Hello friend

I was out for a walk this morning when I remembered about one of the first lessons I learned from Tony Robbins.

Before I get started I’ll tell you a little tale from my past.

I was 17 and had recently passed my driving test. I was out for a drive with my girlfriend when all of a sudden I noticed the car behind me getting closer and closer. As it started fill my rear view mirror I noticed that the guys driving were threatening us.

I was concentrating so much on what was going on behind me that I started to drive erratically and swerve all over the place. I managed to mount the curb and once I even crossed the white line which resulted in furious horn blowing from the oncoming vehicles. In short I was all over the place and out of control.

In that sense life and driving are much the same. I spent a lot of my life living looking backwards and re-affirming how bad everything was and more importantly how I didn’t like myself or the way I dealt with certain situations. Trust me when I say that you can never move forward whilst you are looking backwards - you will crash eventually. I know this all too well - on many occasions.

So I can imagine you’re thinking what should I do then. That stuff really did happened to me - I can’t just erase it.

This is true but it is a fact that you can only look in one direction at once. If your looking to the future then you can’t look back into the past at the same time. Makes sense right? There is a great way to use this which is to design your ideal future, then to live there by visualising it in as much detail as possible. Try to imagine what it would look like, smell like, feel like, sound like or maybe even taste like - get all of your senses involved to make it as realistic as possible.

I wrote down everything that I would want in the life of my dreams. Where I wanted to live, my dream car, the kind of house I wanted, what I wanted to do, my ideal weight, my ideal fitness level, the kind of people I would want to be friends with - everything I could think of. I then spent a fair amount of time visualising and being thankful for having these things in my life already. I would imagine I was driving my dream car - even though mine was an old banger. I would look through design mags for house ideas. I would even visualise myself speaking in from of groups of people.

As you can imagine you start to get a pretty vivid picture in your mind after a while. So much so that after a while I would have periods where I didn’t even think about the bad stuff. There were also times when I realised I had achieved one of the things that I had written down originally which gave me a huge boost.

This brings me up till today - about 7 years since I heard this lesson for the first time.

I’m by no means perfect but I’m a 1000% better than I was back then. I have my own house where I wanted to live near the country. I had my dream car but didn’t like it so got a regular one for now! I am my ideal weight and fitness. Most importantly - I am happy

Oh yeah - to finish the story….

In the end I had to stop at some traffic lights. Even though I was scared - I had a good look in my mirror and it was then that I saw it was two of my crazy friends, showing off  in their Dad’s car. They had chased us for a laugh, so there was never really any threat - apart from the threat I was to myself (and everyone else). Again, not unlike in my life!

So I ask you - Would you set off for a car journey without a destination? I don’t think you would, would you? Of course not - so why do we journey through life without a clue where we are going, with no destination?

I would like to ask you another question - Have you got a destination, a vision of where you’re going? If so then why not review it, give it a spring clean then reaffirm where you want to be.

If you haven’t got one then now would be a great time to start thinking about where and who you would like to be. After all - you are worth it my friend

I’ll be going into much more detail on the power of visualising and goal setting in future postings - I hope this story has whetted you appetite.

Have fun

Tim xx