The Power of Visualization: How Visualization Can Improve Your Life

Visualization seems to be a buzz word these days. Although I am a strong believer in visualizing what you want in order to achieve it and that there is no coincidence, I sometimes get tired of hearing so many people, especially celebrities, make these truly life changing and important issues trendy.

However, there is great power in what you think and picture for yourself. Have you ever heard someone say "I'm always sick." And they really are. Or "I never have any money." And they don't. Their thoughts and visualizations are energy that is driving negative energy toward them. Then you may look at others and wonder how they are always happy or never want for anything. The energy that you draw to yourself is created through your thoughts and images positive and negative.

So how do you create the life that you want to have? Thinking about your life and the things that you are unhappy with are critical to moving forward with change. For myself, I am constantly thinking about how to live my life as an example for my children and how I can be of service to others. When I went into teaching, I thought that this would be a wonderful way to help others grow and see value within their own lives and well as help children to discover the world around them and learn from that.

Although I love being a teacher, I have for the past several years seen a great decline in the morale and positiveness within my work place. Although I love being a teacher, it has changed a great deal since I started 14 years ago. With the unrealistic demands being placed on teachers, especially those of us working in urban districts, and the influences of the media and other social factors on children, teaching has become much less about teaching. Ideally it would be wonderful to move into a school district that has a much more positive working and learning environment. However with the way that school systems are set up, along with the economic decline, it is not that easy. So with that in mind, I am making my way toward being able to move into another area of work.

So in your busy and chaotic life, how can you improve your skills in visualization in order to draw the kind of life, job, or relationship that you want for yourself?

1. Make an image page. This is sort of a collage with pictures and words that represent the life that you envision for yourself.
2. Spend 5 minutes each day picturing yourself in the life that you want. Make sure that you picture this down to the littlest detail. For example, don't just visualize being in a job that you love, be specific in your vision about what this looks like. Are you working from home? Are you surrounded by others or alone? Are you traveling? Be specific!
3. Take five minutes at the end of the day to picture the positive things that are in your life and be thankful for them. Then picture adding to that tomorrow.
4. Create an action plan for your life and post it somewhere that you can see it everyday. Next to the bathroom mirror is a great place for this!

I spend most mornings on the phone with my mom. We have great conversations about how we are doing with our goals for our life's work. During these conversations we share things we've learned, talk about what is working for us and what is not and providing each other with encouraging words. Just yesterday I was telling her about the realization that I had come to and how visualization had played a strong part in my excitement for my next endeavor.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Danette Watt's hub on gratitude. I try to practice gratitude on a regular basis but quite frankly it gets lost in the shuffle of my daily life. It is not ALWAYS a conscious part of my daily routine. I even tried starting a gratitude journal last year but it fell by the wayside as the weeks went on. So after reading her hub, I decided that I was going to try a few of those practices again as well as work on visualizing my goals for the future.

I started to begin each morning visualizing the type of day I was going to have, focusing on the positive. Along with this, I have been visualizing more exposure to my writing therefore generating more income in return. In this two week time period, I have had some interesting things happen. First, I had published a hub on creating a writing notebook for children. A fellow hubber, JimmieWriter, read and commented that she would be sharing it at The Notebooking Fairy in January. I was so honored that she felt that it was useful enough to share with others. I went to her profile and checked out The Notebooking Fairy. It is a great site that shares some wonderful tips on notebooking as well as printables. I could really see how I personally could find this useful for my own classroom. But even beyond that, I walked away with an aha moment. That she was graciously and selflessly promoting others' sites through her own. Now this may seem like something quite obvious to you, but for me it was transformational. I realized at that moment that I don't have to be in competition with others, that there is enough to go around for everyone. Even though I may have intellectually believed this before, I GOT it spiritually this time. So I owe thanks to JimmieWriter for being the vehicle in that life lesson for me.

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So in the past two weeks, I have had several other things that I have visualized that came to fruition. First, I have been picturing a particular sum of money in my hubpages each day. For the last week I have been within pennies of that amount. Now, I will add that I have been visualizing higher than what I had been typically making, and it has happened. On the one day that it did not (and I admit I was a bit disappointed but quickly let it go), it had been an unaudited amount and eventually changed for the greater. Back to the power of that visualization I had done.

The final event that happened this week was that I had a birthday. My birthday this year was unusual because we had a lot of extenuating family things happening that created a much busier time than normal so my birthday, although celebrated, came and went without much thought. So by the end of the week I thought to myself, boy it would be nice to have a delicious soup and salad lunch brought in for me for my birthday. Well wouldn't you know that one of my student's Mom saw me that morning and said, "Mrs. Ardelean, I didn't realize I missed your birthday on Monday. I'm buying you lunch today. How about soup and salad from Panera?" I had to pick my jaw up off of the office floor to thank her. Exactly what I had visualized on my way to work that morning. The power of visualization.

When I think back to less busy times, I visualized my future a whole lot more. The most significant life event for me involving visualization was the conception of my beautiful daughter Grace. Through two years of fertility challenges, the power of visualization aided in her arrival. If you want to read more about that life changing moment, I have written about it in A Journey into Motherhood.

This hub is as much of a lesson or reminder for me as it is for others. There is power in visualization a better life for yourself. Create the life you want to live through your thoughts and pictures that play in your mind. Keep at it, you will see amazing things happen as a result.