You Won’t See How to Reach Your Goals
David Allen, in his book entitled Ready for Anything stated:
“You won’t see how to do it until you see yourself doing it. Our brain’s pattern-recognition mechanism is triggered by the images you identify with and the focus you hold. You see the outcome first, and then you are unconsciously made conscious of information. If you won’t see yourself having or doing something until you see how to do it, you’ll never recognize the methods, though they are all around you. Notice what you notice and how you make that happen.”
Allen says: “I am continually amazed at how often I forget about our astonishing ability to create what we want by what we envision. Outcome thinking and the willingness to visualize something’s being true before it’s physically present is a master skill that we all could probably develop to a much greater degree.”
I recently pulled out a long term life plan that I had developed about ten years ago. I was amazed at how many of my goals I had reached, some of them without even realizing it. Wow! What was happening here? My plan included finances, work, and family items.
Allen added: “Those images for years had sparked and supported my significant choices. Some of the pictures weren’t very exact, in terms of what I achieved. I never really got to a proficient level of playing jazz flute, as I had drawn. But much of the little mural was quite exact about what has come to pass. Some of my visions were pure fantasies when I had them. But I allowed myself to draw the blueprint.”
Why does this work? Two lines of thinking include:
- “Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than you ever could by conscious thought. You supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.” – Maxwell Maltz
- “If you limit your choices to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.” – Robert Fritz
Getting the results you want requires that you start to visualize them. As Dan Sullivan, my Business Coach and president of The Strategic Coach™ stated:
“Getting results doesn’t take much time at all. It’s not getting the results that takes up all the time.”
Think about it, as you begin a New Year!
