Expand Perspective

Sometimes we are knocked out of our left-brain environment and thought patterns and into the right

brain by an unplanned experience. The death of a loved one, a severe illness, a financial setback, or

extreme adversity can cause us to stand back, look at our lives, and ask ourselves some hard questions:

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart

"What's really important? Why am I doing what I'm doing?

But if you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create

perspective-expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.

There are a number of ways to do this. Through the powers of your imagination, you can visualize

your own funeral, as we did at the beginning of this chapter. Write your own eulogy. Actually write it out. Be specific.

You can visualize your twenty-fifth and then your fiftieth wedding anniversary. Have your spouse

visualize this with you. Try to capture the essence of the family relationship you want to have created through your day-by-day investment over a period of that many years.

You can visualize your retirement from your present occupation. What contributions, what

achievements will you want to have made in your field? What plans will you have after retirement?

Will you enter a second career?

Expand your mind. Visualize in rich detail.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart Then I can visualize it. I can spend a few minutes each day and totally relax my mind and body. I

can think about situations in which my children might misbehave. I can visualize them in rich detail.

I can feel the texture of the chair I might be sitting on, the floor under my feet, the sweater I'm wearing.

I can see the dress my daughter has on, the expression on her face. The more clearly and vividly I can imagine the detail, the more deeply I will experience it, the less I will see it as a spectator.

Then I can see her do something very specific which normally makes my heart pound and my

temper start to flare. But instead of seeing my normal response, I can see myself handle the situation with all the love, the power, the self-control I have captured in my affirmation. I can write the program, write the script, in harmony with my values, with my personal mission statement.

And if I do this, day after day my behavior will change. Instead of living out of the scripts given to me by my own parents or by society or by genetics or my environment, I will be living out of the script I have written from my own self-selected value system.

I have helped and encouraged my son, Sean, to use this affirmation process extensively throughout

his football career. We started when he played quarterback in high school, and eventually, I taught

him how to do it on his own.

We would try to get him in a very relaxed state of mind through deep breathing and progressive

muscle relaxation technique so that he became very quiet inside. Then I would help him visualize

himself right in the heat of the toughest situations imaginable.

He would imagine a big blitz coming at him fast. He had to read the blitz and respond. He

would imagine giving audibles at the line after reading defenses. He would imagine quick reads with

his first receiver, his second receiver, his third receiver. He would imagine options that he normally wouldn't do.

At one point in his football career, he told me he was constantly getting uptight. As we talked, I

realized that he was visualizing uptightness. So we worked on visualizing relaxation in the middle of

the big pressure circumstance. We discovered that the nature of the visualization is very important.

If you visualize the wrong thing, you'll produce the wrong thing.

Dr. Charles Garfield has done extensive research on peak performers, both in athletics and in

business. He became fascinated with peak performance in his work with the NASA program,

watching the astronauts rehearse everything on earth again and again in a simulated environment

before they went to space. Although he had a doctorate in mathematics, he decided to go back and get

another Ph.D. in the field of psychology and study the characteristics of peak performers.

One of the main things his research showed was that almost all of the world-class athletes and other

peak performers are visualizers. They see it; they feel it; they experience it before they actually do it.

They Begin with the End in Mind.

You can do it in every area of your life. Before a performance, a sales presentation, a difficult

confrontation, or the daily challenge of meeting a goal, see it clearly, vividly, relentlessly, over and over again. Create an internal "comfort zone." Then, when you get into the situation, it isn't foreign. It doesn't scare you.

Your creative, visual right brain is one of your most important assets, both in creating your personal

mission statement and in integrating it into your life.

There is an entire body of literature and audio and video tapes that deals with this process of

visualization and affirmation. Some of the more recent developments in this field include such things

as subliminal programming, neurolinguistic programming, and new forms of relaxation and self-talk

processes. These all involve explanation, elaboration, and different packaging of the fundamental

principles of the first creation.

My review of the success literature brought me in contact with hundreds of books on this subject.

Although some made extravagant claims and relied on anecdotal rather than scientific evidence, I think

that most of the material is fundamentally sound. The majority of it appears to have originally come

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart out of the study of the Bible by many individuals.

In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a

foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life.

They are extremely powerful in rescripting and reprogramming, into writing deeply committed-to

purposes and principles into one's heart and mind. I believe that central to all enduring religions in society are the same principles and practices clothed in different language -- meditation, prayer,

covenants, ordinances, scripture study, empathy, compassion, and many different forms of the use of

both conscience and imagination.

But if these techniques become part of the personality ethic and are severed from a base of character

and principles, they can be misused and abused in serving other centers, primarily the self center.

Affirmation and visualization are forms of programming, and we must be certain that we do not

submit ourselves to any programming that is not in harmony with our basic center or that comes from

sources centered on money-making, self interest, or anything other than correct principles.

The imagination can be used to achieve the fleeting success that comes when a person is focused on

material gain or on "what's in it for me." But I believe the higher use of imagination is in harmony with the use of conscience to transcend self and create a life of contribution based on unique purpose and on

the principles that govern interdependent reality.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1079