Focus On What You Really Want

You often hear people say things like “I’m trying to lose weight” or “I want to stop smoking”. The problem with these statements is that they practically doom you to failure from the start.

1. Your brain does not recognise negatives

When you say “I want to stop smoking”, the only mental image that your brain has to latch on to is “smoking”. The other words have no visual images associated with them. Therefore the more often you make this statement, the more times your brain sees the image of you smoking. You are literally programming your brain to make you smoke more!

I used to have a weakness for cheesecakes. Every time I stepped into a cafe or restaurant for a meal, I would tell myself “No cheesecake today!” Since the only word that had a meaning to my brain was “cheesecake”, my eyes would involuntarily wander over to the dessert counter to see what cheesecakes were available. The sight of delicious cheesecake was, of course, irresistible.

2. Shift your focus

What finally stopped me craving cheesecake was telling myself that tiramisu tasted as good and was slightly healthier. When I stopped focusing on cheesecake and started thinking about tiramisu, my cravings for cheesecake subsided. Of course, I then started eating a lot of tiramisu!

Once you realise that shifting focus works, the next step becomes simple. From tiramisu, I changed focus to salads. Every time I started thinking about what to eat for lunch, images of fresh green salads popped into my mind, and I could almost taste the crunchy leaves and bacon bits in my mouth. It was a breeze to stop eating cakes and start eating salads.

3. Form mental images of what you want

Visualisation is the master key to getting what you want. If you want a lean and toned body, start seeing yourself with that body. Cut out images of your ideal body from magazines and paste them on the fridge door where you’ll see them every time you’re tempted to open the fridge for a bar of chocolate. If you want a car, find a picture of your dream car. If you want to write a book, design your book cover with your name as the author and print this out.

Your mind thinks in pictures. The more often it sees the pictures you have prepared, the more it will think that this is your reality. Your subconscious mind is extremely powerful, like a large ship that is steered by the tiny rudder which is your conscious mind. Once your conscious mind gives the subconscious mind a direction to move towards, the whole ship will turn slowly but surely.

4. Visualise everyday

It’s not enough to do a visualisation exercise once. You need to do this at least once a day to convince your mind that the reality you want is as real as the ‘real’ world your mind sees everyday. When you think about something so often that it becomes real to you, then the likelihood of it materialising in your reality is almost assured.

When I wanted to have a lean and trim body, I started to see myself as I was when I was a fit eighteen year-old. In my mind, I could feel my clothes starting to get loose. It was only a few weeks later that the reality caught up. The same was true of my finances. When I started to visualise the figures I wanted to see in my financial spreadsheet, the real figures started to appear within a few years.

5. Be absolutely certain

You must see the reality you want as if it was 100% true. There is no room for doubt or uncertainty because you will confuse your brain. When you look down the road to your life one year from now or five years from now, the picture you see must be what you want. Admit no possibility that you will not arrive there.

The lifestyle I have today is certainly the result of imagining my ideal day over five years ago when I was spending too many hours at work with not enough time for my family or myself. There was no doubt in my mind that I would someday have control over my time.

6. Let time do its work

Sometimes the results of focusing on what you want come about relatively quickly, in a few days or weeks. Sometimes it will take years, especially if the difference between what you want and what you currently have is significant, or if you don’t visualise regularly enough, or if your mental images aren’t clear enough, or if you introduce doubt into your thinking.

Be patient. Even if you turn the rudder of your subconscious today in the right direction, a big ship takes time to turn. And once it’s headed where you want it to go, the journey itself takes time. But arrive you will. Bon voyage!



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Posted by Daphne | September 12, 2008 | in Work Hard


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