5 Essential Skills For Momentum: #1 Visualize

Visualization is the skill of imagining a future state of the world you want to bring about.

Luckily, visualizing is relatively straightforward. It is what it sounds like.

And it’s easiest with projects that have clear end points. For instance, if you want to write a book, it’s not hard to visualize what the end state looks like. You have a finished book.

Other projects aren’t so clear. Landscaping your backyard could fall into this category as could getting your twenty-something son to leave home.

There are practically an infinite number of ways the “project” could end. But that’s up to you to imagine. See below for some tips on how to feel into the right fit for you. 

Here are some challenges you might experience in your projects, which visualization can help with: 

1. Staring at the “blank screen” effect. Too many possibilities can paralyze you. When this happens, we refuse to choose any possibility, waiting for some sign from the cosmos that one of our ideas is the right one to pursue. The primary way to overcome this problem – through visualization — is to pick one of the possibilities and start making it real.
2. Getting stuck in the “HOW” before getting clear on the “WHAT.” “How” questions can sometimes over-constrain our ideas.  If you’re stuck on ‘how’, focus on a compelling, positive outcome you can imagine coming to pass, and visualize that rather than obsessing over a specific method.
3. Picking a scope that’s too big or too small. Think of this challenge as the Goldilocks principle. If your idea is too big to fathom, it starts to go into wish land. If the scope is too small, it’s easy to overlook. To overcome this challenge, upgrade or downgrade the scope of your visualization until you get a fuzzy future state that tugs at you. Yes, this is an intuitive thing, but you’ll know when you hit “just right.”

Visualization is a skill (like writing) more than it is a capability (like hearing). Practice and experience make you better at it. The skill will also prevent spinning wheels — it helps you choose to get started, even when you don’t know precisely where you’ll end up.

Make sure to check back for more details on the five essential skills needed to use Momentum to its full advantage. 

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