Cherish your visions and your dreams, as they are the children of your soul—the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
You possess and have available to you virtually unlimited mental powers. Many people are unaware of these powers and fail to use them for goal attainment. That is why their results are only average.
When you begin to tap into and unleash the power of your subconscious and superconscious minds, you will often achieve more in a year or two than most people achieve in a lifetime. You will start moving more rapidly toward your goals than you can currently imagine.
Your ability to visualize is perhaps the most powerful faculty that you possess. All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. You are where you are and what you are today largely because of the mental pictures that you hold in your conscious mind at the present time. As you change your mental pictures on the inside, your world on the outside will begin to change to correspond to those pictures.
Visualization activates the Law of Attraction, which draws into your life the people, circumstances, and resources that you need to achieve your goals.
Visualization also activates the Law of Correspondence, which says, “As within, so without.” As you change your mental pictures on the inside, your world on the outside, like a mirror, begins to change. Just as you become what you think about most of the time, you become what you visualize most of the time as well.
Wayne Dyer says, “You will see it when you believe it.” Jim Cathcart says, “The person you see is the person you will be.” Dennis Waitley says that your mental images are “your previews of your life’s coming attractions.”
Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than facts.” Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Imagination rules the world.” Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
The most common characteristic of leaders at all levels, throughout the ages, is vision. This means that they can visualize and imagine an ideal future, well in advance of its becoming a reality. Just as Walt Disney clearly saw a happy, clean, family-oriented amusement park many years before Disneyland was built, everything worthwhile in your life begins with a mental picture of some kind.
As it happens, you are always visualizing something, one way or another. Every time you think of someone or something, remember a past event, imagine an upcoming event, or even daydream, you are visualizing. It is essential that you learn to manage and control this visualizing capability of your mind and focus it, like a laser beam, in the direction of achieving the goals that are most important to you.
Successful people are those who visualize in advance the kind of success they want to enjoy. Prior to every new experience, the successful person visualizes previous success experiences that are similar to the upcoming event. A successful salesperson will visualize and remember successful sales presentations. A successful trial lawyer will visualize and remember his performance in court during a successful trial. A successful doctor or surgeon will visualize and remember her successful treatment of a patient in the past.
Unsuccessful people, on the other hand, also use visualization but to their detriment. Unsuccessful people, prior to a new event, recall, reflect upon, and visualize their previous “failure experiences.” They think about the last time they failed or did poorly in this area, and they imagine failing again. As a result, when they go into the new experience, their subconscious minds have been preprogrammed for failure rather than success.
Your performance on the outside is always consistent with your self-image on the inside. Your self-image is made up of the mental pictures that you feed into your mind prior to any event. And the good news is that you have complete control over your mental pictures for good or for ill. You can choose to feed your mind with positive, exciting success images, or you can, by default, allow yourself to be preoccupied by failure images. The choice is up to you.
Almost everything that you have achieved in life, or failed to achieve, is the result of the use or misuse of visualization. If you look back, you will find that almost everything you visualized positively eventually came true for you. You visualized completing school, and you did it. You visualized getting your first car, and you got it. You visualized your first romance or relationship, and you met the right person. You visualized taking a trip, getting a job, finding an apartment, or purchasing certain clothes, and all these events came true for you.
You have been using the power of visualization continuously throughout your life. But the problem is that most people use visualization in a random and haphazard way, sometimes to help themselves and sometimes to hurt themselves.
Your goal should be to take complete control of the visualization process and be sure that your mind and mental images are focused continually on what you want to have and the person that you want to be.
George Washington, the first president of the United States, considered by most historians to be the “indispensable man” at the founding of the American Republic, started his life in humble circumstances. He was born in a small house and raised with few advantages. But he was ambitious and at an early age he decided that he had to mold and shape his character and personality so that he could become the kind of person who would be accepted and successful in society.
The guiding influence of his young life became a book with 130 rules for manners and deportment. He read this book over and over again and eventually committed it to memory. Thereafter, he practiced the very best courtesy and manners in his every interaction with other people. By the time he became a powerful figure in the American Revolution, he was described as one of the most courtly and gentlemanly men in the American colonies.
Benjamin Franklin—a founding father; a remarkable statesman, diplomat, and inventor; and a wealthy man—started as a penniless boy in Philadelphia apprenticed to a small printing company. He was outspoken and argumentative and often made enemies who then contrived to hurt his chances and hold him back.
At a certain point in his young life, as Benjamin Franklin reveals in his autobiography, he realized that his personality was in great danger of hurting his chances for long-term success in early American society. He therefore decided to develop within himself a series of key virtues, such as sincerity, humility, temperance, discipline, and honesty, that he felt he would have to possess if he wanted to achieve his full potential.
For many years, week after week, both Washington and Franklin practiced visualization. They thought of a characteristic or quality that they wanted to embody. They visualized and imagined themselves as possessing that quality. In every interaction with other people, they referred to this “inner mirror” to see how they should behave and then carried themselves in a manner consistent with that ideal inner picture. Over time, these mental images became so deeply impressed on their subconscious minds that the mannerisms and the person became one.
Piero Ferrucci, in his book What We May Be, explains how you can develop any quality you desire by dwelling upon that quality continually and imagining that you have it already. Read about the quality you desire. Learn about it. And especially, imagine yourself practicing that quality whenever it is needed.
Aristotle wrote that the very best way to develop a virtue, if you currently lack it, is to imagine and to behave in every respect as though you already had the virtue whenever that virtue is called for. See and think about yourself as you can be, not just as you might be today. Gradually, you will become that new person.
In essence, you control the molding and shaping of your own personality and character by the mental images that you dwell upon hour by hour and minute by minute. By changing your mental images, you change the way you think, feel, and act. You change the way that you treat other people and the way they respond to you. You change your performance and your results. You can actually remake yourself in the image of the very best person that you can imagine yourself becoming. This is all part of the constructive use of visualization.
In professional athletics, there is a training method called “mental rehearsal.” Top athletes in every field mentally rehearse their events before they go into active competition. They see themselves performing at their best prior to every event. For many days and hours prior to a major competition, they visualize themselves performing successfully, over and over again.
They continuously recall their “personal bests” in previous competitions and replay this personal best like a “movie of the mind” in their own mental screening room. They see themselves doing well over and over and feel the joy and satisfaction that accompany a peak performance. They become excited and happy about doing just as well in the upcoming competition. And when the competition begins, as far as they are concerned, they have already won.
Figure skaters, for example, play the music to their skating routines over and over again while they sit, deeply relaxed, with their eyes closed, imagining themselves skating on the ice. One of the benefits of skating in their minds is that they never fall or make a mistake. They see themselves skating their routines perfectly, over and over again, before they actually go onto the ice. By that time, their subconscious minds have been trained to take them through their routines smoothly and gracefully.
Your physical body has no mind of its own. The slightest movement of your fingers or toes is controlled by your central computer, your brain. It is your mind that sends impulses of nerve energy down your spine and throughout your body to your muscles to coordinate your physical activities. When you visualize, you actually train your master computer. You program your mind with the performance that you want your body to carry out.
There are four parts of visualization that you can learn and practice to ensure that you use this incredible power to its best advantage all the days of your life.
The first aspect of visualization is frequency, the number of times that you visualize a particular goal as achieved or yourself performing in an excellent way in a particular event or circumstance. The more frequently you repeat a clear mental picture of your very best performance or result, the more rapidly it will be accepted by your subconscious mind and the more readily it will appear as part of your reality.
The second element of visualization is the duration of the mental image, the length of time that you can hold the picture in your mind each time you replay it. When you deeply relax, you can often hold a mental picture of yourself performing at your best for several seconds and even several minutes. The longer you can hold your mental picture, the more deeply it will be impressed into your subconscious mind and the more rapidly it will express itself in your subsequent performance.
The third element of visualization is vividness. There is a direct relationship between how clearly you can see your desired goal or result in your mind and how quickly it comes into your reality. This element of visualization is what explains the powers of the Law of Attraction and the Law of Correspondence. The vividness of your desire directly determines how quickly your goal materializes in the world around you.
Here is an interesting point. When you set a new goal for yourself, your image or picture of this goal will usually be vague and fuzzy. You may have no idea at all what the successful goal will look like. But the more often you write it, review it, and repeat it mentally, the clearer it becomes for you. Eventually, it will become crystal clear. At that point, the goal will suddenly appear in your world, exactly as you imagined it.
The fourth element of visualization is intensity, the amount of emotion that you attach to your visual image. In reality, this is the most important and powerful part of the visualization process. Sometimes, if your emotion is intense enough and your visual image is clear enough, your goal will immediately come true.
Of course, the elements of frequency, duration, vividness, and intensity can help you or hurt you. Like nature, the power of visualization is neutral. Like a two-edged sword, it can cut in either direction. It can either make you a success or make you a failure. Visualization brings you whatever you vividly and intensely imagine, whether good or bad.
For example, worry is a form of negative goal setting. It is the process of thinking about, imagining, and visualizing, with fear and anxiety, exactly what you don’t want to happen. When you worry, you are using visualization in a negative way. Exactly those problems that you don’t want will be attracted into your life. In Job 3:25, Job says, “The thing which I greatly feared has come upon me.” This refers to the unhappy consequences of negative visualization. You must be very careful how you use the visualizing power.
When my wife and I got married, we had very little money, and after I started my own business, what little we had quickly ran out. Nonetheless, like all couples, we talked about someday having our “dream home.” We fantasized about living in the perfect home for ourselves and our family. Eventually, we decided to put the powers of visualization to work for us in the acquisition of our dream home.
Although we were living in a rented house at the time and had very little money, we subscribed to several magazines that described beautiful homes for sale around the country. We read Better Homes and Gardens and Architectural Digest. On the weekends, we went to open houses in the best neighborhoods in town. We walked through the rooms of beautiful, expensive homes and imagined living in those surroundings.
In complete faith that the process would eventually work, we created a scrapbook made up of pictures and descriptions of beautiful homes. Over time, we created a list of forty-two items that we wanted to have in our ideal house.
Meanwhile, I kept working at my job, building my business, increasing our income, and adding to our savings. Within a year of starting this process, we had moved from a rented house into a beautiful home that we had purchased in a lovely neighborhood. It was ideal in many respects, but we knew in our hearts that it was not yet our “dream house.”
A year and a half later, we moved again, this time to San Diego. After a month spent looking at dozens of homes for sale all over the city, we walked into a home that had just been listed two days before and knew immediately that we had found our dream house. We looked at each other without speaking and looked around at the house. We were both in perfect agreement.
It took two months of negotiation to finalize the purchase price and five more months to arrange the financing, but right on schedule, we took possession of our dream house, and we have lived there ever since. And it turned out to have forty-one of the forty-two items that we had listed for our perfect home.
Most people want to be physically fit and trim. Psychologists will tell you that this is only possible when you “think thin.” One way you can create this mental image of thinness is to take a photo of a person who has the kind of body you would like to have, cut off the head, and put your photo there instead. Put this picture on your refrigerator. Make multiple copies of it if you can and put them all over your house.
Every time you look at a picture of yourself with a beautiful body, your subconscious mind will register it. Eventually, you will find yourself eating less and exercising more. Your outer reality will soon correspond to your inner picture.
Often single people ask me how they can find their “soul mate.” I ask them if they have made up a list and created a picture of what their soul mate will look like. They are always surprised and sometimes insulted. They say, “I will know the person when I meet him (or her).”
But that’s not the way it works. Casualness brings casualties. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want, you end up getting something else. I advise these single people to sit down and write out a complete description of their ideal person, including every single quality and characteristic that they would like their soul mate to have. I tell them to be clear about age, temperament, personality, interests, values, background, sense of humor, level of ambition, and so on.
It is absolutely amazing what happens. A good friend of mine, a graduate of one of my three-day seminars, did this immediately after the program. Ten months later, he met a woman who fit his written description perfectly. They got married shortly thereafter, had two beautiful children, and have been happy from the first moment they met.
If you are single, you should give this technique a try. You might be happily surprised at what happens.
In every area of your life, you can use visualization to make it better. Earlier in this book, I talked about the use of “idealization.” This process involves creating an ideal picture of what you would like your life to look like sometime in the future. Idealizing is just another version of visualizing. Remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. But if you are absolutely clear about what you want, you will eventually achieve it.
As with goal setting, the two best times to visualize are late in the evening and early in the morning. When you visualize your goals as if they were already achieved before you go to sleep, your subconscious mind accepts them at a deeper level. It then adjusts your words and actions during the day so that you do and say more and more of what will make your goals into realities.
Another time to visualize is first thing in the morning. Clear mental images of what you want to accomplish during the day will make it far more likely that you will achieve those results, exactly as you imagined and on schedule.
To repeat, all improvement in your life starts with an improvement in your mental pictures. Start today to flood your mind with pictures of the person you want to be, the life you want to live, and the goals you want to achieve. Cut out pictures from magazines and newspapers that are consistent with your goals and desires. Post them everywhere. Review them regularly. Discuss them often. Imagine them continually.
Make your life an ongoing process of positive visualization, continually imagining and “visioneering” your ideal goals and your perfect future. This can do more to help you to step on the accelerator of your own potential than any other exercise you engage in.
1. Project forward and imagine that your life was perfect in every respect. What would it look like? Whatever your answer, imagine this picture regularly.
2. Cut out pictures of the things you would like to have and the person you would like to be in the future. Look at these pictures and think about what you could do to make them into realities.
3. Use mental rehearsal before every event of importance. See yourself in your mind’s eye as performing at your very best in everything you do or attempt.
4. Continually feed your mind with clear, exciting, emotional pictures. Remember, your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.
5. Design your own dream house, dream business, or dream career. Write down every ingredient it would have if it were perfect in every respect. Visualize this as a reality every day.
6. Make the process of visualization a regular part of your life. Invest the time regularly to create exciting mental pictures of yourself and your life exactly as you want them to be. Then, have complete faith that your pictures will materialize exactly when you are ready.