Page 73 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

anywhere!” Yet, that’s how we live our days when we don’t check the map.

Sometimes in my seminars on motivation, people say they don’t have time
for goal-setting. But the four-circle system I described takes only four minutes!
Once during a workshop on goal-setting, I asked if anyone in the audience had
any interesting experiences with visualization. We had been discussing sports
psychologist Rob Gilbert’s observation that “losers visualize the penalties of
failure, and winners visualize the rewards of success.”

A young couple shared a story about how they had wanted for years to buy
their own home, but never got the money together to do it. Then one day, after
reading about the practice of treasure-mapping (posting pictures of what you
want in life somewhere in your office or home), they decided to put a picture on
their refrigerator of a new house, the kind they dreamed of owning.

“In less than nine months, we’d made the down payment and moved in,”
said the amazed husband. His wife added, “Alongside the photo of the house we
eventually put a little thermometer that we filled in as our savings toward a down
payment grew.”

I have heard many similar stories about how treasure-mapping has worked
for people. I have also read books and attended seminars that explain why. Most
of them discuss what happens to the subconscious mind when you send it a
picture of something you want. Because the subconscious mind only

communicates with vividly imagined or real pictures, it will not seek to bring
into your life anything you can’t picture.

Without advertising our goals to ourselves, we can lose sight of them
altogether. It is possible to go an entire week, or two or three, without thinking
about our main goals in life. We get caught up in reacting and responding to
people and circumstances and we simply forget to think about our own purpose.

I have an example of how this practice worked in my life: Three years ago I
was interested in giving more seminars on the subject of fund-raising. I
coauthored a book called RelationSHIFT: Revolutionary Fund-Raising with
University of Arizona development director Michael Bassoff. We had done
some successful seminars on the subject, and I wanted to do more. So, on the

wall of my bedroom I put up a white poster board, and on that board I put up a
lot of pictures and index cards with my goals on them. I wanted to have all those
goals in front of me when I woke up each morning, even though I only spent a
minute or two looking at the board each day.