Top o’ the Mornin’ to Ya!
TLDR: Discover why visualization has the most transformative power among the morning savers but is most often used incorrectly. Learn how to connect your big Kingdom vision to daily steps through strategic visualization that includes all the “glue” between where you are today and where God is calling you to go.
What?
We are on part three of the morning savers: Visualization. Visualization probably has the most transformative power and probably is most often used incorrectly.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, I was an alpine ski racing coach working primarily with 10 to 15-year-old kids. In that age range, they started their first downhill ski race – that’s skiing down the hill going 70 miles an hour. Part of the process of downhill is practice runs. They practice on the course before they race, and they inspect the entire course from top to bottom before they practice.
As they inspect that entire course, they get to visualize every piece of it along the way. You’ve seen that picture where the athletes are closing their eyes and they’re wiggling around like this, visualizing going through the course. The athletes memorized the course, visualized the course, exercised their mind to go through the course on their own and feel the muscle movements, the muscle actions that it would take. And they timed it.
We would get to the finish of our inspection, and they would all close their eyes, get down in their meditative stance, and they would go through the course. We would set a timer. The target times that they were going for is what we looked for as they felt making each turn in the course. When they got up there for their first practice run, they had already run the course five or ten times through our inspection and rehearsal.
Why?
This experience revealed something crucial about visualization: the transformative power is so insane that it’s hard to believe, but most people use it incorrectly. The first part of visualization breakdown is picturing that thing way out there – that’s your big goal, that’s where you’re going. For me it’s being like Tony Robbins and speaking in front of a big stage and having tons of Christian men swarming around and building each other up and building up God’s kingdom.
But if all I had was that goal way out there, I would get deluded – not diluted, deluded. I would get like “oh, I’ll never get there. Oh, I can’t do it.” The problem is when people only visualize the end goal without connecting it to today.
The other visualization is all the parts between me here now today and that big vision. When it’s separated from our big vision, we can’t stay in discipline, we can’t stay in momentum. We get that motivation high but we need the discipline and momentum to keep doing each step each day.
Lesson
So visualization has to include the big vision, but the glue is the part that matters. What is the glue? What are the next steps? What are the baby steps? Who is the coach? The example, the target. Who is the me I want to be in the next two to three years? And where does that fit in my visualization? Where is the goal in the next five to 10 years? That’s the glue.
That’s where the superpower of visualization comes in – because it connects me all the way out there and brings me back to here. And it’s like “oh, that’s all connected. It’s all connected.” When we lose the connection, we can change that. We learn more, we know where we’re going more, we want something different because we’ve learned along the way.
But we gotta keep it grounded. Keep it connected. Keep it in chain with, in alignment with, on a path with where we are today. As soon as we take where we’re at today and it’s separated from our big vision, we can’t stay in discipline.
If you ran up to a set of stairs and there was only the top step, you’d be like “ah!” You need all the steps in a staircase to be like “oh yeah, I need to visualize each step all the way up to the top.” And that’s how our visualization comes together.
Apply
Get that visualization, get it clear. Add all the senses to it and connect it to the now stuff. All the now things have to be connected to the future things. Visualization should include:
1. Your big Kingdom vision (the top step)
2. Your 5-10 year goals
3. Who you want to be in 2-3 years
4. Your next steps and baby steps
5. Today’s actions
Write down in the Doobly Doo: What’s your big Kingdom vision? What are the specific steps between where you are today and that vision? How can you visualize not just the destination but the entire staircase of steps to get there?
Consider: Are you only dreaming about the big goal, or are you visualizing the daily disciplines and intermediate steps that will actually get you there? How can you make your visualization more connected and grounded in actionable steps?
Tomorrow we’ll cover exercise, then reading, and then scribing to complete our morning savers series.
You be blessed!
Morning Savers Part 3: Visualization That Connects Big Dreams to Daily Steps
