How To Live An Extraordinary Life
"We are defined by the narrative that we write for ourselves every day. Is it a story of joy, perseverance, love, and kindness, or is it a story of guilt, blame, bitterness, and failure? Find a new vocabulary to match the emotions and feelings that you want to live by. Talk to yourself with love." —Jay Shetty
What keeps you from living an extraordinary life? What is holding you back from making decisions that will help you realize your dreams? Sometimes the whole process seems simple:
1. DESIRE. Develop a burning desire to have or do something.
2. PLAN. Make a plan that will allow you to accomplish your desired goal.
3. ACT. Just go out and do it.
If only it were that simple. Each of us is influenced by our past, our friends, our family, our job, our religion, our education, and many other things that set the patterns for our life. Each of us has responsibilities, physical and emotional limitations, schedules, and budgets. These influences can be positive for establishing a stable life, but they can also inhibit our imagination and be barriers to achieving our dreams.
Besides that, and perhaps even more crippling, excuses surround us! Time, people and commitments are excellent excuses for not making decisions and for deferring actions that could help us accomplish important things. But, by unleashing your imagination and allowing your dreams and wishes to surface, you can harness a powerful new force, using newfound creativity and design thinking to work around whatever gets in your way, reach your goals, and achieve your preferred future.
We have been trained to approach decision-making with rational, logical thinking. That’s fine as far as it goes, but unfortunately, an analytical approach can de-power the imagination and hobble our ability to see innovative solutions. Creative thinking is vital to re-inventing life and planning a spectacular future. If we are to be inventive in our businesses and personal life, we need to change the way we think and discard routines that stifle our imaginative potential. Approaching life with an open mind and a spirit of curiosity will inspire more innovative solutions in your search for answers.
Creativity uses the right side of the brain, and exercising this side can lead to the transformational power of getting in touch with your own creativity. Unleashing your imagination helps you tap into reservoirs of innovation and revel in the joys of discovery. Perhaps, most importantly, it can be a source for a new vision of an extraordinary life.
Life does not have to just happen to us. You can create it. You are the designer of your life, and you can make the choices that will decide your future and decisions that will affect your life. By opening your subconscious mind and unleashing your imagination, you can discover many more opportunities for creating an exceptional life filled with new opportunities and excitement.
Deciding to embrace optimism is the only choice if you wish to advance to a more extraordinary life. But you must make that decision. When you choose optimism, all of the options you have in life are more likely to succeed. This is what I would urge you to remember:
1. You are in control of your life.
2. You control your future.
3. You can decide to realize your full potential on a day-to-day basis and for a lifetime.
4. Your decisions can chart a course for a happier, more productive life.
These are bold statements, but the success of your life starts with decisions you make. And the more preparation you do to support your decisions, the more successful the results will be.
All kinds of influences shape the decisions you make in your personal and business life. But you can govern those influences and balance them with a clearly written plan for the future – a plan guided by your wishes and dreams. If you allow outside influences to control your daily decisions and the long-term direction of your lives, they will not only influence today’s activities, but establish a direction for your entire life.
It is up to each of us to chart the course for all aspects of our life, despite the influences of our business, our friends, our family, our spouse and people we meet every day. We are influenced by the education we received, our religious affiliations, the media and even our government. These influences can be positive or damaging. That is why we need to design a clear direction for our future that clarifies all aspects of our life.
The first decision to make is whether to proceed through life with a positive or negative attitude. This seems to be a ridiculously easy question. Who would choose to be negative? But do you know people who have a negative attitude about nearly everything they do? Has that worked for them? Do you enjoy being with them? Not likely. On the other hand, do you know people who are almost always upbeat and have a positive approach to life? These are people we are drawn to, whose energized, effective life we naturally want to share.
Why would people choose a sad, negative approach to life? What possible benefit could there be in choosing to live this way? Perhaps they haven’t thought about it. Maybe they haven’t taken control of their lives. Maybe they haven’t even realized that they have the power to make decisions for their lives. Maybe they are Eeyores, who cling to perpetual pessimism, as unwarranted and damaging as it is. Danielle LaPorte says:
"Self-doubt is so insidious that it not only renders us stuck in our lives, but it also actually weakens our ability to dream about what living unleashed would look like. And here’s the thing: The mere act of dreaming is a vitalizing,
life-affirming endeavor. As it turns out, using your imagination is very, very good for your well-being. Einstein believed that imagination was even more important than knowledge itself."
If you find negative thoughts intruding, resolve to break that habit and train yourself to see things more positively. You can learn to look at life with optimism. You can use the tools and attitudes in this book and many other books to plan a spectacular life for yourself. We all know life can be a tremendous challenge. It takes all our effort and intelligence to make it what we wish it to be. And it takes a spirit of imagination to unleash the most innovative solutions. With that spirit of imagination, we can achieve what would otherwise be only naïveté. We can begin to believe this instead:
LIFE IS A WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE.
I AM IN CONTROL OF MY DESTINY.
When you take control of your life, unleash your imagination, focus on your future, and refuse to complain, no matter how many obstacles life has thrown at you, you can rebuild your life. By using your imagination, you can find new approaches through creative discovery. When you use abstract thinking, you can uncover those dreams and desires hidden in your subconscious. Let them surface, and let them be a guide to your future. It’s time to be positive about who you are and where you are going. As Simon Sinek says, “Being for something…is about feeling inspired. Being for ignites the human spirit and fills us with hope and optimism.”
And yet, this book is not about happiness. There are so many books written about happiness that the whole concept can get confusing. Why are people seeking happiness when happiness is only a state of being? This book is a guide to building a more exciting life, one driven by purpose, one filled with enthusiasm and one that harnesses your dreams and ambitions and leads you to accomplishments that you never knew were possible.
If you have had significant success, you might be resting on your laurels, wasting time in a contented state, while opportunities pass you by. And yet we all have enormous potential, a responsibility to our society and an ability to contribute. It’s about finding purpose and crafting a purpose-driven life. We can unleash our imagination and our dreams to envision a future for ourselves that expands our horizons and opens doors that have been closed for decades. We are significant, and we can have a tremendous impact on issues that need to be addressed in our society, our profession, and our lives.
If we have a powerful, clearly defined purpose, we can use it to guide an extraordinary life. Unleash can help you use your imagination to discover your passions and find your purpose. And it will help you clarify the key questions that can guide you toward an exciting future.
We don’t need just happiness. We don’t need only to be content. We need to take action, find out “why,” surpass our own limitations, and exceed our expectations. We need to envision a new future, multiply our abilities, and envision a life that may only live in our imagination. Once we see it, we can achieve it. Our life can be extraordinary, one that we generate and one that surpasses our more modest goals. We can stretch our imagination to build a life guided by superior expectations and excellence. Through harnessing our talents and abilities, focusing our dreams and imagination, we can build a life of significance.
Encourage Your Curiosity
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” -- Walt Disney
The truth is not yet totally known. We live in an ever-changing world where assumptions and theories are challenged on a daily basis. Science continues to find new evidence about our world, our origins and everything around us. We continue to grow in our understanding and discover things we never even knew existed before. And today we face paradigm-changing advances, like artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Such advances often make us question our beliefs, and if they don’t, they should. It is very easy to be stuck in our thinking, our assumptions, our long-standing concepts of life and how we live it. We must embrace the continuing research and curiosity of our inventive professionals in every field of study. We do not know everything yet, and we need to give curiosity a chance and support the imaginative and innovative pursuits that bring about advancements in our understanding of our world and of our lives. “No one is dumb who is curious,” says Neil deGrasse Tyson. “The people who don’t ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.”
What Is, Isn’t
What is good enough for today, is not necessarily true for tomorrow, or next month or next year. So why hold on to traditions and assumptions that have been gathering dust for decades? Curiosity stimulates the imagination, and inspires us to ask how and why. Our imagination brings us closer to invention and innovation. Curiosity is one of the most powerful forces influencing our thinking. It makes us see things in a different way and encourages creativity and new approaches to everyday situations in need of change, advancement and improvement. Curiosity, imagination, innovation, improvement, and change – these advance our society and can advance our personal lives. In the words of Albert Einstein: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, in Big Magic, says, “You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.”
Curiosity inspires growth—mental growth. That’s a good reason to continue asking questions, to continue trying to understand “why.” Curiosity nourishes our mind, stimulates our creativity and allows us to investigate new directions for our life.
Keep Asking Questions
Keep asking why. And seek to understand all of the basic truths that are part of your belief structure. What will come next? What new inventions will change your life and the way the world works? These are the exciting questions that we must continue to ask. Not everything is known yet. So, open your mind to the possibilities, to the unknown and imagine what could be. Imagine what is not here yet. Anything is possible, and through the unleashing of your imagination, anything can be created.
“My favorite words are possibilities, opportunities and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.” -- Mario Testino
Imagine the Possibilities
“Then we send kids to school, and that fantastic creative process is suddenly a bad thing. The child’s imagination is called ‘not paying attention.’ Drifting off into the glorious realm of the imagination for a few moments elicits a swift ‘What are you doing?!’ from the teacher.” -- Bob Procter
The more imaginative you are, the more creative you will be, and the more creative you are, the more possibilities unfold for an exciting, innovative, passionate, and dynamic life. This is why I titled this book Unleash Your Imagination. We are obsessed with making out lists, setting goals and prioritizing in order to achieve these goals. And yet, often these goals have not been formulated by reaching deep inside and stretching our imagination to achieve a list of truly spectacular goals, goals that ignite our passions, our dreams and all that allows our fantasies to surface and influence our desires. Does this sound impossible? Perhaps. But why limit yourself when you are trying to unleash the dreams that are hidden within you? According to Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
While attending a lecture by Thomas Moore, the author of Care of the Soul, at the Unicorn Historical Writers Conference, I was impressed with many of his concepts about goal setting and using our imagination. Moore says:
1. We need to be less committed to goal setting. Reaching for goals will restrict your life to a very narrow pathway and will limit the potential for imagination. We become so obsessed with the path to achievement that we miss a wealth of opportunities and new insights along the way.
2. We need to un-focus. Focusing is a rational act. The more rational we become, the less imaginative are the results
of our labor.
3. We need to become more irrational in order to open the subconscious mind and allow it to create and innovate.
Can you imagine the possibilities? What if you could realize the dreams of long ago that never came to fruition? What if you could live in that cottage by the ocean and hear the seagulls calling? What if you could spend a year living in the south of France and experience the charm of the Mediterranean coast and be influenced by the light and the atmosphere that inspired the impressionist painters? What if you could live with those who reinforce your life and inspire you to reach for new, far-reaching goals well beyond what you thought you could achieve? What if you could live with the expectation that a spectacular life is possible?
But when you do set goals, don’t set simple goals – goals that you know you can achieve. Those are not much more than a Saturday morning laundry list. Set goals that you have no idea how you can achieve. Stretch so far that you enter a world of spectacular possibilities. Set goals that create excitement in your life and allow you to anticipate their reality. In his book, The Art of Living, Bob Proctor says: “If you set a goal and you know how to achieve it, you’re not growing. You’re going sideways. When you set a goal, you should be setting a goal for something you have absolutely no idea how to do.” You may never reach such a goal, but you will have stretched your imagination so far that it will take you much further than you thought you could go. You will have achieved even higher levels of discovery along the way.
In The Law of Attraction, Esther and Jerry Hicks say, “Imagination is the mixing and massaging of thoughts into various combinations. It is similar to observing a situation. However, in imagination, you are creating the images rather than watching something in your current reality. Some use the word visualization, but we want to offer this subtle distinction: Visualization is often only a memory of something that you have once observed. By imagination, we mean deliberately bringing desired components together in your mind to create a desired scenario…When we use the term imagination, we are really talking about Deliberately Creating your own reality.”
Unleash your imagination. Re-imagine your future. Think of the spectacular possibilities. They are there waiting for you. You control your life. You are responsible for the decisions that guide your future, and you have free rein to make it happen. It begins with unleashing your imagination.
“There is hope in dreams, imagination and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.” -- Jonas Salk
Visualize Freely
“Seeing differently is like putting on an imaginary pair of special glasses and filtering the information through them. Your life is what it is. What is different is what glasses you choose to decide how you want to see the same things differently.” -- Ayse Birsel
What does your dream look like? Where does it take place and who is sharing it with you? How does it feel to be in that place with that person? Visualize it. Pretend you are there. Place it in your mind, and soon it will become part of your subconscious. That’s where it should be. From there it can influence you until your vision is realized. We need to have a vision to guide the decisions we make. The vision is the final destination towards which our road map of life is plotted.
Your vision does not start with analytics. It does not begin by studying the numbers. It starts in your mind and follows the fantasies that motivate you to taking action. It incorporates your wishes and dreams with an inspired imagination. This is the fun part of planning – the unrestricted, open-ended possibilities to plan without anything in your way. Life will give you all kinds of roadblocks along the way. Life will say no. It will say, “You can’t do that.” It is up to you to talk back, and say, “Yes, I can.”
The stronger your vision is, the more committed you will be to it, and the stronger the possibilities are for realizing that vision. Starting with a blank canvas or an empty piece of paper can be intimidating, especially when it holds the possibilities of a future project or an important plan. But if you have unleashed your imagination, unlocked your dreams and desires and are beginning to form a glimpse of your preferred future, the visualization process will have a head start. When your desires and dreams excite you and become your motivation, a picture of your new life model becomes more in focus. As Bob Proctor says in The Art of Living, "What ideas wind you up and make you want to move into action? If you’re not sure, get quiet and visualize. Visualization is where everything starts. When you think about it, everything begins with a picture."
Developing a vision can take place in all kinds of planning – life planning, project planning, even vacation planning, directing a play, or coaching a sports team. Seeing your vision first allows you to see the strategies you will use, the tactics you need to achieve that vision. Seeing your vision at the onset will provide the enthusiasm to help you move forward through whatever adversity stands in your way. When your vision originates from your dreams and wishes, you have more of a commitment to achieving it. You have created the plan and all of its details, and the planning experience makes the vision more desirable, perhaps almost an obsession. This knowledge and intimate understanding of your vision will enhance your commitment to making it become a reality.
Everyone’s life is a blank canvas. It is up to each of us to choose the colors and the image for a perfect picture. Each of us is the artist of our life and can paint the picture that is our vision. There are many ways of making this comparison, but Brian Tracy says it simply: “The person you see is the person you will be.”
“There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.” -- William James
Order a Copy
Unleash Your Imagination, published by River Grove Books, can be ordered through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.
"We are defined by the narrative that we write for ourselves every day. Is it a story of joy, perseverance, love, and kindness, or is it a story of guilt, blame, bitterness, and failure? Find a new vocabulary to match the emotions and feelings that you want to live by. Talk to yourself with love." —Jay Shetty
What keeps you from living an extraordinary life? What is holding you back from making decisions that will help you realize your dreams? Sometimes the whole process seems simple:
1. DESIRE. Develop a burning desire to have or do something.
2. PLAN. Make a plan that will allow you to accomplish your desired goal.
3. ACT. Just go out and do it.
If only it were that simple. Each of us is influenced by our past, our friends, our family, our job, our religion, our education, and many other things that set the patterns for our life. Each of us has responsibilities, physical and emotional limitations, schedules, and budgets. These influences can be positive for establishing a stable life, but they can also inhibit our imagination and be barriers to achieving our dreams.
Besides that, and perhaps even more crippling, excuses surround us! Time, people and commitments are excellent excuses for not making decisions and for deferring actions that could help us accomplish important things. But, by unleashing your imagination and allowing your dreams and wishes to surface, you can harness a powerful new force, using newfound creativity and design thinking to work around whatever gets in your way, reach your goals, and achieve your preferred future.
We have been trained to approach decision-making with rational, logical thinking. That’s fine as far as it goes, but unfortunately, an analytical approach can de-power the imagination and hobble our ability to see innovative solutions. Creative thinking is vital to re-inventing life and planning a spectacular future. If we are to be inventive in our businesses and personal life, we need to change the way we think and discard routines that stifle our imaginative potential. Approaching life with an open mind and a spirit of curiosity will inspire more innovative solutions in your search for answers.
Creativity uses the right side of the brain, and exercising this side can lead to the transformational power of getting in touch with your own creativity. Unleashing your imagination helps you tap into reservoirs of innovation and revel in the joys of discovery. Perhaps, most importantly, it can be a source for a new vision of an extraordinary life.
Life does not have to just happen to us. You can create it. You are the designer of your life, and you can make the choices that will decide your future and decisions that will affect your life. By opening your subconscious mind and unleashing your imagination, you can discover many more opportunities for creating an exceptional life filled with new opportunities and excitement.
Deciding to embrace optimism is the only choice if you wish to advance to a more extraordinary life. But you must make that decision. When you choose optimism, all of the options you have in life are more likely to succeed. This is what I would urge you to remember:
1. You are in control of your life.
2. You control your future.
3. You can decide to realize your full potential on a day-to-day basis and for a lifetime.
4. Your decisions can chart a course for a happier, more productive life.
These are bold statements, but the success of your life starts with decisions you make. And the more preparation you do to support your decisions, the more successful the results will be.
All kinds of influences shape the decisions you make in your personal and business life. But you can govern those influences and balance them with a clearly written plan for the future – a plan guided by your wishes and dreams. If you allow outside influences to control your daily decisions and the long-term direction of your lives, they will not only influence today’s activities, but establish a direction for your entire life.
It is up to each of us to chart the course for all aspects of our life, despite the influences of our business, our friends, our family, our spouse and people we meet every day. We are influenced by the education we received, our religious affiliations, the media and even our government. These influences can be positive or damaging. That is why we need to design a clear direction for our future that clarifies all aspects of our life.
The first decision to make is whether to proceed through life with a positive or negative attitude. This seems to be a ridiculously easy question. Who would choose to be negative? But do you know people who have a negative attitude about nearly everything they do? Has that worked for them? Do you enjoy being with them? Not likely. On the other hand, do you know people who are almost always upbeat and have a positive approach to life? These are people we are drawn to, whose energized, effective life we naturally want to share.
Why would people choose a sad, negative approach to life? What possible benefit could there be in choosing to live this way? Perhaps they haven’t thought about it. Maybe they haven’t taken control of their lives. Maybe they haven’t even realized that they have the power to make decisions for their lives. Maybe they are Eeyores, who cling to perpetual pessimism, as unwarranted and damaging as it is. Danielle LaPorte says:
"Self-doubt is so insidious that it not only renders us stuck in our lives, but it also actually weakens our ability to dream about what living unleashed would look like. And here’s the thing: The mere act of dreaming is a vitalizing,
life-affirming endeavor. As it turns out, using your imagination is very, very good for your well-being. Einstein believed that imagination was even more important than knowledge itself."
If you find negative thoughts intruding, resolve to break that habit and train yourself to see things more positively. You can learn to look at life with optimism. You can use the tools and attitudes in this book and many other books to plan a spectacular life for yourself. We all know life can be a tremendous challenge. It takes all our effort and intelligence to make it what we wish it to be. And it takes a spirit of imagination to unleash the most innovative solutions. With that spirit of imagination, we can achieve what would otherwise be only naïveté. We can begin to believe this instead:
LIFE IS A WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE.
I AM IN CONTROL OF MY DESTINY.
When you take control of your life, unleash your imagination, focus on your future, and refuse to complain, no matter how many obstacles life has thrown at you, you can rebuild your life. By using your imagination, you can find new approaches through creative discovery. When you use abstract thinking, you can uncover those dreams and desires hidden in your subconscious. Let them surface, and let them be a guide to your future. It’s time to be positive about who you are and where you are going. As Simon Sinek says, “Being for something…is about feeling inspired. Being for ignites the human spirit and fills us with hope and optimism.”
And yet, this book is not about happiness. There are so many books written about happiness that the whole concept can get confusing. Why are people seeking happiness when happiness is only a state of being? This book is a guide to building a more exciting life, one driven by purpose, one filled with enthusiasm and one that harnesses your dreams and ambitions and leads you to accomplishments that you never knew were possible.
If you have had significant success, you might be resting on your laurels, wasting time in a contented state, while opportunities pass you by. And yet we all have enormous potential, a responsibility to our society and an ability to contribute. It’s about finding purpose and crafting a purpose-driven life. We can unleash our imagination and our dreams to envision a future for ourselves that expands our horizons and opens doors that have been closed for decades. We are significant, and we can have a tremendous impact on issues that need to be addressed in our society, our profession, and our lives.
If we have a powerful, clearly defined purpose, we can use it to guide an extraordinary life. Unleash can help you use your imagination to discover your passions and find your purpose. And it will help you clarify the key questions that can guide you toward an exciting future.
We don’t need just happiness. We don’t need only to be content. We need to take action, find out “why,” surpass our own limitations, and exceed our expectations. We need to envision a new future, multiply our abilities, and envision a life that may only live in our imagination. Once we see it, we can achieve it. Our life can be extraordinary, one that we generate and one that surpasses our more modest goals. We can stretch our imagination to build a life guided by superior expectations and excellence. Through harnessing our talents and abilities, focusing our dreams and imagination, we can build a life of significance.
Encourage Your Curiosity
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” -- Walt Disney
The truth is not yet totally known. We live in an ever-changing world where assumptions and theories are challenged on a daily basis. Science continues to find new evidence about our world, our origins and everything around us. We continue to grow in our understanding and discover things we never even knew existed before. And today we face paradigm-changing advances, like artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Such advances often make us question our beliefs, and if they don’t, they should. It is very easy to be stuck in our thinking, our assumptions, our long-standing concepts of life and how we live it. We must embrace the continuing research and curiosity of our inventive professionals in every field of study. We do not know everything yet, and we need to give curiosity a chance and support the imaginative and innovative pursuits that bring about advancements in our understanding of our world and of our lives. “No one is dumb who is curious,” says Neil deGrasse Tyson. “The people who don’t ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.”
What Is, Isn’t
What is good enough for today, is not necessarily true for tomorrow, or next month or next year. So why hold on to traditions and assumptions that have been gathering dust for decades? Curiosity stimulates the imagination, and inspires us to ask how and why. Our imagination brings us closer to invention and innovation. Curiosity is one of the most powerful forces influencing our thinking. It makes us see things in a different way and encourages creativity and new approaches to everyday situations in need of change, advancement and improvement. Curiosity, imagination, innovation, improvement, and change – these advance our society and can advance our personal lives. In the words of Albert Einstein: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, in Big Magic, says, “You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.”
Curiosity inspires growth—mental growth. That’s a good reason to continue asking questions, to continue trying to understand “why.” Curiosity nourishes our mind, stimulates our creativity and allows us to investigate new directions for our life.
Keep Asking Questions
Keep asking why. And seek to understand all of the basic truths that are part of your belief structure. What will come next? What new inventions will change your life and the way the world works? These are the exciting questions that we must continue to ask. Not everything is known yet. So, open your mind to the possibilities, to the unknown and imagine what could be. Imagine what is not here yet. Anything is possible, and through the unleashing of your imagination, anything can be created.
“My favorite words are possibilities, opportunities and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.” -- Mario Testino
Imagine the Possibilities
“Then we send kids to school, and that fantastic creative process is suddenly a bad thing. The child’s imagination is called ‘not paying attention.’ Drifting off into the glorious realm of the imagination for a few moments elicits a swift ‘What are you doing?!’ from the teacher.” -- Bob Procter
The more imaginative you are, the more creative you will be, and the more creative you are, the more possibilities unfold for an exciting, innovative, passionate, and dynamic life. This is why I titled this book Unleash Your Imagination. We are obsessed with making out lists, setting goals and prioritizing in order to achieve these goals. And yet, often these goals have not been formulated by reaching deep inside and stretching our imagination to achieve a list of truly spectacular goals, goals that ignite our passions, our dreams and all that allows our fantasies to surface and influence our desires. Does this sound impossible? Perhaps. But why limit yourself when you are trying to unleash the dreams that are hidden within you? According to Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
While attending a lecture by Thomas Moore, the author of Care of the Soul, at the Unicorn Historical Writers Conference, I was impressed with many of his concepts about goal setting and using our imagination. Moore says:
1. We need to be less committed to goal setting. Reaching for goals will restrict your life to a very narrow pathway and will limit the potential for imagination. We become so obsessed with the path to achievement that we miss a wealth of opportunities and new insights along the way.
2. We need to un-focus. Focusing is a rational act. The more rational we become, the less imaginative are the results
of our labor.
3. We need to become more irrational in order to open the subconscious mind and allow it to create and innovate.
Can you imagine the possibilities? What if you could realize the dreams of long ago that never came to fruition? What if you could live in that cottage by the ocean and hear the seagulls calling? What if you could spend a year living in the south of France and experience the charm of the Mediterranean coast and be influenced by the light and the atmosphere that inspired the impressionist painters? What if you could live with those who reinforce your life and inspire you to reach for new, far-reaching goals well beyond what you thought you could achieve? What if you could live with the expectation that a spectacular life is possible?
But when you do set goals, don’t set simple goals – goals that you know you can achieve. Those are not much more than a Saturday morning laundry list. Set goals that you have no idea how you can achieve. Stretch so far that you enter a world of spectacular possibilities. Set goals that create excitement in your life and allow you to anticipate their reality. In his book, The Art of Living, Bob Proctor says: “If you set a goal and you know how to achieve it, you’re not growing. You’re going sideways. When you set a goal, you should be setting a goal for something you have absolutely no idea how to do.” You may never reach such a goal, but you will have stretched your imagination so far that it will take you much further than you thought you could go. You will have achieved even higher levels of discovery along the way.
In The Law of Attraction, Esther and Jerry Hicks say, “Imagination is the mixing and massaging of thoughts into various combinations. It is similar to observing a situation. However, in imagination, you are creating the images rather than watching something in your current reality. Some use the word visualization, but we want to offer this subtle distinction: Visualization is often only a memory of something that you have once observed. By imagination, we mean deliberately bringing desired components together in your mind to create a desired scenario…When we use the term imagination, we are really talking about Deliberately Creating your own reality.”
Unleash your imagination. Re-imagine your future. Think of the spectacular possibilities. They are there waiting for you. You control your life. You are responsible for the decisions that guide your future, and you have free rein to make it happen. It begins with unleashing your imagination.
“There is hope in dreams, imagination and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.” -- Jonas Salk
Visualize Freely
“Seeing differently is like putting on an imaginary pair of special glasses and filtering the information through them. Your life is what it is. What is different is what glasses you choose to decide how you want to see the same things differently.” -- Ayse Birsel
What does your dream look like? Where does it take place and who is sharing it with you? How does it feel to be in that place with that person? Visualize it. Pretend you are there. Place it in your mind, and soon it will become part of your subconscious. That’s where it should be. From there it can influence you until your vision is realized. We need to have a vision to guide the decisions we make. The vision is the final destination towards which our road map of life is plotted.
Your vision does not start with analytics. It does not begin by studying the numbers. It starts in your mind and follows the fantasies that motivate you to taking action. It incorporates your wishes and dreams with an inspired imagination. This is the fun part of planning – the unrestricted, open-ended possibilities to plan without anything in your way. Life will give you all kinds of roadblocks along the way. Life will say no. It will say, “You can’t do that.” It is up to you to talk back, and say, “Yes, I can.”
The stronger your vision is, the more committed you will be to it, and the stronger the possibilities are for realizing that vision. Starting with a blank canvas or an empty piece of paper can be intimidating, especially when it holds the possibilities of a future project or an important plan. But if you have unleashed your imagination, unlocked your dreams and desires and are beginning to form a glimpse of your preferred future, the visualization process will have a head start. When your desires and dreams excite you and become your motivation, a picture of your new life model becomes more in focus. As Bob Proctor says in The Art of Living, "What ideas wind you up and make you want to move into action? If you’re not sure, get quiet and visualize. Visualization is where everything starts. When you think about it, everything begins with a picture."
Developing a vision can take place in all kinds of planning – life planning, project planning, even vacation planning, directing a play, or coaching a sports team. Seeing your vision first allows you to see the strategies you will use, the tactics you need to achieve that vision. Seeing your vision at the onset will provide the enthusiasm to help you move forward through whatever adversity stands in your way. When your vision originates from your dreams and wishes, you have more of a commitment to achieving it. You have created the plan and all of its details, and the planning experience makes the vision more desirable, perhaps almost an obsession. This knowledge and intimate understanding of your vision will enhance your commitment to making it become a reality.
Everyone’s life is a blank canvas. It is up to each of us to choose the colors and the image for a perfect picture. Each of us is the artist of our life and can paint the picture that is our vision. There are many ways of making this comparison, but Brian Tracy says it simply: “The person you see is the person you will be.”
“There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.” -- William James
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Unleash Your Imagination, published by River Grove Books, can be ordered through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.