What's Your Career Success Dream?

Success Tweet: Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed. As a career success coach, I suggest once you define what career success means to you personally, you need to develop a clear mental picture of your career success.

This image should be as vivid as you can you make it. Try to create you career success vivid image in 3-D. When I was 25, I conjured up a vivid image of myself as a success coach, motivational speaker, management consultant and author. I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations. This office had a floor to ceiling wall of books I could use for easy reference. It also had a state of the art IBM selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone. PCs and the internet were science fiction in 1975. I also saw myself having one to one discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team building sessions in conference rooms at their locations. Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking. I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks. I saw myself signing a book I had written at a bookstore. I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my speaking, coaching and consulting gigs. All of these vivid images came true. My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has a two PCs and cell phone, not a selectric typewriter and clunky phone. The wall of books is there – overflowing. I've written 11 of the books on the shelf. People don't smoke in my training and team building sessions anymore and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I've imagined it. I've spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia. I am a million mile flyer with Continental Air Lines. I'm living my career success dream – in large part because I dared to dream it all those years ago. What's your career success dream? Have you created a vivid mental image of it? I suggest you take some time for yourself. Ask and answer these three questions:

• Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
• What will it look like and feel like when I'm there?
• What will my life be like?

Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success. This is not day dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind. Keep this mental picture of your career success with you as you go about your day to day business. Every once in a while, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of career success. If the answer is no, make sure that you take at least one act the very next day to move closer to your vivid mental image of your career success. In this way, you'll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your goal. The common sense career coach success point here is simple. Successful people define what success means to them. Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their success. They heed the advice in Tweet 12 in Success Tweets: “Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed." They use their vivid mental image to help keep their dreams alive and to keep moving forward to what they want in their lives and careers. Creating a vivid mental image of your success is not day dreaming. It's real work – it's the work of designing your future, so you can take the steps necessary to create it. Read more » articles by this approved expert.