At the end of last week, I also wrote an article about a process that I teach virtually all of my hypnotherapy clients and students and one that i have used a great deal in my own training and with regards to all of my goals in
life.
It is a process about actively and purposefully creating your own future memories with self-hypnosis.
Whenever we successfully achieve something that we planned, or hit a different goal of some kind, it makes everything worthwhile, and it feels really good.
So how about getting familiar with that feeling before it has happened in reality?
That is what this process does, though it does far more than that.
These good feelings (of achieving
the goal) can generate passion for the goal.
Thus, an effective part of any goal setting process can include you imagining that you have achieved a particular goal set for some moment in the future:
You imagine the satisfaction of success, the glow of accomplishment.
This satisfaction serves as a real motivation, a passion for achievement that will last throughout your plan of moving towards the goal.
Also, doing such a thing can inform you greatly about the kind of mindset needed, the actions and behaviours required, and much more
besides.
Joe Montana (Montana & Weiner, 1997) encourages storing future memories in this way:
“If you are in a slump, focus on your mental approach before you mess around with what you are doing
physically. Visualizing specifically and realistically what you will be doing will help you move from stressed-out to confident and relaxed…
This isn’t fantasizing, it’s rehearsal.”
– Joe Montana
Mental rehearsal is good on so many levels, and it can inform us as
well as familiarising us with those great outcomes.
This process also has an effect on your confidence. Imagining successful achievement of our goals helps us to perceive achieving a potentially difficult goal as a real possibility that we are very much capable of.
Building this kind of
confidence motivates you to expend the energy necessary to achieve the goal.
Lots of people view their future through their past.
They think because they have always done certain things a certain way, then they will continue to happen that way. Whereas creating your own future
memories is going to enable you to have a vision of the future — which can be a much more powerful force in determining the future than is often given credit for.
When I first was introduced to the world of personal development in my late teenage years and early twenties, I recall reading a classic self-help book by James Allen, entitled, ‘As a Man Thinketh’.
In it, he suggests that we all imagine that the mind is like a fertile garden and the thoughts that you have in your mind are seeds. All that your thoughts need to grow, is your attention. Your attention is like the rain and sunshine that the seed needs to grow.
So, if you allow old, limiting
thoughts and beliefs to continue to grow and then keep focusing on them, you are going to have a mind filled with fruit of the belief that you do not know how to overcome obstacles or worse still, a mind filled with failure or lack.
This process is a very classic and generic process combining self-hypnosis with future memory creation, you bend it and tweak it according to your own requirements,
enjoy this: