And in your mind’s eye – in your imagination – you would see a little red dot on the ground, and that would be you after you’ve fallen.
Logic goes out the window when imagination kicks in.
You could be assured a thousand times that you’re going to be okay and it’s totally safe, but you still wouldn’t be able to bring yourself to do it. Because when you imagine something bad happening, all the logical explanations and assurances disappear.
This is why we get frustrated when someone tries to reason with us about doing something that scares us. Their logic doesn’t help, because we can’t get past our limiting thoughts. To get the results we want, therefore, we must alter our imagination. If we can do that, we can put a process of change in motion that will positively impact what we accomplish in life.
It Starts with Your Imagination
| If you change your imagination | → then → | you change how you feel |
| If you change how you feel | → then → | you change what you’re going to do |
| If you change what you’re going to do | → then → | you change what you can accomplish |
| If you change what you accomplish | → then → | you change your life |
IMAGINE THE GOOD
Controlling Your Imagination
Let’s talk about how to take control of the part of your brain where imagination resides so you can use and control the creativity and sensitivity that G-d has given you.
After all, it is simply patterns of thought that have kept you stuck – self-limiting patterns.
If you were to interview ten thousand people with limitations, you would see that they share similar patterns of thought. And if you were to interview ten thousand people who live their dreams, you would see that they, too, share similar patterns of thought.
Imagine that two people are about to board an aircraft. One is nervous and the other calm. There’s no biological difference between them other than what’s happening in their brains. The nervous one is imagining that the plane is going to crash and he’s about to meet his death. The calm person is imagining that he’s arriving at his favorite vacation destination, excited about the great time he’s going to have.
If we were to switch their thinking patterns, whereby the person who is calm is now imagining that he’s going to die in an hour and the person who’s nervous is imagining that he’s going on his favorite vacation, their feelings would change.
It’s all about imagination. If you imagine that something bad is going to happen and things aren’t going to pan out the way you want, you’re going to be stressed, despite any facts that your logical brain knows that may refute this.
Don’t get me wrong. Logic serves a very powerful purpose. It keeps you in check so you don’t imagine things that make no sense or are totally outside reality. You’re not going to imagine walking through a street safely when there are cars coming at you at ninety miles an hour.
Yet you have the choice to always imagine that good things are going to happen, that things are going to pan out the way you want. If that’s how you imagine things will be, that’s how you’re going to feel, regardless of what logic dictates.
The way people can walk on a tightrope, or over fire, is by using their imagination. Once they logically recognize that there’s a way to do it safely and they have the skill, then all they need to do is imagine themselves on the other side safely.
That’s right – success in a seemingly over-the-top endeavor is primarily about controlling your imagination.
Remember: When you control your imagination, you control your feelings. And when you control your feelings, you control the direction your life will take.
UNDERSTAND YOUR FOUR-PART BRAIN
Let me give you a model to help you understand your brain so you can make changes to your imagination and get started right away on getting what you really want.
The following model shows the four parts of your brain: the unconscious mind, the subconscious mind, the critical filter, and the conscious mind.
Part 1 – Your Unconscious Mind
The job of the unconscious part of your brain is to control your heartbeat, your digestive system, your temperature, the blinking of your eyes, all the automatic processes. And it is under lock and key from G-d – and there’s very little you can do to control that part of your experience.
Part 2 – Your Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind is divided into two components.
Component A is the filing cabinet that stores every single memory you have ever experienced. According to researchers, we start storing information from the moment we’re conceived. Even when we are in our mother’s womb, we not only store information but can also access it. Some people believe that, through hypnosis, we can retrieve information from that time – that we can go back to our earliest experiences before and after birth and recall events. Even though we never experienced this time consciously, it was being recorded.
This component of the brain can store unlimited amounts of information.
Component B consists of our images of who we are and what we are. These are locked into our subconscious mind. They aren’t easily accessible, and for good reason! If we were affected and changed by anything anyone ever told us about ourselves, life would be quite a roller-coaster ride for us. That’s why these images are under lock and key.
Here’s an example to help you understand this concept better. You see yourself as a healthy person with a healthy heart. Because this is locked into your subconscious mind, if you walk down the street and somebody tells you you’re sick, it’s not going to affect you. You know you’re healthy.
Part of your job in achieving the life you desire is to make some changes to this part of your mind. But for now it suffices for you to know that this is part of your subconscious mind.
Part 3 – Your Conscious Mind
Your conscious mind is where you experience the thoughts you’re aware of. The conscious mind is very limited! For example, scientists claim that it can hold only seven to nine bits of information at a time.
But it also serves a very important function. It is the doorway to the subconscious mind. Anything that your senses experience passes through your conscious mind on the way to your subconscious mind.
Part 4 – Your Critical Filter
If we experience something through our senses, why is it that we don’t process everything consciously? Why are we not affected by everything we experience? The answer lies in the part of the brain called the critical filter, which is between your conscious mind and subconscious mind. It decides:
• which experiences will go in to the component of the subconscious mind that is just concerned with memory (it can be accessed at a later time without our even being aware that it was stored there), and
• which experiences in our conscious mind will reinforce those images we have of ourselves.
Going back to the example of your beliefs about your health, let’s suppose we’re friends and I tell you that your heart is weak. My statement would likely have no effect on you. It would go through your