Reading Orrin Woodward’s latest book Resolved gave me a new insight into visualization and a different angle on how to use it to effectively change. We have all heard of the power of visualization. In Orrin’s book he goes deep into the power of not just visualization but connecting your ant ( conscience ) and your elephant ( sub – conscience ). If you can figure out how to harness this power you can really accomplish anything.
Author Vince Poscente in The Ant and The Elephant, describes the difference between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind, teaching that the conscious mind in one second of thinking stimulates 2,000 neurons, while the sub-conscious mind in a second imaging stimulates four billion neurons. That’s 4,000,000,000 neurons to 2,000 neurons ; literally two million times more neurons are stimulated in the sub-conscious than the conscious mind in a second of mental activity. This is why you will hear every performer at the top of their game talking about using visualization as a powerful weapon to their success. In “Resolved” Orrin gives 2 examples of this, olympic athletes and Will Smith, and how they used the power of it.
Most of us think about this elephant and mental picturing only from one angle. That angle is to picture what we want. Weather that is a material reward, helping some cause, paying off debt or eliminating a job. I never thought about using this tool to change myself. To change my attitude, how I react, what I say, or even how I think. I was trying to do those things but I was using the ant method instead of the elephant method. I would write down 3 things that I wanted to work on and change about myself. I would put them on my mirror in my bathroom and my steering wheel so I could see them and read them regularly. This process did work and it still works but now I have realized that using elephant method is a much more effective way of making the changes that I want to make.
I have tried my new technique and was shocked at how fast the change happened. What I do now is write down what I want to change but I write down to visualize the change. This is what I mean. My first list of items I wanted to change was smile, book a follow-up meeting, and don’t get defensive when I got questioned about my business. Now what I would do is write a note to remind myself to visualize me smiling, visualize me booking the follow-up meeting and visualize how I would respond if someone did question me about my business. Doing this is using the four billion instead of the two thousand and obviously would cause change quicker.
I have recently tried this on a new list of items I am working on and I have seen the change almost immediately! I didn’t believe it so I told my wife and she tried it on something she was working on. She had the exact same result! Now this doesn’t mean that it is permanently programmed into our brain but the change happened that much faster. Now we just have to continue doing the visualization to make the movie that we play, in our sub conscious mind, a permanent movie. Hope this help
God Bless