Powering up a Vision

A couple of days ago, I was chatting with a very good friend of mine, discussing the power of intentionality and visioning – why it works sometimes, and not always – and how we might increase the probability of creating what we envision.

And, generally speaking, what we are living is what we envision. There was a couple, the husband being someone who was suspicious that his wife was running around. Every time she was a little late, or when she got all dressed up, he kept envisioning her being romantically involved with someone else. His constant images of her betrayal never abated, getting more graphic in his mind. After years of this, she actually did have an affair. Now I'm not saying he CAUSED her to have an affair. That was strictly a choice on her part. However, I will say his badgering her about being unfaithful made it easy for that image to take root in her Reticular Activating System (see previous post).

The more powerful the emotion surrounding the vision, the more powerful the vision. So if you want something to happen, make the vision specific, adding in all the sensory input from your eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch and let yourself be awash in physical sensations/feelings – the 'go' juice of a vision.
Example, when I was in grad school, I had a paid-for Sport Fury – a gas guzzler. The university was a minimum 45 minute drive – 3 days a week. I was a single mom, working 2 part-time jobs. I decided to envision a small car that got 30 miles to the gallon, and it had to be maintenance free (new), and, oh, no car payments. So I told several people what I was looking for, realizing that it sounded next to impossible, but I kept visioning filling up my gas tank once a week for $10 (this was a while ago!) – and grinning like a Cheshire cat. About 10 days later, a friend of mine told me a friend of hers had just bought a Plymouth Arrow, brand new. She didn't like it, wanted a bigger car. Hmmmm.

Bottom line, the arrangement we made was that we would trade cars – she would continue to make the payments on her car for the next year and a bit, until she had fully paid for my car … which was the exact time frame in which I would be graduating with my masters. So I got a brand new car, costing me nothing until after I graduated, and guess how many miles to the gallon it got …. 30.1 mph! And Plymouth Arrows were, at that time, notoriously high maintenance – mine never was.

Later I realized that part of the power of that vision was that I had no counter-vision running in parallel to undermine my main vision. I was not feeling desperate about running out of money paying for gas. There were no other visions, fueled by some version of fear to drain energy from my primary vision – partly because it seemed almost like a joke – yeah, I want a new car for free. If I hadn't had a car already, it likely would have been easier to be more desperate, which is born of a different vision of 'lack' – the desperation could have out-weighed the delightful amusement born of my primary vision.

If my fear-driven vision had had more fuel (more fear) than my delightful amusement-driven vision, it probably would have won the contest, and I would have lived my more powerful vision – buying gas every few days for $20 a tank.