7 Reasons why visualisations are key to success

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Once you get into the habit of using visualisations, it is one of the most fun and easy ways to help you to focus on and achieve your goals.

Who would have thought that daydreaming could be so productive?

Here are my 7 reasons why visualisations are key to success…

1) If you can’t even imagine what it is you are trying to achieve and have a clear picture of your goal, how can you be expected to achieve it? Visualisations help us to FOCUS and with laser precision.

2) If it’s good enough for the world’s top athlete’s and coaches, it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Athletes now take visualisations so seriously that it is part of their daily work out plan, as important to them as doing the physical training. Have you ever seen an amazingly talented and fit professional athlete but you just know that they are not going to have the success that they desire because their mind is not in the right place? This is why visualisations are key – they help the mind to SEE and FEEL the success that we are aiming for. Athletes talk about ‘when I stepped up, I had already seen myself take the shot/do the dive/hit the ball’ and they absolutely know that what they are aiming to achieve is possible, because they’ve already seen themselves doing it and winning.

3) Visualisations help you to begin with the end in mind, and when we are working towards a goal this is crucial. We then know what we are aiming for and once we know what we are aiming for we can break it down into a) what do I need to do next and b) how will doing this thing help me to get closer to my end goal? We can’t achieve a huge goal overnight, in fact, a huge goal can be so overwhelming that we get stalled and don’t take any action at all, so doing this process of steps will help us to achieve our end goal quicker and easier than we ever thought possible.

4) By using visualisations you can actually see the goal that you thought you wanted and sometimes, we DON’T want what we think we want! So once you have lived out your goal in your minds eye, you can change it slightly to fit in with what you actually DO want. For example, you may think that you want to be a famous musician but then when you see yourself having achieved your goal being pursued by the paparazzi and being hounded by crazed fans, you may not be so keen, so you can change your goal to reflect this. You could aim to be a music writer, writing all of the songs for the rock stars. You still get to be involved in the music business and you get the royalties (caching!) but you wont have to deal with the downsides of mega stardom. On the other hand, your goal could have been to be a writer, but then by seeing your goal you realise that it is the success and recognition that you want, so again, you can tweak your end goal to reflect this.

5) Using visualisations will help you to align your conscious thoughts to your subconscious mind. This is vital to success in any area of your life but it is so difficult to do because we cannot hear our subconscious mind. The minds eye will help you to train your mind with positive thought patterns (seeing yourself after you’ve achieved a specific goal for example) rather than the old negative thoughts or beliefs that you are harbouring in your subconscious mind, most of which are not even your beliefs they are planted their in our childhood from the adults that are around us at that time. Only by letting go of these old beliefs or obstacles will we ever achieve true success, so visualisations are vital part of this.

6) Following on from step 5 (retraining your brain) you can use visualisations as an anchoring technique, in fact this is why it works so well. When you see or feel how great it is to achieve your goal, it anchors the good feelings and this in itself can be terrific motivation for achieiving the goal. We naturally want to move towards happiness and success and away from unhappy feelings or failure, so if we show our brain that Success is this way >>>> we will be guided to follow through will our goals (ie get off our butts to do something about them!).

7) You may have heard about the law of attraction? If so, you will know that like attracts like and if you are therefore thinking positively about your goal in a specific way and actually seeing yourself after you have achieved the goal – you are much more likely to attract great results than if you are thinking negatively; it’s too hard, I can’t do this, I’m not sure if I’m good enough. This will only ‘attract’ failure.

Please feel free to leave a comment, I would love to hear your thoughts on this and your best visualisation stories or tips if you have one.