Advertise to yourself

Advertise to yourself

I often start the day by drawing four circles on a blank piece of paper.
The circles represent my day (today), my month, my year, and my life.
Inside each circle I write down what I want. It can be a dollar figure, it
can be anything, and the goals can change from day to day—it doesn't
matter. There is no way to get this process "wrong."

But by writing the goals down, I am like an airline pilot who is
consulting his or her map prior to takeoff. I am orienting my mind to
what I am up to in life. I am reminding myself of what I really want.
We wouldn't think, before an airline flight, of poking our heads into the
cabin and saying to the pilot, "Just take me anywhere!" Yet that's how
we live our days when we don't check the map.

Sometimes in my seminars on motivation, people observe that 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 had co-authored 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.

One of the index cards I had pinned to my goal board simply contained
the bold-markered letters, "ASU." It was almost lost among the
hodgepodge of photos and goals I'd covered the board with, and I'm
certain I only barely noticed it each morning as I got up. I put it up there
because I thought it would be great if I could give seminars to Arizona
State University, especially now that I was living in the Phoenix area. I
really thought nothing more of it.

One day at the offices of the corporate training company where I
worked, I was asked to shake the hand of a new employee, Jerry. I
asked Jerry to come in and sit down. We talked in my office for a few
minutes about his joining the company. I asked him about his family and
he casually mentioned that his parents were living in town, and that his
mother worked at ASU.

Normally, that would have meant nothing. ASU is a very well-known
and oft-mentioned presence in the Phoenix area. But something went
off in my mind when

he said that, and I know in hindsight that "something" was my daily
view of my goal board.
My ears perked up when he said "ASU" and I asked him, "What does
your mother do at ASU?" "She's the chief administrative assistant to the
development director at the ASU Foundation," he said. "They're in
charge of all the fund-raising at the University."

I really brightened at that point, and I told Jerry about my past work in
fund-raising at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and how I'd always
wanted to do similar work at ASU. He said he'd be delighted to
introduce me to his mother and to the development director himself.
Within a month, ASU fund-raisers were attending my seminar in
"RelationSHIFT" and I had realized one of the goals on my board.
I honestly believe that if I had not had a goal board up in my bedroom,
Jerry's mention of ASU would have gone right past me.
And this illustrates something important. We need to advertise our own
goals to ourselves. Otherwise, our psychic energy is spread too thin
across the spectrum of things that aren't that important to us.