The Success Principles Series – See What You Want. Get What You See.
The eleventh topic in the book “The Success Principles” by Jack Canfield is all about seeing what you want and getting what you see. .
He explains that visualization – or the act of creating compelling and vivid pictures in your mind – may be the most underutilized success tool you possess because it greatly accelerates the achievement of any success in three powerful ways:
- Visualization activates the creative powers of your subconscious mind.
- Visualization focuses your brain by programming its reticular activating system (RAS) to notice available resources that were always there but were previously unnoticed.
- Visualization magnetizes and attracts to you the people, resources, and opportunities you need to achieve your goals.
He goes on to explain that when you perform any task in real life, researchers have found, your brain uses the same identical processes it would use if you were only vividly visualizing that activity. In other words, your brain sees no difference whatsoever between visualizing something and actually doing it.
Harvard University researchers found that students who visualized in advance performed tasks with nearly 100% accuracy, whereas students who didn’t visualize achieved only 55% accuracy.
The truth is that visualization simply makes the brain achieve more. And though none of us were ever taught this in school, sport psychologies and peak performance experts have been popularizing the power of visualization since the 1980s.
If you’re not familiar with the reticular activating system (RAS), he explains that at any one time, there are about 8 million bits of information streaming into your brain – most of which you cannot attend to, nor do you need to. So your brain’s RAS filters most of them out, letting into your awareness only those signals that can help you survive and achieve your most important goals.
The RAS is a powerful tool, but it can only look for ways to achieve the exact pictures you give it. When you give your brain specific, colorful, and vividly compelling pictures to manifest, it will seek out and capture all the information necessary to bring that picture into reality for you by what you choose to think, how those thoughts make you feel, and how those feelings drive your actions.
Whether you write them down or cut out pictures and put them on a vision board, you need to have a way to help your brain visualize what you want, as if you already have it.
He suggests you set aside time each and every day to visualize every one of your goals as already complete. Some psychologists have even claimed that one hour of visualization is worth 7 hours of physical effort!
Simply start with 10 minutes a day – see what you want so you can get what you see.
Source – “The Success Principles”