How Visualization Can Prepare Founders for Future Challenges
This week, we challenge you to look into the future.
Thinking about the challenges that we have coming up on the horizon, our challenge has a few parts to it:
The first thing we want you to do is think about the biggest challenge coming up in the week ahead. You can write it down on a sheet of paper or just simply pull it into your mind, and think about the biggest challenge you have coming up in the week ahead. Now, we want you to fast-forward a little bit to the month ahead. What’s the biggest challenge, the biggest event, or could be a big opportunity, but something you see as a big roadblock or a challenge? This could be an opportunity for you to perform in a certain way to create a certain result that you want in your business or in your personal life - those are often so connected for us as entrepreneurs. So, you’ve got your biggest challenge from the week, you’ve got your biggest challenge from the month ahead, now we want you to think about the quarter year, so the next three months ahead of you. What’s the biggest challenge in your business or personal life that comes to mind when you think about the next 90 days in front of you? Write it down, or just take a moment to think about it in your head. Lastly, we want you to do the same exercise with the rest of this year, all the way through to the end of the year. What’s the biggest challenge you see? It could be an event that’s happening later this year, it could just be a problem in your business that you need to solve and you don’t think you’ll be able to solve it in the months or the weeks ahead but it’s going to take the whole year to get where you want to go to a solution. So, hold those in your head or write them down.
Now, for the second part of the challenge this week, we want you to pick one of the challenges that you wrote down, some of them could be similar, so if you saw the same one multiple times, maybe that’s one to consider. But the way we want you to think about it here is pick the one that you had the greatest, the most intense emotional response to as you thought of it when we asked you to think about the next week, think about the next month, the thing that popped into your mind that you selected, that challenge. Which one, of all of the ones that you created, for the week, for the month, for the quarter or the year, for those four, which one stands out? If you’ve written them down on paper, go ahead and circle the one that had the greatest emotional response for you. That could be a feeling of dread like, “Ugh, I don’t know how I’m going to solve this problem,” or, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it when I get there. I kind of wish it wouldn’t actually come,” or, “I wish I could avoid it.” It could even be a feeling of excitement or sheer joy around, you know, “I can’t wait for this to get here, I wish it was here today.” It could be positive, negative, anywhere between but the goal here is to find the one that had the most emotional intensity around it.
Then we’re going to start the next step of the challenge, which is using a Visualization process to think through that experience and that event. What you’re going to do in the Visualization is actually experience the event. You’re not going to actually transport into the future, but the future is going to come to you. You’re going to think through the entire process of that event. What is it like to enter that challenge or that experience? What does it feel like in the moment? Who are you interacting with? You’re going to fast-forward all the way to the end over about a minute or two of visualizing, and then you’re going to rewind it using the Visualization tool and you’re going to do it again with a slightly different twist on it, all the way through to the end, observing in the moment, picturing sort of experiencing it as if you’re actually there, disappearing from the physical world around you and actually transporting yourself into that experience. Then you’re going to rewind again and the Visualization tool walks you through this process and you’re going to go through the experience a third time, and this time the little twist that we added for the second round is even more outlandish - you’re going to have a really wild experience, an unexpected experience with that situation.
So that’s the practice for this week. Find that big event or challenge, pick the event or challenge that’s the most emotionally intense for you, and then go through the Visualization process. This is a great way to prepare ourselves for the challenges that are ahead, and also to look into the future a little bit. It’s so easy as entrepreneurs to get stuck working on what’s in front of us today which both sometimes can feel incredible because we don’t see the cliff coming, or sometimes it feels incredibly frustrating and daunting because it’s so challenging. This exercise is going to let us look ahead and build some positive experiences about what is to come so we can thrive in the moment when we get there.
The Visualization tool is one of many tools available in the Founders First mindstate tracking app for entrepreneurs. See all the tools and get personalized recommendations on how to best invest your time each day based on your current mindstate by trying the app free for 7 days.
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