The Journey to Realise Your Future

By Sonya Yeh Spencer & Mark Spencer, NLP Trainers, Change Agents & Facilitators

The impetus

“Have you set your New Year’s resolution?”  I was asked by a person I only just met at a friend’s place:  “Did you know that nine out of ten New Year’s resolutions fail within the first three months?”  Biting my tongue, my natural response did not burst out with “according to whom” or challenging his presuppositions that I should have set New Year resolutions in the first place, or New Year is the time to set any kind of goal or resolution, or that those that are set fail, and a definition of ‘fail’.  He continued “Look, if you are wondering how you can achieve your goals this year and not become one of the statistics or part of the group of failures, I can help you.  I am a coach.”

“What is the most important element to achieve a goal?” I asked.  His reply was very smooth “You need to be able to visualise, see yourself achieving the goal.”  “And how would you do that?” I probed.  “Look I am a trained NLP coach, have you heard about NLP?  NLP is the technology for success …..if you want to come see me for a session, here is my card”, as he continued with his spiel rapidly without taking a breath my friend finally came and introduced us.  After he learned that we deliver NLP training and self-improvement coaching for a living, I was shock by his next question, “So, does visualisation really work?  How do you visualise correctly?” My reaction can only be described as Red, hot, fast tempo and very loud (shift your sub-modalities, can you feel what I was feeling), a bit fired up by now.  I thought to myself, “so, how many people has he lured into his web only to end up as one of the ‘statistics‘ or ‘failures‘? ”  With impeccable state management and a smile on my face, “Yes, visualisation does work and is important if one wants to realise their compelling future”, as I step away and start formulating this article and maybe a series of articles to help you, the reader – achieving your outcomes.

 

Make your Desired Outcome Real

In our own study of successful people, experiments on realising our own desired outcomes and helping others to achieve what they want, we have found the ability to visualise what one truly desires is one of the key ingredients.   Your ability to visualise does much more than enabling your unconscious to activate the “Automatic Success Mechanism”, or as we call it the “Automatic Success Engine (ASE)”, that drives us and create the necessary filters that focus us on what we want to achieve.  The ASE is also the feedback mechanism that provides important information to guide us, so it is also an “Automatic Success Guidance System (ASGS)”.  There are many more elements that are involved in achieving goals and making your desire a reality.  It really pays to understand, work with and experiment a little to understand how your ASE and ASGS works.  You will be reaping the rewards at the end of the day.

In 2012, we will deliver a series of articles that will focus on how to help you achieve your goals and we invite you to participate in the experiments and exercises that we have set out in each articles to participate fully.

We will help you establishing your own ASE and use your ASGS.  Along the way, these articles will enhance your beliefs that will help you achieve your goals and how to identify the beliefs that does not assist you and need to be changed.  The relationship between self image, self worth and getting the life you want will also be clear to you.  We will start this series with “How to Make Visualisation Work”.

Create Compelling Future – Make Visualisation Work

How do you know you have generated a compelling future?  What is a compelling future?  A compelling future, according to Leslie Cameron-Bandler, is “one which is capable of motivating and guiding you so that eventually you can make that desired future a present reality”.  I agree with this completely and from our own experiences, this compelling future has to be so “real” that you know that achieving it is a reality.  When you have this sense of “it is a reality” and you fully expected it to happen without a doubt, you are very focused, steady, calm and have a very clear mental image about what achieving that outcome is like.

How clear shall this mental image or your visualised outcome be?  Let us do a little experiment here, for the purpose of noticing the quality of the visualisation.  Imagine for a moment walking to the bathroom, reaching for the shower tap and turning it all the way to the position that indicates very hot water and taking off your garments one at a time.

How clearly can you visualise?  Can you visualise with even more details then what has been described above?  If you just read the above instructions, re-read it by going through the imagine exercise and then continue.  Are you looking at a picture of you turning the tap and removing your clothes or are you in the picture?  Can you feel your hand touching the tap, turning or pressing the tap, feeling any sensations on your body when taking off your clothes, how about the sensation of standing on the bathroom floor, walking towards the shower, stepping in and about to turn the tap on?

If you can visualise vividly with as much details as you can and you are in the picture, experiencing this imagined experience, then you are making it clear enough to activate your Automatic Fulfillment Mechanism (AFM).

Is it Compelling?

Now let us continue this experiment, imagine yourself stepping into the shower, standing under the shower head, your hand on the shower tap that is pointing at a very hot water position.  Do you turn the shower on immediately or do you hesitate?  Would you turn the tap on if you imagine rotating the tap to a position that indicates “your perfect temperature”?  What are you compelled to do?  In fact, what are the conditions that will compel you to achieve your outcome is the real question!

Your willingness to turn on the tap or hesitate to do so is the feedback from your unconscious about certain aspects of criteria of the outcome has been met or not been met.  This feedback is telling you that you might need to do more investigation and find out more about the outcome that you want to achieve through learning, experimenting or other means.  These criteria might also be the consequences that by achieving the outcome might bring, good or bad.  By following this feedback you get from your unconscious you can start to refine your outcome and be more specific about it.  This is using your Automatic Success Guiding System (ASGS) to really guide your every step, and making your desire a reality.

Your ASGS will also help you identify any resistance and emotional blockages.  In our next installment we will be helping you identify these resistance or emotional blockages.

Experiment With This Process Yourself

So, do you have your New Year’s resolution?  Do you have a goal or a desired outcome?  How about experiment with making it compelling, by creating a compelling visualised image of you having achieved the outcome?  Notice what happens next and can you make changes to this mental image to make it even more compelling? 

If you are NLP trained, experiment with changing your sub-modalities as well.

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