Chapter 14

Succeeding in the Workplace: Creative Visualization as a Leg Up in Leadership

In This Chapter

Visualizing to develop your skills as a leader

Attaining success and beating the competition

Gaining your team’s respect

Conveying your vision successfully

Achieving greater levels of team motivation

To paraphrase a line from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night; some people are born leaders, others naturally progress to positions of leadership, and some have leadership thrust upon them. But whether or not leading comes naturally to you, being a good leader isn’t easy. You need to make difficult choices, assume responsibility for your team’s successes and failures, accept the praise and the blame, and keep people motivated, in line, and working together.

Being aware of the specific leadership traits you want to develop allows you to use visualization effectively to become a good leader.

A number of different traits make for a good leader, of which these are probably the top five:

Confidence: You have a high sense of confidence, in line with reality.

Consistency: You maintain a core set of values and follow through on plans.

Priorities: You ensure that group members know what needs to be done and when.

Purpose: You have a strong vision that you share clearly with the group.

Relationships: You’re concerned about group members and their input.

In this chapter I describe how you can use creative visualization as a practical tool to address many of the challenges that leaders face.

Visualizing to Achieve Success as a Leader

A good leader is never satisfied with past achievements and is continually on the lookout for ways to do better. Without these characteristics you stand the risk of increased competition from other groups in the organisation and other organisations as a whole, who (if they haven’t already) may surpass you in one or more areas such as research and development, creativity, turnover, profit, and so on. The world of business is highly competitive and good leadership is essential to maintaining a leading edge.

But even in less competitive industries, such as health care, education, and social work, room for improvement always exists and is often required. Faster response rates, higher qualifications and pass levels, and providing greater assistance are constantly demanded, especially in difficult economic climates in which more is expected from fewer financial resources.

The following visualization exercise helps you to stay on the lookout for ways to further improve your leadership skills:

1. Imagine that you’re a pole-vaulter.

The bar over which you need to vault is set at your current level of ability as a leader.

2. Hold the pole alongside your body and start running towards the jump.

Lift the pole high above your head as you run.

3. When you’re close enough to the bar, thrust the foot of the pole into the receptacle.

Leap as it lifts you up and clear of the bar.

4. Feel your sense of achievement as you sail over the bar.

Fall back down safely, and land on your back on the thick and spongy mat.

5. Visualize that the bar is now raised an additional inch (indicating even greater leadership skills) and perform the whole exercise again.

Vault successfully over your new personal leadership best.

Each time you practise this exercise, you reinforce in your mind (and your unconscious mind) your desire to always improve yourself and become ever better at leading others well and effectively.

Aiming for excellence

Excellence is a talent or quality that’s unusually good and so surpasses ordinary standards. So by aiming for excellence, you’re trying to raise your standards that little bit higher.

You can’t be the best at everything, but you can excel at one or two things by selecting a couple of goals at a time.

You may decide that your first excellence goal is customer satisfaction. Achieving such a rating requires dedication from all your customer-facing team members, with encouragement and support from you as their leader.

In order to provide your team members with the necessary reinforcement to achieve this (or any excellence-based) goal, repeat the following affirmations to yourself:

I aim to rise to excellence wherever I see the potential.

My quality of work will surpass ordinary standards.

I have the ability to produce superb work.

I will be the best that I can be.

I’m proud of the excellent things I’ve done.

Repeating these affirmations holds the concept clearly in your mind that excellence is all about being better than ordinary, producing things that are better than the average, attaining higher marks than the mean, and in leadership, guiding your team always to produce better than expected results.

When you repeat these affirmations think of something superb that you like such as a great painting, a wonderful piece of music or a gripping novel and desire to be as good as that. This helps strengthen the effect of the affirmations.

With this notion of excellence at the forefront of your mind, you motivate your team as follows:

You can explain to team members why providing truly excellent customer service is so important (repeat business, customer recommendations, fewer contract cancellations or product returns, and so on).

You can outline how improving customer satisfaction affects team members on a personal level (a friendlier team, greater satisfaction with customer contacts because they complain far less, greater job security due to a strong business, and so on).

You can demonstrate to team members successful ways of managing difficult customers.

These affirmations can be used with any excellence-related goal and help keep you focused on continually raising your standards in order to be a successful leader. As you read this chapter you may notice that some of the affirmations in it connect with or are similar to other affirmations in the chapter. That’s to be expected because nothing is ever clearly defined and cut and dried, and much overlap exists between the various aspects of leadership

Maintaining high standards

Good leaders set consistently high standards because it encourages the entire team to aspire to a higher level of excellence. If less than high standards are set, usually only mediocre results are seen because the team members unconsciously (or even consciously) assume that not too much is expected of them.

Of course, the standards considered important vary between organisations, but some examples of keeping high standards in a business are as follows:

Ensuring that reports are comprehensive and completed on time.

Making research as accurate as possible and displaying it in a quality manner that’s easy for all to understand.

Being punctual for meetings and other events.

Refusing to take sick days unless you’re really unwell; normal colds and coughs are annoying but most people can still work despite having them.

Maintaining a strong dress sense and always looking smart and neat.

To help keep striving for high standards, repeat the following affirmations every now and then:

I enjoy aiming for and maintaining the highest standards.

I’m the person to set the bar for high standards.

I can more easily lead my team to success by maintaining the highest standards.

I refuse to let my standards slip.

I know that keeping up high standards can be hard, but doing so is absolutely worthwhile.

As you speak these affirmations (preferably out loud, but in your head if necessary) imagine yourself climbing up a ladder of which there are many, both to the left and right of you. See that some people are below you on their ladders, so you’re already doing quite well, but a few others have reached a higher position than you. They have therefore set an example for you to do as well, so see yourself spurred on to match, and then pass them.

As you read each affirmation, in your imagination pull yourself another rung or two up your ladder of excellence and also note your subordinates below you as they follow your example.

This exercise may sometimes feel a little intense. Therefore, when you’ve finished, take a moment to relax before going about your day in a calmer manner.

Injecting a little innovation

The adoption of innovative practices, products, and ideas sets winners apart from losers, because innovation is something that drives you to the top.

Apple created the digital publishing revolution with Mac computers, seized the portable music throne from Sony with the iPod, stole a huge slice of the mobile phone pie with the iPhone, and single-handedly created the new field of tablet computing with the iPad.

How does one company keep beating the competition in this way? The simple answer is innovation. Apple consistently brings to market brand new products or ones that are demonstrably superior to those already in existence. Apple isn’t a ‘me-too’ company. When releasing a product, Apple fully intends to become the market leader, and it does so through innovation.

Being innovative takes creativity and thought, which are two attributes that you can enhance using creative visualization. Use the following affirmations to keep the concept of innovation at the forefront of your consciousness:

I’m a creative person who loves to come up with new ideas.

I often pick up an item and instinctively know how it can be improved.

I see ways of enhancing almost everything.

I love the ‘Eureka!’ moment and the light that flashes in my mind when I have a great new idea.

I’m becoming more and more innovative with each passing day.

As you repeat these affirmations visualize yourself – plucking great ideas out of thin air like little seeds blowing in the wind. Bring them close to your eyes and look at each one, noticing its shiny golden glow, then let it go again – because there are plenty more where they came from.

This helps strengthen your inner feeling that good ideas are everywhere and you simply have to find them to be more creative.

Turn to Chapter 17 for more exercises to develop your powers of creativity and innovation.

Outshining your competitors

One of the biggest indicators of your success as a leader is being able to beat your competition. You can measure your performance against others by comparing results of marketing a product in terms of units shipped, market penetration in different regions, consumer brand awareness, value of company by share price, and so on.

Use the range of all possible sets of data at your disposal to fire up your team, and from them pick the easiest target to achieve as the first goal, and move on when that’s attained. When you’ve pinpointed a particular area in which you can beat at least one other competitor, such as product or service sales levels, try practising a visualization such as the following:

Think about the product or service your company provides: a very specialised product, a particular consulting service, a computer program, or anything. Focus on it clearly in your mind and run through all its features. Look at each feature and consider how functional it is. If within your control, change or improve that function or consider ways of doing so.

All the time think about the satisfaction of your customers and whether the feature is going to make them want to purchase more of your product or service. Consider the way your product or service is seen by the customer, such as the way it’s presented, its colours, style, and design.

By performing this exercise you’ll be able to think creatively about a product and more easily come up with ways in which you can increase its sales.

Using previous successes to inspire new ones

Nothing breeds success like success itself. For example, have you ever noticed how those people who do the most and obtain the best results are often given the most (and most interesting) things to do? That’s because they’re go-getters who thrive on success. They build a reputation for getting the job done and so end up being given increased responsibilities.

In contrast, less successful people are generally asked to do fewer tasks because they usually take much longer to finish them and always seem to have their plates so full they couldn’t manage any more work. And that’s just fine by many of them, because they’d often rather not have too much on their plates. But this tendency can lead to a downward spiral (of avoiding responsibility and so being offered less), which in the worst case can result in redundancy or being fired.

In a more mature organisation or team, a good idea is to remind everyone of the business’s past successes to help engender feelings of pride and victory. Your team can then direct these feelings towards current projects.

Whether your team has one or one hundred past successes under its belt, I recommend providing your team members with a sheet of affirmations such as the following:

Our team thrives on success.

All our team projects are going to be successful.

We all have the ability to bring all projects to a successful conclusion.

We all play a valid part in creating success.

We’re all working hard towards a successful outcome.

When reading or saying these visualizations, suggest that your team members also think about a successful sporting team (or any other type of team) they support or admire, and how its members work together to achieve their results. Focusing on this role model team at the same time as reading or saying the affirmations helps to reinforce the team spirit in your staff.

You can alter these affirmations to fit in with your particular team or organisation and, in fact, ask the group members to come up with their own set of affirmations, and even use this process as an exercise in team building. In this way, everyone’s part of the creation and formulation of the collective aspirations. If the team is small enough, why not ask team members to come up with one affirmation each? As your team grows, you can encourage new members to add their own affirmation to the list so that everybody’s ideas are included.

I also recommend telling your team about the incredible results of writing down goals (as I describe in Chapter 4). Ask all members to take a few minutes to note down their own personal goals as they relate to the organisation. These goals don’t need to be shared with the rest of the team, but are for your team members to refer to regularly in order to keep their goals at the forefront of their minds.

Gaining Respect as a Leader

Great leaders are respected because of who they are rather than the power they wield.

To be a leader you need only issue orders and ensure that they’re followed, but to be a great leader who commands natural authority, you need to be respected for your confidence, reliability, trustworthiness, tolerance, and so on.

Good leaders acquire these traits through experience – the making of and learning from mistakes – and through practice. As a younger person thrust into a position of leadership, you can often face difficulties because people assume that you’re too inexperienced. In which case your task is to set about earning respect as quickly as possible. But even as an experienced leader, you can keep working to maintain the level of respect your team holds for you by continuing to demonstrate characteristics that contribute to your success as a leader.

Conducting yourself with confidence

A leader needs to be (or at least needs to appear to be) extremely confident in order to earn respect. Without confidence you may appear weak and unsure of your role and strategy in the organisation, and people will then feel you have less authority over them and will be harder to motivate to properly perform the tasks you require of them. If you feel they aren’t high enough you can repeat the following affirmations to help increase your confidence levels as a leader:

I’m confident of my ability to lead people.

I enjoy being a leader and feel extremely comfortable about it.

I have this position of leadership because I’m the best suited for the job.

I know that my skills and character are what make me a good leader.

I’m a good leader and will become a great one.

To further enhance these affirmations you may wish to try standing upright and adopting a confident position as you say them. At the same time try to visualize yourself as a great leader – someone famous you admire, such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or perhaps an entrepreneur such as Richard Branson, and feel the sense of confident leadership that person engenders in your mind.

By combining the affirmations with your physical stance and visual imagery of a great leader, you provide lots of information to your unconscious as well as your conscious mind. The three techniques then work together to maximise their effectiveness in making you a much more confident leader.

Check out Chapter 13 for more confidence-building exercises.

Offering encouragement

One of your main tasks as a leader is to encourage the members of your team, to spur people on to do the best that they can and enjoy doing so. Your role as a leader is to explain the task at hand, describe how to accomplish it, ensure that team members have the skills required for their contribution, and encourage people to work together to complete the project – even when deadlines are ridiculously tight, money is a scarce resource, and job security isn’t totally secure (even for you).

Some members of your team may struggle to motivate themselves and even those who are normally able to get started on their own may still require some encouragement. Be aware that everyone needs a bit of support now and then and people appreciate their leader taking the time to provide it.

You can encourage people in many different ways, and you’re probably going to need to use different approaches for different people, as not everybody requires the same level of support. But hey, you’re the boss and you know your team, so you should be able to figure out the best way to support each individual.

To develop your ability to encourage others, practise the following visualization exercise:

1. See yourself standing in the middle of a circle of ten men and women of different ages.

You don’t know any of them and you aren’t their boss and none of them are yours. However, you know that they’re all people who need a little encouragement in their lives.

2. Visualize yourself shaking each person firmly by the hand and imagine an energy passing from you to each individual.

This energy contains strength, motivation, and encouragement, and it feels refreshing and healthy.

3. Sense deeply that you want the person whose hand you’re shaking to succeed in everything in life.

You want them to do as well as, or even surpass, you.

4. Continue working your way around the circle until you get back to the start.

Pass the vital and powerful energy to each person.

5. Go to the circumference of the circle and become the 11th person in the group.

All place your arms on each other’s shoulders, and feel your unity and companionship.

Take this feeling with you as you go through your day at work and even throughout the rest of your life. Drawing on the feelings of comradeship and team membership generated from this exercise helps you to become more motivated to encourage other people, and makes it natural for you to bring people along with your vision.

All people are equal, even when they have authority over each other, and you’re providing encouragement to others because you have the ability to do so, you want to do so, and you’d happily accept it from others – whether you’re someone’s boss or not.

Choosing to be trustworthy

As a leader, your team members need to trust you, otherwise it will be hard to get them on your side. Without trust, people feel little moral duty to comply with your requests and may only do so in order to keep their job or to achieve promotion, instead of because you asked them, and creative visualization can help you build this trusting relationship.

As a good leader your job is to be above reproach. To be a trustworthy leader you need to:

Avoid the temptation to take shortcuts, lie, or steal.

Refrain from talking about other people (peers, superiors, or team members) in a derogatory manner.

Never stab others in the back.

Keep to your word.

One of the major causes of upset in organisations is broken promises by the boss, leading to disappointment and grudges. If you promise something to an employee you need to stand by your word. Your word is your bond.

To help remind you of and emphasise your own honesty and trustworthiness, and to help resist temptations to get involved in corporate back-stabbing and other unpleasant things, repeat the following affirmations from time to time:

I’m an honest person who’s thoroughly trustworthy.

I keep my promises.

I refuse to use other people as simply a ‘means to an end’ for my own benefit.

I don’t talk negatively about people behind their back.

I enjoy being known as an honest and trustworthy person.

Turn to Chapters 12 and 13 for more information and exercises to do with honesty and integrity.

We all know some highly successful people who get to the top using underhand methods – but do you want to be one? I don’t think so or I doubt that you’d be reading this book. Leaders who aren’t trusted tend to be despised and are only tolerated as much as necessary. For example you would very soon lose respect for a boss who continually promises you a promotion or pay rise that never materialises. Neither would you trust a boss who talks badly about other employees behind their backs to speak well of you when you aren’t there.

Temptation comes upon everyone and the immediate rewards can appear quite huge, but in the end an honest person regrets taking any such shortcuts.

Practising tolerance and respect

You’re going come into conflict with things and people from time to time. When this situation arises, you can cope in one of two ways. On the one hand, you can tolerate and simply put up with it, albeit grudgingly. On the other hand, if you take into account why people do something or why a thing is the way it is and work on appreciating those things, people respect your behaviour. The latter respectful approach is more positive and makes for far better relations in the workplace.

As a leader, ensuring that all your team members are treated equally is important. Make sure that you fully respect all individuals’ abilities, practices, and beliefs, inside and outside of the workplace. When you establish a genuine sense of tolerance in your team, people are more likely to respect each other.

Creative visualization can help you practise being a tolerant and respectful leader, so that these qualities will clearly come through in your work life.

By respecting differences through understanding them (even if you disagree with them), you’re better able to integrate your team, enjoy working with everyone, and pass your values of tolerance and respect on to others.

The following affirmations help you to keep tolerance and respect firmly in mind so that you always properly take into account the views, practices, and needs of everyone in your team.

Tolerance is a worthy aim, but respect is far worthier.

Even though I may not believe in something myself, I respect other people’s rights to do so and their reasons.

As a leader I want everyone working together as a team and won’t exclude any member for any practice or belief.

I understand that other people may not agree with my opinions but trust they’ll respect my right to have them.

My leadership philosophy is always inclusion over exclusion.

While repeating these affirmations, visualize that you’re walking in the park when a thunderstorm suddenly blows in, and the rain begins pelting down. Fortunately you have an umbrella with you, which in your visualization is able to expand to any size you need. This is fortunate because you can now invite all the other park visitors nearby to shelter under it with you. There are people of both sexes, all ages and all religions, but all are welcome under your umbrella.

It’s a slightly complex visualization to imagine while repeating affirmations, so just imagine one or two people coming under your umbrella at a time, before moving on to the next affirmation, so that by the time you’ve finished repeating them you have a motley collection of colourful characters all sharing the use of your umbrella.

By combining these affirmations with this visualization you experience what it is like to respect and provide a service to people simply because they are fellow humans.

Being reliable

When you’re responsible for a team of people, you have to be thoroughly reliable, otherwise the team flounders and ultimately fails in its tasks. You’re the oil in the works and the master clock by which others are set. To be an effective leader it is best to set a good example by attending all meetings where you’re needed and producing your reports on time. When you say you’re going to do something, it’s important to ensure that you do it. And when a team member is stuck, you’re the person to help them out if no one else can.

Your vision and leadership drive your team and if you can’t be relied on in your tasks, your team members are likely to be unreliable as well. For a start they may be confused by mixed signals due to never knowing whether (or if) you’ll turn up for meetings, or when you’ll have your reports ready, and so on. And after a while you can lose control of the reins and find that another (more reliable) member of the team usurps your role.

Here are some affirmations you can repeat to keep the concept of reliability uppermost in your mind. If you’re prone to being disorganised, these phrases help you lead a much more manageable life:

Punctuality is important to me.

I’m never late for appointments.

I do what I say I’m going to do.

I always finish the things that I start.

I can be relied on to help others in a fix.

As you repeat these affirmations imagine a large clock in your mind’s eye, with the time set to 11:55 a.m. and a door under it behind which you’re due to attend a meeting at 12:00 p.m. You’re five minutes early and have therefore arrived in good time, just as you always do.

This single focus, combined with repeating the affirmations, will help embed your desire to be reliable more deeply, and will help you find the time you need to be punctual, the motivation to complete tasks that you start, and the willingness to help other people in need.

As with all visualizations and affirmations, try your best to feel an emotional response as you perform the exercise to further enhance its effectiveness. For example, feel a quiet pride in always being punctual and standing by your word, and feel compassion for others so that you have increased desire to help them.

Communicating Your Vision

People follow good leaders because the person displays something that others want to follow; usually, this ‘something’ is the leader’s vision, which infects everyone else with its vitality.

As a good leader you have to be a good communicator and develop the ability to explain your own and your organisation’s visions (which are closely interrelated, I hope). In other words you need to be a storyteller and an example setter, and show that your vision drives you and keeps you and your team motivated to complete a project successfully.

Using creative visualization you can practise passing on your vision to others so that when it comes to doing so in real life you’re more effective at getting it across.

Sharing your enthusiasm

An enthusiastic leader is an infectious one, because nothing shows dedication and vision more than enthusiasm. As a leader, be as enthusiastic as you can about your organisation and its products or services so that you similarly enthuse your subordinates.

Being enthusiastic is a great benefit to you as well as your team, because the enthusiasm that you bring to a project helps to keep you fired up and focused.

To keep your enthusiasm strong, here’s a visualization exercise you can practise:

1. Imagine that you’re somewhere outside, quiet and peaceful.

Perhaps you’re by the seashore, or at a country campsite. The sun has gone down and the sky’s a dark blue with just a few specks of stars starting to show.

2. Hold your hands out in front of you forming a bowl and notice a small orange glow in it.

This glow is your enthusiasm for life.

3. Gently blow onto the orange glow to feed the flames.

Watch the ball of fire grow as it writhes and flickers colours of red, yellow, orange, and sometimes blue and white.

4. Remember how much you love life, love your friends and family, and all the things you do, at home, at work, and everywhere you go.

Feed that love into the fire and watch it grow to the size of a basketball. The love even has a little weight so you have to use your muscles to hold it up.

5. Feel the warmth and energy coming back to you from your ball of enthusiasm.

Look around you and see how it lights the ground and other things nearby (such as rocks or trees) with a shimmering glow.

6. Get ready to release the ball.

Tense your muscles, take a deep breath, and fling it high into the sky where it explodes like a magnificent firework, sending colourful sparks across the world to light up other people’s lives.

7. Watch the firework of enthusiasm fade away and then let your eyes get re-accustomed to the night sky.

Smell the fresh air, feel the gentle breeze, and sense that you’re at one with the world.

Don’t worry that your enthusiasm is now gone because you have plenty more where that came from – nothing is lost by doing this exercise; in fact it helps to substantially increase your enthusiasm.

By practising this exercise you increase your own levels of enthusiasm, which you outwardly express and are able to use to help motivate your team.

Demonstrating your commitment

Some projects or work environments are long-term and keeping up the necessary work can be difficult. In this situation you need commitment: the dedication to turn up day after day to complete a hard day’s work and to stick with the project at hand and not quit.

As the team’s leader, your job is to stay focused and lead from the front. Even if you have a really bad cold, try to turn up because you should have fewer sick days than any other team member. At those times when you find inspiration hard to come by and are tired, don’t let yourself slack off. You’re the leader and are expected to work the hardest of all.

Using creative visualization you can reinforce your level of commitment to such an extent that it is clearly obvious to the rest of your team or department.

Here are some affirmations you can use to keep yourself (and your team) going when you find the going gets tough:

I always finish whatever I start.

I’m not a quitter.

I lead my team from the front and by example.

I care deeply about this project, my organisation, and my team.

In America there was a very well-known series of TV advertisements for a mobile telephone company, in which an engineer was seen continuously testing the signal strength of the network in a variety of locations. And always behind him was his team of engineers carrying a range of different pieces of equipment, ready to work on any problem or make any necessary upgrades to the network, and so on.

As you repeat these affirmations, imagine you’re like that engineer, and that your team is right behind you as you lead the way forwards. You provide leadership and direction, while your staff provide the support required to achieve the team’s objectives.

Making decisions and justifying them

You’re the boss, and your way is best. Of course you’re open to the ideas and suggestions of other people and you’re not saying that every idea you have is the only way that something can be done – but you’re sure that your approach to the job in hand is the right one.

The following affirmations help you to evaluate your decisions in order to always try and make the best ones:

I always try to examine things from all possible angles.

I consider the effects of taking and of not taking a decision.

I imagine implementing all the options to see which works best when more than one way of doing something is possible.

I’m open to suggestions and if an idea is better than mine I’m happy to use it.

I take care to make the right decisions so I can always explain my reasoning.

When repeating these affirmations, try bringing back to mind the sphere in the preceding section and visualize turning it to a variety of different angles, as you peek into different parts of your organisation to get yourself even better acquainted. This gives a visual enhancement to the affirmations that helps increase their effectiveness.

Your job as leader is not only to make the decisions, but also to communicate them to the team and quite often to persuade others to get on board with your ideas and plans of action.

Creative visualization can help you better justify your decisions to other people by analysing them in advance so that you have ready answers always available for even the trickiest of questions.

Here’s a visualization technique that can help when you’re presenting a new idea, strategy, or project to a group of people.

Visualize clearly in your mind’s eye what you need to explain, as if you’re looking at an actual painting. See all the parts that make up the whole and how they relate to each other. If you like, add some explanations or diagrams to the picture until it’s complete and fully explanatory. (For more on creating pictures in this way, see the earlier sidebar ‘Painting the vista’.)

When you’re ready to make your explanation, recall the image you painted previously. As you talk, paint your picture again in your mind’s eye in bright and vivid colours with broad and confident brushstrokes. Take your audience with you as you’re painting, and when the picture’s finished, everyone has a very clear idea of exactly what you want them to know.

Visualizing in order to Motivate Your Team

Whenever I think about motivation I’m reminded of a line in the song ‘Motivation’ by Steve Hillage from the album Motivation Radio: ‘Motivation is the key’. The entire disc is a concept album (much loved by ‘hippies’) about getting up and doing something positive in your life. But the record also has a clear message for everyone in that motivation is the key to many things.

Without motivation in life, little would get done. Humans even have chemicals in their brains that make them feel good in order to motivate people to do all the necessary things for survival: for example, when you eat, you feel an enjoyable sensation. If these chemicals didn’t exist, perhaps humans wouldn’t have lasted very long as a species, because early humans would simply not have bothered to eat very much (assuming the negative motivator of hunger was also missing).

But humans have come a long way from being primitive creatures and now have a whole host of things that motivate them, such as money, possessions, arts, crafts, sports, and so on. The trouble is that with so many distractions nowadays, people can have difficulty choosing their motivators. Consequently some people give up and do very little.

But if, as a leader, you can guide your team members in the right direction and find the necessary motivators, you can steer your team wherever you need it to go, and by using creative visualization you can gain experience and practice in motivating your team in your mind, before doing so in real life, helping ensure that you do a great job.

Providing focus

When your team has a number of goals to achieve, keeping everyone working together with the same aim can be hard. But if you provide focus for your team, it more clearly sees where it needs to be heading and its members understand what’s required of them.

You can provide focus for your team by using creative visualization. If you highlight single goals at any one time and let your team focus all its energies in that direction, you can ensure that the job gets done, and gets done well.

Here’s a visualization technique you can use to refine the focus in your mind and help identify where focus needs to be directed within your team:

1. Spend five minutes looking at all the things your team needs to achieve.

For example, trim overheads by 10 per cent, beat company X at selling units of product Y, increase the number of visitors to your website, and so on.

2. Try and narrow in on the one most important task as your focus.

For example, perhaps you decide that beefing up the website is the most important task because Internet sales are cheaper to make than sales through distributors.

3. Examine clearly in your mind: it’s the focus point on which your team needs to concentrate.

For example, does your current website require a re-design? Do you have sufficient web servers to handle a lot of additional visitors? Can you negotiate a better commission for credit card sales from your card processor if sales do increase? Do you have enough customer support staff to handle the potential additional enquiries?

4. Once you have all aspects of the task in your mind, decide which one to work on first.

For example, you may decide that a re-design is the first port of call, so you’ve found the most important priority.

Repeat this exercise from time to time. And if the focus point turns out to be the same as the last time you performed the exercise, that’s fine – you just haven’t quite completed that aspect of the project yet.

When you have this focus clearly in your mind, you can more easily convey it to others when guiding their progress and motivating them.

Setting challenges

One great way to motivate people is to give them challenges.

When my wife and I used to run public houses and restaurants, we frequently set contests in which employees attaining certain goals (such as serving a set number of customers or up-selling a fixed quantity of desserts) achieved a cash bonus or small prize, with an even greater incentive for the member of staff who performed the best. We kept a chart on the wall and the staff constantly tried to outdo each other, while behind the scenes staff in the kitchen had their own non-customer-facing targets and bonuses too.

All organisations are different and lend themselves better to different incentives, which means that you can have some fun coming up with your own challenges and incentives for your staff or team members.

Try this creative visualization exercise to focus on the challenges and incentives that motivate your team to perform to their highest capability.

Set aside some time to think about and visualize your team as an organic whole, rather than a collection of individuals. Think about the power they have as a team due to the ability to split large tasks into smaller parts and assign them to different people to undertake.

Concentrate on areas that can be improved in your organisation and imagine ways in which you can motivate your team to achieve these improvements. Work through these areas in your mind and use mind movies to see whether the incentives you think of seem to work.

For example, perhaps you operate a restaurant and have determined that the layout of the tables is slowing down service to the tables, due to waiting staff having to detour around certain sections. In this case, to save moving the tables about many times until you achieve a solution, visualize doing so and make a mind movie of your waiting staff using a new layout to see if it works. Now you need only to try out this smaller number of configurations that have worked in your imagination, and you’ll have a solution far more quickly than through physically trying a large variety of different layouts.

Go to Chapter 2 for more on creating mind movies.

Implementing the challenges and incentives that you visualized can result in a more highly motivated team.

Meeting milestones

When your team is working on larger, long-term goals, a good idea is to set milestones at appropriate points in a project’s overall time line, which can be treated as mini goals. When these milestones are checked off, they can work just as effectively for motivation purposes as main goals.

You can break the stages of any project down in the same way and creative visualization can help you.

Use the following visualization technique to help you identify appropriate milestones in your project for yourself or your team:

1. Visualize your whole project, and everything required to complete it, as a movie that you can play through in your mind.

Visit Chapter 2 to discover how to make your own mind movie.

2. Start the movie rolling and make notes of important landmarks.

For example, completing each of a number of different sections in a catalogue, receiving proofs of the catalogue for grammar and spell checking, and so on.

3. Use your mental fast-forward button to skip past less relevant scenes.

For example, collecting proofs from the typesetting department and other essential administration but make sure that you see all the important ones.

4. Run the movie backwards, because the backwards viewing provides a different viewpoint to forwards.

See if that brings up any scenes you’d forgotten about: you don’t want to miss anything important, so double-checking is good practice.

5. Get a pen and piece of paper.

Write down all the noteworthy events in order of occurrence.

6. Decide which of the events need to be treated as milestones.

These will be things that have a clear end, such as completion of a section of a catalogue, taking the final photograph, and so on.

7. Choose what reward to provide for the completion of each milestone.

Maybe allocate a budget from which to provide free cinema tickets, restaurant vouchers, and so on.

Using a spreadsheet program is an easy way to record your milestones and keep track of them when they’re achieved.

Building camaraderie

If you want a productive team, you need a happy one. Camaraderie is more than simply friendship: it’s the good natured and light-hearted rapport between people who spend a lot of time together.

Using creative visualization you can first get this camaraderie going in your own mind, before setting out to spread it around your team.

Repeat the following affirmations in order to keep camaraderie uppermost in your mind as something important to foster in your team:

I want everyone working together towards a common goal.

I always give praise where praise is due.

I ask team members to take on greater responsibilities as and when they’re ready.

I require team members to rely on each other more and more as they become more capable.

I always do my best to engender greater commitment from the team, to the project, and to each other.

As you read these affirmations, imagine that you’re the captain of a sports team (in any type of sport such as soccer, volleyball, baseball, cricket and so on), and visualize that you’re about to play a match and are giving a pep talk to your fellow team members. Feel how you’re being your most encouraging and persuasive to motivate everyone to put in their best effort and work towards beating the other team. Feel the warmth of agreement and support from everyone as together you’re all whipped up to a level of excitement ready to go out and win.

The combination of this visualization and the emotions accompanying it along with the affirmations will ensure that your commitment to building team camaraderie will remain high.

Encouraging growth

Just as you’re continuing to grow in your personal and professional life, also assist the growth of your team members by encouraging them to try different tasks, take on new roles, attend training, and so on.

Their personal growth is important to you and to them, because as their skills improve so does the input they provide to your organisation. And, yes, some are going to grow wings and fly away to pastures new. But that’s the nature of life; never hold anyone back just for your own benefit.

You may find the following affirmations helpful in increasing the amount of growth you encourage from your team members:

I value each person as an important team member.

I want all my team members to excel at what they do and always get better at it.

I do everything in my power to help my team members fulfil their true abilities.

I won’t stand in the way of team members who are clearly heading for bigger and greater things, and I’ll help them if I can.

I want to grow in my life and so I encourage my team members to grow too.

A good visualization to accompany these affirmations is to imagine your team as a blackberry bramble. All right, they may be prickly plants but their fruit is delicious. See yourself and each of the team members as a leafless bramble at the start of spring. Some of you are roots, while others are branches and vines interconnected with each other. Then, as spring arrives, others of your team form leaves, while yet others blossom into flowers. As the season turns into summer, a few vines return to the earth and bury themselves to form new roots and whole new brambles, as the plant that is your team creates offshoots (representing people leaving for other departments or companies).

Simply imagine a new stage of growth between each of the affirmations, and feel the sense of both your team and the bramble experiencing strong and healthy growth. Growth is the lifeblood of most businesses, and so this combination of visualization and affirmations helps you to embody growth as an important part of your personal management style.

If you encourage growth in those you lead (and everyone, in fact), you all grow together and keep experiencing bigger and better things as your group’s input into your organisation (and life in general) increases.

Leadership For Dummies by John Marrin (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.) is packed with lots more tips on how to be a successful leader.