Visualization, imagination, future self, goals, mindest, self talk, and all the buzz words of the self help industry have been a standard in my life for the past 16 years.

In 2000 I attended my first of many Anthony Robbins seminars which opened the proverbial rabbit hole of personal development for me. Then came neurolinguistic programming and the law of attraction with Esther Hicks. With each era many new learnings took me that much farther down the hole into understanding who I am and how I create my experiences.

This past week though, I had a very big ah-ha that through all my past learnings, I never realized.

If I do not see my future self as me…. I cannot imagine my accomplishment of a goal.

Let me give a bit of background around this thought.

In 7-10 of Master Keys, Haanel goes on telling the story of Nikola Tesla and his method of visualizing his inventions before attempting to work them out.

Having first built up the idea in his imagination, he holds it there as a mental picture, to be reconstructed and improved by his thought. ‘In this way’, he writes in the Electrical Experimenter. ‘I am enabled to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of, and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete, the product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived it should; in twenty years there has not been a single exception’

Understanding the huge influence Tesla has had on our understanding of the law of vibration and electricity, I took this paragraph as being very instrumental in being dedicated to visualization of MY inventions… my goals. And realizing just how PRECISE I need to be in all aspects of what I want to accomplish.

So I set off last week with a great week of visualization and getting even clearer on my desired goals.

In comes week 8 and the discussion of our future selves. Mark spoke to the awareness that we need to see our future self as our friend not as a faceless stranger…. after all are we more likely to go out of our way and help a good friend or stranger?

This is where my thoughts begin to take a sharp turn on overload.

In 8-11 of the Master Keys Haanel states that “imagination is the constructive form of thought which MUST precede every constructive form of action”.

Now, I REALLY want to achieve my goals I claimed at the beginning of this mastermind…. No…. I MUST achieve them. For I have lived way too many years of my life doing things for other people that did not interest me or excite me. I refuse to die without living the life I know I am meant to experience.

When I read 8-15, I knew this was a key learning:

Constructive imagination means mental labor, by some considered to be the hardest kind of labor, but, if so, it yields the greatest returns, for all the great things in life have come to men and women who had the capacity to think, to imagine, and to make their dreams come true.

In my usual visualization of my goals on Monday and Tuesday, I realized that I was having a very difficult time mentally seeing my future self in my visualizations. If at all, it was represented as a shadowy figure with no descriptive features that would even suggest that it might be me.

Then on Wednesday, right after I did the “sit” exercise of mentally visualizing an object and imagining the creation of it backwards in time…. going from a battleship to the raw metal in the foundries being forged into the ship, to the architect designing the ship, to the discovery of how large objects float in water…. etc, I did this with my goal.

I figured if I can do this with an object, why not with my goal and maybe receive some insight into what else I may need to think of or do to accomplish it.

So as I sat and visualized my goal… working on getting even that much more clear on details… I started at the endpoint… The actual accomplishment. Then I worked my way backwards to present day…. visualizing what I knew already that I would need to do along the way, and using my imagination to fill in the gaps…. I came to present day.

IT THEN HIT ME.

As I visualized my already accomplished goal… I saw myself as I was a year ago. Pre cancer, pre chemo. I was 20# lighter (yay) and had long beautiful brown hair (double yay).

BUT…. THAT IS NOT WHO I AM TODAY. That past person is basically a stranger to me. Someone I once knew but am very different from today.

It took me YEARS to grow my hair that long.

It took me months to put on weight.

It took weeks for me to lose my hair.

I don’t want to wait years subconsciously because my hair might need to grow long again before I accomplish my goal.

I don’t want to “try to lose weight” before allowing my goal to come into being.

I need to see my future self as me as I am. The me I know now.

Maybe this is what is referred to as time traveling…. I have had many cool conversations in my head about this awareness this week…. and somehow trying to explain the profound awareness of all of this has fallen flat and seems woo-woo and out there. Yet I KNOW this is very important for me. To be able to see ME in accomplishment of my goal and not some fuzzy dark nondescrip image achieving my goal.