Last week Haanel’s sit exercise had us visualizing starting at an end result and working backwards to its’ inception. I found this to be easy and then applied it to my goal and had a relatively easy time with it.

This week’s sit is reversing the process and starting at the beginning and visualizing to completion. He has us start with our favorite flower…. to take its seed and plant it. Care for it and see the roots growing, a new stem emerging, and eventually blossoming into a flower.

Again, I tried applying it to my goal. In this direction, I found it to be much more difficult to visualize. I would get stuck at the same point every time. Coincidentally (or maybe not), it is the point at which I get stuck in real life.

The more “sits” I would do in applying Haanel’s exercise to my goal, the more frustrated I became…. and realized that I am actually training my subconscious backwards to resist this point. It even caused me at times to question my decision of working a network marketing business. Doubt has reared its ugly head and in moments of clarity I see that this spot I get to and resist is really my big nut to crack to be able to move forward TO my goal.

I must keep my clarity and remain open to the process and possibly get feedback from someone who is already past that point to help me see what I am not yet seeing.

I will keep my promises to do the work and continue forward as I am driven to break through this!

Visualization, imagination, future self, goals, mindest, self talk, and all the buzz words of the self help industry have been a standard in my life for the past 16 years.

In 2000 I attended my first of many Anthony Robbins seminars which opened the proverbial rabbit hole of personal development for me. Then came neurolinguistic programming and the law of attraction with Esther Hicks. With each era many new learnings took me that much farther down the hole into understanding who I am and how I create my experiences.

This past week though, I had a very big ah-ha that through all my past learnings, I never realized.

If I do not see my future self as me…. I cannot imagine my accomplishment of a goal.

Let me give a bit of background around this thought.

In 7-10 of Master Keys, Haanel goes on telling the story of Nikola Tesla and his method of visualizing his inventions before attempting to work them out.

Having first built up the idea in his imagination, he holds it there as a mental picture, to be reconstructed and improved by his thought. ‘In this way’, he writes in the Electrical Experimenter. ‘I am enabled to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of, and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete, the product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived it should; in twenty years there has not been a single exception’

Understanding the huge influence Tesla has had on our understanding of the law of vibration and electricity, I took this paragraph as being very instrumental in being dedicated to visualization of MY inventions… my goals. And realizing just how PRECISE I need to be in all aspects of what I want to accomplish.

So I set off last week with a great week of visualization and getting even clearer on my desired goals.

In comes week 8 and the discussion of our future selves. Mark spoke to the awareness that we need to see our future self as our friend not as a faceless stranger…. after all are we more likely to go out of our way and help a good friend or stranger?

This is where my thoughts begin to take a sharp turn on overload.

In 8-11 of the Master Keys Haanel states that “imagination is the constructive form of thought which MUST precede every constructive form of action”.

Now, I REALLY want to achieve my goals I claimed at the beginning of this mastermind…. No…. I MUST achieve them. For I have lived way too many years of my life doing things for other people that did not interest me or excite me. I refuse to die without living the life I know I am meant to experience.

When I read 8-15, I knew this was a key learning:

Constructive imagination means mental labor, by some considered to be the hardest kind of labor, but, if so, it yields the greatest returns, for all the great things in life have come to men and women who had the capacity to think, to imagine, and to make their dreams come true.

In my usual visualization of my goals on Monday and Tuesday, I realized that I was having a very difficult time mentally seeing my future self in my visualizations. If at all, it was represented as a shadowy figure with no descriptive features that would even suggest that it might be me.

Then on Wednesday, right after I did the “sit” exercise of mentally visualizing an object and imagining the creation of it backwards in time…. going from a battleship to the raw metal in the foundries being forged into the ship, to the architect designing the ship, to the discovery of how large objects float in water…. etc, I did this with my goal.

I figured if I can do this with an object, why not with my goal and maybe receive some insight into what else I may need to think of or do to accomplish it.

So as I sat and visualized my goal… working on getting even that much more clear on details… I started at the endpoint… The actual accomplishment. Then I worked my way backwards to present day…. visualizing what I knew already that I would need to do along the way, and using my imagination to fill in the gaps…. I came to present day.

IT THEN HIT ME.

As I visualized my already accomplished goal… I saw myself as I was a year ago. Pre cancer, pre chemo. I was 20# lighter (yay) and had long beautiful brown hair (double yay).

BUT…. THAT IS NOT WHO I AM TODAY. That past person is basically a stranger to me. Someone I once knew but am very different from today.

It took me YEARS to grow my hair that long.

It took me months to put on weight.

It took weeks for me to lose my hair.

I don’t want to wait years subconsciously because my hair might need to grow long again before I accomplish my goal.

I don’t want to “try to lose weight” before allowing my goal to come into being.

I need to see my future self as me as I am. The me I know now.

Maybe this is what is referred to as time traveling…. I have had many cool conversations in my head about this awareness this week…. and somehow trying to explain the profound awareness of all of this has fallen flat and seems woo-woo and out there. Yet I KNOW this is very important for me. To be able to see ME in accomplishment of my goal and not some fuzzy dark nondescrip image achieving my goal.

I feel a lot like the video posted this week! I laughed so hard as I watched it for the 2nd and 3rd time! And wished I could be a fly on my own wall to watch myself go through all the readings and sit this week.

This week feels like the week of pulling it all together for me. Finally alot of the exercises are just making sense. Not sure what the magic moment was, but definitely understand now what Mark means by all this being cumulative.

Actually I’m also feeling quite peaceful and patient. And as the week goes on, it is much easier to stay in the flow of positivity. My family has joined me on the mental diet and we are seeing some amazing results from this combined effort.

Feeling like this is a short blog post as I still am assimilating all the cool feelings and new awarenesses of the week.

Peace out!

This past week has been an eye opening week for me. I think it is pretty safe to say that most everyone agrees that multitasking is not as productive as it seems to be.

All my adult life as long as I remember I have multitasked everything all the time. I figured it was my Aries nature. Always in a hurry with too much to do, what other option is there than to do 1-2-3 things at a time?

The topic came up at our tribe call before our weekly webinar last Sunday and I committed to go the week without multitasking and report back to my mentor as to how it went.

It didn’t. Yet I was very aware of when I was doing it and the results were less than preferred. I discovered that although I felt that I was accomplishing more while multitasking… It actually took me longer to complete tasks. I also realized that I was irritable and easily distracted during those times.

And when I made the effort to be singly focused on one task at a time…. I got it done quicker with less stress and irritability.

During the reading this week of Part 6 in the Master Key System by Haanel I resonated with these sections:

19. Attention or concentration is probably the most important essential in the development of mind culture. The possibilities of attention when properly directed are so startling that they would hardly appear credible to the uninitiated. The cultivation of attention is the distinguishing characteristic of every successful man or woman, and is the very highest personal accomplishment which can be acquired.

So then I realized that I spent my entire adult life multitasking everything… To the great dismay of not specializing or accomplishing anything great in any one area. I always had lots of projects, interests, even jobs. Always busy… But not really moving forward greatly in any one area of my life. At least not like how I wished.

21. So with the power of thought; let power be dissipated by scattering the thought from one object to another, and no result is apparent; but focus this power through attention or concentration on any single purpose for any length of time and nothing becomes impossible.

By dissipating my focus onto many things at one time I actually was sending the success cycle into reverse…. It is no wonder that I did not accomplish e great things I wanted to accomplish… I truly believed to be successful was to be busy busy busy with multiple things and projects at the same time!

Now I see the error of my belief! To be focused on one task… One project… One thing at a time actually gives the time spent on it more energy to move it forward.

I am now committing to be singly focused and present when I do a task. Whether it is housework, cleaning, work, or hobby… Even spending time with my family and husband… To be completely present and focused…. Not only will I have better results… My family and husband will appreciate my undivided attention I know!