Have you heard of Creative Visualization? Did you know that it is a power with which you can draw into your life pretty much anything you can imagine. A power that can help turn your life around 180 degrees: from poverty to wealth, from failure to success, from loneliness to love and friendship and from disease to harmony, peace and wellness. Everybody has access to it and everyone can use it.

Creative Visualisation is one of the primary tools we can use for attaining our life’s ambitions. It can be the key for motivating our inner drives and firing up our energies in order to focus our mind to achieve those deeply held desires.  Creative Visualisation works powerfully because the subconscious mind easily understands pictures. It gets ‘it’ quickly and definitely. The life we can create for ourselves is limited only by our imagination.

Impressing the image of our ‘desires’ upon our subconscious on a regular basis is like painting a target for a missile. Our mind will move us ever closer to our goals as long as we keep that target – our pictured desires – in clear focus through regular guidance via our visualisation sessions. Maxwell Maltz in his classic book ‘Psycho-Cybernetics’ says of the creative imagination that it “sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on” (Maltz, 1960, p.28).

Unfortunately the thought of using our creative imagination can be off putting too many people who have convinced themselves that it is hard to do, a bit crazy or somehow beyond their capabilities! Of course, that isn’t true in most cases and it should be, like the best things, a very simple technique to put into practice in our lives.

What should I visualise? What are the benefits? Well here are some of them:

• Helps you clarify your intentions and clearly define your goals in life
• Supports and maintains your motivation and ambition
• Aids concentration and focus
• Affects your attitude and daily life in a positive, powerful way

So you can see it should be worth it! This is how we do it. We fill our minds with positive powerful, success images as often as we can and allow them to take root in the fertile soil of our subconscious. They will in turn appear as the events and circumstances of our lives in the most wonderful ways! The subconscious mind “works accurately to externalise the suggestion which is most greatly impressed upon it” (Bristol, 1969, p.85).

How do you visualize for success then? Try these six steps:

1. Decide on the desire or goal you want to achieve or whatever successful outcome you would like to see happen in your life.
2. Get yourself into a relaxed state of mind and body in order to more freely access your creative imagination.
3. Breathe deeply and evenly for a few moments as your breathing helps control your mental state and level of concentration. Focus on your ‘in’ and ‘out’ breaths.
4. Imagine or form a mental picture of the end result you desire and the complete attainment of your goal. For instance, if it is a new job that you’re after then see yourself in the position you want. Picture the office, the type of work it is, your colleagues or boss telling you how valuable you are!
5. As you visualize, feel the emotions that you would have with the goal achieved. This is very important and you should feel positive, excited, happy and so on. If you are not in this state when you are visualizing your goals but feel more neutral or negative then just relax and try at a different time. You might want to re-examine the goal to see if it is really what you want. Sometimes when we picture something we want or think we want, our minds often ‘spontaneously’ generate negative images and thoughts; this indicates the presence of resistance to the idea or resistance to change.
6. Continue in a relaxed state for about ten to fifteen minutes. Do not mentally strain during the process. If your mind wanders, just gently re-focus on your image and goal.

Shakti Gawain, in her book ‘Creative Visualization’ describes it as “using your imagination to create what you want in your life,” and that it is the “basic creative energy of the Universe” (Gawain, 1990, p.13).

Here are some more tips if you are just starting out with the technique:

• When you practice there may be a single image or you may have several which you move between, backwards and forwards and that’s fine.
• Make the image as detailed as possible with regards your actions. For instance if you want to be a writer, try and see the computer, the pen, the paper, your desk, the light coming in, finishing the last page of your book etc.
• Feel the emotion. The pictures are ways to get us to an emotional ‘place’ and then that emotion of excitement, joy, pleasure, anticipation etc fills the picture with power which impresses the subconscious mind more deeply.
• You can visualize a series of still pictures or a movie sequence, whatever works for you.
• If you can’t see clear pictures that’s ok too; many people see more symbolic or ‘impressionistic’ images. In this way, visualisation is like art, it’s subjective and many people interpret what they see in their own way. The effect is the same as long as the emotion is there.
• Practice several times a week or everyday if you can. Every skill improves with practice and visualization is no different.

You can visualize success, wealth, power, harmony, love, friendship; whatever you can imagine for yourself can be achieved. Take a look at this article, “creative-visualization-for-money“. Mastering visualization should be one of our priorities; the rewards are endless and it leads to a lifetime of personal power and satisfaction.

References:

Gawain, S. (1990) Creative Visualization, New World Library, San Rafael, California.

Bristol, C. (1969) The Magic of Believing, Simon & Schuster, New York.

Maltz, M. (1960) Psycho-Cybernetics, Prentice-Hall, New York.