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The Importance of Visualizing Your Goals

by Don Dulin

Visualizing your goals has become a hot trend recently. The idea behind visualizing your goals is that if you “see” your goal, you are more likely to achieve it. Some people find this technique silly, while others see it as bunk. I hope to show you that visualizing your goals can have a practical place in your life.

Do You Know Where You Are Going?

If you don’t know where you are going, or what you want out of life, how are you ever going to know what actions you need to take? You won’t. By knowing what you want out of life and then visualizing that along with the actions you need to get there will have a profound effect on you actually reaching your goals.

By Visualizing Your Goals, You Believe

Once you know where you are going and what you want out of life, you need to start believing you can attain it. By believing and visualizing this, you begin to slowly weed out self-doubt. This leads to ….

The More You Believe, The More Likely You Will Act

As you begin to believe more and more that you will reach your goals, you get motivated and begin to change your habits. Slowly but surely, you begin to do things you might otherwise not even attempt to do.
Athletes use visualization all the time to better their performance. Arguably the greatest golfer in the world, Jack Nicklaus once said,
“I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First I “see” where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I “see” the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there’s a sort of fade out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.”
There is also a scientific study that was conducted on a few athletes that were looking to improve their free throws in basketball. They were divided into three groups:

• Group 1: They physically took practice free throw shots during the day
• Group 2: They only visualized making shots every day
• Group 3: They physically took practice free throw shots during the day and before going to bed, visualized making perfect shots.

The results of the study were amazing:

• Group 1 (only took shots): Improved free throw shooting by 7%
• Group 2(only visualized making shots): Improved free throw shooting by 10%
• Group 3 (took shots and visualized making shots): Improved free throw shooting by 32%

Keys to Visualizing Your Goals

There are some key aspects that you have to be aware of when visualizing your goals as a technique to help you reach your goals:
Focus on your senses: When I visualize the goal of my dream house, I am standing in my front yard with my dog. I can feel the warm sun on my back. I can hear my dog panting. I can smell the fresh cut grass. All of these things help my visualized goal to become more real. When you first begin to visualize, you may not be able to experience all of your senses. This is OK. It is a lot like trying to clear your mind meditating or trying to touch your toes when stretching. As first, you most likely cannot do either, but with time and practice, you are able to clear your mind and touch your toes.
Focus on details: This takes focusing on your senses to the next level. When I say focus on the details, I want you to get very specific. For instance, I can see the individual blades of grass and I can see the fibers of the tennis ball. Work your way up to being able to see very specific details. In time, this will become easier for you.
Overall, using visualization techniques go a long way in helping you to achieve your goals and dreams. There have been countless times in my life where I visualize something and it comes to pass. It might not happen tomorrow or the next day, but it does happen. Does this prove that visualization works and you will attain all of your goals through visualization? Most likely not, but you never really know. So then why chance it by not visualizing?
Image courtesy of Evgeni Dinev / FreeDigitalPhotos.nethttp://www.breathofoptimism.com/the-importance-of-visualizing-your-goals/