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Article Summary : Discover Brian Tracy, a leading authority on personal and business success. This text, Seeing With Your Mind's Eye, is part of a series of business English articles on the themes of business success and management. The reading of short business articles is an excellent way to enlarge your English vocabulary. |
Success is not an accident. It is a deliberate, systematic process of deciding where you want to go and what it will look like when you get there, and then taking the steps, day by day, to turn those dreams into realities. And perhaps the most powerful of all tools for success you can learn to use is visualization, seeing with the mind’s eye.
Visualization is an absolutely amazing process that is used by highly successful men and women. However, it is a power that is available to everyone. And the better you get at visualization, the more rapidly you move forward to accomplish your goals and aspirations. Perhaps the best statement on visualization comes from Denis Waitley, who says, “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”
All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. Your mental pictures act as a guidance mechanism that causes you to act in ways that make your mental pictures come true in your life.
The Law of Correspondence says that “As within, so without.” It says that your outer world tends to be a reflection of your inner world-like a mirror. What you see in the world around you will be consistent over time with the world inside you. The Law of Concentration says that “Whatever you dwell upon grows in your reality.” Those two laws in combination explain much of success and most of failure.
Successful people are those who continually think about pictures and images of the people they would like to be and the lives they would like to lead. Unsuccessful people, unfortunately, are those who continually dwell upon and imagine exactly the things they don’t want to happen in their lives.
Your subconscious mind is extraordinarily powerful, but it is a servant, not a master. Your subconscious mind coordinates every aspect of your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, words, actions and emotions to fit a pattern consistent with your dominant mental pictures. It guides you to engage in the behaviors that move you ever closer to achieving the goals you visualize most of the time. But your subconscious mind merely accepts commands from your conscious, visualizing mind. If you visualize something that you fear, your subconscious mind will accept that as a command as well. It will then use its marvelous powers to bring your fears, instead of your dreams and aspirations, into reality.
Over and over, in surveys and tests, it has been found that successful, happy people think about successful, happy things most of the time. Unsuccessful, unhappy people, on the other hand, continually dwell upon and mull over the people they dislike, the situations they are angry about and the events that they don’t wish to occur in their lives. And-surprise! surprise!-whatever a person thinks about continually, either positive or negative, tends to materialize in the world around him.
Since virtually no schools or courses ever teach people about the power of visualization, average people use it in a random, or haphazard, way most of the time. Instead of continually thinking about the things they desire and, therefore, moving consistently toward them, average people think first about something they want, and then they think about something they don’t want. They think about things they desire, and they think about things they fear. They think about people they like, and they think about people they dislike. They think about success, and they think about failure. They think about wealth, and they think about poverty. They think about having a nice life, and they think about being impoverished or being deeply in debt. And then they can’t understand why their life seems to go back and forth, back and forth, and they make very little progress.
The starting point of great success in your life begins, in the simplest terms, when you discipline yourself to think and talk about only the things you want and refuse to think and talk about anything you don’t want. The fact is that your mind is so powerful that if you don’t want something, you must absolutely refrain from allowing yourself to think about it when it comes into your mind. You must push it out, knock it aside, get rid of it, and get your mind back on what you want.
One of the best formulas for positive thinking I ever learned was this: No matter what is going on around you, think about your goals. If you have problems with your finances, stop-refuse to dwell upon them-and instead think about your goals. If you are having difficulties with other people, change your mind by switching your thinking off of your problems with them and onto your goals.
Eventually, through repetition, you will find yourself thinking about your goals most of the time. And, as we’ve known for more than 2,000 years, as you think about your goals, you begin to move toward them, and they begin to move toward you. All manner of remarkable things happen in your life that bring you closer to your goals.
You see, your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between something that you vividly imagine-such as a goal, a hope or a dream-and a real experience. For example, if you go to an automobile dealership and take your dream car for a drive, and, as you drive along, you imagine you already own that car, and you create the feeling of enjoyment that would accompany your being the proud possessor of that beautiful machine, your subconscious mind simply accepts that the car belongs to you. It doesn’t argue; it doesn’t complain; it doesn’t try to change your instructions. It simply tries to make your instructions a reality.
Think of your subconscious mind as a photo lab and your conscious mind as a camera, or a photographer. Your conscious mind takes pictures of what you want and passes the film to the photo lab, your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then develops the pictures and passes them back up to your reality. The photo lab doesn’t argue with you over the content of the film that you sent to it. It simply develops the photographs exactly as you saw them through the lens of your mind’s eye.
To get back to our car example, when you resume driving your old car after having driven the new car from the dealership, your subconscious mind accepts the new car as your desired reality and the old car as your past situation. Your subconscious mind then goes to work and consistently, continuously begins to urge you in the direction of doing the things that will make it possible for you to have that new car.
A friend of mine, who was unemployed at the time, decided to use this technique to get a new BMW. He began visiting the dealership every Saturday and taking a new BMW for a drive. He feasted his mind and senses on the car. He smelled the leather, he looked through the windshield and at the dashboard, and he thought of himself owning this car as he drove it around on test-drives. He got a brochure on the car from the dealership, cut out the pictures and put them everywhere, including on the steering wheel of his old car. Each time he glanced down at the steering wheel and saw a picture of his new BMW, he imagined that he was already driving it.
The most remarkable things began to happen. First, he went from being unemployed to being employed. After two months, he changed to a better job, and after four months, he changed jobs again. By the end of the year, he was making three times what he had made at his very best job in the past. This time, he was working in an area of sales that was totally suited to him. Almost exactly to the day one year after he began this visualization process, he walked into the BMW dealership, traded in his old car, bought his brand-new BMW, and drove it away. He was still driving it the last time I spoke to him. Does visualization work? Well, here’s an exercise that has worked for me and might work for you.
Everyone I know wants to have his “dream home.” The first problem with obtaining a dream home is that most people have never even sat down to think about what it would look like.
Many years ago, when my wife, Barbara, and I were going through financial difficulties, we began putting together a composite of our dream home. We subscribed to magazines full of beautiful pictures and descriptions of lovely homes for sale. We cut out pictures and descriptions that were consistent with what we were looking for. We discussed our dream home at great length. We went to open houses in the best neighborhoods in the city. We looked at beautiful, expensive homes and at the details and furnishings in them. We read Architectural Digest and House Beautiful. We eventually came up with a mutually agreed on composite of what our dream home would look like. Within a year after beginning this exercise, we moved from a rented home to a beautiful home that we had purchased. It wasn’t quite what we had in mind, but we both recognized at the time that it was merely a stepping-stone to what we really wanted. A year later, after looking at 150 houses in different cities, we walked into a home that was for sale, took one look around and, without speaking, both knew that we had found it. This was the home that we had been looking for. It cost twice as much as we ever had imagined paying for a house, and it required a good deal of renovation to make it conform to the mental pictures we had developed. Nonetheless, we bought it, renovated it, repainted it, furnished it and landscaped the grounds exactly as we had imagined. And it all began to come together after we had carefully crafted a clear mental picture of what it would look like when it was done.
Many, many books and articles have been written on the process of visualization. I’ve personally studied the subject for many years. Because the ability to visualize is a natural attribute, it is something that you can learn to do extremely well with practice. If you do it properly, and consistently, visualization can help you to move ahead further and faster than perhaps any other process you could engage in.
There are four specific dimensions of visualization that can contribute to its effectiveness in bringing you the things you want in life.
The first of these is vividness. The more vividly you can see something that you want in your mind’s eye, the more rapidly it will materialize in your reality. Most people have only a vague, fuzzy picture of what they want. They say they want to be rich or healthy or happy. But when you ask them exactly what that means to them, they don’t really know. If it fell on them out of the second story of a building, they probably wouldn’t recognize it.
Vividness refers to the clarity of detail in your mental pictures. The more time you spend examining pictures of your desired goals, or drawing your own pictures of them, or writing out clear descriptions of what your goals and dreams would look like when they came true, the more rapidly the pictures are accepted by your subconscious as a command. Your subconscious mind immediately goes to work to coordinate all of your other resources, internal and external, to bring those desires into your life. “As within, so without.” The clearer and more vivid your goal is in your mind’s eye, the more rapidly it materializes in the world around you.
The second dimension of visualization is intensity. This refers to the amount of emotion you accompany your mental pictures with. Emotion is central to all accomplishments. There is a little formula, T x F = R. Thought times feeling equals realization. This means that the thought or picture multiplied by the feeling or emotion that accompanies it equals the speed at which it occurs in your reality. For example, you might think of increasing your income by 20 percent this year. The thought in and of itself has no power to affect your subconscious mind or your behavior. But then combine the thought of an increase in income with the emotion and excitement of what that would mean to your standard of living. Think of why you want to earn more money, what you would do with it, how you would spend it, and how it would improve your standard of living. Think of the vacation you could take, the clothes you could buy, the home you could live in, the beautiful furniture you could acquire, the car you could drive. The more you think about those exciting reasons for increasing your income, the more emotional and intense you become about it. You become more excited and enthusiastic about any increase in income, and this emotional energy begins to drive you toward doing the things that make your income increase a reality.
Men and women whose lives don’t improve from year to year are those who have never thought about why they want their lives to improve in the first place. If you don’t think about the reasons why, you can’t generate the emotional excitement and energy that motivates you to do the things that make your dreams come true.
One of the most important exercises in visualization is “getting the feeling.” This means that you imagine something you would like to be, have or do. You then imagine that you have already accomplished it, and you create the emotion that would accompany the accomplishment of the goal.
Let’s say that you wanted to win a prize for being the best achiever of the year in your company. Imagine you have already won the prize. Then imagine how you would feel accepting the prize in front of an audience of your peers. Imagine the pride and happiness and joy and satisfaction of having risen to the top. As you bask in that feeling, like a sunbather basks in the sun, the mental picture is combined with the emotion and passed on to your subconscious mind. Suddenly, amazing things will begin to happen. You will have more energy and enthusiasm. You will be more creative and imaginative. You will be more focused and directed. You will be more efficient and effective. You will do more and more of the things that move you in the direction of making that mental picture a real picture.
The third dimension of visualization is frequency. This refers to how often you play the mental picture of your desired outcome on the screen of your mind. You see, when you begin to think of yourself accomplishing something that you have never accomplished before, your subconscious mind will tend to keep you stuck in the old, lower levels of achievement. In fact, your subconscious mind will be a little skeptical of your new ambition. You must convince your subconscious mind that you really want it by repeating the command, that mental picture, over and over, until it is finally accepted as an absolute instruction for your subconscious mind to act on. When many people see others driving nice cars, wearing nice clothes, living in nice homes and going to nice restaurants, they say to themselves, “I surely wish I could do things like that.” Then, just as quickly, they start talking about their problems, their bills, their relationships, and what they are going to watch on television that night. Then they wonder why nothing good ever happens to them. In fact, if they think about what they are going to watch on television that night, that becomes their visual image, their guiding force, and their subconscious mind organizes their thoughts, feelings and activities so that they get home, get onto the couch and watch television. They have realized their visualization.
The fourth dimension of visualization is duration. This refers to how long you hold the mental image or picture in your mind at one time. The longer you can hold that picture, combined with emotion and vividness, in your mind, the more rapidly it will be accepted by your subconscious mind as new operating instructions. That is why you must think about your goals all of the time.
Highly successful men and women think about virtually nothing but the things they want to accomplish. For instance, wealthy people think about engaging in activities that will create wealth. Healthy people think about engaging in activities-proper diet, exercise and rest-that will bring about health. Men and women who are happy in their relationships continually think about the things they can do and the kind of people they can become so that they will be more enjoyable to be around. Successful people are serious about their lives, and they are especially serious about keeping their minds on what they want and off what they don’t want.
My friend Ed Foreman says that worrying, for example, is a form of negative goal setting. It is setting goals that you absolutely don’t want to accomplish. It is thinking about and vividly imagining and emotionalizing pictures of exactly the things that you don’t want to happen.
It doesn’t really matter to your subconscious whether your mental images are positive or negative. It will bring you whatever you ask for. There are seven methods that you can use to tap into the powers of visualization to help yourself move ahead more rapidly. You can use any or all of them. They are used by the most successful men and women in our society.
1. Continuously flood your mind with pictures and images of the person you want to be and the things you want to have and accomplish. Read magazines that contain pictures and stories of what you want to achieve. Go to stores and visit open houses that give you mental images of the kind of lifestyle you want to live. At the same time, stop watching long, drawn-out television shows depicting images of things that you don’t want to have in your life. Stop reading about characters you don’t admire and situations you don’t like. Stop associating with people who are going nowhere.
2. Read stories about and autobiographies by successful people. Continually read self-development materials filled with ideas and examples of men and women who have set goals, overcome adversity, and accomplished great things. As you read, you will begin to identify with those people, and you will actually begin to become like them in your own personality and character.
3. Listen to success audiocassettes, and watch success videos. Also, on television, watch the specials that feature biographies of successful people and interviews with men and women who have accomplished the kind of things that you want to accomplish. Soak your mind in images of success, and success soon will appear in the world around you.
4. Rewrite your major goals, in the present tense, each morning. When you rewrite your major goals for a greater income, thinner waistline, better relationships, and so on, stop to get the feeling or emotion of pleasure and satisfaction that would go along with the accomplishment of those goals. Imagine that you have achieved them already. Smile, and enjoy the feelings of achievement. If you do this every day, you will be amazed at how much more rapidly you will move toward achieving the things you really want.
5. Use the quick affirmation technique. Prior to every event in which you want to be successful, such as an interview or a sales presentation, close your eyes, and take a few seconds to create a clear mental picture of this meeting going extremely well. Breathe deeply. See yourself as relaxed, calm and confident, and see the other person as positive, happy and cooperative. See, in your mind’s eye, the exact outcome or result that you want at this meeting. Smile, and enjoy the feeling of success. Then open your eyes, stand up straight, and, with complete confidence, go into the meeting, knowing that you have already succeeded in your own mind.
6. Use the standard affirmation technique. On three- by five-inch index cards, write down your major goals, in the present tense, and review them on a regular basis. As you read a goal on a card-for example, “I earn $50,000 per year”-close your eyes for a few seconds, and imagine what it would be like if you were earning that kind of money. Visualize your ideal lifestyle. Imagine the restaurants you would dine at, the clothes you would wear, the car you would drive, the people you would associate with. Get the feeling of success and achievement that goes with that greater income. Then open your eyes, smile, and go about your business, knowing that you have already succeeded in your mind’s eye in achieving your goal.
7. Feed your mind a clear mental picture of your desired goals for the coming day, the coming week, the coming months, just before you go to sleep at night. You should use this method every day. We know that in the last 15 minutes before you drop off to sleep, your subconscious mind is the most receptive to the input of new commands. Since your mental pictures are a command, take those last few minutes before you fall off to sleep to daydream and fantasize about exactly the person you want to be and the life you want to have. Your subconscious mind will then take the picture down into its laboratory and work on it all night long. Very often, when you wake up in the morning, you will have ideas and insights to help make those mental pictures a part of your life.
Visualization is a wonderful power. But it is like fire. It can either create or destroy. It can generate warmth or heat and power, or it can cause destruction and failure. Your job is to join the rare few who consciously, consistently and deliberately use visualization to achieve the goals they want to achieve and to become the people they want to become. Your job is to use the power of visualization consciously and continuously to create the kind of future you want for yourself. Remember, as Denis Waitley says, “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.” Use it with care.
Copyright © 2001 Brian Tracy International. All Rights Reserved. -
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