How To Create Your Dream World & Achieve Your Goals | Vishen Lakhiani

So there's this great quote by the American entrepreneur Mike Dillard. And Mike says, the greatest achievement in life is to have the ability to create the world around you so that it matches the dreams in your head. I strongly agree with that statement. I think one of the greatest things we can teach people in our education system is how to translate the ideas, the dreams, the ambitions in their head into the real world. Think about what this means if you could take those thoughts in your head. Dreams for healing, dreams for creating works of art or companies, or contributing to the world and more rapidly get them out into the physical world. See, the thing is, our education system teaches us to function purely as a physical being, to create things. You create them physically. But what if they are tools? Powerful tools that exist purely in terms of using our minds, our intellect, our abilities, such as dreaming and visualizing within us minds to accelerate the creation of the world that we want. These tools exist. It's called creative visualization. And if you can learn this art, it is one of the most incredible things you can gift yourself in the world. Here's why I believe in creative visualization. I've always believed that there's a slow way and a fast way to create change in the world. I've always been able to do it in a fast way. For example, if you look at Mindvalley today, we have one of the most gorgeous offices of any company. It was voted Inc. Magazine Top 10 Coolest Workplaces. But just a few years ago, this is what our office looked like a few years ago. This is what our diner looked like. This is what it looks like today. This is what our team looked like just 10 years ago. This is our team today. Once a year, we take our entire company to a little team retreat on an island. This is what that looked like a few years ago. Today we rent private islands. Just a few years ago, when a new person joined Mindvalley, we inducted them into our business in our hall of Awesomeness, which was this tiny living room. But this is the hall of Awesomeness today. So if you look at those pictures, you see dramatic changes, dramatic shifts, beautiful things being created. All of that came unnaturally fast to me. And when people ask me how I did wasn't because of a specific set of knowledge or ideas or money. It was because every single day for the last 20 years, every single day in the morning, I start my day by visualizing my life three years ahead. This is the essence of creative visualization. Creative visualization is based on the idea that the thoughts that you have in Your head influence physical reality in deep, meaningful way ways. It creates situations where you can accelerate healing. For example, the doctor or Carl Simonton used it to help cancer patients go through spontaneous remission or healing. He called it imagery therapy. Bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger say that this is the secret for how they were able to create muscle growth. There are studies of athletes and Olympians that show that creative visualization dramatically helps accelerate their sports performance. Now, it's easy to measure and study this when it has to do with the human body. It may be a little bit of a jump to then say that our thoughts could influence the wider world. Can we in effect create coincidences, synchronicities, opportunities? Maybe, maybe not. The fact is, we don't know how it works. Some theories say it has to do with the brain's reticular activating system. When you have a dominant thought in your brain, your brain throughout the day is more likely to look for opportunities that fit that dominant thought. For example, in a classic explanation of the reticular activating system, you might read the example of how if you were to buy a white Volkswagen, all of a sudden as you're driving, you will start to notice more white Volkswagens on the road, because it's in your brain. Likewise, the thoughts you have in your brain about your future create an opportunity where you're more likely to look and seek and identify, or opportunities to help that future come to you. So that's the scientific explanation. But there's also metaphysical spiritual explanations emerging. For example, biocentrism by Dr. Robert Lanza. Dr. Robert Lanza made the Time magazine Top 100 Most Influential People in the World list for 2014. In his theory of biocentrism, he suggests that consciousness conceives, governs and becomes a physical world. Do we know it's true? No, it is just a theory. But the thing is, just because we don't understand how something works, doesn't mean we cannot use it. Think, for example, about the sun. Today we know that the sun is a star. It's a giant thermonucleic reaction in the sky. We know how it works from atoms and molecules and fusion type of perspective. But if you go back 40,000 years ago, human beings had no idea what the sun was. The ancient Egyptians thought it was the fire God Ra in the sky. Other cultures believed it was a glowing orb of fire. Nobody knew what the sun was. But at the same time, we could still use the sun. Our ancient forefathers could use the sun for farming, for navigation, for Warmth for light. They didn't have to know how the sun worked to be able to use it. Perhaps someday we will understand human consciousness in a deeper detail, that we can scientifically explain how our consciousness might be creating our reality. But until we figure it out, it doesn't stop us from being able to actively use it. This is where creative visualization comes into play. In fact, the evidence for creative visualization is becoming so much deeper every year that the author of the book Happiness Advantage, Shawn Acher, says we are all, in effect, reality architects. I love that word reality architect, because think about what it means. It says that you can choose to live a life where life happens to you, or you can live a life where life comes from you. What this means is that whether you like it or not, you create your life. Your dominant thoughts shape your life. The problem is your dominant thoughts are always shaping your life. And to most people in the world, their dominant thoughts are often thoughts of anxiety, fear, worry. It's the human brain's tendency to obsess over danger over fears. And so to most people in the world, their brains, their thoughts are focused on what could be taking things away from them, what could be harming them, Loss of love, lack of help. But if you understand that your thoughts are shaping your reality and you learn the tools to shift it, you can now choose dominant thoughts that propel you forward. Fears and worries create negative situations that attract more fears and worries, which create negative situations which attract even more fears and worries. This becomes a negative spiral pulling you downwards. But when you learn the tools of creative visualization, you create beautiful visions to pull you forward. These beautiful visions attract the types of events and moments in your life that make you even more optimistic. Because it's self affirming, this helps you expand your vision and thus pull you forward even more. As the philosopher Esther Hicks says, for an observer, the better it gets, the better it gets or the worse it gets, the worse it gets. However, one who is a visionary thrives all the time. So get with the program, be a visionary. And this is where creative visualization comes in. What does it look like? Well, in the book Psycho Cybernetics, Dr. Maxwell Maltz describes it this way. Simply define your goal or end result. Picture it to yourself clearly and vividly. Then simply capture the feelings you would experience if the desirable goal were already an accomplished path. Then you are acting spontaneously and creatively. Then you are using the power of your subconscious mind. Then your internal machinery is geared for success, to guide you in making the correct muscular motions and adjustments to Supply you with creative ideas and to do whatever else is necessary in order to make the goal and accomplish that. So it's time to get off the train of mediocrity. How long does it take? Well, in the book Creative visualization by Shakti garbage, Gawain Gawain says the technique is so powerful that as little as five minutes of practice starts to create ripples of change in your life. I believe that because I practice this for no more than three minutes every single day for the last 20 years, and the latest science is showing that it actually does create changes in your brain. They call this neuroplasticity. So the thing is, anyone can practice creative visualization, but there's an ordinary hack way, and then there's a spectacularly advanced way in which you can do it. You could decide you want to write a book. You get on your computer, you, punch a couple of keys, and boom, you've translated words onto a page. But is that a book? No. To actually write a book, to get a best seller, There are methodologies, There are frameworks, There are writing techniques, There are content framework techniques that you can bring in to create a best seller. When it comes to creative visualization, this task, this skill, is so important. You don't want to be a dabbler, you want to be a master. So you want to invest time to learn the right techniques, the right ways to really make this work for you. There are deep questions to be answered in terms of what are the best approaches to creative visualization? Questions such as what levels of brain frequency are optimal for this? How do you bring in your other senses? How do you set the right goals? How do you identify goals that fit in with your level of human awareness? How do you even know what is your level of human awareness? How do you use creative visualization as a group, as an individual, as a couple, as a family? What's the difference between aspiration and healing and goal setting and dreaming and problem solving? These are all different things and different tactics and tools of creative visualization applied differently in these frameworks. How long do you do it? When do you stop? How do you know you're being successful? What do you look for? What thoughts do you carry in your head when you come out of your creative visualization session? I love this technique. And so for 20 years, I've been studying fine tuning, reading hundreds of books on these ideas, from philosophers to biohackers to extraordinary entrepreneurs and how they used it in their lives. And that's why I really excited about this upcoming class on the mindvalley Academy where me and Lisa Nichols are going to be teaching you some of the most powerful tools to bring creative visualization into your work. Dr. John Elliot of Harvard University in his book Overachievement wrote this I insist you throw caution at the wind. Ignore the pleas of parents, coaches, spouses and bosses to be realistic. Realistic people do not accomplish extraordinary things because the odds of success stimmy them. The best performers ignore the odds. I will show you that instead of limiting themselves to what's possible, the best will pursue the heart pounding, exciting, really big difference making dreams so long as catching them might be possible. Creative visualization gives you that heart pounding attitude towards life. Pains, trauma, things holding you back no longer jar you as much and realism is tossed behind you as you move towards creating that epic life that you've always dreamed about as a child. So join us for this next class on the Mindvalley Academy.