Inspired Leap - You are far more brilliant than you think you are!

• Quotes of the Month
• Upcoming Speaking Engagements
• Thinking Impossible Things
• Seeing Is Believing
• Simple Steps for Visualizing Your Dreams into Reality
• Put Some Emotion into It!
• Inspired Leap Reminders
• Final Thoughts on the Power of Visualization

Last month I mentioned that spring is typically a time for bursting forth with high energy, creativity, new endeavors, and new selves. In an effort to help you launch a new endeavor or achieve a goal, this month I’ll focus on the power of the mind to make happen whatever you can dream up. Specifically, we’ll take another look at a tried-and-true (and therefore often overlooked) method for achieving your goals—visualization.

A friend recently shared how visualization had helped her attract new clients, so don’t think of it as something only for personal goals. It’s a powerful tool for creating the fulfilling career you desire as well. So, let’s put all of that spring fever energy to good use and imagine and visualize your way to success.

Read on to be inspired to develop your "mind’s eye" to create success in all areas of your life.

An Intuitive Intensive at Lake Austin Spa Resort: March 16, 2006, 9:00 am – 3:00pm, with spa treatment immediately following. ( Inspired Leap )
Inspired Creative Thoughts: How to Generate Them, Even in Pressure-Packed Situations: March 24, 2006, American Creativity Association International Conference, Austin, TX. Please give serious consideration to attending this conference. Your future success likely depends upon your creativity flourishing! (Visit "www.amcreativityassoc.org to sign up now.

A quote from a 1st-century-B.C. poet and a quote from a 19th-century author—clearly the notion of the power of the mind to imagine and create reality is not new! Yet, because the idea of visualization has been around for a while and is often only mentioned in the context of personal goals, it can get overlooked when putting together action steps for achieving professional ones.

What exactly is visualization? Author Valerie Wells offers a succinct definition in her book, The Joy of Visualization:

Visualization is simply the process of creating pictures in your mind, giving form to your thoughts so you can more easily direct them toward a specific goal. It is a way of achieving creative control over your life. By creating mental pictures of the kind of life you want to have, you significantly increase the possibility of having it. [pp. 7-8]
Thankfully, "creating pictures in your mind" does not require being able to "see" these pictures in your mind. While some people can, there are many of us (like me, for instance) who don’t literally see our visualization, yet we can describe it and sense how we’d feel if we were really experiencing it. So don’t be discouraged if you’ve ever tried visualization before and determined that it’s not for you because you don’t see any images.

As I’ve discussed before, scientists have found that approximately 5/6 of our brain (the nonconscious or subconscious brain) takes visual images literally. That’s why you physically react to negative or scary pictures even though you know that, logically, that spider (for example) is not real. While this can be embarrassing or irritating when surprised with a negative image, it can also be quite powerful when you take control and practice "showing" your nonconscious brain positive images of your vision of success—or your impossible dream.

In his audio and video course, Mind Your Brain, author and "brain expert" Doug Bench combines all of his excellent insight on the latest brain research to share powerful science lessons for achieving your dreams. Lesson 27 is called, "You can lie your way to success and higher achievements." Using an example of a person wanting to be more motivated or achievement-oriented, this lesson is really about the old advice to "fake it until you make it."

You take your conscious brain power and you act as if you are a motivated person or you act as if you are a skilled person in a particular skill that is an achievement goal of yours. However you perceive a motivated person to act, act that way. However you perceive an achieving person to act, act that way. Fake it till you make it.

It has scientific basis in reality. How does it happen scientifically? Whenever you stimulate your brain, it forms new DSP connections [neural pathways] in your brain. Five-sixths of your brain sees every image you generate literally—as real. The new DSP connections formed via your non-conscious brain when repeated over and over and over again, generates enough new connections to get it onto your RAS [reticular activating system] important list, to get it to influence your feelings, your attitudes, your beliefs, and ultimately your behavior. Fake it till you make it. [Lesson 27]

In the quote above, Bench references something within our brains called the RAS, or reticular activating system. I’ve referred to this before, but for those who aren’t familiar, the RAS serves as a gatekeeper for all of the impulses of information being sent to the brain. Whether it’s an image, sound, scent, or other form of stimulus, our conscious minds can only handle so much. The RAS sends to your conscious mind only what it deems to be important to you.

How does your RAS determine what’s "important"? It focuses first on whether or not a physical threat to you is likely and then, secondarily, pays attention to what you are thinking about. If you’ve been thinking about how hungry you are while driving to work, your RAS will make sure you see and hear every advertisement about food, or smell everyone’s breakfast as you walk to your office.

Repeated visualizations of what you want can tell your RAS that it’s important to you to successfully complete a project, launch your product, make that speech, and so on. Then, like a hound on the scent of a fox, your brain will be on high alert to help you stay aware of opportunities, information, challenges, and synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) that can help you reach your goal.

For outlining the simple steps to visualizing, I turned to the classic, Creative Visualization, by Shakti Gawain. Gawain wrote this book in the late '70s, years before the completion of brain research that would confirm what she had already learned from spiritual and metaphysical masters. Her advice is still powerful and applicable today. I have paraphrased and condensed her recommendations below, along with my own recommendations:

1. Relax Your Body and Mind. Gawain recommends breathing slowly and deeply, relaxing each muscle or area of your body, then counting down from 10 to 1. This will bring you to an alpha state—a state where your brain waves are slower and more conducive for creating powerful visualizations.

2. Set Your Goal. Start with a simple goal, or one that you are fairly confident of achieving. When you start any new process, you don’t want to have to deal with too much negative resistance. The same is true for visualization, so pick a fun, simple desire or goal.

3. Create a Clear Idea or Picture. This is the fun part! Imagine that you have just received that raise. What does it look like? Are you in your bosses' office grinning at her? Shaking her hand? Doing a jig? Whatever the picture you create, make sure you are in it, and that it is in the present tense. See it happening now (not in the future).

4. Focus on It Often. Our brains are most receptive to visualizations in the morning when we wake up and in the evening before we go to sleep. Ideally, you would set aside 5 to 15 minutes at these times and at midday to reinforce your visualization. However, don’t let the ideal situation stop you from starting. Even if it's only 5 minutes whenever you think of it and you simply keep flashing to that visual image/feeling whenever you can, you will be well on your way to making visualization a powerful force for helping you achieve your goals.

5. Give It Positive Energy. Gawain emphasizes the value and importance of using affirmations to reinforce the visual image. Don’t overcomplicate this. Think of one simple affirmation (or as I call them, Facts-In-Progress) to repeat often. Again, using the example of a pay raise, you might say something like, "I joyfully receive a 10% increase in my monthly paycheck," or name a specific dollar amount if that's more meaningful to you.

6. Pay Attention to Your Energy Level and Ability to Focus. Despite my advice to start with a simple goal, you might find as you work with this process that your desire for that goal lessens, changes, or meets with resistance. Pay attention to anything that comes up as you do this. It’s fine to change the visualization to reflect a new goal, but the key is to stay with the process. If you find negative self-talk comes up when you try to visualize, you can simply ignore it, or you might want to take the visualization in small steps. First visualize a success that doesn’t bring up this resistance (or brings up only minimal negativity), then step into a more powerful visualization once you’re confident about or have achieved the first step.

Have fun with this process and make sure you really do celebrate when you actually achieve your visualization. Also, be sure to say thank you to whomever makes sense to you (God, yourself, the Universe, and so on) once you’ve achieved your goal.

While visualization is very easy, there are a few steps you can take to make your efforts much more powerful. One of the most important is to be sure to put emotion into your visualization. Even if you only spend 60 seconds visualizing a positive outcome to a situation, make sure you smile, pump your fist, or celebrate yourself achieving victory. Your visualizations will ultimately work without the emotion, but think of it like that old adage, "the squeaky wheel always gets the grease." By packing your visual image with emotion, it rises to the top, gets much more attention from your RAS (and thus the rest of your brain), and will come about quicker.

Another step is to make it fun and relax. If visualizing becomes another to-do and a source of stress, you’ll hardly be in the right mindset to create powerful visualizations. In fact, you’ll be more likely to find excuses to avoid it. And, as I mentioned before, even a few moments of visualizing a powerful positive image of success can make a tremendous difference. By putting positive emotion into your visualization, you’ll actually be more likely to see this process as fun.

As a child, you might have been told to "stop daydreaming," so it might seem strange to be invited to daydream—visualize—often. Even so, give yourself permission to visualize your way to success. Let your nonconscious mind do the hard work of placing you in the right place at the right time and notice how you’re able to achieve more of your goals with ease.

Inspired Leap Reminders are areas of focus and part of the Inspired Leap Approach to maximizing productivity, creativity, and morale. In each newsletter, we take a look at how the topic of the month might be viewed in the context of these important areas of focus. Or, in some cases, we use the section as a gentle reminder to pay attention to these concepts in our daily lives.
Responsibility: Spring is here. What are you doing to grow personally and professionally? Put some of that glorious spring energy to use and channel it into creating a new habit of visualizing what you want. Last month I urged you to take responsibility for your personal and professional growth and commit to one significant change that will strengthen your ability to use R-Directed aptitudes (skills from the right hemisphere of the brain). Visualization is a perfect choice if you haven't already selected something to focus on. I’m personally committed to getting my rusty visualization skills back on track. Please join me in this fun process. I've got a great visualization for prosperity (thanks to Valerie Wells and The Joy of Visualization). Just shoot me an email (damorde@inspiredleap.com) if you'd like to receive it and commit to using it.

Creativity: A powerful imagination goes hand in hand with creativity. Use visualization to get your imaginative muscles working again. If you want to take your visualizations to another level, consider creating a "vision board" to reflect your goals and desires. If you haven’t done this before, simply grab a stack of old magazines and start looking for words, phrases, and pictures that catch your eye or fit with something you desire.

For example, I have a vision of vacationing in Italy in the fall of 2007, so I’m splurging on vacation magazines, getting brochures, and downloading images from the Internet to place on a vision board. Each time I look at the board (daily, or at least frequently), I reinforce my goal and get my nonconscious mind to work on making it happen. I’m looking forward to telling you all about my vacation. How about you? What do you want to happen? Visualize it and create a vision board for it, then watch what happens!

Detachment: There is a fine balancing act that we need to master in order to have our visualizations deliver peak results. While we want to put emotion into them and feel the positive experience of seeing ourselves in our image of success, we also need to let go of any attachment to the outcome. Any attachment is usually in reference to our fear about what might happen if we don’t achieve our result. Worrying about whether or not we’ll get what we want is actually creating negative images that counteract what we are trying to visualize!

Forgiveness: Use your ability to visualize to imagine yourself forgiving someone or being forgiven by another. If you've resisted forgiving yourself or others, use this process to start opening your heart and mind to the possibility of forgiveness. What visual image comes up for you if you were to be forgiven or you were to forgive someone for something? Play with that image over the next few weeks and see if your feelings about forgiveness change.

Kindness and Compassion: In the words of Doug Bench and others, "fake it until you make it." If you want to express more kindness and compassion or receive it, act as if you already do. How might your workday be different if you gave and received more kindness and compassion? What would "success" look like in this case? If you’ve struggled with the notion of having kindness and compassion be part of work, then visualization might be a great way to turn it into an idea that works for you.

Resistance to Change: Even with something as simple as visualizing your dreams, our friend "resistance" is still around to try to sabotage the creation of a new habit. You’ll think of all sorts of excuses to keep from finding the time to visualize (I certainly have), but know that is simply the part of you that is afraid of changing, even for positive dreams and goals. Start with a small step of 5 minutes of visualizing each day. You must take a 5-minute shower or bath, right? Visualize there. Write "Visualize" on a piece of paper and place it where you’ll see it every day. Do what you need to in order to overcome this resistance. Achieving your dreams is worth the hassle up front.

May you find the courage to fully embrace the power of visualization and weave it into your daily life. Challenge yourself—try visualizing 5 to 15 minutes every day for 30 days and see what happens. What do you really, really, really want? Let your whole mind—including your nonconscious mind—help you achieve it. Kick off your shoes, take a deep breath, close your eyes, look in your mind’s eye, smile, and see yourself living the life of your dreams. It’s waiting for you. All you need to do is see it, feel it, and believe it!

What if it's really that simple? What if all you have to do to take your career and life to the next level—and the level beyond—is spend a few minutes every day visualizing or daydreaming about your success? "Mind moves matter," said Virgil all those years ago. Maybe he was on to something.

If your company needs help with inspiring employees to reach new heights in productivity, creativity, morale, and integrity, please contact us at inspiredleap.com or 512-236-0090. If you need some more inspiration or more regular nudging to practice these steps, check out our website to see what’s new to inspire you (a visit to The Quiet Room may be just what you need!).