Make Your Goals Come Alive through Imagery

Sherri Fisher’s recent instructive post, Nurturing Your Creative Mindset, provides ways for people to use their creativity by forming mastery goals. The deliberate practice of an activity through a growth mindset can eventually lead to the realization of goals, and this may be enhanced by using vivid imagery of an anticipated outcome.

What Happens When We Use Imagery?

The use of imagery may be compared to a mental video/DVD library, a cataloged collection of thoughts that one has the power to create, recall, and consequently use to evoke a variety of psycho-physiological responses. We have amassed a great number of mental movies that have been stored in long-term memory. We have good movies, bad movies, and even horror movies of images – real or imagined – that have influenced our lives. Our images can represent all our senses, not just visual memories. We also store auditory (sound), kinesthetic (touch, feel), gustatory (taste) and olfactory (smell) memories. When we focus and practice positive imagery, our imagined thoughts have a greater opportunity to become reality. The more conscious we are at using our senses for good, the more adept we become at creating positive future scripts that link the mind to the body.

What Happens When We Set Goals?

In her book Creating Your Best Life, Caroline Adams Miller suggests that goal setting is a bit more complex than adhering to “just add water” goal-setting methods. She says, “having a ‘realistic’ goal may not stretch your imagination and abilities as far as possible, while a goal that is very audacious might be appropriate for your particular emotional make-up and situation, but not for someone else’s.” To address the components of bold goals, she has made a practical extension of the goal-setting work of Edwin Locke and Gary Latham.

Effective goals have the following qualities:

• both specific and challenging
• approach and not avoidance oriented, making them exciting and magnetic
• driven by values
• intrinsic (not extrinsic) — yours, not what someone else wants
• measurable — producing ongoing feedback
• non-conflicting and leveraged
• capable of stimulating the state of flow
• written down
• pre-committed — you make yourself answerable for them
• capable of creating feelings of both independence and connectedness

Using imagery to realize your goals

Three years ago, I wrote a post called The Digital Scrapbook/Portfolio that focused on using anticipated memory – visualizing future thoughts that helps to frame hopes and dreams and make them become real. At that time, I wrote about Keegan Kinkade, one of my former students at Culver, who aspired to become a U.S. Navy pilot. In his digital portfolio, he had placed a vivid video of a jet pilot taking off from an aircraft carrier with the backdrop of a “Steppenwolf” song. He later went on to college at the United States Naval Academy (USNA).

Keegan has been very specific with his goals as a Navy Midshipman. They are exciting and magnetic, derived from his strong value system. His goals were written in his high school portfolio, as he made a pre-commitment to follow these aspirations. His goals have stimulated frequent experiences of flow. For his final semester at Annapolis, Keegan has been named Brigade Commander, the highest position within the Brigade of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy. He claims that watching the video reinforced his goal to attend the Academy, a major step toward becoming a Naval pilot, an ambition that he will pursue after graduation.

 

Like Keegan, you can capture anticipated experiences in a variety of sensory modalities including visualization in order to

1. foster self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-analysis
2. gain a more explicit and overt awareness of progress toward your goals
3. “connect the dots” of your experience more meaningfully by tracking your life satisfaction

Your internal video/DVD system is free. Just plug in your positive images that fit your realistic goals!

 

---

 
References

Miller, C. A. & Frisch, M. B. (2009), Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide. New York: Sterling.

Latham, G. (2009). “Motivating Employee Performance through Goal Setting”. In E. A. Locke (Ed), Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior: Indispensable Knowledge for Evidence-Based Management. Wiley.

Images
The Library courtesy of peruisay
USS Nimitz Continues Operations courtesy of DVIDSHUB