Visualization

In The Name of Allah, The Source of Mercy, The Most Merciful. 

The great leaders of business, industry, and finance, and the great artists, poets, and writers all became great because they developed the power of self motivation. Take a Steve Jobs or a Walt Disney or a Henry Ford. All titans of their industries, they all understood that learning cannot be confined to the schoolyard. For these men, and the pioneers before them, personal growth is closely tied to learning how your mind works, and conditioning our psychology for success. So many of us believe that after a college education the learning stops. Formal education will make you a living; self education will make you a fortune.

As children we are taught trigonometry and calculus, however no one taught us how to be a compelling leader or build financial freedom or how to create energy and vitality and not just prevent disease. No school taught us how to proactively manage our lives. But if we want an extraordinary life filled with financial abundance and outstanding health and energy and passionate relationships, then we need to actively take a different path of higher expectations, demands, something greater for our lives. We need to seek out the best.

There are 4 parts of visualization that you can learn and practice to assure that you use this incredible power to its best advantage all the days of your life?

How Often?

The first aspect of visualization is frequency. This is number of times that you visualize yourself performing in an excellent way, in a particular event or circumstance, to achieve a particular goal. The more frequently you repeat a clear mental picture of your very best performance or result, the more rapidly it will appear as part of your reality.

How Long?

The second element of visualization is the duration of the mental image, the length of time that you can hold the picture in your mind each time you replay it. When you deeply relax, you can often hold a mental picture of yourself performing at your best for several seconds, and even several minutes. The longer you can hold your mental picture, the more deeply it will be impressed into your subconscious mind and the more rapidly it will express itself in your subsequent performance.

How Clearly?

The third element of visualization is vividness. There is a direct relationship between how clearly you can see your desired goal or result in your mind and how quickly it comes into your reality. This element of visualization is what explains the powers of the Law of Attraction and the Law of Correspondence. The vividness of your desire directly determines how quickly it materializes in the world around you. Here is an interesting point: When you set a new goal for yourself, your image or picture of this goal will usually be vague and fuzzy. But the more often you write it, review it, and repeat it mentally, the clearer it becomes for you. Eventually, it will become crystal clear. At that point, the goal will suddenly appear in your world exactly as you imagined it.

How Intensely?

The fourth element of visualization is intensity, the amount of emotion that you attach to your visual image. In reality, this is the most important and powerful part of the visualization process. Sometimes, if your emotion is intense enough and your visual image is clear enough, you will immediately achieve it. Of course, the elements of frequency, duration, vividness, and intensity can help you or hurt you. Like nature, the power of visualization is neutral. Like a two-edged sword, it can cut in either direction. It can either make you a success or make you a failure. Visualization brings you whatever you vividly and intensely imagine, whether good or bad.

Action Exercise

Continually feed your mind with clear, exciting, emotional pictures. Remember, your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions. Learn how to accomplish all of your goals here.

Low Self Esteem

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE SOURCE OF MERCY, THE MOST MERCIFUL.

One of the major reasons we don't ask for what we want or need is the barrier called fear. And its roots can run deep. Sometimes where it all comes from is that we were shamed as children. We asked for something, and we got, "Don't you care about this family? How could you possibly ask for that? Don't you see how much we're struggling?" It goes on. Or we got laughed at or we asked for something in class, and the teacher put us down, and then we thought to ourselves. "I'll never let that happen to me again." "It's not safe." "I'll be hurt." So we stayed inside, and didn't ask.

There's a research study that was done in which they sent leads to salespeople. They were actually bogus leads that were prepared by the company to find out whether or not these people would ask for the order. Now some of these people would drive an hour across to this desert city out in the middle of nowhere, make this great presentation for the insurance, and then they wouldn't ask for any action from the customer. As they did this study, they were shocked when they found out only about 3% of the people were asking for the order. They were waiting for the person to say, "Okay, I'll buy it."

So they brought in all these great sales trainers that taught them all the 35 ways to close the sale. Then they sent them back out. And what happened was the number of people who actually asked for the order, you'd think it would go up to something like 99%! But it stayed relatively low. They realized it wasn't because people didn't know how to ask for the order, rather people are afraid to hear the word "NO."

Another barrier to asking for what we want is low self-esteem. Most people don't know this, but two out of three people have low self-esteem; only one out of three have high self-esteem. We often say at our seminars, "Look to your right; look to your left. One of you is okay; two of you are in trouble." When you think about that, it's pretty amazing. And what happens when you have low self-esteem is you don't feel worthy of asking; you don't feel worthy of receiving.

Turns out during World War II a Commander had taken a whole troop up the Rhine River, and as they got up the river, they were attacked. He was the only survivor out of several hundred men. Because he felt so guilty that he had been responsible for this troop and he was the only survivor, when he got out of the war, he went on a two-week drinking binge and then joined the monastery. He'd been there for almost 40 years and he was there because he didn't believe he deserved to have any happiness in his life.

Many of us are running that same game. I don't deserve, and therefore, why would I ask for something I don't believe I deserve? A lot of people believe their needs aren't important. Never got what they wanted; therefore, they never felt that they were validated in their importance.

Another barrier to asking for what you want is pride, and it's that we're afraid that we're going to appear helpless, weak, needy. There's a threefold model of most people's evolution. We start a need, "I need this. I need that." Then you go into greed, and you start getting it, and you become a little avaricious.

When you get your consciousness right, when you really know how to ask for yourself and you really know how to balance your life, then you're freed. And the whole goal here is to go from being needy, greedy, to being freed. Because once you're freed, you can go out and free other people.

We saw a cartoon recently. It showed a man, and his wife asked him the question, "Why don't you stop and ask for directions?"

And he says, "Because my genetic program prevents me from stopping to ask for directions, that's why." We men have to look as if we have it all together. We have to look as if we're totally self-sufficient at all times.

And so the reality is there's a whole deal of programming for men that it's not okay, so our pride as men is at stake; it stops us from asking.

Remember, all you have to do is ask!