I remember watching old movies as a young child and seeing the proverbial fortune teller, clad in Gypsy clothing and offering passersby a chance to know their future for a nominal fee. She would usually take the customer into her home and sit them at a table where there sat a large crystal ball. Chanting and waving her hands, she could suddenly see the future as if watching a video inside the glass orb. Of course, in the movies, these characters were often portrayed as a source of trickery to scam their clients into paying money.
While I think many people would be interested in knowing their future, what I really want to talk about here is how we plan our future. Specifically, I would like to examine not how to plan, but how we experience the planning process. Planning addresses the logistics of our journey as we move from our present location towards our destiny. Some logistical issues we may deal with are the timelines we are facing, the distance we have to travel, obstacles that we will likely face, resources we have available to us as well as what we are trying to achieve. Planning is an indispensible guide that can keep us on course, while traveling without a plan tends to leave our arrival at our destiny up to chance. Planning is both extremely important and necessary.
Before we talk more about planning, I would like to spend a moment talking about two different types of reality that I define as Physical Reality and Constructed Reality. I define Physical Reality as that which is real, actual and able to be experienced. Physical Reality operates on a timeline, takes place in the present moment, and follows all of the natural laws of the universe. I define Constructed Reality as the idea or concept we mentally create of how we want Physical Reality to occur in the future. Constructed Reality does not operate on a timeline and is not bound by the natural laws of the universe. Constructed Reality is only limited by one’s imagination. It is the way we envision our life to happen.
An example of Constructed Reality is allotting ourselves 30 minutes to drive home after work. That is the constructed idea of how long it will take to arrive home. It is the goal. Physical Reality is what happens when we find ourselves stuck in a traffic jam that causes us to arrive home after we had anticipated. So, you see, the ideas of Physical Reality and Constructed Reality are relatively simple. We construct what we think will happen (the plan) and then physically experience what actually happens which in the above example could have been arriving home early, on time, late or not arriving at all. How we plan to achieve our goals is directly related to this process. We plan out what we want to achieve and then we go out and do our best to make it happen.
Constructed Reality (planning), we mentioned, is an invaluable part of the process of getting from our present location to the goals we have envisioned for ourselves. So, I want to mention again here that constructing reality is a good and necessary thing. Let’s examine our planning process, our method of constructing reality. Specifically, I would like to talk about two components of Constructed Reality, Planning and Visualization.
The first component of Constructed Reality is called Planning. Planning is how we envision moving from where we are now to our end goal. Some of the ideas we need to construct are timelines, likely obstacles, available resources and the results we are looking to achieve. I recommend making a more complete list that pertains directly to your goals and keep it handy as a resource. Examples of a constructed timeline would be to open a business within six months or to sell a certain amount of product within a certain amount time. Examples of a constructed obstacle might be dealing with a saturated market or even planning for an expected dip in the market due to an upcoming event. Examples of a constructed resource may be looking at the financial resources you plan on having available through several investors, or it could be having access to a market through an associate you have recently met. Examples of constructed results might be reaching one million dollars in sales per year or being able to take a month long vacation to Hawaii. The reason I call these plans Constructed Reality is because they are what we envision and desire to occur in our Physical Realities.
The second component of Constructed Reality is called Visualization. Visualization is a technique used for decades by some of the top athletes in the world. This is a technique whereby a person “sees” themselves successfully accomplish a certain task or goal inside of their minds. Some athletes are very precise during visualization exercises and athletes such as high divers may visualize in real time how they will climb to the top of the platform, how many breaths they will take, adopting a perfect starting position, the actual technique they will dive as it unfolds, all the way down to how they recover under water. This allows them to have a visual (mentally constructed) practice most anytime or place they desire.
Visualization works by acting on a unique trait of the subconscious or inner mind. There is a part of your mind that cannot distinguish between Physical Reality and Constructed Reality. Let me say that again because it is a very important concept to highlight. Our inner mind can “experience” constructed reality as if it was physical reality. Let’s say you go out into your garage and when you pick up a trash bag there is big snake curled up underneath it. What kind of reaction are you going to have? Now let’s say a year goes by and as a joke someone places a big rubber snake underneath your trash bag. When you go and pick up the trash and see the rubber snake, what kind of reaction do you think you are going to have? Your mind will physically experience a real snake because you will present your mind with a constructed idea of a real snake. As a result, the mind will perceive your constructed idea the exact same as if it was real. Similarly, when we replay images or events inside our mind, our mind starts to grasp the constructed reality and believe that it is physical reality. And, our conscious mind becomes more susceptible to believe that we can physically perform the way we imagine ourselves to perform during the visualization exercises.
As a result of visualization training, we can prime our minds to allow us to break through to higher levels of physical performance on both a conscious and subconscious level. Consciously, we feel more confident to be intimate with the tasks we have to perform and subconsciously your mind will ease off the brakes that usually hold us back, mainly a lack of certainty that we can perform the task perfectly. Visualization works and helps people break through to new levels of performance.
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