I was listening to an interview with Ed Mylett, a successful author, speaker and marketing guru where he talked about being so broke his water was shut off at his apartment shortly after he was married. He had to take his wife to the pool at their apartment and stand there holding a towel up so she could bathe at the pool shower. As humiliating as that must have been, he always had this vision of living with her in a beautiful home on Laguna beach and that vision is what fueled him to keep working and not get down on himself.
It occurred to me how much the “vision” thing matters even in our personal lives and how I’ve heard it come up in other ways recently. Therapists often have clients journal so they can “manifest” who they want to be into something better but the point is they first have to imagine being different to then start down the path of improvement. When people are young, this seems easy or more natural. Kids imagine themselves being everything from heroic firemen to princesses in a castle to astronauts and so on. But many people lose this somewhere in their late teens early 20’s and start focusing more on the past or what they can’t do etc. We use all sorts excuses like being too old for this or it’s too late to do something different (did you know Ray Kroc was 52 when he opened the first McDonald’s?). Keeping a vision and imagination is the anti-dote to that type of self-limiting thought! The next-year version of yourself has an opportunity to be different than the this-year version of yourself.
A friend who’s close enough to share with me about dealing with anxiety was telling me the other day about how his therapist gave him this exercise to do where he had to write down what she sees herself like in 10 years, what his life’s values are and what he would want to be remembered for. All of this is meant to open your mind up to what’s possible.
