How do you see yourself every day? When you’re having a thoughtful moment and thinking about what you want to become in the future, how do you see yourself? do you spend time rehearsing in your head the kind of future you would like to see yourself in… or do you use most of that time to visualize all the negative things that could cause your plan to fail?
I’m guessing that for a lot of people unfortunately the second one is true. Many people have a tendency to focus the majority of their awareness on the possible bad outcomes of any kind of new endeavor. We have a built in theater in our own minds for the evolutionary purpose of seeing into the future and avoiding danger… so its no wonder that for many people thinking about the future has more to do with fear than it has to do with possibility.
We all see ourselves in third person from time to time. We imagine ourselves from the outside almost like a character in a movie, going through the slides from our favorite scenes. Its easy to imagine yourself at least for moments far off into the future where you’ve accomplished the kinds of things you only dreamed were possible. But the next day when you wake up that sense of where you wanted to be has faded into the cold reality that your present negative habits and fears of making changes right now override that desire to evolve.
For example take a habit change like wanting to get up earlier every morning… Your sitting there reading a post online about the many benefits of being an early riser and you’re seeing yourself in your minds eye, getting up, stretching your arms, well before the sun has come up with a smile on your face. You go to bed that night and you set your alarm for 5:00 am and doze right off to sleep. The next morning you wake up at five to the sound of your alarm and roll over almost instinctively and hit the snooze button falling right back asleep till your usual seven o’clock or nine o’clock or whatever rolls around. Merely having a clear visualization of what you would like to have accomplished in the future doesn’t necessarily give you the willpower or perspective to break free of the daily habitual patterns that stop you from making the first step.
Maybe you’re about to go into a big meeting where you need to make a good impression, you know just how bad you want to succeed at this yet all you can manage to think about as you go into the encounter is all the negative experiences you’ve had with meetings. Reminding yourself of all the things that can go wrong as if any of it can help you do what you need to in order to make the encounter go right. Your mind makes a habit out of its usual fear mongering and before you know it you’re blowing every opportunity because all you can visualize is how its going to fail.
I’ve been trying lately to take into account all the ways my mind uses my fears and past negative experiences to keep me stifled in a sense and inhibits me from taking risks and going after the things I really want. I’ve always had to deal with a mental habit I picked up early in life, where I tend to see the ways I could fail or make a fool out of myself easier than I can visualize how its going to look to succeed and really be the kind of Chris I want to be. The habit is anchored deeply in my unconscious as it is, but with enough positive reference experiences I’ve slowly began to push myself through those barriers and watch myself do things I previously didn’t think I would ever have the willpower to do. Taking charge of your negative thinking habit can be one of the most important first steps on the road to discovering what the limits of your actual potential really are.
So how do you break through this habit when it takes a little more than ‘just thinking positive’? We all know that we have dreams and aspirations but what is it that makes the negative images and possible failures habitually spring to mind and stifle our ability to change our ways? Its simple really…. the negative patterns are just habits themselves. My tendency to think negatively or cynically about the possibility of success begins to break down when I do two things:
1. Intentional Positive Visualization
This means sitting down every now and then and taking a few moments to actually visualize what it is that you really want to be or do. See it in full richness and color, exploring both the way your dream looks from the third person outside view and the first person account seeing what success will look like when seen through your own eyes. When you catch yourself engaging in those negative visualizations again, change their color and push them away in your minds eyes, intentionally bringing in the successful images you were visualizing before. Repeat this kind of visualization as often as negative thoughts occur, changing the color or sound of them, playing cheesy music the background, then pushing them farther away, drawing those full color images of success closer, training your mind to associate thinking negatively with the desire to shift into something more positive.
2. Visualized Steps
This is something optionally that I’ve found of great use when dealing with changing personal habits of all kinds whether they are just ingrained in the body or whether its a negative mental pattern that is engraved in my consciousness. We were talking a little earlier about how easy it is to visualize yourself successful in say five years time or something, but when you wake up tomorrow taking that first step in the face of all the negative habitual patterns you’ve built up daily can be nearly impossible. So my remedy for this kind of thing is to spend a little time after you have doing some intentional visualization to visualize clearly, in color, in third and first person, not just what success will look like for you in five years time, or what its going to look like when you’ve already succeeded but also what successful decisions you’ll be making just tomorrow when you wake up and start your day. See yourself making those first steps with the deep intention of creating new patterns and new habits for yourself and remind yourself how amazing its going to feel when all that discipline pays off. Make it a new goal to break down the big goals and single task on each one of those steps. Its not about making it all in one day, its about discovering the deep capacity for sustained change inside yourself when you give up those old belief patterns.
3. Follow Through
Like all the change technology we talk about on the blog, its only effective with the right attitude and follow through. No magic hat trick is by itself going to be sufficient enough to undue countless years of negative thinking… unless you yourself have made the clear decision to be done with it… and under no condition allow yourself to ever look back on those limiting beliefs…. you will never manage to accomplish the things you wish to achieve in the time you have. If you decide for yourself that you will accomplish your goals no matter what, and only use these ideas as far as they solidify your resolve on that path, you can’t go wrong.
Breaking down the entire process of visualization like this into both the practice of seeing your end goal, and visualizing the steps between here and there as individual goals in and of themselves to rehearse will give an added advantage to your visualization practice and help you start to see success right now…before it even happens.
Related Stuff on the Web:
Worry Is Negative Visualization
The Power of Negative Thinking
Visualization to Create the Life You Dreamed Of…
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-Chris
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