Visualize And Do

A tag-team for success

While sharing some of my recent successes with one of my un-official coaches (see my comments in the “Your Solopreneur Support System” article), she was excited and pleased at what I had accomplished since the last time we talked.

You see, while we were working together, one of the things she coached me about was to visualize where I wanted to be. Since then, not only have I been working on the visualization of my goals, but I’ve also followed that up by taking the needed actions to accomplish them.

The combination of the two activities is extremely powerful. Individually, each is a great tool for personal success. But when employed together, you may find (as I have) that the progress comes much faster.

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Visualize

This activity includes the “planning” functions that all modestly successful people must follow, but goes beyond that – it isn’t just saying “I’m going to write a book”, it isn’t even planning out the book writing activities that will happen in a schedule. It’s much more than that. It’s seeing an image of yourself sitting with your completed book in your hands, smelling the freshly printed paper, feeling the pages as you flip through them, hearing the paper crackling as you go.

A complete sensual picture in your head of what it will be like as you hold the proof copy of the book for the very first time.

Do

In order to create that vision, you must take steps…

Take action, get the lead out, hustle. And it doesn’t always have to be one great big effort, small steps work effectively too.
Get out of bed in the morning, and make something happen. Leave behind the thoughts of what you can’t do today, and complete a few of the things that you can do today.

It might not seem significant tonight when you’ve taken just one small step, but all those small tasks will add up. And at the end of the month, you might be surprised with the results of your consistent effort.

One without the other

Here’s the part I need to emphasize – you can’t do just one of these.

Visualizing without doing leaves you tired and unfulfilled. Doing without visualizing leaves you tired and unfulfilled.

The tiredness in visualizing is that you’ve not gone anywhere (because you didn’t do anything); the tiredness in doing is the physical exhaustion of working on a treadmill. Without planning and visualizing where you want to be, you’re just doing things for the sake of doing them.

Both together move you forward

And so take the time to consider where you want to be in the future, “see” it, make some plans in how you can get there – through little steps, do it, and then look back on the process.

I’m thinking you’ll feel pretty good about what you’ve accomplished and see yourself in more and better places in the future – places that you’ll work hard to reach.