Visualization can be the secret weapon in turning your dreams into reality. You already have the power to achieve what you want in life; motivation, strategy, and the Big Idea are already there, locked in your subconscious mind. Take just ten minutes every day to unlock that power and start to move towards your goals.
1. Harness the Power of your Subconscious
You may not realize how powerful your subconscious is in determining whether or not you succeed in life. A negative mindset can act as a drag, stopping you from imagining your dream life and going for it. It will remind you of past failures and tell you that gaining success and wealth is hard work and painful, even impossible.
Studies have shown that you can rewire your mindset by programming the Reticular Activating System in your brain to select for positivity and success. The RAS acts a bit like an email folder, getting you to focus on what’s important to you. If you tell it to prioritize information that will feed your success, you will have your subconscious mind working for you, not against you.
2. Make Visualization a Habit
Just ten minutes a day of visualizing your future life is enough to keep the momentum going and your motivation high. Make the visualization habit easy by doing it at the same time and place each day. The ten minutes before you get up and before you go to sleep are the perfect times to practice visualization. You’re relaxed, unlikely to be interrupted, and in the ideal state of mind to have an impactful visualization.
Bring to mind every detail of your future successful life, How does it feel? What can you see, feel, hear, and taste? What are you wearing? What emotions are you feeling? Make it as real and detailed as possible.
3. Be present
You can practice visualization not just by thinking about the future but also being fully present in the here and now. Placing your happiness in the future means you miss out on all the good things in your life right now. And that can be demotivating and lead to a drop in positivity.
Don’t postpone happiness. Think of all the things in your life that you are grateful for right now. Celebrate your successes and your gifts and use them to fuel your ambition for more and better.
See yourself working your way along the map and ticking off your successes as you get closer to achieving what you want. Mark every success, no matter how small and keep your energy and motivation high.
Did you miss the first post in this series? Check it out HERE.
You’ve probably heard about visualizing as a personal development tool. Or maybe your sports coach used visualization to help motivate you and your team. But did you know that there’s a scientific basis for how visualization works? Neuroscientists have found that visualization actually changes the brain and can set you on the road to success.
Rewire Your Brain
You may not realize it, but there is a powerful part of your brain that already prioritizes what you need to know. The Reticular Activating System (RAS) protects your brain from being overwhelmed by the millions of bits of information that flood it every day. It acts as an email filter, discarding what you don’t need to know and prioritizing important things. The RAS is influenced both by your childhood messages and what you ‘tell’ it that you want to know. Ever noticed how, once you decide you want a new car, you see that model of car everywhere? That’s your RAS saying ‘look at this’!
Using visualization enables you to hack your mindset and refocus your thoughts from negative doubts to a clear positive vision of where you want to be. Instead of anxiety about where you are now, you can visualize an alternative reality and hack your RAS to start priming you for success. Keeping your goals literally top of mind will help you focus on achieving them.
Harness Your Brain Chemistry
Your brain works with a complex system of hormones and other chemicals. You can manipulate things like your dopamine feedback loops to focus on successful behaviors. That good feeling when you win is all about the rush of dopamine that floods your brain as a kind of chemical reward. This is what keeps you motivated to try and achieve bigger and better goals.
You can harness this dopamine reward system by stretching your challenges. Aim to get two new clients this week, three the next, and so on. You are feeding and encouraging your motivation by priming your dopamine loops. And as a bonus, it makes the work more fun!
Use Your Memories
Scientists have found that you can edit your memories to focus on the good ones. Instead of remembering past bad experiences and then feeling less confident, you can bolster your motivation by remembering past successes.
You can take the sting out of bad memories by playing them over and over in your mind, visualizing them getting smaller and smaller until they disappear. Conversely, you can turn up the color and volume on good memories. Make them IMAX sized in your mind and enjoy how they make you feel. Use that vision to fuel your motivation.
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