For Successful Goal Setting, Visualize Success

For Successful Goal Setting, Visualize Success
Matt Morris, the founder of Success University, wrote
something about "goals" and "vision" in a recent newsletter
that stopped me in my tracks.

Here's what he said:

"We all know what a goal is, but vision is a topic of
confusion for many. To put it in the simplest of terms,
your vision is how you see yourself. You can set goals all
day long, but if you cannot truly see yourself achieving
them, your goals will never be realized. To accomplish a
goal, you must truly expect to achieve it."

The key word is "see".

How many of us fail to achieve goals because we don't give
them real substance in the subconscious by visualizing them
taking place? I could show you pages full of "year goals"
that I set for myself each New Year and had failed to
achieve by New Year's Eve. They were worthy enough goals,
but they lacked any deep vision of success.

The problem with setting your goals without first seeing
your vision is that you are failing to appeal to your
subconscious mind with pictures that compel. If you do not
appeal to your subconscious with a clear picture it is
unlikely that your life will change.

Anyone who is familiar with Matt Morris's story will know
that his background was one of poverty and low
expectations. By constantly focusing on how broke he was
his circumstances came to dominate his subconscious mind.

Matt writes:

"I had no idea that my vision, which is trained by my
subconscious mind, was overriding my efforts to succeed."

The subconscious mind will draw on whatever is to hand. If
poverty and failure are the only materials to hand, they
will be drawn upon and they will certainly continue to show
up in your life.

But you CAN change the vision your subconscious works with.
The subconscious level of the mind is influenced by what
other people say about you, by your experiences in life and
by what YOU think about yourself.

So, here are three things to do if you want to prepare the
ground and plant your vision deep in the fertile soil of
your mind:

1. Hang around less with people who put you down. Seek out
people with vision, mentors to guide you. If you cannot
find a good mentor, try an online mentoring programme such
as Matt Morris's Success University, which is what I have
been using.

2. Reinterpret your own history more positively. Turn your
past into a source of strength, not weakness and
self-defeat.

3. Change the way you speak and think about yourself. This
is where positive thinking is important - in the thoughts
you think about yourself.

Start to build your vision in thought pictures and impress
them upon your subconscious mind as vividly and as often as
possible. Again, the support of an organization like
Success University will provide you with daily
reinforcement and help in this area of personal
reorientation.

When your subconscious is impressed with a clear vision it
will work towards your goals through flashes of
inspiriation, changes in posture, attitude and expectation,
which will, in turn lead you to take action or respond to
opportunities.

Your vision will lead you through the inevitable failures
and false leads that will beset your progress and that
would cause you to give up if you had merely set goals and
not written your vision in vivid pictures on the tables of
your subconsious mind.

Having a vision is ultimately about how you see yourself,
and it is that vision that will bring you through whatever
tribulations you must face on the path that is set before
you.

Maxwell Maltz, the writer of the bestselling "bible of
self-image psychology", Psycho-Cybernetics, describes how
failures and false leads are actually an important part of
successfully achieving your vision, or "self image".

The first thing to understand is that,

"YOU make mistakes, mistakes don't make YOU - anything."

Tiger Woods, a man who has spent much of his life in the
company of great mentors, talks about failure like this:

"The most we can ask of ourselves is to give it our best
shot, knowing that sometimes we will fail. We are often
defined by how we handle that failure."

So your mistakes should not affect your vision, your "great
expectations" of achieving your clearly seen goals.

In fact, if you have a clear vision, your mistakes serve an
important function which actually contributes to your
eventual success, rather like a servo-mechanism in a
rocket. Your "mistakes" are like "negative feedback" that
tells you that "you need to take corrective action to get
back on beam," as Maxwell Maltz explains:

"If negative feedback is working properly, a missile or a
torpedo reacts to 'criticism' just enough to correct
course, and keeps going forward towards the target. This
course will be... a series of zig-zags."

Similarly, our vision provides us with an inbuilt
"servo-mechanism" that gets us zig-zagging towards our
goal, with the aid of negative feedback.

When Matt Morris discovered that "vision" was the key to
achieving "goals" he "forever broke the shackles of
poverty" from his life. He went on to found Success
University and turn it into the most popular personal
development website on the Internet in its first year of
business.

You too, can do great things, provided that you write your
own vision, make it plain upon on the tables of your
subconscious and run with it until you see it made manifest
in your life.

----------------------------------------------------
David Hurley is a British Internet marketer who lives in
Japan. He runs Grasp-The-Nettle.com, a website dedicated to
spurring on anybody seeking to set up and succeed online. A
free "Internet marketing startup" newsletter full of
marketing advice, tips, and secrets are available at
=> http://grasp-the-nettle.com .
It comes complete with a series of FREE Internet marketing
guides plus over 30 money-saving, influence expanding
resources.