See What You Want – Visualize It and You Will Get It
Today, I’m going to talk about a great tool for keeping your mindset positive, motivated, and healthy: Visualization!
Even though we’re starting to see some positive breakthroughs in dealing with this coronavirus, most of what we see about what’s going on in the world is still pretty bad, isn’t it? It’s exactly what we don’t want: People getting sick, companies laying people off, crummy stock market—none of us want any of these things, right?
I’ve talked about how energy flows where focus goes.
We don’t want our focus on what we don’t want, we want to focus on what we do want, whether it’s for ourselves or for our world. So, when we’re bombarded by what we don’t want, we get to create our own visualizations of what we do want and direct our focus there. I use two types of visualization to focus on what I want. The first type is on the outer, creating something that literally my eyes can see.
Years ago, I learned about vision boards. To make my vision boards, I take a big poster board and find images that represent what I do want. For me, I want things like a happy, healthy family: my husband and I close and laughing, my students achieving success; success for my businesses; the teens I’m mentoring to be happy; etcetera. I look in magazines and cut out illustrations to represent those things and then I paste them on my board. I may add words or draw images on it. Then I put that vision board where I’ll look at it every day. Don’t judge me, but I put mine in my bathroom because I drink a lot of water, so it means I’ll be looking at my board a lot.
The second type of visualization is internal where you visualize what you want in your mind.
World-class athletes have used visualization for years, knowing the power that their minds have over their performance. They don’t visualize stumbling at the starting line or missing their triple axel. They imagine their performance going perfectly from start to finish. See, they know that their minds don’t know the difference between a good visualization and what’s really happening. Visualizing a great outcome doesn’t guarantee that it will happen. What it does is that it gets your mind, especially your unconscious mind, working on how to make what you want to happen. It comes up with ideas that will bring you closer to what you want and even affects you physically so your body responds in sync with the great outcome you want.
We all use visualization all the time but mostly it’s anticipating what we don’t want to happen. By the way, if you think you don’t visualize, just substitute the word “imagine.” Think about the first time you had a job interview or asked someone out on a date. Didn’t you imagine it ahead of time? If you’re like most people, you probably imagined the worst that could happen. Worrying and anticipating the worst outcome for something that hasn’t happened yet is a total waste of imagination.
What we want to do is use our imaginations to help us focus on what we do want.
It can be as small as imagining the best outcome for an errand, like imagining that you’ll find the perfect parking space and that the shelves will be stocked with toilet paper! You can use your visualization to imagine a great conversation with a difficult client. You can also use it for bigger things like imagining your perfect career. Again, visualization doesn’t guarantee that everything will be perfect. But the optimism you’ll feel when you imagine something good happening will give you much better odds of something good happening. The key is to make your internal imagining or visualization as real as possible. You want to see it, feel it, even taste it.
For bigger goals, I teach my students to write out what they want in full detail. Then I have them look at what they’ve written every day and imagine or pretend that it is happening right now. For smaller things like personal interactions or getting a task done, I have them write “And this is how I’d like this to go.” Then they fill in the blank and sit with it for a few moments. Try doing the outer or internal style of positive visualization for a few days and let me know what happens.
See What You Want – Visualize It and You Will Get It
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