way of life.

The Futures Effect examines the essentials of personal empowerment and taking a proactive, rather than reactive stance toward life’s challenges.
Embracing the concept of self-directed purposeful evolution—we have the power to personally evolve ourselves—Meyers discusses how to successfully prepare for the stress-provoking rapid changes of modern life, creating a “resilient future,” and how to envisage a “future self” to serve as a guiding light for navigating and understanding the present. Meyers addresses human emotions and feelings, decision-making and planning, knowledge and thinking, and purpose, self-narratives, and self-identity in outlining his futurist philosophy.

Filled with illuminating examples from his own personal history and experiences—of difficulties and successes and insights—Meyers’ The Futures Effect is an enthusiastic and constructive roadmap for heightening one’s future consciousness and re-energizing one’s life.

Thomas Lombardo, Ph.D.
Director of the Center for Future Consciousness
Executive Board Member and Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation
Author of Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution, Essays on the Future of Psychology and Consciousness, and numerous other books and publications

This book is all about inspiring you to think constructively about your future. By providing a straightforward and useful framework based on unwavering principles, it fosters the development of a guiding narrative for the future, for one’s life.

By using that framework, we can define and design a preferred scenario of the future that is better than one left up to chance. Everyone can easily follow the steps suggested by the book to progress, live a meaningful life, and assure a “GREAT” future in this fast changing and challenging world. It teaches us how to analyse, develop, and pursue our preferred plans using language that is simple to read and understand.

The clever use of “Y’our” rather than “Your” by the author serves to remind us that our choices, decisions, and actions influence more than just our own lives. We must thus construct our future based on that awareness to be responsible people who care about the future.

For readers at all educational levels who want to live a purposeful life in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, this book is highly helpful.

Alireza Hejazi, Ph.D.
Analyst for Leadership and Futures Studies and author of a.o. Responsible Foresight and Becoming A Professional Futurist

As an osteopath and an autodidact futurist, Tom links the most important skills from futures thinking to learn how to feel with your whole being. His vision is not so much about shaping your vision about the future; it’s about shaping your feelings about the future and using that as an instrument to choose directions. It is not a book that is made to be read at one time. It reads like it is simple, but it is not. It’s a book that you should read chapter by chapter and think through and let the content make sense for you before passing on to the next chapter. You need to take time to digest.

In his writing, Tom takes you by the hand. Sometimes the text seems to repeat but then it comes to another point for which you still had to go back to what was told before. He teaches us personal futures thinking through his own experiences and underpins them with lots of research from other futurists, (mental) health experts, philosophers, and scientists.

My greatest learning from the book is that a lot of things are uncertain but there are also a lot of things you can count on.  I love the insight that “…certain feelings I longed for were constant in life, like feeling content, fulfilled and healthy… I knew I would not always experience those things, but I would always be striving for them”. Working with Tom on GREAT futures is not about knowing; his futures effect is about wisdom with all your body, mind and soul.

Linda Hofman MSc.
Senior lecturer & futures researcher, Fontys Academy for Creative Industries

About

Tom Meyers

Tom Meyers was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1970. His life has been eventful, to say the least, but he came to an abrupt halt at age 29 when his gourmet deli business failed, leading him into an existential crisis. Three revealing steps – what he now calls “Futurizing Yourself” – saved his life and helped him overcome his limiting beliefs and make his preferred future into an ongoing reality.

Today, Tom is an osteopath and body-centred stress coach with a private practice in Brussels. He promotes health and wellbeing and is the founder of the “Reaset Approach”. Tom combines his health practice with his work as a wellbeing futurist, speaker and author. His mission is to help people flourish and thrive as they prepare for the future with confidence.