 Is it possible to just sit around and wishfully think your way into being rich, famous, successful, sexy, and wanted by everybody? This was essentially the premise of a movie that came out around 2005 called The Secret. And this disrupted a lot of people. Half the people thought that they could just sit there in the living room and picture Lamborghini and it would magically show up because metaphysics. And half the people went crazy and said positive visualization had no merit whatsoever. Today we're going to break down the truth about the movie The Secret, positive visualization, and how to actually use things that are a little woo-like dreamboards to get what you want in life. Here we go. The movie The Secret. You love it or hate it. Most people have a very strong opinion about it. I'm not sure why. Like anything else in life, usually there's a little bit of truth to it and a little bit of falsehood. So once we understand what works about The Secret, what works about positive visualization and what does not, we can actually use it for our benefit. So if you're on here late and you want to build a successful business, you want to have the partner of your dreams, you want to have your dream home, you want to travel the world, you want to help other people, you want to change the world, you want to invent something new, whatever it is, we can use positive visualization to accomplish this. And this is not some unaccepted pseudoscience. Students have studied positive visualization for years. Elite athletes use it. I know when I used to compete in snowboarding right when I was about to drop into the course, I would always be visualizing my run and the more consistently I could do that, the more likely I would actually pull it off during the contest. So how do we use positive visualization in life? As far as I know, GOT started with the book Thinking Girl Rich and also Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. Those are the two classics that were written many, many decades ago that people cite most often. And they basically said, if you have a dream and you visualize it every single day, over time it will come true. Now new research has since emerged that refutes some of this. And I didn't figure this out until a month or two ago, an old friend brought up Psycho-Cybernetics to me and I said, yeah, of course I've read Psycho-Cybernetics and he asked if I wanted to do a challenge, a 30 day challenge to go through and do these positive visualizations again. So after the gym every day, I would make my protein shake, mix it up, go out on my balcony, sit in the sun and start to do my positive visualizations. I think about all the success that I want to have in business, my revenue numbers, my team success, my customers, how great it felt, the house I lived in, the car, what my day looked like, what my family looked like, the contribution everybody was making. And something started to happen. At the end of my visualization every day, I started to actually have less motivation to go out and get those things. Because here's the deal, doing stuff in life, getting what we want that's abnormal from the rest of society is extremely difficult. It takes an extreme amount of persistence and grit and hard work and most of all pain, the ability to endure pain. And so I would sit there and I would visualize me living in my house in California on the ocean in my huge beach house for $10 million, driving my Lamborghini. And then I would sit up and look at reality and say, well, that felt pretty good. I don't really want to go through the pain to actually make it happen. I visualized it and it felt just as good. And I actually was doing less to make those dreams come true. And I started to look into this, started to Google some things about positive visualization because I thought, you know what, I think people have it all wrong about positive visualization. It actually takes away that hunger, that drive. You have to have this sick compulsion almost to go out there and make your dreams come true. Otherwise, you would never put in the pain. Some people say, if you knew what it took at the beginning, you would never get started. And I think that's probably true. Business is in general so much harder than people could ever imagine. And that's not because business is hardest because we're not the kind of people that are equipped to succeed in business until we go through that growth period. So I'm not trying to discourage you here. It's worth every second, every minute of pain. Because once you accomplish that result, nobody can take it away from you. And you have superpowers that nobody else has because you've gone through the pain that was required to get there. So how do we make positive visualization work for ourselves? We can't just create dream boards, although I do encourage you to create a dream board. And we can't just sit there and think about all the good things we want to have without actually doing something about it. Because like it or not, the world is cause and effect. We must have a cause to get the effect. So number one, I'm going to encourage you to actually do positive visualizations where you do sit down and you think about what you want and you imagine how good it is to actually feel that and to have that. And this does a couple of things. One, just get to actually sit down and think through what I want my life to look like, what I want my relationships to look like, what I want my health to look like. What does that feel like? What is it that I like about that? Is that what I really want? And the reason that's important is because most people never even take the time to think about what they want like. They don't know what they want. So how are they supposed to go after it? And so this gives you kind of some practice, figuring out what you want. And then we can work backwards from there and say, okay, if that's what you want, what's it going to take to get there? So it's a great start to go out there and make a dream board. You can cut out pictures from magazines that inspire you. You can look at that house you've wanted to buy. You can go and test drive cars that you could never afford right now to know what it feels like. But I can tell you that only doing that is not going to get you there. It's step one. Step one, figure out what we want. The way that we want to feel and figure out if that's what we really want, or if we just kind of think that'd be cool. And then once we think about it more, we're like, no, I don't actually need that. One exercise I love is some people start with their perfect day. So they actually think, where do I wake up in the morning? What does it feel like? Who's next to me? What are we for breakfast? What do I do after that? How many hours in a day do I spend on work? What do I do to be around my family? How am I making a contribution? What do people think of me? What do people say about me at my funeral? All those kinds of things. And another thing this does is this gets our nervous system comfortable with being in this situation. There's this big thing in life where most of it is just a battle with your nervous system. If you're wanting something, you tried to go after it, and you just couldn't get yourself to do it or yourself sabotage, because your nervous system is sabotaging you. Your body starts to feel unsafe, you stop taking the actions, and you're just out of the game. You can watch some of my other videos to learn more about how to deal with this. But what we're doing is we're training our nervous system to be relaxed in this situation. But me being relaxed, owning a Ferrari, is not the same as me being relaxed doing the work that is required to get a Ferrari. And so that brings me to my next step. We're actually going to plot out, we're going to work backwards, we're going to say, okay, what do I want? Then what's it going to take to get there? And that's what we really have to figure out. Okay, we can't just focus on the outcome, we have to focus on the process. And the process is very difficult and painful and not always a good time. Sometimes it's a good time, sometimes it's not. And so we need our nervous systems to not only relax during the outcome of owning the Lamborghini, we need to relax on that sales goal. Getting rejected by another customer, shipping our product to the market and finding out it has defects and keep going anyways instead of giving up. Having our ads bomb and having the strength to get out of bed, write new ads and try again, even though we're losing money every single time. So that's what we really have to get comfortable with in business is the hard stuff. And if we can get our nervous system to relax during the hard stuff and the process, and we can learn to actually enjoy that process no matter how painful it is, that's where the secret really comes into play. And so the only piece they're really missing is they tell you to visualize the end results, but we need to visualize the process. We need to get comfortable and start to feel safe in that process. And once we can do both of those simultaneously, we're in a lot better place. Now it doesn't end there. These books, they mentioned that you have to do this continuously over time and be consistent. So we're constantly course correcting, right? I might decide that I want to build a million dollar a month business today, and then I get really pumped up about it for a week, but two weeks from now, I kind of fallen into my old habits and it's been really hard to try and work on that goal, and I'm not going after it anymore and I didn't even notice. And so we actually need to course correct every single day, right? Cause if we get just a little off course over time, we're gonna end up so far away from where we want it to be. So every day, multiple times a day, you can read your goals and don't only read your outcomes that you want, but read the process that you have to engage in, okay? Now, if you don't believe me up until this point, I want to tell you a quick story about some research studies that I've done on this. So they took a group of women who were at least 40 pounds overweight and they put them through a weight loss program and they have them do visualization every day. Now they had three groups. They had one group that did not visualize anything. They just put them through the weight loss program. They had one group who did the secret style of visualization and they just pictured the positive outcome. And they had another group who did something a little different, which I'll talk about in a second. Now, just so you know, the group that visualized just the positive outcome lost more weight than the group who did not visualize at all. Quite a bit more in fact, but there was a third group who lost, I think, 28 pounds more. So if I think back to the study, there were probably more than 40 pounds overweight. They lost 28 pounds more than the next closest group. And so they had this group picture their weight loss journey and they're going through this weight loss program and they had them picture coming, somebody coming up with a tray of donuts. And the control group who only picture the positive outcomes, they would picture just resisting the donuts, not eating them, behaving perfectly well. And then they would picture seeing an old friend after a couple of years and they've lost so much weight and the friend thinks they look so great. Now the next group, they picture the donuts coming up and having a really hard time not eating them. They pictured themselves breaking and slipping and eating the donut, even though they knew they shouldn't. And then they also picture meeting up with an old friend and the friend thinking they look so great and they lost so much weight. Now this group who pictured the difficulties in an honest manner, they pictured themselves struggling with staying consistent and disciplined and having to course correct and feeling and falling off the wagon and then getting back on. This is the group that lost 28 more pounds than the next closest group. And this is what's called mental contrasting. And what we do is we contrast the thing that we really want, things going extremely well through the process in the end result with the inevitable struggles, the failures, us not living up to our expectations of ourself or others' expectations, things not going well. Like I said, launching Facebook ads, having them bomb, having our accounts shut down, having our product shipped to market with defects, having customers refund. All these things that come along with owning a business, having haters come after you, these are all very real and if you don't picture them in your daily visualization, when they happen, when that tray of donuts is put in front of you and you can't resist and you take a bite, you say to yourself, I'm a failure, I didn't make it, my visualization didn't come true and then you fall off the wagon completely. Now, if you've pictured yourself breaking and eating the donut or the customer yelling at you and asking for a refund, when it happens, you know it's just part of the process and you're not thrown off and you don't give up on everything. You just know that it's inevitable and you course correct and you keep going. So that's what's called mental contrasting and this will absolutely change your life, right? I know the visualization stuff sounds woo-woo, I do it every single day, it's so important and the more successful I become I think the more important it becomes but it is incredibly important to visualize daily and have it written down and review it every single day, what you want from your life and what the process looks like to get there and constantly be course correcting but the change most of us need to make is implementing mental contrasting where we actually visualize things going wrong and what that feels like and what that looks like and the pain of getting back on track after we've fallen off and that way when it happens in real life which it will, it always does, guess what? We're prepared, our nervous system is relaxed, it's used to it and we consistently work towards that vision that we had for our life. So if you've watched The Secret, if you have read Psycho-Cybernetics, if you've read Thinking Girl Rich, there's just one small tweak to make. Visualize exactly what you want in life, take the time to make the vision boards to write down your goals, to review them daily then also visualize the process, what is the cause and effect that is going to get you there, focus on the process over the outcome and then use mental contrasting and picture what will happen when it goes wrong, what that's going to feel like, how much it's going to suck and also how you just get right back on track, how you eat that donut and then you get back on the weight loss program, you're going to end up losing 20 more pounds than the control group. So whether you're after something in business, in health, in relationships, I hope this helps. Positive visualization has been scientifically proven to make it more likely that you will get your outcome but you have to be consistent, do it every day, use mental contrasting. Go ahead and put it in the comments. Does this clear up some misconceptions about the secret, about Psycho-Cybernetics and Thinking Girl Rich? How are you going to use mental contrasting in your life and what's one thing that you could start to visualize today that's going to go wrong in your business so that when it does happen, you're ready for it? I'd love to hear in the comments, is Christian the work money or digital marketing guy and I'll see you in the next one.