If you’ve never practiced visualization before, then you’ve surely heard about it when very successful people talk about achievement. Most likely, you heard about it in the context of sports stars. You’ve no doubt heard time and time again that the very best sports stars in the world visualize themselves succeeding. For the strongest and most practiced of them, they are almost religious about it.
This phenomenon is widely recognized and practiced in the sports world. However, many would be surprised to find that it’s just as common among the most successful in the business and entertainment worlds as well. All over the world, and in all different cultures, successful people use visualization to help prime their brain and make success inevitable. Don’t you think it’s time you joined them?
Visualization works because it smoothes the path for real life success. What has seemed impossible suddenly seems possible. You can use visualization to change your habits and achieve your goals, starting today, no matter what your goals are. Are you ready?
How Visualization Fits Into My Basic Habit-Change Philosophy
You’ll see my habit-change philosophy throughout IMIT as well as the theory behind visualization. Now, I’d like to tell you how to use it very practically to change your mindset and see real habit change.
Ideally, I recommend you use visualization every morning. You can visualize what your day is going to look like. See yourself flying through your day, happily, using good habits, and achieving your goals for the day. This helps set you up for success in the morning.
I always recommend that you review the specific habit you’re working on, before you begin. You’ll need to pay close attention to that habit each day before it truly takes hold and becomes part of your life. The same goes for your goals. Often, the difference between those who succeed and those who do not is that successful people review (and even re-write) their goals daily.
In addition to visualizing yourself using new, positive habits and achieving daily goals, you should also visualize yourself achieving long-term goals. There are certain things you have decided you will achieve. It’s important to focus on the day-to-day, yes, but you also need to see yourself achieving in the long-term. This is sort of like keeping your eye on the prize.
The ideal scenario is that you’ll use visualization throughout your day. You’ll use it in the morning before you start your day, and ensure that what you visualize is specific to your day. You’ll also have a daily session where you visualize specific to your long-term goals so you stay on track and keep them fresh in your mind.
Yes, this means you will be visualizing a few times a day. I’d recommend you actually set a reminder on your computer or phone so you remember to do this. You should make it a habit. You should be able to wake up, review your goals, desired habits, and to-do list for the day and visualize yourself happily and successfully working through it. At some point in the day, you should be able to review your long-term habit wish list and goals and visualize yourself successfully achieving those more long-term goals, by way of your new and improved habits.
It really doesn’t take that much time to do this every day. The beauty of it is that, when you do it, it will lead to magnificent results. You’ll see results immediately… because you’re reviewing your to-do list and meeting the goals you set out for yourself in the morning.
You’ll also see long-term achievement. I promise that if you review your goals and habits (let’s say for the month) every day, that your brain will start making natural movements toward those goals and habits without any stress or strain on your part. All you had to do was visualize yourself getting there. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?
And if you might be thinking that I’m talking about something very esoteric, almost suggesting voodoo, think again. Remember the old saying “what the mind can believe, it can achieve”.
That’s exactly what will happen once you set the GPS tracking system that is your subconscious onto a path that is your desired Point B destination. It will help you find a way to get there, trust me on that.
Really, if you’ve had trouble with habit formation or successful goal setting in the past, why not just remove any negative doubts about whether this will work or not, and trust that it will. A month from now you will be as convinced about it as I am.
How Visualization Will Help You Change Your Habits for Life
Maybe you buy into the fact that visualization can help you change your habits in the short term, but do you really think they can help you change your habits for life? I hope you believe that, because it’s absolutely true.
It takes around one month for you to form a new habit. That might seem like either a really long time to you or a really short time. In the world of habits, it’s a long time. It’s a long time because a lot can happen in a month.
Remember— what you’re so excited about and positive about right now can feel way too difficult in a couple of weeks. You might even convince yourself that changing that habit actually isn’t that important after all, simply because it’s the human way to take the path of least resistance.
It’s hard to make it through that full month when you’re trying to change or adopt a new habit. It’s extremely hard. Only, it’s not so hard when you use visualization. It’s not so hard when you use my method of breaking your habits down, attaching important goals to them, and focusing on everything little by little.
But, I want to make it clear that not only does visualization work in the short-term, it also works in the long-term. If you can use visualization to help you get through the first month or two months or three months of habit-change, then that positive, better habit can take root for life.
Remember— visualization is the fertilizer that’s going to allow your little seed of a habit to grow big and strong so it lasts forever. Without that fertilizer, that seed doesn’t have a chance against harsh conditions. With that fertilizer, it has an amazing chance.
If you want long-lasting change, then you need to make visualization a big part of your life. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve never tried it before or not, you can do it. It’s extremely easy to use visualization. As I’ll make clear in the next section, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. The only important part is that you do it.
And then, after your first amazing success with visualization, you’ll begin to make doing that a habit as well.
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