The July 18 issue of Newsweek, the one with Sarah Palin on the cover, had a really interesting article on the Science of Success. It made for some very interesting career success reading. At the end of the article, five winners gave their perspective on winning: Lindsey Vonn, an Olympic Gold Medal Skier; Ken Jennings, winner of a record 74 straight Jeopardy shows; Tina Thompson, four time WNBA champion; Joey Chestnut, winner of five straight Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contests; and Jennifer Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winner – quite an eclectic group.

I’m a big Lindsey Vonn fan. She; lives in Vail CO, so she’s almost a neighbor. A couple of weeks ago, she won the 2011 ESPY award for Female Athlete of the Year.   Many people think she is the best American female ski racer ever.  This is what she had to say about ski racing and winning.  What she has to say applies to life and career success as well.

“The entire morning on a race day is a ritual, solely designed to me confidence. When I wake up, I do a workout and usually listed to rap. It gets me into that kind of aggressive state of mind. When I’m actually in the starting gate, I’m pretty calm. I’ve already visualized the course an hundred times and know exactly what I need to do.”

I like what she has to say about visualization. I am a big believer in the power of visualization. Tweet 12 in my career advice book, Success Tweets says, “Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed.”

As a career success coach, I suggest that once you define what career success means to you personally, you need to develop a clear mental picture of yourself as that career success. This image should be as vivid as you can you make it. Try to create your career success vivid image in 3-D.

When I was 25, I created a vivid mental image of myself as a success coach, motivational speaker, management consultant and author. I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations. This office had a floor-to-ceiling wall of books that I could use for easy reference. It also had a state of the art IBM Selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone. PCs and the Internet were science fiction in 1975.

I also saw myself having one to one discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team-building sessions in conference rooms at their locations. Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking. I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks. I saw myself signing a book I had written at a bookstore. I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my speaking, coaching and consulting gigs.

All of these vivid images came true. My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has two PCs and a cell phone, not a Selectric typewriter and clunky phone. The wall of books is there – overflowing. I’ve written 14 of the books on the shelf. People don’t smoke in my training and team-building sessions anymore and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I’ve imagined it. I’ve spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia. I am a million-mile flyer with Continental Air Lines.

I’m living my career success dream – in large part because I dared to visualize it all those years ago.  I created a detailed vivid mental image of my career success. Just like Lindsey Vonn, I was calmwhen I set out to create my career success, because my vivid mental image of my success helped me know exactly what I had to do.

What’s your career success dream? Have you created a vivid mental image of it? Take some time for yourself. Ask and answer these three questions:

• Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
• What will it look like and feel like when I’m there?
• What will my life be like?

Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success. This is not day-dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind.

Keep this mental picture of your career success with you as you go about your day-to-day business. Every once in a while, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of career success. If the answer is no, make sure that you take at least one act the very next day to move closer to your vivid mental image of your career success. In this way, you’ll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your goal.

The career coach success point here is simple common sense. Successful people define what their career success means to them personally. Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their career success. They heed the career advice in Tweet 12 in Success Tweets: “Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your career success, the more likely you are to succeed.” They use their vivid mental image to help keep their dreams alive and to keep moving forward to what they want in their lives and careers. Creating a vivid mental image of your career success is not day-dreaming. It’s real work – it’s the work of designing your future, so you can take the steps necessary to create it.

That’s my career advice on the power of visualization for career success. What do you think? Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment. As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success. I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained. It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail. Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy. You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

The July 18 issue of Newsweek, the one with Sarah Palin on the cover, had a really interesting article on the Science of Success. It made for some very interesting career success reading. At the end of the article, five winners gave their perspective on winning: Lindsey Vonn, an Olympic Gold Medal Skier; Ken Jennings, winner of a record 74 straight Jeopardy shows; Tina Thompson, four time WNBA champion; Joey Chestnut, winner of five straight Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contests; and Jennifer Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winner – quite an eclectic group.

I’m a big Lindsey Vonn fan. She; lives in Vail CO, so she’s almost a neighbor. A couple of weeks ago, she won the 2011 ESPY award for Female Athlete of the Year.   Many people think she is the best American female ski racer ever.  This is what she had to say about ski racing and winning.  What she has to say applies to life and career success as well.

“The entire morning on a race day is a ritual, solely designed to me confidence. When I wake up, I do a workout and usually listed to rap. It gets me into that kind of aggressive state of mind. When I’m actually in the starting gate, I’m pretty calm. I’ve already visualized the course an hundred times and know exactly what I need to do.”

I like what she has to say about visualization. I am a big believer in the power of visualization. Tweet 12 in my career advice book, Success Tweets says, “Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed.”

As a career success coach, I suggest that once you define what career success means to you personally, you need to develop a clear mental picture of yourself as that career success. This image should be as vivid as you can you make it. Try to create your career success vivid image in 3-D.

When I was 25, I created a vivid mental image of myself as a success coach, motivational speaker, management consultant and author. I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations. This office had a floor-to-ceiling wall of books that I could use for easy reference. It also had a state of the art IBM Selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone. PCs and the Internet were science fiction in 1975.

I also saw myself having one to one discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team-building sessions in conference rooms at their locations. Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking. I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks. I saw myself signing a book I had written at a bookstore. I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my speaking, coaching and consulting gigs.

All of these vivid images came true. My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has two PCs and a cell phone, not a Selectric typewriter and clunky phone. The wall of books is there – overflowing. I’ve written 14 of the books on the shelf. People don’t smoke in my training and team-building sessions anymore and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I’ve imagined it. I’ve spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia. I am a million-mile flyer with Continental Air Lines.

I’m living my career success dream – in large part because I dared to visualize it all those years ago.  I created a detailed vivid mental image of my career success. Just like Lindsey Vonn, I was calmwhen I set out to create my career success, because my vivid mental image of my success helped me know exactly what I had to do.

What’s your career success dream? Have you created a vivid mental image of it? Take some time for yourself. Ask and answer these three questions:

• Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
• What will it look like and feel like when I’m there?
• What will my life be like?

Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success. This is not day-dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind.

Keep this mental picture of your career success with you as you go about your day-to-day business. Every once in a while, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of career success. If the answer is no, make sure that you take at least one act the very next day to move closer to your vivid mental image of your career success. In this way, you’ll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your goal.

The career coach success point here is simple common sense. Successful people define what their career success means to them personally. Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their career success. They heed the career advice in Tweet 12 in Success Tweets: “Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your career success, the more likely you are to succeed.” They use their vivid mental image to help keep their dreams alive and to keep moving forward to what they want in their lives and careers. Creating a vivid mental image of your career success is not day-dreaming. It’s real work – it’s the work of designing your future, so you can take the steps necessary to create it.

That’s my career advice on the power of visualization for career success. What do you think? Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment. As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success. I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained. It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail. Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy. You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

The other day I saw a great career success story on line about Roger Ferger, Publisher of the Cincinnati Inquirer.  As a young boy, Mr. Ferger was fascinated with newspapers.  He decided that he wanted to become an editor of a newspaper.   He visualized himself as a newspaper editor.

As the story goes, every day he pictured himself as an editor; he dreamed about it at night. He created a detailed vision in his mind of himself in an editor’s chair.  It was as if he had created a vivid color movie that he played back in his mind every night.

I tell this little story here because I think that visualization is very important to your life and career success.  Tweet 11 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Create a vivid mental image of yourself as a career success.  This vivid image will keep you motivated and moving forward.”  Tweet 12 says, “Visualization is powerful.  The more vivid the image you have of your career success, the more likely you are to succeed.”

Once you define what career success means to you personally, you need to develop a clear mental picture of yourself as a  career success.  This image should be as vivid as you can you make it.  Create your career success vivid image in 3-D.

When I was 25, I created a vivid image of myself as a career success coach, motivational speaker, management consultant and author.  I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations.  This office had a floor-to-ceiling wall of books that I could use for easy reference.  It also had a state of the art IBM Selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone.  PCs and the Internet were science fiction in 1975.

I also saw myself having one to one discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team-building sessions in conference rooms at their locations.  Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking.  I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks.  I saw myself signing a book I had written at a bookstore.  I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my speaking, coaching and consulting gigs.

All of these vivid images came true.  My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has two PCs and a cell phone, not a Selectric typewriter and clunky land line.  The wall of books is there – overflowing.  I’ve written 14 of the books on the shelf.  People don’t smoke in my training and team-building sessions anymore and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I’ve imagined it.  I’ve spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia.  I am a million-mile flyer with Continental Air Lines.

I’m living my career success dream – in large part because I dared to dream it all those years ago.

What’s your career success dream?  Have you created a vivid mental image of it?

I suggest that you take some time for yourself to visualize your career success.  Ask and answer these three questions:

• Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
• What will it look like and feel like when I’m there?
• What will my life be like?

Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success.  This is not day-dreaming.  It is real work.  You are designing your future in your mind. 

Keep this mental picture of your career success with you as you go about your day-to-day business.  Every day, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of career success.  If the answer is no, make sure that you take at least one act the very next day to move closer to your vivid mental image of your career success.  In this way, you’ll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your goal.

The career success coach success point here is simple common sense.  Successful people define what success means to them.  Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their career success.  Heed the career advice in Tweets 11 and 12 in Success Tweets. “Create a vivid mental image of yourself as a career success.  This vivid image will keep you motivated and moving forward.”  (Tweet 11) “Visualization is powerful.  The more vivid the image you have of your career success, the more likely you are to succeed.”  (Tweet 12) Use your vivid mental image of your career success to help keep your dreams alive and to keep moving forward to your life and career success.  Creating a vivid mental image of your career success is not day-dreaming.  It’s real work – it’s the work of envisioning your future, so you can take the steps necessary to create it.

That’s my career advice when it comes to developing a vivid mental image of your life and career success.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained.  It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

The other day I saw a great career success story on line about Roger Ferger, Publisher of the Cincinnati Inquirer.  As a young boy, Mr. Ferger was fascinated with newspapers.  He decided that he wanted to become an editor of a newspaper.   He visualized himself as a newspaper editor.

As the story goes, every day he pictured himself as an editor; he dreamed about it at night. He created a detailed vision in his mind of himself in an editor’s chair.  It was as if he had created a vivid color movie that he played back in his mind every night.

I tell this little story here because I think that visualization is very important to your life and career success.  Tweet 11 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Create a vivid mental image of yourself as a career success.  This vivid image will keep you motivated and moving forward.”  Tweet 12 says, “Visualization is powerful.  The more vivid the image you have of your career success, the more likely you are to succeed.”

Once you define what career success means to you personally, you need to develop a clear mental picture of yourself as a  career success.  This image should be as vivid as you can you make it.  Create your career success vivid image in 3-D.

When I was 25, I created a vivid image of myself as a career success coach, motivational speaker, management consultant and author.  I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations.  This office had a floor-to-ceiling wall of books that I could use for easy reference.  It also had a state of the art IBM Selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone.  PCs and the Internet were science fiction in 1975.

I also saw myself having one to one discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team-building sessions in conference rooms at their locations.  Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking.  I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks.  I saw myself signing a book I had written at a bookstore.  I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my speaking, coaching and consulting gigs.

All of these vivid images came true.  My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has two PCs and a cell phone, not a Selectric typewriter and clunky land line.  The wall of books is there – overflowing.  I’ve written 14 of the books on the shelf.  People don’t smoke in my training and team-building sessions anymore and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I’ve imagined it.  I’ve spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia.  I am a million-mile flyer with Continental Air Lines.

I’m living my career success dream – in large part because I dared to dream it all those years ago.

What’s your career success dream?  Have you created a vivid mental image of it?

I suggest that you take some time for yourself to visualize your career success.  Ask and answer these three questions:

• Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
• What will it look like and feel like when I’m there?
• What will my life be like?

Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success.  This is not day-dreaming.  It is real work.  You are designing your future in your mind. 

Keep this mental picture of your career success with you as you go about your day-to-day business.  Every day, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of career success.  If the answer is no, make sure that you take at least one act the very next day to move closer to your vivid mental image of your career success.  In this way, you’ll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your goal.

The career success coach success point here is simple common sense.  Successful people define what success means to them.  Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their career success.  Heed the career advice in Tweets 11 and 12 in Success Tweets. “Create a vivid mental image of yourself as a career success.  This vivid image will keep you motivated and moving forward.”  (Tweet 11) “Visualization is powerful.  The more vivid the image you have of your career success, the more likely you are to succeed.”  (Tweet 12) Use your vivid mental image of your career success to help keep your dreams alive and to keep moving forward to your life and career success.  Creating a vivid mental image of your career success is not day-dreaming.  It’s real work – it’s the work of envisioning your future, so you can take the steps necessary to create it.

That’s my career advice when it comes to developing a vivid mental image of your life and career success.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained.  It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

I am in the process of blogging about each of the tweets in my latest career success coach book, Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less.  You can get a free copy of Success Tweets at www.SuccessTweets.com.

Today’s focus is Tweet 25, one of several tweets on the importance of goal setting and goal achievement…

List the reasons you set for each goal you set for yourself.  These reasons will come in handy when you get tired and frustrated.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned Denis Waitley’s ideas on goal achievement.

1. Your goals need to be clear.
2. Your goals need to be written.
3. Your need to focus on your goals several times a day.
4. You need to visualize yourself achieving your goals.

Listing the reasons for your goals can help you with visualization.  This is turn will help you when you get tired and frustrated.  Tweet 14 says, “Don’t visualize the pain of failure, visualize the euphoria of success.”  Achieving a goal should be a euphoric experience.  If not, you probably didn’t set a high enough goal.

If you want a job with a specific company, list the reasons why you want to work for that company then visualize yourself showing up at work the first day and entering your new office.  If you want a promotion, list the reasons you want it and then visualize yourself reading the congratulatory emails from your friends when they read the announcement of your promotion.  If you want to start your own business, list the reasons for starting a business and then visualize yourself depositing your first check.  If you want to marry the woman (or man) of your dreams, list the reasons you want to marry that particular person and then visualize yourself on your wedding day and honeymoon.  This is some of the best career adivce I can give you.

Listing the reasons for each of your goals and then creating a vivid mental image of the euphoria you’ll feel when you accomplish them is a great way to keep you going when you are struggling with a goal. 

I used to work for Marathon Oil Company.  My job with Marathon was my first job in business.  Prior to that, I had been working in government.  I met my future Marathon boss at an American Ssociety for Training and Development convention in Atlanta.  He invited me to company headquarters to interview.  I arrived there the night before I was scheduled to have a full day of interviews.  I had the names and titles of the people with whom I would interview.  I had one big reason for wanting this job – it was my ticket to a career in business, a stepping stone to creating my own business one day.

That night, before I went to bed, I visualized myself on my first day of work there.   I also visualized (and rehearsed) what I would say to each of the people with whom I would interview the next day.  This visualization and rehearsal helped me relax during the interviews.  I kept the image of me on my first day at work for Marathon in mind as I interviewed.  I got the job.  I was euphoric. 

Many of the naysayers in my life told me that since I had worked in government for five years after college, that I would be unlikely to get a job in business.  I proved them wrong – because of my very important reason for wanting the job, my visualization of my success and because of my preparation.  It seemed as if I knew more about Marathon Oil Company than many of the people who interviewed me. 

These days I visualize myself as a successful internet entrepreneur.  I work in my home office, creating new information products that I sell on line.  I see big numbers in my PayPal account.  My reason is simple.  I want to spend more time at home, with Cathy and doing all of the things I like to do in beautiful Colorado.  I want to spend less time on planes and in hotels.

What are your reasons for each of your goals that will lead to your career success?  Are they really important to you?  Do you have a clear vision of you achieving these goals?  Are these mental images sharp, clear and vivid – or are they fuzzy and out of focus?  If it’s the latter, sharpen them up.  Create a really vivid mental image of you achieving each of the goals you’ve set for yourself.  Use the reasons for setting these goals in the first place as a place to start.  As I’ve mentioned in other blog posts and in several of my career success coach books, visualization isn’t daydreaming.  It’s important work that will help you become the life and career success you deserve to be.

The common sense career success coach point is simple.  Successful people follow the career advice in Tweet 25 in Success Tweets.  “List the reasons you set for each goal you set for yourself.  These reasons will come in handy when you get tired and frustrated.”  As a career success coach, You will get frustrated as you pursue your goals.  Your reasons for each goal will help you better visualize the euphoria of achieving it.  If you can vividly imagine the euphoria associated with achieving your life and career goals, you’ll be well on your way to achieving them.  Visualization makes it easier to do the work when things are not going well.  The reasons for each of your goals helps you create clear and vivid images of you as a success.

That’s my take on Tweet 25 in Success Tweets.  What’s yours?  What are your goals?  Please leave a comment sharing with us your vivid mental picture of what it will be like when you achieve one of them.  You will inspire us all.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud