If you are in mid-career burnout or thinking about your second act post-retirement, and I ask you what would you like to be, now that you have grown up?
The chances are that you will say, “I want to be an author or a writer, or you may say, “I want to be my own boss and start my own business.” Your teenage dreams of being a Rock Star, Actor, or Investment Banker gave way to the more mundane dreams of getting a job and keeping it as you entered the “real” world.
But we humans are dreamers, serial dreamers. We just trade one for the other, keeping hope in our bosom alive. So we dream of the next level; higher pay, better perks, and grander titles, only to realize that they are pipe dreams for most of us. We find solace by reminding ourselves of the old English nursery rhyme:
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
But our tendency to daydream does not let up. According to a 2013 article in Huff Post by William Dietrich, a pollster reported that more than 80% of Americans would like to be an author. I do not doubt that if they did an international poll, the numbers would be as high or close enough. According to a Google estimate, 130 million books have been published in human history. And a UNESCO survey of 123 countries states that each year a total of 2.2 million books are published!
Another most common dream is entrepreneurship. 62% of adults think it’s a promising career and 26% want to be entrepreneurs for the freedom to be their own boss. These are big numbers.
So why only a small number of people actualize their dreams?
A dreamer myself, with a mind abuzz with hundreds of random thoughts going in and out every nanosecond, I had an epiphany one day that our mind does not control us if we know how to channelize it to be a servant and not the master!
In our new age thinking, many motivational speakers and self-help authors have brought out the benefits of creating a vision. It somehow taps into the Universe’s energy and orchestrates everything to manifest for you. To me, that seems too surreal and given to magical thinking.
In our pragmatic world, we use creative mind-mapping with doodles and nodes, allowing a free flow of thoughts connected to the central idea and joined by lines and squiggles and color-coding to envision a future state. (Nowadays, Mind Mapping has become IT based processing-mapping Apps, with more linear thinking than the free flow creativity-induced exploration). We also have storyboarding and vision boarding, augmented with focus groups and brainstorming for granular details to create the picture of the future state of business and strategy, which result in greater motivation and momentum toward implementation. But how does it work when we use only imagination in abstraction to create a future?
How do the mere thoughts get converted into actual events that lead to desired results? How does it all come together?
Over the last decade-plus, we have made great strides in understanding how the mind works, how the mind and brain interact, and how the body-mind connects and uses biological processing and neurochemistry to activate and transmit information.
Let me state it right here. I am not a neuroscientist, but I have been curious about Neuroscience since I discovered neuroplasticity and have been researching purely out of curiosity.
Conceptually, to convert wishful thinking into a reality, we must propel the energy of thoughts and engage in processing a group of relevant ideas by:
- Envisioning: Creating a mental image with granular details.
- Stating the intent: Intention provides a guidepost to map out a blueprint of how to get from point A to point B. This blueprint is essentially like an architect’s perspective drawing of strategy. It leads to making a clear action plan.
- The action plan is a result of tactical thinking.
- Tactical action leads to implementation.
- Implementation leads to the outcome.
- The outcome further leads to adjustment for success.
Viola!
Daydreamers never get beyond the wannabe stage because they do not move beyond the first and second point here. Good at conjuring the big picture, they loathe getting into granularity in creating specificity into the big picture. Perhaps mental laziness or ignorance of how the brain works sabotage the process because the first two activities are subconscious. Most people are not aware of the covert actions occurring in the brain.
A thought is a prerequisite for action, but it is quite possible to think and never act on it. Perhaps inertia occurs, and dreams are abandoned before getting to point 3 to 6 in the above list. Although devising strategies, tactical plans, and implementation are at a conscious level with full awareness.
So how does the Mind-Brain-Body interaction turn daydreams into reality?
According to neuroscientists, the mind is a hyper-charged organ bombarded with information of all kinds from various sources. It handles the processing of information very efficiently, weeding out the irrelevant from the important before it gets stored in the memory banks. It needs input from all the five senses to simulate a vision of reality in thoughts. It embeds this imprint in mind through your reinforcing the concept of what you want to be and how you want to feel and experience repeatedly, at least once or twice a day, so that it can mobilize the responsible brain-parts to release the neurochemicals for transmitting it electrochemically to strengthen that part of muscle or area of the brain that one uses in actual execution. Your vision must include the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the feel of the future state of what you wish to experience. With the repeated input, the brain goes to work to enable the shift from a vision to reality. It happens because the brain does not distinguish between the real or imagined scenario.
Well-known research involved an experiment where the researchers recruited two groups of volunteers, one to play a real piano and the other to simulate playing the piano. In this two-part experiment, they took brain-scans over five consecutive days. Then, they compared brain scans of both the groups with a third control group that neither played nor imagined playing the piano. The brain activity was identical between the real piano players and those that simulated playing the imaginary piano. It was a breakthrough finding. (https://drdavidhamilton.com/does-your-brain-distinguish-real-from-imaginary/)
The mind, an abstract entity that we call consciousness (unlike the brain’s organs), plays its role like a panoramic camera lens taking in all that it sees and experiences from the five senses as the inputs, and efficiently processes using past experiences stored in memories, including the experiences stored in unconscious and subconscious levels. And it compares, interprets, and determines the importance and relevance to your life, and transmits it to memory ignoring the rest. This transmission to the appropriate brain parts triggers the brain to releases neurochemicals for electrochemical activities in neurons to the muscles to respond to the stimuli. A physical and emotional reaction is a behavior that results from the mind-brain interaction.
When we create a clear vision of a future state we wish to achieve, we use imagination. Pay attention to the word imagination! We are essentially telling our mind to ‘make it happen’ by embedding images of a future state that we wish to have, and orchestrate whatever will result in manifesting in reality.
Going back to my camera analogy, it is like putting a close-up lens and filters to sharpen and get the desired result. Our vision becomes a frame of reference for our senses and mind to pay active attention selectively. For example, on long car rides, I used to tell my young children to pick a color and then count how many cars they counted of their chosen color. Of the hundreds of vehicles on the road, their eyes quickly picked out the specific colored car. What I had done was ask them to envision their favorite car and created an intent, leading to selective attention. And that is how visualization aids us in achieving our goals.
An article in the Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/back-to-the-future-how-th/)by David Biello confirms that the brain can anticipate future events using experience with similar events (based on scientific experiments). So when we provide a vivid “template” of the future that we desire and imagine, the brain uses various parts, in addition to the most active part collaboratively, to supply data and information from the memories and interpretations to predict what will happen next. As I mentioned earlier, the brain does not differentiate the imagined event from an actual event, so the brain’s activity triggers similar action-reaction and behavioral manifestation. Repeating mental images of the future state results in neuronal activity that strengthens the brain’s areas.
So how does Universe figure in manifesting a daydream into reality?
The Universe is what the Universe is, in constant motion of time and tide, like the road with hundreds of cars in my example of travel with my children and their desire to count the specific colored cars. At any given moment, there are hundreds of opportunities around us. Still, we ignore most of them until something interesting or relevant catches our attention because we are not aware. That is selective attention. Our selective attention makes those opportunities pop-out in our consciousness, which are part of the vision we have held in our minds. Once our imagined future comes into our consciousness, we recognize the opportunities that are likely to yield the desired results. It motivates us to take action. We do so because we have primed ourselves to do so.
Like successful Novel writers,
Begin with the end in mind
Happy Visualization!