Fantasize Your Way to Health

When you decide to improve your health, there is a series of steps that will help you to accomplish your goal.  These are the steps that I found to be helpful: fantasize, conceptualize, idolize, plagiarize, verbalize, strategize, visualize, energize, fraternize, improvise and downsize.

Fantasize

The first step to achieving your goal is to fantasize.  Imagine all of the ways that you could improve your health.  Sit down with a pen and paper or digital recorder and brainstorm ideas.  Try to come up with at least 20.  How much do you want to weigh?  Do you plan to completely revamp your diet?  Or would you rather just eliminate one particular unhealthy food from your diet?  Just sit and fantasize about what you would like to achieve.  From this list, choose one idea that you think will have the biggest impact on your health in the near-term.  You will be most effective if you focus on developing just one habit.

Conceptualize

Once you have come up with your single focus, conceptualize what achieving the goal will mean to you.  Look at the entire concept of what you're trying to accomplish.  How is it that you want to look and feel?  Imagine how your new habit will impact your life.  Figure out why you want to achieve the goal.  If you have a big enough why, the how is often easy. Spend some time imagining and conceptualizing exactly what this new habit will do for you.

Idolize and Plagiarize

Once you have in your mind exactly what it is you would like to achieve and how it will impact your life, you should then idolize.  What I mean by this is that you should find other people who have achieved the same goal that you are pursuing and then just copy what they did.  Plagiarize their method.  All too often, we get very excited about what we would like to achieve and blindly start taking action, but then we stumble on the first obstacle and quit.  Following someone else’s plan will not only eliminate most of the obstacles you face, but it will help you to achieve your goal much faster.

Verbalize

Step four is to verbalize.  If you cannot verbalize your goal you are not serious about it.  One of the most effective ways to program yourself for success is to verbalize your goal daily.  You should look yourself in the mirror and say something like “I am happily achieving my target weight of 150 pounds.”  Say your goal out loud with emotion at least 5 or 10 times first thing in the morning and just before going to bed at night.  This reinforces the goal in your mind and keeps it in the forefront of your thoughts.

Strategize

As you are conditioning your mind to focus on your goal, you need to strategize.  Come up with a specific plan or set of strategies to achieve your goals.  For most goals, you already have the knowledge and skills to begin the process of achieving it, so don’t feel like you have to learn more before developing a strategy.  You can fill in the holes in your knowledge as you progress, and you can fine tune your plan along the way.

Visualize

When you have a functional strategy, you need to start visualizing.  Imagine yourself already having achieved the goal.  Take a few minutes each morning and each night after you verbalize your goal and picture yourself doing the steps that are required to achieve it. Visualization can be very powerful.  Olympic athletes use this technique to improve their performance.  There have been studies done that measured the electrical activity of muscles while the athletes were engaging in creative visualization.  You can use this same technique to improve almost anything you do.

Energize

Perhaps the most important step is to energize.  This is the action step.  This is where you take massive action every day to achieve the goal.  You don't become a runner without putting on your shoes and going for a run.  Taking action is the single most significant step in achieving any habit or goal.

Fraternize

Taking action consistently can be difficult to sustain.  It helps to fraternize.  In other words, associate with like-minded people who are doing what you would like to do. This is one of the reasons why gym memberships are so popular, if not always effective for those who join.  Hitting the gym at the same time each day and seeing the same people give you the motivation to continue.  Being around accomplished people is helpful because it shows you that taking action really works, and it helps you to learn from successful people.

Improvise

As you begin to take action and associate with other like-minded people, you'll notice that not all of the strategies that they employ work for your particular situation.  In this case, you must improvise.  In other words figure out what's working and what's not.  You can then make intelligent improvements to your plan.

Downsize

You may also downsize what's not working.  Stop doing those things that are not helpful to you.  Remember, the only way to fail is to give up.  Crank up your success engine now and fantasize, conceptualize, idolize, plagiarize, verbalize, strategize, visualize, energize, fraternize, improvise and downsize your way to success.