Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (25 page)

Think of your pen as a magic wand. Writing out your Intentions is a powerful way to speed things up. As you write, you imagine and focus, which sends out powerful thoughts and helps you create more detail in your imagination. It is such a fun way to spend five minutes. Write them on a pad, tear off the sheet, fold it up, and place it in a back pocket or a purse. Read it often during the day when no one is around to notice.

I like to do this every morning, and it is the first thing I do when I step into my office. My handwriting is awful these days, but that is irrelevant. It is the deliberate act of writing them that has the power because it fires up my imagination. Every time I imagine the dream as already having been achieved, I increase the detail. Detail makes it feel more familiar and that speeds up its journey to me.

Keep a whiteboard on a wall in a location where only you can see it. Intentions change regularly, and as each is achieved, it is erased and replaced, which is a wonderful feeling. Read it several times a day. I like to use different colors and change the wording regularly because the exercise makes me think more about them. My board hangs on the back of the office door.

Keep a written list of Intentions in your wallet or handbag. Have a file in your computer, tablet device, and phone. Never be far removed physically or mentally from your Intentions.

Speak out your Intentions when you exercise or when you are alone in nature. My dogs think I am nuts, but I can live with that.

This is the mental imaging exercise I mentioned in Step Two. Sometimes, after taking quiet time, we can open the door to a world of chaos, and it can be hard to protect the new neural network in time before it is polluted. Immediately after taking quiet time, I pick one of the bigger Intentions and then daydream for a few minutes about what the achievement of it feels
like. I pretend it just came to fruition, and then imagine the emotions and sensations of that. In effect, I imagine living a day with that Intention achieved.

Sometimes, I also read out loud a list of my Intentions immediately after taking quiet time. The purpose is to ensure that the newly rewired network gets an immediate positive dose of images to connect to before I put on my mentality shield and rejoin the world.

Never share your Intentions with anyone else. Nothing will drain your energy or weaken your creator spirit more quickly than hearing someone you care about laugh at them.

That, however, is not the only reason. Sharing goals or Intentions is one of the most common mistakes people make. While I was writing this segment, a perfect real-life example of why you should never share your Intentions literally walked through the door of my office.

To avoid a difficult home environment, Anne hangs out with a neighbor’s family. The mother in this alternative family, Sue, is a nurturing spirit who has taken Anne under her protective wing. She is encouraging her to take charge of her destiny. No one cares more for Anne than Sue.

Anne has her heart set on a particular occupation. She interviewed for three positions and wanted one more than the others. Because I had encouraged her to use the Three P’s, she announced that she had been imagining already receiving this job offer. I asked her a few questions, and clearly she had taken on board the advice about future-history. I was excited for her.

Unfortunately, in her excitement as the nurturer, Sue told me how much she had been imagining it for Anne as well. My stomach
lurched a little. A few minutes later, Anne admitted that she had shared her Intentions with some friends. One friend sent her a text to say she had already purchased a celebration gift for Anne in anticipation of her success. My heart sank.

Let’s use imagery to think through why her failure was almost guaranteed. After all, doesn’t everyone just want the same thing, that good news for Anne? We now know that everything we are is energy. Everything around us is energy. Everyone’s thoughts are energy.

Anne had an Intention. At the moment she had the thought, she was standing on the edge of a clear, still pond. The pond represents the infinity of nothingness. Her dream job is on the opposite bank, and all she needed was to find some way to send energy to it and have it connect. Once connection is made, the laws of nature fill in the details. The intended target must come to the requestor.

She picked up a pebble, which is the energy of her thoughts. The weight, shape, and balance of the pebble are unique to Anne because no two people have the same thought cocktail. She tossed it gently into the pool. Concentric ripples spilled out from the small splash and gently stretched across the pool. The outermost ripple moved toward the opposite bank. At this point, Anne was in complete control of her destiny. Soon the ripple would spill onto the opposite bank and the connection would have been completed.

All of a sudden, however, Anne’s guardian and Anne’s friends ran out of the woods to join her around the lake. Shouting encouragement like cheerleaders, they all picked up pebbles and tossed them into the water from various positions. Although they meant well, their pebbles are not only being thrown from different angles, but they have their own unique shapes, weights, and balances, which reflect their own mixture of thoughts.

The effect of their help was to send ripples out in all directions. Suddenly, there was a mass of competing energy in the pool. When energy waves collide, they become subject to what is called
interference
. Interference can be constructive or destructive, depending on the matching amplitude of the energy wave. To be constructive, the angles and amplitudes of the clashing energy waves must match perfectly.

Thoughts are as unique as fingerprints. No two people have identical thoughts and images at the same time. Anne’s support is coming from different angles, and with different energy amplitudes, and that is more likely to cause destructive interference, even though the emotions are all positive.

Anne had lost control of
her
creative process. Ripples crashed into each other, and a mini-maelstrom was born in the center of the pond. No ripple made it to the other side. The connection was never made.

This is what usually happens when we share the energy of our Intentions with others. In reality, Anne can only have control over her own mentality and, therefore, her own energy. As much as Sue cares for her, Anne has no sense of how well her guardian angel controls her own mentality. Although Sue is shouting encouragement, she may also be so desperate for Anne to succeed that the actual thoughts and images she has are not of success but fear of what would happen if Anne was not offered the job.

Like all good mothers, she worries about Anne, and although the words from her mouth are gung-ho, the image in her mind might also be of how she will support Anne if the job offer is not forthcoming. Because we always get what we imagine, Sue is now as likely to get the experience of having to support a disappointed Anne as Anne is of getting the job offer. Their thoughts are competing even though their Intentions are noble.

When Anne and Sue left our home, my wife and I said together, “What a pity,” because we knew the risk we all take when we enthusiastically share goals. A week later, Sue was in our house again and told us Anne did not get the offer she wanted.

Your life is at stake. Never share the energy of your Intentions with anyone. There are no exceptions to this rule. Even my wife of thirty years does not know what my Intentions are, and when I asked her about this rule, she told me that when she enters my office she deliberately avoids glancing at my whiteboard. She doesn’t want her thought responses to interfere with my Intentions. Of course, we often talk with excitement about things we both want to experience together, but we do not know the specific Intentions that belong to the other person.

Many self-help books support their goal-setting programs with the practice of visualization. This is a technique involving focusing on positive mental images in order to achieve a particular goal. Because of the importance of making Intentions as something already achieved, it is necessary to change mindsets subtly when it comes to this practice.

Now you understand that when you have a thought, it has no option but to become physical reality. In essence, that means you can lie, and eventually the lie becomes your experience. In some ways, we have to become a bit like Walter Mitty, a fictional character in James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which eventually became a film starring Danny Kaye.

Mitty is a genteel man with a vivid fantasy life. In a few dozen paragraphs, he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Where he differs from the Walter Mitty in each of us is that, even in his heroic daydreams,
he does not triumph. His fantasies always end abruptly and negatively. Our daydreams always end in achievement.

One excellent way to daydream is to imagine going through a perfect day. When I had little in the way of material rewards, I used to sit outside on a sunny day, close my eyes, and imagine how I was living my perfect life. I walked my mind around my dream home and garden, checked in on the super cars in the garage, helped my wife prepare a gourmet dinner, and then watched a great film on a huge media screen. All of these have shown up in my reality and are part of my typical routine today.

When I bought my first basic car, I imagined a Mercedes-Benz ornament protruding from the front of the hood as I was driving. At other times, I have imagined walking into a high-end auto dealership, laying cash on the desk, and driving off with the vehicle of my desires. I continued to imagine how it felt to be driving that vehicle, all the heads of passersby turning as I pressed the accelerator. I might drive it to a top-end hotel or a beach, depending on what fancies I had at the time. One day I got to do it for real, and it felt even better.

Additionally, I have daydreamed fantastic vacations, financial and business success, health, and relationships into reality. As I am writing this, I realize that everything in my life today was once a daydream. There is not one thing around me that did not originally germinate in my head.

Daydreaming is not enough. We have to add realistic detail by physically accessing the core of each dream. When I had nothing but a bicycle for transport, I went to the high-end showroom and sat in my dream car. I touched it, brushed my hands over the leather seats, closed the door, and breathed that wonderful new-car scent. At first, this takes courage because dealerships can be intimidating, but eventually you do it so many times that it becomes a habit. The fact you do not yet have the cash for a purchase is a minor inconvenience because you know it is on
the way. The salespeople looked me up and down and assessed me as not being able to afford the car so they assumed I must be with someone else who could afford a car and always ignored me. Ironically, when the time came for me to purchase my first super car with cash, the salesperson looked me up and down, and again assessed me as being unable to afford the car, turned his back, and walked away.

At one time, my wife and I could not afford a vacation, but we visited the best hotels in the city where we lived, sat at one of the bars or in the lounge, and ordered coffee. It was all we could afford at the time, but we felt it essential to become comfortable with the environment and atmosphere that would be part of our future.

Initially, we felt like con artists. Being surrounded by the wealthy and successful took some getting used to. As you start seeing miracles show up daily, you will know it is just a matter of timing. The discomfort disappears when it becomes a habit.

I feel a bit nerdy writing this, and I hope it does not come across as bragging because that is the last emotion I could feel, but I want you to understand how far the three simple steps have brought me, and how they have turned an ordinary life into an extraordinary adventure.

When I first started setting Intentions and imagining success, I used to drive to the airport once a month and just hang around the ticketing area for an hour. I would read the departures board and imagine I was the one getting on the planes. Whereas others there may have been plane spotters, I just wanted to get so familiar with the environment that I felt I belonged to a lifestyle of travel. These days, most people are familiar with airports and travel is relatively cheap. What do you do, however, if one of your dreams is to travel only by private jet? Yes, a couple of years ago, before I sold my first company, I started hanging around those lounges too.

When we finally started taking vacations, we could only afford to stay in basic hotels. So, we spent at least one day of the vacation visiting the best hotels in the area and walking the grounds. We would also walk through the lobby and spend a few minutes soaking up the ambience. At first we felt like loiterers, but doing this helps add so much detail to the Intention that it speeds up the move to a state of knowing. Getting comfortable with your future environment brings it to you sooner. When we could finally afford to stay at the top places, they already seemed familiar to us, and we took it quite in stride because we had stayed there in our imaginations so many times.

If we had a small budget for a meal out, we would visit a top restaurant to share a cocktail at the bar rather than spend the same money on a full meal at a family restaurant chain. One has to live the future life now as much as budget allows. When flying economy class, we always took a stroll in first class, and took our time before going back to our seats.