of the Empire State Building and across to the building on the other side of the street and asked you to walk across?
If you’re like most people, you would balk at the very idea. If I were to ask you why, you most likely would say, “Because it’s dangerous.”
Let’s say I then introduced logic to explain why it’s totally safe, telling you, “This road plate was put in place by the same engineering team that built the famed Verrazano Bridge, and they have confirmed that it is equally as safe.”
If I asked you whether you would stand on it now, what would you say? Chances are your answer would still be a resounding no.
You might say, “Maybe the weather’s going to be windy.”
I might respond by saying, “What if the entire team of meteorologists from radio station WCBS 880 vouched that the weather was totally fine and there wasn’t going to be any wind? Would you walk on it then?”
“I’m not feeling well,” you might say. “I couldn’t possibly try it.”
If I brought a team of doctors in to attest that you were perfectly healthy, would that do the trick? Not likely.
Logically, I showed you that walking on the plate eighty floors up is as safe as walking on it on the sidewalk below. But the reason logic has no sway over you is that you are accessing something a lot deeper than logic – your imagination.
You would look down at the road plate sticking out of the eightieth floor and down at the scene below, and ask, “What are those little rectangles moving around?”
And I would answer, “Those are buses.”
“And what are those smaller rectangles?”
“Oh, those are cars.”
“And what are those dots?”
“Oh, those are people.”
And in your mind’s eye – in your imagination – you would see a little red dot on the ground, and that would be you after you’ve fallen.
Logic goes out the window when imagination kicks in.
You could be assured a thousand times that you’re going to be okay and it’s totally safe, but you still wouldn’t be able to bring yourself to do it. Because when you imagine something bad happening, all the logical explanations and assurances disappear.
This is why we get frustrated when someone tries to reason with us about doing something that scares us. Their logic doesn’t help, because we can’t get past our limiting thoughts. To get the results we want, therefore, we must alter our imagination. If we can do that, we can put a process of change in motion that will positively impact what we accomplish in life.
It Starts with Your Imagination
| If you change your imagination | → then → | you change how you feel |
| If you change how you feel | → then → | you change what you’re going to do |
| If you change what you’re going to do | → then → | you change what you can accomplish |
| If you change what you accomplish | → then → | you change your life |
IMAGINE THE GOOD
Controlling Your Imagination
Let’s talk about how to take control of the part of your brain where imagination resides so you can use and control the creativity and sensitivity that G-d has given you.
After all, it is simply patterns of thought that have kept you stuck – self-limiting patterns.
If you were to interview ten thousand people with limitations, you would see that they share similar patterns of thought. And if you were to interview ten thousand people who live their dreams, you would see that they, too, share similar patterns of thought.
Imagine that two people are about to board an aircraft. One is nervous and the other calm. There’s no biological difference between them other than what’s happening in their brains. The nervous one is imagining that the plane is going to crash and he’s about to meet his death. The calm person is imagining that he’s arriving at his favorite vacation destination, excited about the great time he’s going to have.
If we were to switch their thinking patterns, whereby the person who is calm is now imagining that he’s going to die in an hour and the person who’s nervous is imagining that he’s going on his favorite vacation, their feelings would change.
It’s all about imagination. If you imagine that something bad is going to happen and things aren’t going to pan out the way you want, you’re going to be stressed, despite any facts that your logical brain knows that may refute this.
Don’t get me wrong. Logic serves a very powerful purpose. It keeps you in check so you don’t imagine things that make no sense or are totally outside reality. You’re not going to imagine walking through a street safely when there are cars coming at you at ninety miles an hour.
Yet you have the choice to always imagine that good things are going to happen, that things are going to pan out the way you want. If that’s how you imagine things will be, that’s how you’re going to feel, regardless of what logic dictates.
The way people can walk on a tightrope, or over fire, is by using their imagination. Once they logically recognize that there’s a way to do it safely and they have the skill, then all they need to do is imagine themselves on the other side safely.
That’s right – success in a seemingly over-the-top endeavor is primarily about controlling your imagination.
Remember: When you control your imagination, you control your feelings. And when you control your feelings, you control the direction your life will take.
UNDERSTAND YOUR FOUR-PART BRAIN
Let me give you a model to help you understand your brain so you can make changes to your imagination and get started right away on getting what you really want.
The following model shows the four parts of your brain: the unconscious mind, the subconscious mind, the critical filter, and the conscious mind.
Part 1 – Your Unconscious Mind
The job of the unconscious part of your brain is to control your heartbeat, your digestive system, your temperature, the blinking of your eyes, all the automatic processes. And it is under lock and key from G-d – and there’s very little you can do to control that part of your experience.
Part 2 – Your Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind is divided into two components.
Component A is the filing cabinet that stores every single memory you have ever experienced. According to researchers, we start storing information
