Hero (16 page)

MASTIN KIPP

The Bible says it best: without a vision, people perish.

LAIRD HAMILTON

Every idea that I’ve ever had and everything I’ve ever done I first saw it in my mind. People talk about visualization; that’s just a way of saying that you can see it in your mind. Ultimately you can’t have a dream without being able to see it. How are you going to manifest something that you don’t see in your mind first?

Sports people and athletes know the power of creating a vision of their dream. You will have heard one athlete after another at the Olympic Games talk about the fact that they had played this moment of winning gold in their mind for four years. Athletes use the technique of visualizing constantly in their training to see everything they want to achieve in their mind, and to practice and improve specific skills.

LAYNE BEACHLEY

I spent a lot of time visualizing as an athlete. The great thing about being an athlete is utilizing that technique to visualize the desired outcome.

PETE CARROLL

Constantly we work with visualization, with envisioning what we could become. All power comes from the ability to envision what you want to become. How could you possibly get there unless you can picture it? You wouldn’t know when you had arrived.

“When I’m about to fall asleep, I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race.”

Michael Phelps

Olympic Champion Swimmer

The sporting world has latched on to one of the most powerful practices to create what we want – create a vision in our mind of the exact outcome we want. Despite all the success that’s achieved in sports by using this technique, people generally are still unaware of the fact that they can use this same technique to create success in their life.

LAYNE BEACHLEY

I could only visualize one outcome, and that was standing on the podium with the trophy above my head, being sprayed with champagne. That’s all that mattered to me.

The most important part of creating a vision is that you get a picture in your mind of the end result or the outcome you want. Get every other detail out of your mind of how you’re going to achieve it, and just see the end result of your dream. Layne Beachley chose the vision of standing on the winning podium being sprayed with champagne because that vision clearly represented the outcome she wanted – becoming a world champion.

MICHAEL ACTON SMITH

I love drawing and doodling and sketching, and I spend hours filling up notebooks. I scribble down the things that I want to achieve and do.

When you sketch elements of your dream, your mind immediately forms a vision from your sketch. When you write notes about your dream, your mind automatically forms a vision from your notes. Either way, you’re visualizing.

In my life, whenever I have to do something I’ve never done before, I never think of going into it without first having visualized the outcome I want. I play that vision over in my mind, and feel the excited feelings as though it has already happened. I don’t think about how I will do it, I just visualize the outcome I want. This technique is one of the most powerful and little known abilities that human beings have to create whatever they want in their life. Because your subconscious mind loves pictures, when you have placed a picture in your subconscious mind it must do everything to make it materialize.

G. M. RAO

My dream was always in my mind. Right from the beginning I was living with my dream alive in me, acting it out even when it was just tendrils of thought. My actions arose from the thought that my dream had already happened, and from my actions I could see the results arise.

“Success is achieved twice. Once in the mind and the second time in the real world.”

Azim Premji

Indian Business Tycoon

PETER FOYO

Virtually everything I’ve done in my life is not as a result of what I’ve studied or of how hard I worked. It’s a result of visualizing and knowing I’m already there.

When I was making
The Secret
film, I visualized the outcome I wanted multiple times during a day. I saw the outcome so clearly in my mind that it felt as though it had already happened. There’s no doubt in my mind that visualization was the most powerful thing I did to help make
The Secret
a huge success.

PETER FOYO

People think you’re an outright liar when you’re visualizing, because they think, “That’s not happening. That’s not here.” Oh, yes it is. Absolutely it’s here, because if you can think it, it can happen.

Once you have got good at visualizing the outcome of your dream in your mind, where you feel as though it has already happened, you can use the same technique for any smaller steps or goals you want to achieve on the Hero’s Journey. But even if you only ever visualize the end result of what you want, your vision ensures that you will get there, somehow, some way.