by: Iain Legg
Visualization can be a powerful tool to help you improve your current circumstances, but it can also help you to be more purposeful about moving toward a brighter future. This can be especially effective if you often feel nervous, anxious or doubtful about your ability to improve your life.
To begin, find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed and take a few minutes to quiet your mind and relax your body. If you like, you can put on some soothing music or simply enjoy the silence.
Take a few slow, deep breaths and imagine that you are releasing all tension, stress and worry from your body. As you inhale, envision soft golden light flowing into your lungs and spreading throughout your body, warming and relaxing you. As you exhale, imagine that you’re purging feelings of fear, anxiety and disharmony from your body. Stay with this deep breathing technique for as long as it takes to feel fully relaxed and calm.
Then, call to mind an image of the type of future you’d like to have. Include as much detail as you can, and focus on all of the important aspects of your life such as your career, financial situation, family situation, and so on.
Imagine yourself living in this future time, waking up first thing in the morning and going through your daily experiences. Focus especially on how you look and feel in this better future. Do you appear happy, productive, inspired, purposeful, confident? Are you living the life you truly want to lead? How does it feel?
Take your time with this exercise, going through each experience and enjoying it as much as you can. By the time you finish, you should be feeling very inspired and positive about your life!
Not only does this exercise make you feel more hopeful and positive about your future, it can also inspire you to take the actions that will eventually usher in those future circumstances!
Even when you return to your normal activities, be sure to keep calling those positive mental images to mind as often as you can, and focus on being the person who was living in that better future. Rather than feeling pessimistic about your current circumstances, affirm that you are creating something better with your visualization exercises.
Since visualization works better if you’re consistent with it, try to make this a daily practice if you can. Even just 10 minutes a day of focusing on these positive images and experiencing the corresponding feelings they invoke can help you bring forth great changes in your life
