You’ve heard the expression “Be careful what you wish for”. When we hold a belief that something will happen, it’s more likely to. This is generally associated with negative events, but it also applies to positive ones, like goals and aspirations.

Successful people – especially the super-achievers – in any field know that success starts with a dream, or a vision.

If you are going to make something with your hands you generally have an image of how it’ll look when you’ve finished it. Well, it’s the same with non-material things like ambitions or goals. The clearer the vision, the more likely you are to arrive somewhere near it.

Dream on…

Take personal resilience, for example. When you create a vision of the resourceful and resilient person you want to become, you can start to move towards it.“Oh yeah!” you might say, “you’re saying that I can DREAM my way out of the terrible mess I call my life?”

No, of course not. But, if you need to tidy up your life, or any part of it, you need to start with an idea about how you want things to be after you’ve got it together and are enjoying your new life.

It’s like any journey; to travel in the right direction you have to know where you are going.

If you want to be more resilient, better at managing the demands you have to deal with, AND have energy left over for a fulfilling life, that takes a little planning. The planning starts when you’ve decided the end-point, where you want to go and how you want to be. That’s your destination.

I started with a saying, so I’ll end with another one: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else”.*

Goals and imagination

We are guided towards our goals by our imagination. If you have trouble accepting this idea, remember that imagination influences our beliefs and attitudes, and these have a powerful influence on our behaviour. So pretty much everything you do is guided. at some level, by your imagination.

You can let your imagination run free, and you can also choose to harness its power by taking control from time to time.

*(This is attributed to American baseball icon Yogi Berra).