My parents work with a business structure that involves dream
building and other visualization exercises. We were talking about it
one day, and he made the comment that he thought that one of the
things that was holding him back was that their life was too
comfortable. He could (and did) desire things, but they were all in
the category of 'wants' and not 'needs'.
The model used for business related visualization is very similar to
a lot of magical workings. You have a goal (or dream), and you put
energy into fully visualizing it. You can use affirmations,
pictures, writing or whatever medium you feel most moved to use, but
you really have to commit. It has to be something that you feel so
deeply that it almost becomes the central focus of your life. This
type of focused concentration changes the way the brain sees itself,
and you will find yourself moving towards where you want to be,
sometimes by very startling coincidences.
That type of focus requires a similar degree of risk. Not always in
the physical sense, although often when people want something badly
enough, they do put their jobs or home or family on the line to
pursue it. But definitely in the mental and emotional sense. When
you commit to a dream to this degree it does change who you are
inside. You become a new you. And the longer the inner you and the
outer you don't match, the more it can eat at you.
But like a lot of things, there is no growth without risk. If you
never shed your old skin and become someone new, you will stagnate.
Your current skin may feel right, but it may be slowly suffocating
you, pinching off bits of you so that they atrophy and wither away or
keeping you from reaching new heights.
The big thing about risk (and dreaming) is that it really doesn't
work unless you jump in with both feet. You can't really dip your
toes into it. You can definitely act carefully and think things
through, but there is almost always a point of no return. A cliff
that must be jumped from if you want to fly. Change is not only
inevitable it is irreversible. Think about it, even if you manage to
go back to a place you used to be at, you have changed and that makes
it something new. Every breath we take changes us, and there is no
going back.
But with this risk comes reward. Whenever we open ourselves up to
change and really embrace it, we are stretching our wings a little
bit more. Even if we stumble and don't quite reach our goal (and
sometimes we do try for things that we aren't ready for), we have
still summoned up our courage and made the effort. The next time we
set a goal, even for something of a very different nature, it will be
a little bit easier. We will remember the times before that we were
afraid or nervous or wary and that we were able to move past it. We
will remember how hard it was to get moving that very first time, but
also how the second time it wasn't quite as hard.
I also think that belief is a big part of the risk/reward cycle. And
belief is like a muscle we must build too. Society teaches us to be
skeptical. We are raised to look for the why's, to search out the
ways in which the mystery can be explained, instead of learning to
accept miracles as the wonderful things they are. Belief is what
fuels our dreams, belief that we can be and have the things we want.
Belief that we are good enough, strong enough, deserving enough. And
it can be hard to build that belief. Some times we have to start
with little things, tiny things, stuff that seems almost trivial.
Perhaps instead of working on a new job, we will work on getting
through the next big meeting. But each time we dream a little, we
build up our capacity for belief.
Cause and effect is a tricky thing. Science would have us believe
that there are distinct events that lead up to an inevitable
conclusion. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of science. But what
many people miss is that if you go deeper into science, we discover
that 2 + 2 doesn't always equal 4. I think one of the greatest (and
most convoluted and thought provoking) scientific theories I have
read about delved into quantum mechanics and the improbability of the
creation of our own universe. That the circumstances for life are so
exact that the probability of it happening the way it did is so crazy
as to be almost implausible.
So what does this have to do with using visualization to achieve
results? Well logically, no matter how much we think about
something, it doesn't make a lot of sense for it to actually change
the world. And yet, when we do visualize, we often see changes.
This is where our belief comes back into play. If we see changes and
we spend all our time and effort trying to deconstruct how they came
to be, we are not enforcing our beliefs. In fact, we are undermining
our own process. If, we instead give gratitude, not only for the
results, but for the many people and things that helped us get there
(all those pesky coincidences), we focus on the wonder of it all and
we build up our belief.
The greater our belief, the more we feel we can risk. The more we
risk, the greater our belief gets built. It doesn't matter really
how the results happen. We are better and stronger for the process.
So what if you risk and fail? How does that effect our belief? I
think there are a lot of ways to look at it. Many people find
comfort in the concept that they didn't get one thing because 'it
wasn't meant to be'. Often this is based on the idea that a higher
power knows better and that what we wished for might not have
actually been in our best interests (or that there is something
better that we will or have received instead). I often think of it
as swimming along a river. I can swim with the same intensity each
time, but depending on the state of the river, I may or may not
actually get where I am going. If the current is with me, then it is
easy, but if the current is against me, then I may not succeed. The
current can be anything from the belief or actions of those around me
to the laws of physics.
The main key to using failure to reinforce belief is that however you
look at it, the reason for the failure is not that the process itself
doesn't work, but rather that some unknown (to you) force interacted
with your actions to create a different change than you were working
towards. It always comes back to belief. Keep your belief in
yourself and your process strong and you will see results.
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