It really is true that “what we think about we bring about.” After hearing so many true stories of other people changing their lives through visualization, I am happy to say that it works for me, too. I believe that when people share their experiences it inspires other people to know what is possible for them, but there is nothing quite as empowering as having the experience for yourself.
So with that said, I would like to share with you a couple examples of how visualization techniques worked in my life so that they might inspire you to try them for yourself. Obviously, you are your own best resource so if something I share sparks an idea of a technique to try on your own, then that’s what you should follow. I’d just like to give you some ideas of what is possible, and then my hope for you is that you tap into your intuition and follow the nudges it’s giving you.
The first time I remember using visualization on a regular basis was as a high school student (long before I had seen the movie The Secret or heard motivational speakers talk about this important tool in achieving success). It just came naturally to me because it was so much fun. It’s fun to daydream about the future as though it’s already happened.
I visualized myself graduating as valedictorian, delivering the valedictory address, and inspiring my classmates and their families in attendance. I knew as a freshman that I wanted to be valedictorian, and I achieved that goal four years later: I received a standing ovation when I finished my speech. As a sophomore I visualized myself as a high school teacher inspiring my students (I had just seen Dead Poets Society), and I went on to achieve that goal nine years later. As a high school student, I visualized myself traveling to Spain, and I achieved that goal five years later when I got to spend the summer in Sevilla. As a college student, I visualized myself traveling to Ireland, and I achieved that goal four years later when I spent the summer in Dublin.
What I didn’t realize then that I know now is that losing myself in these daydreams was key to bringing these experiences into my life. I had so much fun daydreaming, that I felt as though I was already there. And as you may already know, the “feeling” part is most important. If you visualize it, but it doesn’t get you excited, smiling, or buzzing, then it doesn’t have the magnetic power to draw that experience into your life.
About six years after I graduated from college, I saw The Secret and the concept of a vision board was introduced into my life. I loved this idea and had lots of fun cutting out pictures that represented my dreams, putting them on my board, and looking at my board every morning and night. But then nothing happened. Well, a couple dreams came true, but not all of them. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working the way it had worked for the people featured on The Secret. What I eventually realized, from listening to my intuition, is that visualizing while walking is what works best for me. I am a bodily-kinesthetic learner. I have to be moving when I’m learning important concepts. I do my most creative work after having danced or walked. That’s just how I operate. So sitting in my room and looking at my vision board wasn’t making things “click” for me. But once I started incorporating my visualization into my morning walk… WOW! It was like I had tapped into a power source.
A key aspect I want to address more fully in subsequent blog articles is that we are dealing with spiritual principles here. I highly recommend Wayne Dyer’s Manifest Your Destiny as a resource for anyone interested in learning more about this topic. The reason I just wanted to interject the spirituality piece into my article is because if I hadn’t been growing spiritually at the same time, I do not believe I would have had the results I’m about to share with you.
Things started changing really fast from that point on. It was just six months from the time I started consistently doing this walking visualization to the time when my dream of moving to San Diego came true. I’d like to now share the specifics of how this happened so you can peek into my process and see if any of it will help you attain your dreams:
After I visited San Diego with my husband and baby in the summer of 2009, I knew that I wanted to move there (and so did my husband Casey). We had both been ready to leave Arizona for some time, but went back and forth on where we wanted to live. Hawaii, California, Spain, Ireland, and Italy all appealed to us. Once we finally decided on the place, once we got clear, things seemed to happen really quickly.
Now that I knew where we wanted to be and had the benefit of just having been there, I started to pretend every day like I was already living there. Every morning when I walked my son Jack around our neighborhood park in Arizona, I imagined we were walking on the beach. Instead of pavement and grass and playground equipment, I saw the sand and heard the ocean and some days could even smell the ocean. I had conversations with Jack about how much fun we were having building sand castles and running into the waves. At other moments, I’d pretend we were at Balboa Park or the San Diego Zoo… any place that inspired me and represented this city I wanted to move to. The important thing here is that I would get so into the visual (I usually walk for about 30 minutes a day so that’s the length of time I was visualizing) that I’d forget I was in Arizona, which is a key component, I believe. I always had a huge smile on my face and felt butterflies in my stomach, a signal my body sends me when I’m happy or on the right track with something.
And every night when I was rocking Jack to sleep (or before I went to bed on the nights that my husband put our baby to sleep) I would visualize again. I just let my imagination take me wherever it wanted in this new city that I visualized we already lived in. We had such fun adventures and spent so much time laughing that I felt like a little kid.
The visualizations became so much fun for me that I found myself daydreaming during the day, too, about living in San Diego. And it wasn’t from a place of desperation or clinginess. I felt grateful for our home in Arizona, our friends, and our time there so I was approaching this move from a place of gratitude.
A couple other small actions I took to help with this visualization included buying a lotion called Coconut Passion and buying a San Diego key chain. The lotion reminded me of the beach so every morning I’d put on the lotion and all day long I had the smell to trigger the visual that I was already on the beach. And we bought the San Diego key chains (my husband Casey’s idea) when we were on vacation, and I thought this was brilliant. Every day multiple times a day I needed my keys to drive places and lock the house, and each time I grabbed my keys I saw the words “San Diego”… another visual to remind me to visualize us living there. So basically, I was incorporating two other senses to help this dream come to life: the sense of smell and the sense of touch.
Casey and I decided to get specific with where we wanted to live in San Diego and what we wanted to live by so we could add those details to our visualization. We bought a map of San Diego and put it on a bulletin board in our hallway so we saw it every day. Casey had researched all the places that were important to him (i.e. what he wanted to live by) and represented them with the appropriate-colored pushpin. I did the same. And we made a list of the items that were important to us so we could add those to the vision and hold each other’s visions. For example, Casey wanted to be able to go to morning mass each day and preferably at Mission San Diego. I wanted to be within walking distance of a library, park, coffee shop, and restaurants. I also wanted to be within close driving distance of the San Diego zoo and beaches.
What is so amazing to me about this process is that God did exactly that. Our current home is 2 blocks away from a library, park, coffee shop, and restaurants. It takes me less than 10 minutes to walk to all these places. And the mission is just a 5-minute drive from our home. It takes me 12 minutes to drive to the zoo and less than 20 minutes to drive to the beach. How did God know this? Well, because He’s God obviously, but seriously? This is amazing to me! I had done tons of research, including emailing people who currently lived in San Diego to tell them exactly what we were looking for, but no one knew of a neighborhood that could meet all of our requirements.
When we came out to San Diego to find a place to live, none of the places I had researched ahead of time panned out. So I said a prayer Sunday morning that God would guide us to the place. In other words, I trusted our intuition.
We just started driving and Casey turned down a street, saw a sign advertising a 2-bedroom for rent, and I placed a call. They were available to show us the apartment in 30 minutes so we didn’t have to wait long. It was the perfect apartment for us; it had new carpeting, new paint, a new toilet, new flooring in the kitchen and bathroom, and a new kitchen sink and oven. And, best of all, it was less than what I had budgeted for rent. I also told God some other details I wanted in our new home, and He delivered. The apartment was on the ground floor, which I had wanted, so I wouldn’t have to carry Jack up and down stairs every time we needed to go outside. And the laundry room was right next door to our apartment, another detail I had requested.
But this isn’t even the amazing part because we still had the employment hurdle to overcome. I called the landlady, was upfront with our situation, and she was very understanding and willing still to work with us. We submitted our application and agreed to touch base in a couple days. At this point, we were waiting to see if a company would offer Casey a job that he had interviewed for. The company kept putting off their decision so when I called the landlady to tell her we were still waiting for a decision, she said, “Why don’t we just put our trust in each other?” So essentially she agreed to rent to us on faith. We didn’t have confirmation of permanent employment, but we both acted in faith.
I’ve heard it said before that when you’re living your life purpose, the universe conspires to help you… and that’s how I felt. I knew Casey and I were meant to make the move to San Diego. On so many levels (for our careers, our happiness, our marriage), it was the next step in our journey. And God was confirming that knowing by guiding us to this exact apartment owned by this specific landlady.
There were so many lessons for me in this experience, but one of the major ones to highlight is that we didn’t have to worry about the how. I’ll say that again because it’s so important: we didn’t have to worry about the how. All we needed to do was get specific with God about what we wanted, visualize it happening, and then trust that He’d make it happen.
So to bring this back to you… visualization can help you at any stage of the journey. Here are the steps to help you make your dreams a reality:
1. Get clear about what you want.
If you aren’t clear yet about what you want, you can use visualization to help you with this first step. Visualize yourself feeling so great because you know what you want and you have that clarity that you desired. It’s important to remember to think of this as already having happened, as opposed to thinking of it in the future tense. It’s also important to phrase things positively. In other words, if you think, “I don’t want to be confused anymore about my life purpose,” turn it around to say, “I am grateful for the clarity I have about my life purpose.”
2. A) See and FEEL yourself having it.
Since these techniques work equally well with emotions as they do with tangible desires like cars and houses, we’ll use the example of attaining the goal of inner peace. Visualize a situation that in the past would’ve made your inner sense of calm crumble and then picture the outcome you want. See yourself calm and peaceful when something irritating happens. Feel how happy you are in your core and know that nothing can shake that. The beautiful thing about this process is that your mind really can’t distinguish between reality and pretending, and this pretending soon becomes your reality.
A tool that works well for me is I pretend a friend I haven’t talked to in a long time calls me up 6 -12 months from now and is asking me how the past year of my life has gone. Then I go into an excited account of all the amazing things that have happened to me in the past year. So I’m including all the dreams I want to happen, but telling it in the past tense, as though it’s already happened. And as I talk, I get really excited and just let my mind see the dream in all of its details unfold, and that’s what I share in this imaginary conversation.
2. B) Write out your vision!
Writing out your visions in addition to visualizing them is an extremely powerful combination. Some people are able to get clearer about the details when they write down what they want, and it’s these details that help bring your vision to life.
3. Your dreams are sacred!
Don’t share your visions with anyone else unless you know for sure they will be supportive and might even hold those visions for you. The reason for this is because well-intentioned family and friends want what is best for you, but may still be living in fear and cannot see how these dreams could come true. By sharing your visions with them, you subject your visions to their fear before they’ve had a chance to grow in your mind. With that said, trust your gut, and if you have a good friend or family member who will believe in you and support you, then they can be a strong support system for you in this time of cultivating your dreams. When Casey and I decided to move to San Diego, we didn’t tell everyone until our dream was already in the works. If we had shared it in the early stages of dreaming, the move might not have happened so quickly.
4. Study other resources!
I highly recommend Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization and Wayne Dyer's Manifest Your Destiny, but the few tips I just shared with you will get you started. I am so excited for you and your dreams. I would be honored to hold your visions for you as I already do this for my husband, friends, family members, and clients when I do my morning visualization. If you would like me to hold your vision for you, please email me at consulting@ice540.com. I am the only one who reads my email and I will keep them confidential. I would also love to hear your success stories. When you get the results that you have been visualizing, please email me at consulting@ice540.com.
Wishing You Joy as You Visualize Your Dreams,
Kat Brenner, M.Ed.
Career Intuitive Coach
No comments:
Post a Comment