One of the most powerful tools for success that you can learn to use is visualisation (seeing with the mind's eye). Visualisation is an amazing process that is used by highly successful men and women of all kinds. However, it is a power that is available to everyone, and the better you get at visualisation the more rapidly you move forward to accomplish your goals and aspirations.

World-class athletes incorporate the power of imagery to reinforce in their mind exactly how they want to perform. Whether it's a tennis pro acing his opponent with a perfect serve.., or a golfer driving the ball long and straight down the fairway, many top competitors mentally envision a successful outcome before actually achieving it in the "real" world. There was an experiment conducted where students of roughly equal ability were split into 3 groups to test their skill throwing a basketball into a hoop. The first group practised free throws for one hour, every day for a month. The second group did no practice at all. The third group practiced their free throws in their mind for an hour a day. The group that physically practiced improved their average by 2. Group 3, who only did mental practice, improved by 3 ½ %!

Visualisation is, in fact, something you've used since childhood to create the circumstances of your own life. We all store pictures in our minds about the degree of success we'll attain at work, how confident we are, the amount of money we deserve, the type of relationships we'll attract and so on. Where do these pictures come from? We begin to develop our "mental movies" early in life. If we were criticized or felt unworthy as youngsters, we record the events (and the feelings associated with those events) as images in our minds. Because we frequently dwell on these pictures (both consciously and subconsciously), we tend to create life situations that correspond to the original image. Unfortunately many of us have not updated or revised our childhood movies, so we're continually producing results that fall short of our full potential.

Not all mental pictures can be traced to your childhood. You're constantly generating mental movies based on your relationships, career experiences and other events. No matter what the source of your mental images, it's important to realise that you are in control and you can change the meaning of your own movies. While it doesn't help you to deny what happened in a past experience, you can alter your interpretation of the event.

At the time you were originally criticized or things went wrong in your relationship, the meaning you might have assigned to the experience was "I'm not good enough" or "My opinions are not worth anything" or "nobody wants me". While this was your interpretation at the time, you may be inadvertently continuing to hold onto it. Today though, you can consciously choose to view the situation differently - for example, the teacher may have disagreed with you, but it wasn't a statement about your intelligence or your overall worth as a person. The person who left you may have had an issue with commitment.

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