This trick makes all your goals within reach.
How do you communicate with yourself? How do you embody your thoughts, ideas, goals, dreams? Words perhaps? Pictures? I don’t. It’s not the way I think anymore.
I’ve discovered something much more powerful, a real tool to help me achieve my goals.
Having an image to look at and bolster your ambition stays with you whereas just thinking about it, fades.
It’s called “mental photographs”.
There’s a very inspiring e-mail that I receive weekly. Sometimes the content doesn’t particularly resonate. Other times, it makes me think a little bit. But sometimes it’s mind-blowing. This is what happened with the one I received some time ago. Here’s what it said:
“One of the most transformative things you could ever begin doing, Robert, is to start “thinking in pictures.”
Of what you want, of what you love, of who you dream of becoming.
Thoughts become things,
The Universe”
In case you’re interested, it’s free and it’s called “A Note from the Universe”:
“The Notes are brief emails written by “The Universe,” personalized with your name (and occasionally your goals and dreams), designed to remind you that you have, indeed, got goals and aspirations, something you want to achieve or do. They help you with coming up with ideas and ways of doing them.
I’m a great believer in writing things down, so that those thoughts are out of my head and so that I can remember them at a later date.
But putting those thoughts down with pictures to accompany them means so much more.
Images are powerful, hard facts prove it
According to the Visual Teaching Alliance (source: McKnightKurland):
- Our eyes can record 36,000 visual messages per hour;
- We can perceive a visual scene in less than a tenth of a second;
- 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual;
- The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.
Brain Rules found that when people hear a piece of information, they probably only remember 10% of it three days later. However, if a relevant image is associated with the same information, people retain 65% of the information three days later. (source: Hubspot)
Images have a direct effect on our brains and emotions since they do not need to be translated. No wonder this is the bias used in advertising and why movies and TV shows are so popular. Or why we love taking pictures and scrolling through Instagram so much.
Images are even more powerful when it comes to photographs. That’s what this is all about. Photographs encapsulate a fragment of pure reality. That’s why it works so much for visualization:
Photographs=captured reality= seeing oneself in an accomplishment or purpose. Thrilling!
Use the power of ‘mental photographs’ to make your dreams come true
Projecting a picture of yourself in a realisation makes it real. Palpable. It brings a huge dose of motivation because it gives the feeling that, through action, things can become real. That these goals are only a few efforts away. That you are not working in a vacuum. They seem to be within reach, just as they are in reality.
It is also a way to stay motivated in times of uncertainty and doubt.
These goals are no longer just a floating desire. They become real. They become coherent.
This brings high motivation and perspective.
What is your greatest goal? The one you long for the most? Visualize an image of yourself embodying that goal. Feel how real it could be?
Then act today.
