Jack Canfield featured Star of The Secret and co-founder of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Franchise
(who also endorsed my mini movies
and book The Big Book of You ) wrote
an amazing article offering a step-by-step guide to visualizing your dreams. I
think this is powerful because it puts you into several perspectives of your
vision likely stimulating several neural pathways.
My consistent advice is to feel the feelings of having what
you want during this process. Not a “lottery wining” type feeling but the real
deal; you now live this live, what does that feel like in your body, in your
mind and in your soul? Thanks Jack for this great insights!
Visualize
and Affirm Your Desired Outcomes: A Step-by-Step Guide
You
have within you an awesome power that most of us have never been taught to use.
Elite athletes use it. The super rich use it. And peak performers in all fields
are now starting to 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. Visualization of 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.
Mental Rehearsal
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:
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.
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.
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 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. With today’s technology, you could
probably make an even more convincing image using your computer.
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!
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
affirmations, you can achieve amazing results. Visualization and affirmations
allow you to change your beliefs, assumptions, 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, 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 — they will become woven into the very fabric
of your being.
Jack
Canfield, America’s Success Coach,
is the founder and co-creator of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for
the Soul and a leading authority on Peak Performance. If you’re ready to
jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that
you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com
If you are interested in specific visualization techniques
for your business, check out this post In
Marketing, Perception is Reality and Visualization Helps Perception at my other blog The Credibility Branding Blog.
It is also a great exercise.
