Struggling to meet your goals? Do this first.

If you want to hit your goals, have success, reach your desire - you must become a master of visualization. 

Visualization is extraordinarily powerful skill. Science has shown one of the best ways to manifest your desire is to visualize it first.

The brain has a powerful built in "filter" called the reticular activating system. The job of this filter is to allow in certain information into the brain and block out other information.

Guess who programmed that filter? Yes, you!

Here is how it works - if you are holding onto a belief that you are un-worthy and you regularly feel this way in your daily experience - your reticular activating system is going to continuously throughout the day look for experiences and evidence to validate and confirm that negative belief.

It's called confirmation bias. It's the brains way of protecting us from overload. If the brain let in all the information out there with equal value - we would be in serious melt-down mode. The reticular activating system acts like a control filter in order to keep us safe. 

Take the science as a mandate to get busy reprogramming your brain!

By reprogramming your brain, you can literally train your brain out of the unconscious behaviors (and subconscious thoughts) that sabotage your success daily and instead shift into a mode that allows your brain to ...

• Start to spot opportunity,
• Open up to creative possibilities, 
• Spot evidence that things are working out,
• Believe success is possible,
• Notice coincidences that build your momentum, and
• Increase positive thinking. 

One of the fastest and most effective ways to retrain your brain is through visualization.

Anyone can do it and it doesn't have to take hours of your day. Even as little as 30 seconds of thought / visualizing each of your goals and desires in the morning will create a change. 

How-To Visualize.

Here is a quick 2-step process to retrain your brain and create a different filter for success through visualization.

1. Visualize your goal as if it has already been achieved.

Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and then direct your focus to imagine the amazing result, the exciting transformation and the best outcome for your goal. 

For example, if your goal is to improve your self-worth, visualize what your life looks like and how you feel when your self-worth is improved. 

Maybe you see yourself going to the gym or defining better boundaries for yourself.

Perhaps you imagine yourself having success at work, speaking up during meetings, leading a team, receiving a promotion, getting that raise, or earning an award.

Maybe you successfully launched a business or venture you have been thinking about for a long time, and now you see yourself with that success in hand.

Maybe you just received a big payoff or check for all the effort you put in. 

It doesn't matter what it is - it just has to feel good to you!

2. Think of positive emotions you are going to feel when you reach your goal.

This is an important step, not to be skipped. The combination of your intention from step one and the catalyst of your energy from your feelings and emotions in step two act to raise your energy to equal your desire. In doing this, you begin to magnetize your future desire into your reality now. “You move from cause and effect to creating and effect,” says Dr. Joe Dispenza.

As you visualize, allow yourself to notice and feel all the positive emotions of your desire or goal being as if you already accomplished it. For example: 

• I feel proud.
• I feel happy.
• I am standing taller.
• I feel confident speaking up.
• I feel so grateful.
• I feel appreciative of all the opportunities.
• I am noticing my impact and it feels good.
• I am excited by all the success.
• I am filled with a sense of joy.
• I feel abundant.
• I feel worthy and valued.
• I feel whole and confident in who I am.
• I feel like I am adding value.
• I feel accomplished and fulfilled.
• I feel purposeful. 

As you embody the feelings of already having it, having done it, doing it and/or being it - you are training your brain to have a new filter. 

How?

Your brain doesn't know the difference between something that happened to you or something that you imagined happened to you.

The brain is taking that experience of getting the raise, feeling proud, confident and happy and encoding it as a real memory. 

Research has proven and studies have suggested that simply visualizing develops and improves skills - just as if you were actually doing it. One study showed that when individuals visualized playing a song one-handed on piano, they got similar results to having practiced it in real life.

That said, practice counts. The more you practice visualizing consistently, the more you start to believe your goal is possible too, and this belief helps reprogram your brain.

The more you believe, the more confident you become and the more you begin to embody this new way of being. Until you actually begin to do, or be, or have what it is you decided was your desired outcome. 

The network of neurons that act as your filter start to rewire themselves to conform to your new beliefs until a new filter is created.

Instead of looking for all the reasons why you can't or it isn't possible, your brain begins to search for all the evidence that proves you can and you already are. Until you wake up and realize one day, that your vision has become your reality. 

XOXO,

Alexandra