Visualize your success

Visualization Techniques to Affirm Your Desired Outcomes: A Step-by-Step Guide

Visualization techniques have been used by successful people to visualize their desired outcomes for ages. The practice has even given some high achievers what seems like super-powers, helping them create their dream lives by accomplishing one goal or task at a time with hyper focus and complete confidence.

visualization techniques used to focus on success near shoreline

In fact, we all have this awesome power, but most of us have never been taught to use it effectively.

Elite athletes use it. The super rich use it. And peak performers in all fields now use it. That power is called visualization.

The daily practice of visualizing your dreams as already complete can rapidly accelerate your achievement of those dreams, goals and ambitions.

Using visualization techniques to focus on your goals and desires accomplishes four very important things.

1.) It activates your creative subconscious which will start generating creative ideas to achieve your goal.

2.) It programs your brain to more readily perceive and recognize the resources you will need to achieve your dreams.

3.) It activates the law of attraction, thereby drawing into your life the people, resources, and circumstances you will need to achieve your goals.

4.) It builds your internal motivation to take the necessary actions to achieve your dreams.

Visualization is really quite simple. You sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and imagine — in as vivid detail as you can — what you would be looking at if the dream you have were already realized. Imagine being inside of yourself, looking out through your eyes at the ideal result.

Visualize with the ‘Mental Rehearsal’ Technique

Athletes call this visualization process “mental rehearsal,” and they have been using it since the 1960s when we learned about it from the Russians.

All you have to do is set aside a few minutes a day. The best times are when you first wake up, after meditation or prayer, and right before you go to bed. These are the times you are most relaxed.

Go through the following three steps:

STEP 1. Imagine sitting in a movie theater, the lights dim, and then the movie starts. It is a movie of you doing perfectly whatever it is that you want to do better. See as much detail as you can create, including your clothing, the expression on your face, small body movements, the environment and any other people that might be around. Add in any sounds you would be hearing — traffic, music, other people talking, cheering. And finally, recreate in your body any feelings you think you would be experiencing as you engage in this activity.

STEP 2. Get out of your chair, walk up to the screen, open a door in the screen and enter into the movie. Now experience the whole thing again from inside of yourself, looking out through your eyes. This is called an “embodied image” rather than a “distant image.” It will deepen the impact of the experience. Again, see everything in vivid detail, hear the sounds you would hear, and feel the feelings you would feel.

STEP 3. Finally, walk back out of the screen that is still showing the picture of you performing perfectly, return to your seat in the theater, reach out and grab the screen and shrink it down to the size of a cracker. Then, bring this miniature screen up to your mouth, chew it up and swallow it. Imagine that each tiny piece — just like a hologram — contains the full picture of you performing well. Imagine all these little screens traveling down into your stomach and out through the bloodstream into every cell of your body. Then imagine that every cell of your body is lit up with a movie of you performing perfectly. It’s like one of those appliance store windows where 50 televisions are all tuned to the same channel.

When you have finished this process — it should take less than five minutes — you can open your eyes and go about your business. If you make this part of your daily routine, you will be amazed at how much improvement you will see in your life.

Create Goal Pictures

Another powerful visualization technique is to create a photograph or picture of yourself with your goal, as if it were already completed. If one of your goals is to own a new car, take your camera down to your local auto dealer and have a picture taken of yourself sitting behind the wheel of your dream car. If your goal is to visit Paris, find a picture or poster of the Eiffel Tower and cut out a picture of yourself and place it into the picture.

Create a Visual Picture and an Affirmation for Each Goal

We recommend that you find or create a picture of every aspect of your dream life. Create a picture or a visual representation for every goal you have — financial, career, recreation, new skills and abilities, things you want to purchase, and so on.

When we were writing the very first Chicken Soup for the Soul® book, we took a copy of the New York Times best seller list, scanned it into our computer, and using the same font as the newspaper, typed Chicken Soup for the Soul into the number one position in the “Paperback Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous” category. We printed several copies and hung them up around the office. Less than two years later, our book was the number one book in that category and stayed there for over a year. Now that’s a pretty solid example of a successful visualization technique!

You want to take your visualization to the next level, right?
Learn how to create an empowering vision board here!

Index Cards

We practice a similar discipline every day. We each have a list of about 30-40 goals we are currently working on. We write each goal on a 3×5 index card and keep those cards near our bed and take them with us when we travel. Each morning and each night we go through the stack of cards, one at a time, read the card, close our eyes, see the completion of that goal in its perfect desired state for about 15 seconds, open our eyes and repeat the process with the next card.

Use Affirmations to Support Your Visualization

An affirmation is a statement that evokes not only a picture, but the experience of already having what you want. Here’s an example of an affirmation:

I am happily vacationing 2 months out of the year in a tropical paradise, and working just four days a week owning my own business.

Repeating an affirmation several times a day keeps you focused on your goal, strengthens your motivation, and programs your subconscious by sending an order to your crew to do whatever it takes to make that goal happen.

Expect Results

Through writing down your goals, using the power of visualization and repeating your daily affirmations, you can achieve amazing results.

Visualization and affirmations allow you to change your beliefsassumptions, and opinions about the most important person in your life — YOU! They allow you to harness the 18 billion brain cells in your brain and get them all working in a singular and purposeful direction.

Your subconscious will become engaged in a process that transforms you forever. The process is invisible and doesn’t take a long time. It just happens over time, as long as you put in the time to visualize and affirm, practice your techniques, surround yourself with positive people, read uplifting books and listen to audio programs that flood your mind with positive, life-affirming messages.

Repeat your affirmations every morning and night for a month and they will become an automatic part of your thinking… woven into the very fabric of your being.

How to Spend the 10 Most Important Minutes of Your Day

Harness the Subconscious Mind with Visualization Techniques

Visualization – seeing the goal as already complete in your mind’s eye – is a core technique used by the world’s most successful people. Visualization is effective because it harnesses the power of our subconscious mind.

When we visualize goals as complete, it creates a conflict in our subconscious mind between what we are visualizing and what we currently have. Our minds are hard-wired to resolve such conflicts by working to create a current reality that matches the one we have envisioned.

Visualization activates the creative powers of the subconscious mind, motivating it to work harder at creating solutions. You’ll also notice new levels of motivation and find yourself doing things that normally you would avoid, but that will take you closer to success.

The third way visualization boosts success is by programming the Reticular Activating System (RAS), which serves as a mental filter for the 8 million bits of information that are streaming into our brains at any one time.

The RAS thinks in pictures, not words. Daily visualization feeds the RAS the pictures it needs to start filtering information differently. As a result, your RAS will start to pay attention to anything that might help you achieve your goals – information that it otherwise might ignore.

Live in the Moment

Although a daily practice of visualization is vital, we don’t need to spend all day thinking about our goals for this technique to work. In fact, spending too much time in visualization can rob you of something essential – living in the moment.

Daily rituals help to establish the right balance between thinking about the future and living in the moment. Start by picking a time during which you’ll review your goals and visualize your success. Ideally, do this twice a day – first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed. The process typically will take 10 minutes or less.

If you meditate, do your visualizations immediately after your meditation. The deepened state reached during meditation heightens the impact of visualization.

For greatest effect, read your goals or affirmations out loud. After each one, close your eyes and create the visual image of the completed goal in your mind.

To multiply the effects, add sound, smells, and tastes. Most importantly, add the emotions and bodily sensations you would be feeling if you had already achieved your goal.

This is a powerful visualization technique.

Research has revealed that images or scenes that are accompanied by intense emotion will stay locked in our memory forever. The more passion, excitement and energy we muster during visualization, the more powerful the results will be.

Once you have visualized each goal as complete, it’s time to release. Let go of your goals, and spend the rest of your day being in the present moment.

Be Present Instantly

An easy way to instantly become present is to focus on your bodily sensations. It’s impossible to focus on our bodies and be in the past or the future at the same time.

For example, focus on your left foot right now. What are you feeling? Pay attention to the sensation for a minute. Then notice what you’re feeling in your right foot, and spend a few moments really feeling the sensation. If you were able to pay attention to your feet, congratulations. You were absolutely present.

If you find your mind drifting to the future throughout the day, you can use one of the more basic visualization techniques. Just let go of any fears or worries that arise. Shift your thoughts to what you want the future to look like when you get there. Then bring your awareness back to the moment.

As the saying goes, “Today is a gift—that’s why it’s called the present.” Use visualization techniques to achieve your goals, but invest the majority of your time enjoying the gift of today.

This article is reproduced by permission – Jack Canfield, America’s #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul® and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you’re ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now atwww.FreeSuccessStrategies.com

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Rich or Poor..Scrooge or Bob Cratchit?

The headline in the Daily Mail was

So who’s more caring, Scrooge or Bob Cratchit?

A study by a Californian University looking at different types of happiness found that having more money makes us ‘proud, self-satisfied and self-oriented.  By comparison they found that those with little money, depicted in Scrooges’s Bob Cratchit, feel more loving, and are more compassionate.

The findings which were published in the journal Emotion, found that those who are worse off face more ‘threats’.  The study seems to suggest that people with less income seem to have found  a way to cope.

What the study doesn’t reveal is what happens when the person with the higher income embarks on an act of kindness, interestingly as in the very same Dickens tale, when the rich man suddenly experienced the joy of ‘giving’, it changed everything.

Kindness is good for you, its official, and according to scientists the person offering the act of kindness benefits even more than the recipient!

So the moral of the story is clear, Dickens or not, whether you have pots of money or are struggling to get by, it all really comes down to your attitude – and how much you are prepared to give to others.  What this survey also doesn’t address is that whether you are ‘rich’ whatever that means ..or ‘poor’ whatever that means….you may still have blocks and limiting beliefs around money which prevent you from reaching your full potential.  It’s far too simplistic to suggest that everyone who is wealthy is self centred and those who feel worse off are more loving.

Check out the work that Liz Hancock does, she is a ‘wealth entrepreneur and creator of The 50k formula, she can help you to overcome those issues and get the success and happiness that you deserve for your work.  http://www.elizabethmaryhancock.com

New Year…..Its all Good for your business

It was great to interview Cassie Mendoza-Jones for Hay House radio recently, she wrote the  awesome book You are enough, and now her new release is Its all Good How to trust and surrender to the bigger plan.. Cassie is a Sydney based kinesiologist, business alignment coach, naturopath, writer and speaker, who works with women, and with entrepreneurs, healers, coaches and creatives who are driven, devoted and honoring their dreams, and who want to become more powerfully aligned to their bigger vision, clear away perfectionism, procrastination and overwhelm, and create their own version of a beautiful and aligned business and life.

Cassie is keen to remind us, especially those of us in business who so often feel that we have failed, that our failure doesn’t spell the end:  As Cassie says ‘Your perception of your failure is just that—a perception—and with awareness, self-compassion and aligned action, you can clear the disappointment and take aligned action to invite in clarity, and a new beginning’

At the start of a new year it’s easy to set ourselves up for failure, as we determine that next year we will be more focused, more successful, more influential…or whatever our goals for our business might be.

I have a very definite love hate relationship with ‘goals’ and resolutions and I like Cassie’s approach which is to suggest that as business owners we should set intentions rather than goal.  She has a fabulous tip which brings together the concept of intention and manifesting or ‘attracting’ what we desire.  She says we should try setting our intention, preferably in writing, make it something that feels important that we want, whether it’s to attract new clients, be offered a book deal, be invited to be interviewed on a radio show…and then add the words…or something even better…or you may want to add….or another wonderful surprise.

By adding these little phrases we leave the outcome open, we let go of the strong grip we can sometimes have on what we think we want, let’s face it when we look back, some of the things we thought we wanted for our work would have been disastrous if they’d come to fruition at that time!  Similarly it’s a good idea to let go of perfectionism.  Nothing works out perfectly all the time for anyone.  Sometimes it’s important to acknowledge our expectations but be willing to release them

Cassie saysA new you is born through the fire of failure: ‘Our failures and disappointments teach us so much; they help us back ourselves even more as we take steps in the directions of our new dreams. They help us change our mind, deciding where we want to align ourselves, allowing us to open up to a new way of being and thinking’ 

She has a nice calming affirmation –

‘I allow myself to dream and set goals, and also to be open to something even better flowing to me.  I trust that my intentions will manifest in the right time and in the right form for me. I trust that I am on the right path’

We discussed leaning into trust, and how we should trust that our most intense moments of feeling ungrounded may come right before your biggest expansion, so trust the path you’re on.  Cassie says ‘The crumbling down of what you know is paving the way for what’s to come; you simply can’t see the new path because the old mess hasn’t settled into its new beauty yet. The old is becoming the new; be patient, and trust. You’ll see it soon.

We also discussed clearing space just to be. In my own work I sometimes feel so completely overwhelmed and in chaos, my rational mind knows that there simply wouldn’t be space for anything new to come in, however deeply I desire it!  When I feel like that I now realise I must declutter both physically and mentally, I’ve taken to cleaning off a section of my desk, or finding a messy shelf that needs a sort out (they are abundant in my home!) the sense of order that comes from that is amazing,

I also try and lie down for a few moments and mentally close off all the thoughts that are flying around, she suggested I imagine that my mind is like a computer desktop with lots of tabs open (that’s easy to imagine – mine is always like that!) and mentally close them all down, ie the to-do lists, the obligations et al, until there is nothing open and we can do a complete shutdown, we hold that stillness where there is just a dark screen and a little ‘dot’ before it all swirls into action again. Preferably dealing with the ‘projects’ one at a time.

Above all this book reminds us that we can trust in ourselves and know that we are supported in our path, and when we let go of our expectations we can truly receive our dreams…or something even better.

It’s all Good by Cassie Mendoza-Jones is published by Hay House

 The time your dreams take to manifest is needed for your roots to take hold: Trusting in yourself and your path in life allows you to find the strength and courage to show up in life again and again after a disappointment, as your best self. It allows you to let go of your expectations, while still setting goals and intentions, and being more than okay to sit in those spaces in between setting your goals and seeing your dreams manifest.    Cassie Mendoza-Jones

www.cassiemendozajones.com