It’s one thing to say you want something, another to make it a goal, and another to visualize yourself achieving your goal. The last option is possibly the most powerful.
Visualization has been cited as a game-changer by athletes like Olympian Kerri Walsh, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, and Jim Carrey, and influential business people like Bo Bennet and Harvey Mackay.
Rehearsing your own success is not just for the rich and famous, though. It is a powerful tool for everyone from parents at home to kids applying to college, business owners, and everyday staff workers.
What Are Visualization and Rehearsal?
Many people are asking how to make a change in their lives. Visualization and rehearsal are ways of putting yourself into a future of your choosing. It's like designing your future self, your best self. You mentally imagine a goal or desire in a way that feels like you’re already living that reality. It’s similar to the famous saying by William Arthur Ward:
“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”
One of North America’s top athletic and yoga companies, Lululemon Athletica expends a huge amount of money, time, and effort to mindfully prepare its employees for success. Using goal setting, this company asks every single employee to delve deep into what they want their future to look like. Employees craft a 10 and 5-year plan and journal from the perspective of their future self.
Why put so much precious time and income into imagining what the future might look like in 10 years?
Related reading: "How to Use Visualization to Get Amazing Results."
Why Set Goals? Why Visualize?
Knowing how to achieve goals and achieving goals are important in creating a fulfilling life and career. Just like a carpenter begins with a very specific design to create beautiful or useful pieces of furniture, to create a life you love, you need to define what is important to you. And when you take time to visualize the future, you encourage yourself toward a more compelling and meaningful future.
More and more companies and individuals are realizing the importance of rehearsing their future. Lululemon is just one example of a place that knows that investing time into employee goal-setting will pay off exponentially. Workers will become inspired, active participants in their community, forward thinkers and proactive.
Putting yourself inside future goals benefits your business and builds well-rounded personal lifestyles, too.
How to Visualize: Practical Ways to Put Visualization into Your Daily Life
Whether at home or at the office, you can practice imagining and rehearsing your desires and goals with tools like Mind Movies and goal journals. Mind Movies is a great digital vision board allowing you to upload your own pictures (or you can choose from their library) to create a movie of your ideal life.
For many of us, actionable exercises help us rehearse future goals. Using Mind Movies, you create a video of the sights and sounds of your future goal, making a visual meditation where you can dive into the feeling of your future. Combining intention, visualization, and elevated feelings is an effective tool to help manifest your dream. Watching a movie of a possible future with images and affirmations imprints in a powerful way.
When goal journaling, you write out the future you imagine from the perspective of yourself already living it. Use “I am” and “I do” statements, putting your goals into the present tense so they seem not only achievable but completely real.
As an added boost to your successful mindset, try power posing (aka the “postural feedback effect”) to give you the confidence to live the life you visualized. One science-based explanation of power posing is Amy Cuddy’s TED talk about how body posture affects your mood and helps to create successful communication.
Visualization Creates a Better Future
In the end, when you visualize your goals coming true and you empower yourself to make them a reality, you are creating your own future...rather than waiting for it to happen.
It is an inside job. We often return to this concept at Heartmanity—that you have the insight and knowledge within you already. Tapping into that potent potential inside yourself is a matter of practice, and coaching your brain to work in new ways.
