Episode 1039: Visualization and Actualizing

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1039 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:07] Chris Mamula: I'm Chris Mamula. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to take control of your money is key.

[00:00:20] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.

[00:00:25] Scott Maderer: perfect world that you know is just around the corner, but never comes to today because the corner keeps moving. The corner keeps going out over and over again. So if there's things that you've been visualizing for decades for years, for weeks, What can you do to begin to take action to actualize that visualization.

[00:00:50] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn [00:01:00] to use your time. And your treasures for your true call and the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:16] In today's episode about investing in yourself through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about what visualization really is. I also talk about what actualization is and I share why visualization is never enough to achieve your goals. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books.

[00:01:40] But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose [00:02:00] from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via.

[00:02:06] That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast, visualization and actualization. You hear a lot about doing visualizations. Activities doing positive affirmations, whether it's the people talking about the law of attraction and this idea that to manifest a better existence, you visualize that energy.

[00:02:38] And then the like energy is attracted to you. And we've talked before about the law of attraction and how there is truth to it. And then there's also not truth to it. And I wanted to dive a little deeper into one of the problems that I've seen happen when people. Go through this act of visualization. So first off, what is [00:03:00] visualization?

[00:03:00] Visualization is a practice of not just saying, Hey, this is what I want, but actually sitting down and going through the exercise of picturing in your mind, what would it feel like if you got that? It's getting in touch with the emotional reasons behind what you're attempting to achieve. It's trying to program your mind and your subconscious to begin to feel that feeling before you've actually achieved.

[00:03:34] And the idea is that when you do that if you think to yourself I want to have a new job, but then every time you think that you feel fear and doubt and challenges, then you're less likely to actually pursue that new job. But if on the other hand, you can program your mind to feel excitement and joy and feeling like this is something that you really [00:04:00] want.

[00:04:01] Then you're much more likely to follow through and create a situation that gets you into a new job. So it's actually leading to the second step, which is actualization. Actualization is taking action in the real world to create. The likelihood that visualization becomes true to increase that likelihood, to begin to actually do things in response to visualization.

[00:04:34] And the problem is oftentimes people get stuck in the visualization step. They create a vision board, they create pictures on the wall. They create pictures in their head. They picture themselves achieving that. And because that gives them an emotional pain. They think that emotional payoff is sufficient and therefore they don't actually move towards the next step of actualization and taking [00:05:00] action, making it really happen, or they visualize, and they visualize problems and challenges and things that create negative emotion, but then they don't do the next step of visualizing them.

[00:05:13] Solving those problems moving past that negative emotion, they don't visualize themselves taking that fear in their gut and turning it into excitement because the truth is you can spend decades stuck in the idea of visualizing a new job. But if it never comes true, it's probably because you're not actually moving to the next step of actualizing of doing actions of taking positive action.

[00:05:45] And more often than not. It's because of one of two things, either you're visualizing challenges and fear and negative emotion, but you're not doing the process of processing those emotions and moving past them, [00:06:00] or the visualization gives you enough of emotional payoff that you actually feel like it's not necessary to take out.

[00:06:08] Don't get me wrong. You probably don't say that out loud. You don't say yeah, this feels good. So I'm just gonna stick it here. And I'm just going to stay stuck where I'm at. And I'm just going to dream about that better day. And that feels good enough to not actually make it a better day. You wouldn't say that out loud to anyone.

[00:06:27] You wouldn't even admit it to yourself, but often that's what happens. And again, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying visualization is bad. It's not, visualization is fantastic. It is a good first step, but you need to visualize more than just the emotional feeling of what happens when you had. You also need to look at the challenges and look at what negative emotions does it bring up and then make sure that you address those and visualize what would you do to overcome them.

[00:06:59] And then once you've done [00:07:00] that, you need to move to the next step of actually turning that visualization into concrete action. So that you don't get stuck in visualization and do nothing but dream and picture that perfect world that you know is just around the corner, but never comes to today because the corner keeps moving.

[00:07:23] The corner keeps going out over and over again. So if there's things that you've been visualizing for decades for years, for weeks, for months, what can you do to begin to take action to actualize that visualization? Today. Thanks for listening.

[00:07:41] Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your. If you liked this episode on the [00:08:00] stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent.

[00:08:12] Or if you're in the us, you can text 4, 4, 2, 2, 2 talent tips. That's talent tips to 4 4 2, 2, 2, and get those tips until next time. Invest your time. Your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact the world. .