The Power of Visualization for Success

What if I told you that I have a blueprint that lays out a four-step process guaranteed to help you achieve success both in business and in life? These are the same four steps that I have used to achieve success over the past 20 years as a leader in the private and public sector, building a career, the business of my dreams, and a life that I love, and you can use them too. 

Decide What Matters Most to You

Determining what matters most to you is the starting point defining where you are in your personal and professional life. A balanced life is an integrated approach to the work-life balance concept. Attaining balance takes integrating work and life because you can’t compartmentalize the two. You may be tempted to think of yourself as having two lives, your personal and professional lives, but you are one person, and you can’t separate the two. If you are having issues in your professional life, they will impact your personal life. If you’re having tension in your personal life, that tension will make its way into your professional life.  

It’s important to see yourself for who you are and not who you project yourself to be. As business owners, our goal is to see our business for what it is and not what we desire it to be—gaining a realistic perspective takes a fact-finding investigation. You are investigating the ground where you intend to build your success. I call these times of reflection and investigation “mirror moments,” and they are critical to our success.

Consider what matters to you because the things that are important to you will show up in how and when you use your time. You will only make time for those things that are important to you, so if something is a priority in your life, your schedule needs to reflect that. If you find that your priorities and how you spend your time aren’t lining up, you’ll want to see parts 3 and 4 of the blueprint.

The second step in the four-step blueprint is to visualize your balanced life. Let’s explore this concept further:

Visualize Your Balanced Life

A key component to your success is visualizing it. Before you can visualize your success, you have to define what success looks like for you. A great place to start is looking at areas of your life that don’t align with your priorities. Once you’ve taken a look at the places that don’t align with your priorities, you need to visualize what success looks like for you. To get started, ask yourself what success looks like in all areas of your life.

Does Success Look Like:

• • More family vacations? 
  • Spending more time fully present with your family and friends?
  • Increasing output and productivity in your business?
  • Increasing profitability of your business?
  • More time for your personal development?
  • More time for you?
  • Planning for the next generation of leadership in your business?

The definition of success in achieving the balanced life that you want will be a combination of areas in both your professional and personal life. There is no one-size-fits-all definition of work-life balance, just like there is no one-size-fits-all definition of success. Take a few moments to define what success looks like for you! Visualize the business of your dreams and the life that you love!

Visualizing what life would be like if you had the balance you want and then taking steps to make those things happen in your reality is the secret to happiness. Visualize what life will be like with the balance that you have been longing for. What will it look like? What will it feel like? Imagine your perfect day.

It is important to set goals, but it is equally as important to visualize them. This was a discovery by one of the world’s great psychologists, Henry Murray. Murray discovered that with visualization, you could “anticipate and control the future.” You can overcome your fears and accomplish your goals because you have already seen them happen in your mind. It’s about creating a vision for what you want to achieve and then working towards making it happen.

Visualization is simply creating a strong mental image of a future event. This is similar to creating a conceptual design model that supplies a clear picture of the intent of a project. Visualization helps you “see” yourself succeed, allowing you to believe that you can and will succeed—practice success by imagining achieving every aspect, personal and professional, of your balanced life. 

Seeing is believing

If you think you can, you are correct. If you think you can’t, you are also right. Seeing yourself succeed in business and life increases the likelihood that you will.  The second step to engineer your success is to see yourself succeeding both in business and in life. 

To recap, determining what matters most to you is the starting point defining where you are in your personal and professional life. A balanced life integrates work and life because there is only one you; you can’t separate the two; tension in one area will spill over into the other. It’s critical to have a realistic perspective of your business which you can gain through fact-finding introspective “mirror moments.” Your schedule should reflect your priorities, and you need to define what success looks like for you so that you can visualize it. 

These are the first two steps in The Engineer’s Blueprint for A Balanced Life. You can learn steps three and four by downloading your free copy of the blueprint and following the Engineer Your Success Podcast.  What does success look like for you when you visualize it? Leave a comment down below.