Visualizing All Your Dreams Come True

The first paragraph is adapted from The Success Principles, by Jack Canfield…
Fred Couples and Jim Nantz were two kids who loved golf and had very large dreams. Fred's goal was to someday win the Master's Tournament, and Jim's was to someday work for CBS Sports as an announcer. Fred and Jim were suitemates at the University of Houston in the late 1970's, and they would playact the scene where the winner of the Masters was escorted into Butler Cabin to receive his green jacket, and be interviewed by the CBS announcer. Fourteen years later, the scene they had rehearsed many times in Taub Hall at the University of Houston played out in reality as the whole world looked on. Fred Couples won the Masters, and was taken by tournament officials into Butler Cabin, where he was interviewed by... CBS sports announcer Jim Nantz, of course. After the cameras stopped rolling, the two embraced each other with tears in their eyes. They always knew it would happen that way, because they had already done it all those years earlier.
There is amazing power in acting as if something has already happened. In visualizing your dreams... especially when you bring all of your senses into play, and make it as real as possible. I think it was Dennis Waitley that said they did a study of high level athletes, runners, I believe. They tested the runners before, during, and after running, checking how their bodies acted at various points. This is where it gets interesting. Next they had the athletes visualize themselves doing the same run. The athletes saw the entire run in their minds, seeing it as real as possible, and their bodies tested exactly the same when they visualized as when they had actually done the running. Same harder breathing, elevated heart rate, all of it! You see, if you really become a part of what you are visualizing, your body can't tell that it isn't real! What this means is, if we really make our dreams real, in our mind, daily, over and over again, our mind and body think it is real.
Then, your mind starts telling itself, "I need to figure out how to make this dream happen. I need to put together all of the pieces of the puzzle somehow." You start looking for and seeing things that you wouldn't have noticed before. Do you know that, as you go through life, every minute of every day, you don't notice 95% of what is going on around you? Stop right now, and check out every detail of everything around you. Blades of grass moving, a clock ticking, objects around the room, cars passing, everything. Look at every little detail. Up until you started looking for it, you didn't notice 95% of what was there. You couldn't. Your mind can not process that much information at one time. So it focuses on what it thinks it needs to know and pay attention to the most. How does it decide that? One way is habits. Your mind pays attention to what you are in the habit of paying attention to. Another way is pay attention to the most important things, like the road when you drive. Another way is pay attention to what you have trained it to look for. When you visualize certain dreams over and over again, you start seeing things that can help you accomplish that dream. Sometimes you see little tiny things, in bits and pieces, over time. Sometimes you find one huge answer that makes the whole entire dream come true all at once. You train your mind what to look for, and it follows your commands. Science has taught us that human beings only use approximately 5-10% of our brain functions. This might sound a little hokey to some of you, but I honestly believe that by training our subconscious on what we want it to look for, we tap into the vast unused portions of our brain, and it starts working for us. That subconscious has to do something, and I think it does whatever primary directives you give it. If you tell your brain that you are watching TV and vegging, and you don't want it to do anything, it won't do anything. If you tell it to block out something painful, it will block it out. If you tell it to pursue your dreams, it will!!! But you have to make it real. The stronger and more real you make your visualization and images, the harder and faster your brain will work to find ways to create what you are visualizing. Keep in mind, you can't just visualize riches and sit on the couch and wait for the riches. You actually have to think, and plan, and turn your thoughts into actions (process of manifestation: thoughts lead to feelings lead to actions lead to results). But, still, this process will help you find the missing pieces that you didn't see before. The most successful people throughout history knew this... If you study successful people, you will find this is a key ingredient with almost all of them. Short version: what you think about comes about! What you focus on expands.
Personally, about 8-10 years ago I was poor. I made about $8-10/hour, and was solidly lower middle class. I had just started to get seriously interested in real estate, started studying success, etc. My wife Tammy and I went with my Mom and my sister to a gentlemen's house that my Mom was sort of dating. He had a very nice, 3/2/2 block house, with an in-ground caged swimming pool, and beautiful poolside commercial bar and grill (if memory serves me). He was a bit of a wine connoseuir, and, while I am not a wine drinker, most of the rest of them enjoyed sampling a few wines. It was a warm summer evening, the pool had a built in light, and the water was great. We had an amazing time, though my Mom may have drank a little too much wine, and tried to return some (sorry Mom)! The home was unlike anything I had experienced before. When I say I was raised without a lot of money in my life, it is not an understatement. This was a different lifestyle than Tammy, myself, my sister, or my Mom were accustomed to. I told my wife, that night, in front of my Mom and sister, that I would get us a home and pool just like that. If memory serves me, they all rolled their eyes, and I am guessing my wife said something like, “yeah, when we are about 80 years old, maybe”. I said I didn't know if it would take a few years, or many, or what, but we would have that again, and it would be all ours. I told my Mom and sister that, if they wanted that house in their future, too, they could learn with me. I think, at the time, it wasn't real enough for them to start pursuing it. Later, in T. Harv Eker's course "The Million Mind Intensive", we did some hypnosis, and I saw the same home again. I have visualized it many times sense then. In October of 2006, my wife and I purchased our new home, in the very same neighborhood as that house. It is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage, concrete block house. We have done a few things to it, and have plans to do some more some time (I rehab houses!), but it has an in-ground, screened pool, with a light in it. Every time I drive home, I feel a tinge of joy that part of my dreams is coming true again. I experience that high almost every time I start nearing home. On my way home I drive past the street that man’s house is on, and I sometimes look out at the houses and wonder, which of those houses is the one we visited those years ago. Which house helped me visualize my dream home, and helped push me to make it a reality several years later.
Interesting thing... My wife and I looked at pool homes just under $200K off and on for 2-3 years. I always told her we would get our nice, new, pool home before our son started kindergarten, so we would be in a good school district. She sometimes supported me, and other times gave me a "yeah, right". It didn't matter. I already knew I would have it, because I had been there so many times before. When a realtor friend of mine told me about our current house, I told him $249.9K was out of our price range. He said the listing agent said the sellers were very motivated, and we should check it out. I called the listing realtor, chatted with her about the house some, and decided that, even though we probably wouldn't be able to stretch to it, we would look at it, because the pictures were amazing. This house was in a completely different league than anything else we looked at for $200K. We walked in, looked at each other, and both had this smile on our faces like we were home. I knew I was in trouble, and these sellers better be very motivated. Long story short, at that time, I was not thinking the least little bit about my dream. Months later, I was watching "The Secret", and I was reminded that it was my dream house. In "The Secret", John Assaraf shows his son his dreaming board, (I have been gathering pictures so my family can make these soon), and he starts to tear up. He had a picture, from years prior, of the exact same house they were living in, and hadn't even realized it. It was a picture from some glamour homes type of photo shoot or whatever, and it was of the house he later bought as his personal residence. I think it said about 7,000 or 9,000 square feet, with a 3,000 square foot guest house. You know, your ordinary run of the mill stuff.
I will be making a dreaming board soon (and encouraging my wife and kids to do the same), and will do plenty more visualizing, because I am not done yet. I have more, bigger and better things to come, and I hope all of you reading this do as well. Best wishes, and happy dreaming!