How To Love Your Business + Visualization Exercise

By Kim Nagle

Star athletes, dancers, and performers visualize their every move prior to a competition or performance. I raised a visualizer, one of those kids that just can see and then do. This is the same kid who gave me bad knees and prayer holes in my jeans.

I bought him a snowboard when he was nine. As I inquired at the lodge about lessons, someone poked me in the shoulder. “Isn’t that Sean?” I turned to see my son gliding down the advanced hill and launching into a 360. I scrambled to the bottom of the hill, prepared to put pieces back together. He slid up next to me like a pro, all smiles and chest puffed out.

“Who taught you to do that?” I squeaked through breaths as my mother-heart leapt in my bosom.

“I watched the other guys and just did it,” he responded nonchalantly, insinuating that he didn’t know what I was so worked up about.

Three years later, he built a steam engine that, by all engineering standards, shouldn’t have worked. But it did. By sixteen, he had advanced to making cars go too fast by fabricating fuel systems from what he could scrounge up or buy from Ace Hardware. Enough said on that topic, other than to impart a simple moral: What we think matters. Our beliefs and the pictures we put in our heads matter. If you think you can or can’t, you are right either way.

Visualization is one of the best ways to bring resolve to your determined-decisions.

When we can see it on paper and then visualize it, the results become real. When you work through the following exercise, take note of how your business fits (or doesn’t) within the context of your life. How are you feeling? What are you believing? Are there core limiting beliefs creeping in?

The very first time I shared this exercise, I had a room full of women, all relaxed with their eyes closed, walking through daily operations in their minds, mixing what had to be done in their businesses with the contexts of their very real lives.

One of the women yelped, “Well, damn! I have just designed a business identical to the job I am leaving. I hate it!” Holy buckets!

Another woman imagined her very energetic two-year-old grabbing her cell phone and accidentally calling her best client. Holy buckets!

Many breathed a sigh of relief, seeing a less- stressful and well-defined business where they closed the doors of their offices and focused on ideal clients who were delighted to invest in the outcomes they delivered. Happy dance!

As my clients have walked through the visualization exercise with me, there have been some serious Happy dances! moments and some outrageous Holy buckets! moments.

If your visualization exercise reveals a “Holy buckets!” moment, just say, “Here’s your sign.” Make a U-turn and map out your revised plan to take you straight to your right-fit destination. Do not settle for less. You have the tools to tweak your DAMN Plan to fit your actual lifestyle, not the fictitious examples or idealistic ones based on other people’s values and responsibilities.