How to Effectively Use Visualization to Achieve Your Goals

Let's talk about visualization and manifesting your goals. So first let me give you some context. I started my business with nothing. Nobody knew who I was in my industry. None of my friends bought from me. This was back in 2009 and I went into a very, very competitive industry with highly skilled marketers because I went into the marketing industry. So as you can imagine, people in my industry are particularly good at getting attention and it's hard to compete with them at that level. So I have gratefully built up a very successful business. I have four self published books with lots of reviews. My podcast has lots of reviews. I have a waiting list. I've had a waiting list of clients for five years now. My courses sell really well. So what I'm teaching you is I hope you'll believe that when I say that it does work. And what's even more important is that I've built all of that, at least in the last five, six years, with a spirit of joyful productivity rather than hustling and pushing and stressing myself out and stressing other people out. So I think my story is quite unique in that I've been able to achieve what some might call a more authentic state success or a more grounded achievement, a more kind of calm, joyful achievement. And I credit the process of visualization for getting here. Except it's not visualization like most people teach it. That's why I wanted to share it with you and hopefully this will help you as well. All right, so visualization really became popular. It's been popular for decades and you might even say for thousands of years. Right? Because it's not, it's nothing new. Visualization usually is thought of as imagining what you want, feel the feelings of having what you want. You know, this is popularized by Esther Hicks. Abraham. Abraham Hicks, by the Law of Attraction, which was popularized by the Secret, the Movie and the book, etc. And millions of people have tried using visualization. They imagine themselves having millions of dollars and feeling the feelings of abundance and wealth and all that good stuff. And yet millions of people have failed in achieving those goals, even though they may have listened to hypnotic tapes at night and use visualization for years, some of them very persistently. And maybe this is part of your story as well. Maybe you've tried visualization and it didn't work for you. Like it, it was sold to you. So I think that visualization as it's typically taught is detrimental, is damaging to our journey of success. Let me explain. The way that it's taught is that you, like I said, you spend all this energy imagining the ideal scene, the ideal life that you want. But you know, the law of attraction, the secret adds in. Oh, but you must feel like you have it already. And that's not new. Of course it came from, you know, Jesus popularized it back in the New Testament, right, 2,000 years ago. So it's nothing new. You know, imagine what you want, feel that you already have it, and then somehow it's supposed to come to you. How did it go for you? Okay, so the problem is and, and some of you might say, well George, that's not really what the teaching is because if you go deeper, they talk about action, blah, blah, blah. That may be true, but way that it's been popularized, the way that most people think visualization is, is what's detrimental. You visualize, you feel it, but nothing happens. Nothing happens today, nothing happens tomorrow. Nothing might even happen a year or five or ten years from now. That thing that you visualize still hasn't happened that you felt that you've created such strong emotions to. But you see what happens by doing that. Repeated imagination and feeling, you potentially have done two things. You've attached yourself to that very specific outcome thinking you know by you've created your definition of success as that must happen for me to be successful. So number one, you've created tremendous amount of attachment, emotional and mental attachment, which usually not a great thing if it isn't grounded in reality of the actions. So number one, attachment, number two is that you may have created entitlement to say, well I deserve that. Because that is actually one of the benefits of outcome visualization is to help you believe that you deserve it, that you can achieve it. I don't like the word deserve because I don't believe we deserve anything. I don't believe that we deserve anything. I believe, just to give you my philosophy here, I believe that there is a Creator. I believe that I am created and I don't deserve anything. I didn't have to be creator, didn't have to create me. I could have been nothing. And so even one sensation in my life, even if I had one single sensation, one single feeling in my life, one single sensation of touch, one single thought, one single feeling, even if it was a painful feeling, that would have been more than I deserved because I would have not been in existence if the Creator hadn't created me. Now, if you're an atheist, you could say your parents didn't have to make you right, Your parents didn't have to raise you. You deserve Nothing. None of us deserve anything. So why are we visualizing our way to a sense of powerful entitlement to say I deserve that, and if I don't have that, then somehow the world is either conspiring against me or there may be self blame to say that even though I deserved it, I somehow am bad person and I somehow didn't get it. Even though I deserve, you know, it's. I don't know, there's a weird attachment and entitlements that happen with people who oftentimes people who use visualization. And so I don't deserve anything. I don't. But what I have the opportunity now that I've been created, either by God, higher self or your parent, you know, our parents, right? Now that we've been created, we have the opportunity to make the best of our situation. That's all we have. We don't deserve anything. We have the opportunity to make the best of the current situation, whatever that may be. And we have the opportunity to make our parents proud, to make our society proud, to make God or the higher self proud. Okay? So I think we deserve to continually, day by day, improve our process. That's what we deserve. We deserve effort. That's all we deserve is effort. And hopefully an improved effort. And by practicing an improved effort, you will create better feelings in yourself and more joyful success. So instead of focusing so much on oh, I have a million dollars, oh, I have the perfect relationship, oh, I have this, I have that, I have a best selling book, I have a full roster of clients, I feel it, blah blah, blah. Instead of all that, which I said is dangerous, let's instead use our powerful mind and heart to visualize the process. Because that's all we deserve. That's all we deserve, you might say, well, but George, I thought we were children of God. You're a child of God, you deserve the highest you deserve. Okay, you could say that if you want to. And I would say, as a child of God, I deserve, you know, God's love, unconditional love, which even if I didn't deserve it or not, God pours it out in abundance. And so that's what we deserve is God's love. And God's love doesn't mean you get a million doll or have a perfect relationship or have a great business, doesn't mean any of that. Right. It's a bigger sense of what love is. So what we can use visualization for is the process of improving every single day. So let me give you a very concrete example. So at this point, I have self published four books and each book has many gratefully. I'm very grateful that each book has at least a dozen or two dozen, you know, five star reviews. So wonderful. Some of you are hoping to have a book one day and have five star reviews and things like that. So let's use that as an example. So a lot of people would say, oh, I visualize having a wonderful book, five star reviews, blah blah, blah. And that's great. But if we visual, if we instead use visualization on the process, then we will say, let's let me visualize what is it like for me to write today? Where am I writing? What time? What time of day is it? What's the lighting in the room? I'm visualizing, you know, actually that's an external circumstance. I'm even going to take that out. Do not visualize anything externally. Only visualize what you're, what you see yourself doing, what you see what. Because what can you control in life? You can't even control the lighting in your room because of the daylight. You know, my shine in a different way, right? Electricity might go out. So you can't even control that. What can you control is how you are behaving. So why not visualize that? Visualize yourself writing, typing with joy. Visualize yourself having breath and calmness as you face the uncertainty of a blank page. Visualize yourself free writing without any resistance. Visualize yourself not judging yourself, but appreciating yourself. Visualize the person in your mind that accepts your writing. You know, like these are the kinds of things we visualize. We visualize the process seeing ourselves doing it, doing something with joy. So another example, let's say that you want a full roster of clients. Oh, I visualize myself with a full roster of clients. I have so many loving and accepting and wonderful clients that work. That's fine. But like I said, you might get yourself into entitlement or discouragement that it didn't happen. So instead, visualize yourself the process of getting clients. So you need to learn how to get clients. So be sure to learn that. But as an example, how do we get clients? We contact people. That's one of the key ways of getting clients. Or another way of getting clients. We post videos like I'm doing here. We write articles, right? We use Facebook ads to get our videos and articles out there. That's how we get clients, right? So you can visualize yourself using Facebook ads in a calm and joyful way. Visualize yourself patiently, with curiosity, figuring out how to click here or Click there. With patience with technology, you can visualize yourself with patience using the technology rather than the typical way of using it. Being in frustration that you couldn't figure out what to click in five minutes. Right? Visualize yourself being in curiosity, oh, I wonder what happens if I click that? Oh, that didn't accept. Not as expected. Well, let me try clicking this instead. With that kind of curiosity, visualize yourself getting help with the technology. Visualize yourself reaching out to people saying, hey, I've got extra space in my client roster. I know that you have inquired in the past, or I know that you may have friends who are really dealing with this issue. Whatever. Whatever it is you do to get clients, which you need to read up on or I have lots of articles on how to get clients. Go to my website. Click on blog on the right side. Click on client enrollment or whatever. I think authentic enrollment. I have lots of articles help you get clients. So read the articles, visualize yourself doing those things. Okay? And here's the final key I'll leave you with. Visualization is usually done by most people in the. You know, if you read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, you know he writes about visualizing three times a day, right? More, I think, maybe even more than three times a day. Morning, noon, and night, you're supposed to visualize your success, right? And actually, maybe Napoleon Hill is where a lot of the modern visualization comes from. But I recommend that you don't just visualize morning, noon, and night. That's not. I don't even do morning, noon, and night, to be honest. What I do is I visualize before I do the action. So let me explain. I first schedule for myself to do the actions that lead to my success. I schedule it. Okay? And when you're scheduling it, that's actually a good time to visualize, too. When you schedule it in, just take a minute to see. Oh, I see myself typing that email out with joy, with calmness, with a feeling of confidence. I see myself reaching out to people with a genuine sense of service or whatever it is, okay? So even when you schedule the task for you to do it, you visualize yourself doing so. You reduce your resistance to following your schedule. So many of you are so resistant to following your schedule because you have an emotional resistance towards that task. Because you have only visualized the success, you don't visualize yourself doing it with joy, right? So you got to remove all the emotional resistance to doing the hard work. And the hard work doesn't have to be hard. It can be joyful it just what's really hard is for you to remember to visualize. That's really what's hard. But as long as you remember to visualize and you visualize it, then you actually start doing the things with more joy. And the hard part is really the day to day coming back, visualizing, doing. And here's the other key. So when you schedule it, visualize it. And then when it comes time on your schedule to do the task, you visualize it again before you start doing it. And as you do the task, notice if any part of the task is not enjoyable, it's not aligned with how you want to work. So for example, if you are writing an email and you notice yourself with tense shoulders and with shallow breath and being scared, the person will say no. Then you're like, oh, I have, I'm. What are you practicing? You're practicing tenseness and fear. You notice yourself practicing that. You go, oh, wait, let me stop. And instead let me come back to my visualization, visualize myself writing an email with confidence, with joy, with humility, with sense of service. And then go ahead and do it right then and there, practicing that new feeling of doing it, that new process. You see what I mean? So try this kind of visualization instead. And I never like to promise anything, but I will say I promise you, if you practice this kind of visualization, you will probably actually do things with greater confidence and joy. And if you do the right things with greater confidence and joy, it's not a shock that you will reach success. So I hope this is helpful. And this is probably unusual teaching with visualization. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe others have been teaching this as well. So I look forward to your comments about this and may you try this. And I really do look forward to your reports of success or any questions you have about it. So those of you don't know me, I'm George Kao, authentic business coach. I love to help people build business success with calm, joyful, spirituality integrated. So I hope this helps and I will see you in the next video or episode. Take care.