How you visualize or imagine events or anything you do in life beforehand has a huge part to play in how well that experience goes.

I’m sure you must have been in a meeting or event where the outcome directly impacts your success. How you visualize these events beforehand not only determines how you behave, act and come across, but also how others will react to you in that environment.

Imagine you’re going into a situation where beforehand you are thinking something like, “They’re going to think I’m a right pest as soon as I get the catalogues out, they probably want to get on with other things, and are not interested in listening to what I have to say.”

When you get there and they open the door, it doesn’t matter how much you attempt to put on a fake, enthusiastic demeanour, something is not going to be right; there’s going to be a disconnect – subconsciously it’s not going to click right with them. We can detect so many things subconsciously from each other.

Imagine if you’re thinking beforehand something like, “I’m going to go in there, I can’t wait to show them these products, they’re going to love the products.”

You are making pictures of everyone looking at the catalogue, looking at the products and placing orders. When you go in there, you’ll have genuine enthusiasm, which is one of the most contagious emotions. If you want people to be enthusiastic, you’ve got to be enthusiastic first. If you want people to be happy, you can’t be sad and expect to be able to make someone else happy. So if you want people to be enthusiastic about what you are telling them or talking about, you’ve got to have passion and be enthusiastic.

I’ve met so many people that are so successful in selling and they tell me, “I’m lousy at sales, but I just love these products.” (I know I said this earlier in the book, but some things are worth repeating.)

Your enthusiasm comes over and it makes everyone naturally think, “I’d better take a look at this!” It’s not going to work with everyone, but if you go in without enthusiasm, you’re not going to connect as well with the people there.

If it’s a one-on-one situation, it’s not so bad; you can get re-connected if you make a bad first impression. You can turn it around by talking about common interests, using common language styles, things like this, but you can’t do this with eight or nine people in the room. Having said that, even in a one-to-one situation, there is no substitute for going in and making a great, enthusiastic first impression, this must always be your intention.

You have got to go in with enthusiasm and the expectation of a good outcome; it’s one of the most important things because your expectation is based upon your beliefs. If you can’t go into a situation with enthusiasm you need to ask yourself why not? What do you believe about that situation? Find out why you lack enthusiasm and do something about it.

One of the things we unfortunately do as humans is to think about our goals and where we want to be, hoping for success in the long term, yet expecting failure on a daily basis in the short term. That’s the paradox, and the long term is after all an accumulation of all the “short terms” to come.

So your hopes come from your dreams and your wishes, whereas your expectations come from your beliefs. Unfortunately, your beliefs are stronger in most cases, so if you’re expecting people not to be very welcoming, they won’t be, whereas if you’re expecting people to be friendly, they more likely will be. If you think about it, if you’re going in to a group of people thinking they’re not going to be friendly, you’re going to feel and act differently than if you’re expecting them to be friendly, so you can automatically self-fulfil what you’re thinking about.

Of course, you’re probably not going to take someone really, really miserable and make them really, really happy, in a first impression. You’re going to impact it one way or the other and the chances are that it’s going to be enough to help you get the outcome or results you are looking for.

It’s really unfortunate that for most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, the biggest obstacle to our success is ourselves. It’s almost as if you need to get out of your own way so you can move forward.

About ten years ago when I was still working in information technology, I went to a Direct Selling Association conference and my finance director, Maurice, came to me and said, “Mark, Mark, I’ve got brilliant news.”

I asked, “What’s that, what’s that?”

He explained, “You can go on stage and do a two-minute presentation about our product.”

I replied, “You’re not getting me on stage!”

This was still the case five or six years ago, I was still dead scared about doing a presentation. I was fine with showing eight or so people through our software in a client demonstration or training, but as far as doing what I termed a proper talk in public to a group of people, I’d never do it. It was only through breaking down my strategies and applying what I am talking about here that I changed how I thought about things. Now I am at the stage where I get up and speak everywhere, all the time, and never even get nervous, because I changed how I thought about it. The main thing is I was expecting failure and thinking about speaking and everything going wrong! Once I started to think about it going well then, over time, it improved.

How you visualize things beforehand is so important with your expectations, because it is tied to the feeling of “I’ve already got it” as well, it is all the same sort of emotion.

One of the underpinnings of how we work is that every single resource, whether it’s confidence, fear or whatever, we’ve all got them in us, we just don’t use them in the right places. We’ve got wonky strategies, we’ve either attached the wrong emotion to something or the strategy we use is really out of date.

So, a quick little exercise:

Think about one of your strategies – start with something simple, something you either don’t like very much or you procrastinate over doing.

First, I’ll give you an example, one of my strategies, washing the car.

I’m going to wash the car, and I start to picture in my head the fact that I’ve got to sort out all the mess in the shed. Where did I put the sponge? I know I should have washed the sponge out last time. I’ll have to find the hose, I don’t know what the children have done with it after playing in the garden. When I wash the car, I’m going to get soaking wet, I won’t be able to get it dry before it starts smearing, and it will probably be raining afterwards as well.

You know, if that’s my strategy, it is very likely that I’ll end up saying, “I can’t be bothered to wash the car.” Now imagine a different strategy. I think what it is going to be like after it’s done, how good it’s going to look, how good I’m going to feel that I’ve accomplished it. Now I’m more likely to do it.

One of the most powerful things with personal development and motivating yourself through anything, even if it’s something you don’t want to do, is to think how good it’s going to feel five minutes after it’s done, and picture yourself five minutes after. When you think about something you are not comfortable about and fear rises up, life seems to stop and your brain won’t go beyond the event, it gets stuck in the fear. However, thinking about how good you’ll feel later when it’s over and you are doing things you enjoy is telling your brain that you do survive this and everything will be OK. This can often be enough motivation to move forwards.

I was working with someone recently who had to run a stall at an event. She was going to do this event last Christmas and she was really panicking about it. I told her to picture driving home afterwards, and think how good she would feel when it was finished. It worked, she felt better about it and whenever she thought of the upcoming event, she would leapfrog the actual event in her mind and focus on the journey home and what else she had to look forward to.

A lot of people who exercise a lot, who start going to the gym, or start exercising, think, “I can’t be bothered to do this, it’s so boring and so much effort, I can’t be doing with that.” You see these other people who go every day and you wonder how they do that, how do they go every day?

If you actually talked to them, a lot of them will tell you, “Yeah, it is a bit of a bind, but it’s the feeling I get afterwards when I’ve done it. “

You have to get motivated by the outcome if it’s a good thing, but if it’s something you don’t really want to do but need to, then you get motivated by how good you’re going to feel when it’s done and out of the way. You’ll then focus on that more than the process of the thing you’re going to go through. It’s like in my example of washing the car. In my bad strategy, not only did I think of everything that could go wrong I also focused on all the steps involved. Whereas, once I had the good strategy I focused on the end result mainly and how great that would be.

Here’s a good example of this: let’s say you are looking forward to going on a great holiday. If you are like me, you probably daydream about what it’s going to be like from time to time. When you daydream, what does the inner voice sound like? How do you picture things in your mind? Do you see yourself in the pictures you are making in your mind or are you viewing things as if through your own eyes? Perhaps that is a key part of your strategy or way of thinking about this area of your life.

Go back now, revise the strategy, then run it again against the thing you weren’t very motivated to do …

Notice just how much better that feels now.

If you are not totally there yet, it could be an issue with your beliefs or comfort zone, which is what we are going to work on now!