Image Your Outcome, Achieve Your Goal

One of my biggest pieces of advice is to keep your dreams—personal and professional—in your mind so that you are always clear about how to achieve them. Today I want to address a strategy to help you on your course.

Today’s Pearl is: “By imaging your desired outcome, you can achieve your goal.”

Imaging is critical to success. And staying focused on your desired outcome—be it in a meeting with your leadership team or with a client—will lead you to achieving your goal. How? Let me give you an example.

During our IT company’s most rapid growth period we met with Larry Womack, a well-known business consultant and author of Outcome Management (a book I highly recommend). He taught us some priceless practices that day which set us on an extraordinary path. When we started imaging our desired outcome, it worked. From that day forward, we never once went into a meeting, gathering, or event without having first imaged the outcome we expected. By mastering this pearl you, too, can achieve your goals.

This practice is not just something I talk about. It is something I live. At one point during my career I was invited to meet with an engineering company based in Virginia to discuss the possibility of opening up a branch in Huntsville. I was at a crossroads in my career—ready to do something new and different. I decided, “I’m not going to just go up there and discuss it, I’m going to tell these folks what it’s going to take to do it.”

And I did. I went up there with a briefing covering all of the costs associated with opening that branch. I remember feeling like, “If I do this well, these guys are going to hire me.” And it happened just as I imaged it would.

After reviewing the material, the president asked if I would step out of the room for a minute. When they invited me back in, they offered me the job then and there.

Applying the Pearl

Applying the Pearl takes some practice. Below you will find some ways to practice imaging, which will, with a little bit of work, become second-nature to you.

  • Take a few minutes to act out some scenarios you might find yourself in and practice how to achieve the desired outcome. Say you have a meeting with a big client about your new product. What is the desired goal outcome from that meeting? How will you achieve that goal using imaging?
  • Before each meeting or engagement, meet briefly with your leadership team. Practice in “real-time” what you put in place in the above strategy. Ask them what they expect, or image, will happen during the meeting and ask them what they anticipate the outcome will be.

Just think for a moment about what would happen to your business if every time you go into a business development engagement, a staff meeting, or a board meeting you imaged the outcome you wanted and it actually happened. Where could that take you?

How about you? Are there other imaging practices you might try? Can you give an example of a “desired outcome” you’d like to achieve? Feel free to comment in the space below.