Start Doing This Immediately to Train Your Brain for Success!

What I’m about to share with you in this article cannot be ignored. It has literally made the difference in my clients’ ability to gain control over their lives in remarkable ways.

You may have heard of visualization or maybe creative visualization from interviews with athletes who have used this powerful technique to win more gold medals and titles than perhaps any other single training method. This is different than being mindful-the Millennial term for a type of meditation done to calm down, reduce stress and just be in the present moment. By visually creating and actually sensing, feeling and being in a perfect race or competition in their own minds, professional and amateur athletes are able to use these mental images to help them prepare for the real thing. What you may not realize is, this technique is very simple to perform and has been recently popularized by the film and book, The Secret.

This technique has been around for a long time and has many different names. Some religions refer to this technique as seeing with ‘The Mind’s Eye’. Wallace Wattles published The Science of Getting Rich in 1910 and talked about a different way of thinking and referred to being able to heal the body with the mind. Shortly after his book, Charles F. Haanel released The Master Key System. In his book, Mr. Haanel targeted techniques introduced in The Science of Getting Rich and dug deeper into techniques designed to improve thought. Broken into 24 lessons, The Master Key System was designed to be a home study course not only instructing its readers how to think, but that thoughts themselves are the thing that manifest our goals. Twenty- five years later, the well known, best selling work, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill was published. Again, at the core of Think and Grow Rich was the principle that our thoughts should be trained, just like a muscle,and their power taken seriously. In Think and Grow Rich, Hill states, ” Ideas are intangible forces, but they have more power than the physical brains that give birth to them. They have the power to live on, after the brain that creates them has returned to dust.” Hill calls ideas “intangible forces”. Forces?

In 1984, Dr. Denis Waitley began using the same principles of visualization with Olympic athletes. In his very popular 1986 book, The Psychology of Winning, Waitley outlined how to form and really use visualization as a tool for success. The athletes he coached were so effective in Olympic competition; his books became the standard book for sports psychology. Even high school athletes took notice and have since tried his method.

So how can this practice of purposefully visualizing yourself doing what you want, being where you want, looking the way you want to, and achieving the level of success you want be useful to you? Hmm, please re-read that last sentence. It’s a rhetorical question isn’t it?

Just as working out your muscle groups everyday will help you develop the body you want, spending time developing positive visualizations of really feeling and being in your chosen future demands you spend some time and make an effort to get a concrete picture in your mind, no matter what the goal is. This means you need to develop your goals, know exactly what you want and spend time developing the thoughts as to how your future goals will come about. That doesn’t mean you’ll know how it will happen, but actively imagining yourself achieving your success will help make it happen.

This next part cannot be emphasized enough. If I wrote this over and over again, filling up all the space of this article, it wouldn’t be overkill. If you continue to conjure up negative thoughts and you continually give those thoughts the lion’s share of your attention, guess what will happen? You’ll continue to notice the negativity in your life but what’s more, you will have just fostered a breeding ground for more negative thoughts that create more negative things. The cycle continues this way. You may start blaming others for your misfortune. It wasn’t your fault that you didn’t get the job, that the police officer pulled you over or that you were late for work. This is not the way you want to live is it? Not taking responsibility for your actions? This means there is no way you can be responsible for your own success either. If you can’t own up to what you’re doing wrong, it’s only fair that you can’t take credit for what you’re doing right either.

On the other hand, if you practice visualizing positive things and practice having positive thoughts, guess what? Yes, the opposite is true. Now you can begin to foster a warehouse of positive thoughts that produce positive actions. Including creative visualizations of yourself is a powerful catalyst that changes the game.

Since I’m assuming you’ll want to begin immediately, I’m going to start with how to begin. I want you to try a simple exercise. This exercise is detailed in Pam Grout’s book, E-Squared. She calls it “The Volkswagen Jetta Principle”. Basically, by focusing on something specific, you tend to notice that thing more than if you’re not focusing on it to begin with. Makes sense right? Pam Grout’s example asks the reader to take 48 hours to try the experiment and begin with setting the intention to find tan/beige cars on day one and yellow butterflies on day two. You can choose any thing you’d like. Let me state for the record that, I was blown away by how many tan/beige cars are driving around, unnoticed, right under my nose! Start with something simple, say yellow cars or, more specific, tan vans. It rhymes and may be easier to remember. Then on day two think of another thing like yellow butterflies to focus on. This experiment may or may not surprise you. Regardless, I want you to focus on how this principle of ‘thinking is creating’ can be molded into your daily life. Since it’s often easier to envision objects, asking for physical manifestations of your intentions is a good place to start. You’ll feel far more convinced of your own abilities to encourage good fortune when you start small. Think ‘Reasonable and Achieveable’ goals, then start scaling up.

When you begin to add visualization don’t skimp on the details, no matter how small. You should actually see and feel and, for all intents and purposes, essentially “be” in your own future. The more detailed your images of your future are; the more likely you are to make it come true. This may involve visiting the objects you desire, or even cutting out a picture of what you want from a catalog. If you need, create a Vision Board to help you visualize yourself in your dream life and achieving your goals.

For example, if you want your dream car, decide what car that is, right down to the stitching in the leather seats. Many cars come with different levels of trim and upgrade packages. Determine the exact car you want, then go test drive one. Don’t worry about how you’ll afford it. This way of thinking only re-enforces many negative messages about lack of money and dreams always being dreams and never being within reach. Drive that car around. Be mindful of the way it feels when you sit in it.

What does your brand new dream car smell like?
How does it handle?
What does it sound like when you rev the engine?
How do you feel when your hands are wrapped around the wheel while you’re toolin’ around your favorite streets?
Are bystanders gawking?
Are you able to wipe the smile from your face?
Then go home, and clearly remember every little aspect of that test drive. Imagine yourself behind the wheel and how good it felt, and will feel again when that car is yours. The more convincing the image, the more powerful it is.

By consciously and purposefully intending to think positively and boosting these positive thoughts with visualizations of achieving what you want, being where you want, looking the way you want to, and achieving the level of success you want, you can easily hack your brain and condition it for success.

Author's Bio: 

Jason Magill is a respected Licensed Professional Counselor that focuses on behavior modification to help men, women and children achieve goals. He is a husband and father of three. He specializes in working with children and adolescents but started his career working with adults in Chicago, IL. He co-founded, with his wife, Salus Personal Solutions to offer others a way to find the sound advice they desperately seek without the many barriers that often get in the way.