You may have done this exercise before but indulge me. I want you to look around your room and look for anything red, okay, now close your eyes and I want you to think of all the green things you saw. Hahaha! Go ahead and open your eyes and look around, how much green do you see now? I’m sure it’s a whole lot more than when I asked you to look for the red and then think about green, right? This is because our brains see what we want it to see.
I’m going to give early props to Dr. Swart for prompting me to write this post. I listened to her book called ‘The Source’ where she talks about manifesting as the blending of science and spirituality. This really resonates with me because I have an analytical and strategic brain, so I’m “hard wired” to want to know the why and how behind the seemingly foo-foo act of manifesting.
That exercise I just asked you to do is known as selective filtering – it’s our brain’s strategy to filter out unimportant details to ensure that we don’t get distracted from factors that don’t matter to us in that moment. A very simple example of how our brain naturally filter this information in order to protect itself from info overload is us not feeling the cloths you’re wearing or forgetting your glasses are on top of your head. If you haven’t done that, lucky you!
Our brains take selective filtering to another level by also performing an action known as value tagging – basically we interpret the logical before emotional and our brain creates memories that may be recalled at a later date if something triggers it. Our sense of smell is a powerful memory jogger, by the way. Our brains simply aren’t wired to make us happy; the sole purpose is to keep us alive and the selective filtering and value tagging are the brains way of controlling our information intake.
So, how do you train your brain to get out of survival mode and to dream? Visualize. You want to visualize as deeply and vividly as you possible can. What you want your life to look like? Who is there with you? What are the smells, feelings, taste, colors, location? You want to come up with as much detail as possible.
We can do this for short periods of time, but the longer you focus on your goal or dream the more impact it will have, because you’re training your brain to do the value tagging in a different way. Simply put you can’t manifest what you don’t consciously notice.
Here’s a powerful example that Dr. Swart shared about the power of visualization that I’ll paraphrase. A scientific study was done with 3 groups of weightlifters: 1 group did nothing for a week, 1 group had specific finger & elbow weight exercises they did to focus on certain muscles in the fingers and biceps, repeated several times a day, and the last group just visualized lifting finger and elbow weights. The growth in muscle mass in the group that did nothing, was of course, little to nothing, in the weightlifting group, it was around 50%, and the growth in muscle mass in the visualization group was between 13-30%.
That’s a massive amount of growth just from simply visualizing using finger and elbow weights. I mean, let’s all start visualizing ourselves killing in with our workouts and the weight should literally start disappearing. Tee-hee! No? I mean it’s worth a try!
So, if what we think about we bring about, how can we get our goals and dreams to be top of mind? One of the most powerful ways to get our visions (and keep them) at the forefront of our minds is through vision boards. Make sure you tangible items on it too, not just fantasy. Your vision board should include something you can physically work to achieve within 3-6 months and at least one longer 12–18-month time frame goal. But the magic really happens when you include BHAGs [Big Hairy Audacious Goals] or magical opportunities. These are the far out of reach dreams or since you might not know what that is yet you can use something to symbolize that unknown magic you’re wanting to tap into, like a unicorn, your favorite colored balloon, or something that’s whimsical to you.
You want to keep your vision board in multiple locations or at least kept in a way that you look at it often. Perhaps in your bathroom or kitchen, by your bed, on your phone, as a screen saver, you get the picture. You want to make sure that you take advantage of getting those visualizations in your brain as much as possible and then back up your visions with daily action to help you attain those goals.
Using sensory integration takes it a step further. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you can physically buy a piece of clothing that you visualize yourself wearing to help your brain connect the desire with the reality. The more things on your vision board you can take responsibility for making happen will help you start seeing a cascade effect (more things will fall into place). Fulfilling what you can will also increase your confidence, which increases the testosterone hormone, which allows you to take more risk. And then those risks allow us to get one step closer to achieving our goals/dreams.
The last thing I want to make sure I highlight is the act of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means that you can’t rely on talent or manifesting alone. You have to work on a consistent basis towards your goals and dreams. Instead of thinking about it as “fake it until you make it,” I love what Dr. Swart said the neuroscience way of thinking is, “act it until you are it.” Boom!
I’m full of ideas and suggestions, so if you’d like a diffuser blend or roller bottle blend recipe (different than the one above) to help you anchor in your thoughts or motivate you, shoot me an email, I’d love to share one with you and it would be fun to hear about the goal you’re currently working on, if you’d like to share.
xoDanette