Rob Moshe

This article discusses not only the power, but the absolute necessity of employing your gift of imagination to achieve success.

Baseball Example

Our community baseball team made it to the finals this year as the top team, and the finals are best of three.

In the first game we got crushed. The first inning was almost comical, but the majority of our team didn’t find it very funny. In fact with that one inning we went from the posturing of a top team to that of a defeated back-lot bunch.

Entering our second game, we tried to get our momentum back, but you could see in the faces of our team members that we did not believe we could prevail.

Needless to say, though we played a stronger game the second time, we lost that game too and the championship. I could say that they defeated us, but the truth is that we defeated ourselves.

Why am I telling you about my baseball game?

For me, I treat much of my life as a learning lab. I get curious how I act and how others act in any given situation. Because I didn’t take the game personally (I like to have fun), I was able to step outside myself and see how I was reacting.

I have discovered if I visualized how I would look and think if I was a top player, I could actually perform closer to that level. I tried it in this particular game and hit a nice double.

But what I found more interesting (and the focus of this post) was how others perceived themselves.

During the game I suggested to one of our top hitters — who wasn’t hitting very well — to visualize what he would look like performing at his best. I did this with the hope that it would get him into the ZONE. He replied that he was NOT a visualizer, that he had had a trainer try that with him before, and that he just didn’t have the capability to visualize.

What was interesting was that a few minutes later he was talking about something from the past and you could see how his whole persona changed. He was smiling, his eyes had a sparkle, and he was standing taller. He didn’t even realize that he was visualizing.

Unfortunately when he got up to bat he was not seeing himself at his best. He struck out and the game was over.

Intention and Visualization

Before you can take an action, it must first start as an intention in your mind. Even when you do something unconsciously your mind is still actively initiating this process.

What is interesting to note is that our minds work in images not in text. If I say the word “Airplane” your mind does not start typing A, i, r, p, l, a, n, e. Instead you suddenly think of an airplane that is familiar to you. That’s why, if you read any book on memory techniques the focus is almost always on visualization.

With that understanding you can begin to move past the statement, I am not good at visualizing things. The very fact that you’re reading this post right now, demonstrates that you have the capability to visualize. If you couldn’t visualize, then all that you would see is incoherent rows of letters.

Realizing that all your actions are preceded by your mind seeing the required process, what do you need to do in order to improve your likelihood of success? Exactly. Create the right visualization..

You may be thinking, “What if what I’m visualizing can’t be done?”

Let me relate the story of Roger Bannister.

History and science indicated that it was impossible for a human body to run a mile in under four minutes. Roger Bannister understood that he could not physically push his body past its limitations, but he believed that his mind could surpass them. Bannister spent much time visualizing himself break past the four-minute barrier. Eventually the image became so embedded in his mind that when the time came to race, his mind took his body into the reality that it perceived.

Spend time reflecting on the many inventions of the past 50 years. 200 years ago these were just fantasies in peoples minds. All that we imagine has become or is on its way to becoming reality.

So, you may want to invent a new type of energy to power our cities, to greatly improve your business, or to weaken a bad habit.

How can you implement visualization to help you do this?

Reflecting Forward

One of the processes I use to help my clients is an exercise I call reflecting forward.

I ask the client to follow these six steps:

1. Be clear on your intention – What is it that you want to accomplish? What will its accomplishment do for you?

2. Decide how long would you would like this to take – Be realistic. How long do you think it should take you to work towards your objective?

3. Close your eyes and visualize yourself at that point in the future, having achieved your desired goal – You might vividly see this in your mind’s eye or it might be just an awareness. Visualization does not require seeing in detail.

4. Interview your future self – Ask your future self the steps that he took to achieve the desired goal. What where the hurdles? What were the lessons learned? What would he do if he could do it over again?

5. Return to the present and create an action plan – You have the insight of visualization; now create a concrete plan around it.

6. Take immediate action – To breath life into your endeavor, make sure you take action within the following 24 hours. Otherwise it will end up becoming a mere dream.

Conclusion

Remember that in order to create success, you have to be able to visualize it. You need to trust that you have the talents and abilities to accomplish your desired goal.

To paraphrase Dr. David Schwartz in his book, The Magic Of Thinking Big:

If you can perceive and believe, you can achieve.

Alabama – I’m in a hurry [HQ]

The official end of Summer is September 21st, but for many Labor Day marks the end of fun and freedom and signals the time to return to the cubicles and classrooms. Does it really have to be this way?

Is it possible to enter the work space with a new outlook for the coming months?

This post will look as some different ways to approach the “Getting Back To Work” phase of our year.

If I were to ask you to rate on a scale of 1-10 which day of the week is the most stressful, the majority of you would answer MONDAY. In fact a study of heart attacks in Scotland in between 1990 and 2000 showed that 20% more people die on Mondays from heart attacks than any other day of the week. Imagine that! We are the only species on the planet (I think) that has a popular day for having a heart attack.

What does this tell you?

Why should going back to work be so stressful that is can induce a heart attack?

One possibility is the impact of perception. We have placed a certain meaning on work that creates an incredibly high level of stress and anxiety.

For many people work is associated with:

Non-stop action
Extreme effort
Employer pressure
Criticism
Judgment
The pressure of being the bread winner
*add your own here

Considering that work may be currently taking up 1/3 of your life, it may be worth developing a more healthy and purposeful outlook.

To help you with this I would like to share two powerful tools that I recently read about in Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Stress.

Tool #1 – Redefine

This tool helps you create a new perspective on how you perceive work.

Here are the steps:

1. Identify your current definition of work – What does work mean to you? How do you perceive your job and your role in it?
2. What is the source of this definition? – I imagine that you did not plan on spending your life in a stressful environment. How did it come to have this meaning for you?
3. Ask yourself, “How is this current definition of work impacting my life?” – Clarifying this helps to create the awareness that precedes change.
4. Redefine – Create a new definition of what you want work to mean. Play with this till you find a definition that makes you look forward or at least at peace with your work reality.
5. Write down your new definition of work and review it daily until it has become internalized.

This process can help to drastically reduce any stress you might have with work.

Tool #2 – STOP

This tool is goes beyond the meaning of work. The STOP tool is a way to put the breaks on your life and gain some deeper perspective. This tool can save you from coming to the end of your days wondering “What was I doing with my life”.

Whenever you encounter a situation in your life where you are feeling that things “just aren’t right,” use this tool to help you determine your next step.

Step back. – Imagine hitting the pause button of your life and being able to look at the situation objectively.

Think – What is really going on at this moment? What is causing you to feel this way. What are you priorities? Your options? Your obstacles?

Organize your thinking – Create a workable action plan.

Proceed – With greater clarity and understanding you can trust yourself to move forward.

There is no need to dread going back to work. Like a small child our day to day life can be an exciting playground of learning and growth. Use the Redefine and STOP tools to help you create the necessary perspective that can help you bring joy to your work days and purpose to your life.

When’s the last time you saw a magician and thought to yourself “Whoa. He must have super natural powers!”

Most likely part of your might mind was thinking “Cool” and the other was thinking “What tool and slight of hand did the magician employ?”

To the magician there is no magic. He knows exactly what is happening. He uses his knowledge of technology, physics and human understanding to perform the trick.

So to in life, we may look at someones success and think there is an element of magic or luck in it. Especially when we feel that we should have more success than the person we are evaluating.

But in most cases there is no magic or luck there either. The successful person has been able to optimize their G-d given talents to move forward in their life.

What’s holding you back from your success is the inability to recognize your personal “Bag of Tricks”.

In coaching clients I so often here statements like;

• I never recognized that in myself.
• You’re right. I have accomplished a lot in my life so far.
• Oh yeah I forgot about that time.
• I don’t know what I am good at.
• Yeah. I do have that going for me.
• I guess I do have many strengths.

One of my favorite processes to help clients to reconnect with their strength is to have them share a “Freeze Frame” in their life when they felt they were completely in The Zone.
As the client tells me about the Frame, I listen for their strengths and values, I also ask the client to share what they thought some of the strengths they used at the time were.

It is rewarding to see the clients begin to brighten up when they begin to realize that they have the ability to accomplish so much more.

When you begin to realize the strengths and gifts that lie within, you will begin to move in a new direction, a place were what in the past seemed impossible, is now fully attainable.
You will begin to truly believe in magic. The magic that is you.

A few days after I first came on the Twitter scene, I became aware of #FollowFriday. What a great Idea, or so I had thought. I’m sure that when it has started off it was a great way to recommend fellow tweeters, but with the advent of #FollowFriday generators and general abuse of its essence, it has begun to lose its luster. Now it is an opportunity for you to have a moment of elation before you realize that it is a computer program that is recommending the follow.

So I’d Like to Share with you a Four step process for giving compliments in general that you might apply to your #FollowFriday tweets.

When you are going to recognize someone for the gifts and strengths that lie within them the last thing you want to say is:

Your doing a good job

or

You look nice.

When people here statements like that, they immediately shut you out. They feel you are being totally prefabricated.

When it comes to a compliment you need Four Elements. Be ; Sincere, Specific, Succinct, Generous

Be Sincere – Make sure your compliment is for the purpose of recognizing the strengths in the other person. This in not about how they make you feel, its about the greatness you want to acknowledge in them.

Be Specific – What is it that they did? What strengths did they use? What impact have they made? Being specific shows that you took the time to notice who they “BE”

Be Succinct – Bottom line it. There is know need for a big foot shuffling introduction. Get right to what is most important to they person, the positive acknowledgment that they (and everyone else in the world) hunger for

Be Generous – The more time you spend looking for opportunities to compliment others, the more happy and productive they will become. As an added benefit the people that you lift up through your generosity of words will in turn want to carry you higher as well.

So My Twist For #Follow Friday

• Pic 2-5 tweeters that you Sincerely want to recommend today.
• Take the time to really share with others Specifically what you like about the tweeter.
• Succinct?? Well you have 140 character spaces, less the username. So make sure you don’t try to do more than one # follow Friday at a time.
• Generous? The more you selflessly give the more you will ultimately receive.

Have a great weekend.