Three Wildly Successful Women on Imagination

The most important characteristic for success is something we all have and need to constantly develop further: imagination. Below are three ideas from very successful women for you to start working on yours today. Be careful what you wish for! If you back your dreams up with focused action, they’ll come true.

"If you can see the possibility of changing your life...you will be a huge success,” Oprah Winfrey has advised new graduates. We can continue to see ourselves as new graduates, no matter what stage of our careers we’re in. Those who think of imagination is a magical part of childhood that dies when the daily grind of adulthood sets in are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Olympic skiier Kaylin Richardson (shown skiing, above) visited Science House to talk about how one of the ways top athletes approach the mountain is to visualize themselves on the steep slope, imagining the path it offers to success. Kaylin doesn’t just have this philosophy when it comes to skiing. She applies it to all of her entrepreneurial efforts, and to her life in general. She radiates possibility and generates not only a living, but a life.

Time Travel

This morning, my friend Alexandra Monir (shown right) sent me a note asking me if I remember our conversations many years ago about self-actualization. I met her on a flight from Los Angeles to New York years ago, when she was 19. I won’t ever forget our marathon conversation that evening. Alexandra had been inspired by Walt Disney as a child, and believed in the power of dreams and imagination as the path to her own eventual success, which included a vision of herself as a recording artist, entrepreneur and writer. She projected her consciousness into the future to imagine herself having achieved her goals, and this gave her the strength to commit to the grueling path ahead. Over the years I have watched her manifest these dreams into reality a step at a time, unrelentingly. Just today, she wrote a post about time travel and visualization as a form of goal setting, in support of her latest novel, Timekeeper, recently published by Random House.

I find it delightful that her books are about time travel--the mental projection tool she used to get her where she is today.

Optimism

To varying degrees, every human being on the planet faces crushing loss, disappointment and heartbreak. Some people get sucked into the abyss of such events while others transform their pain by turning it into the energy that fuels what comes next. Just today, The Atlantic published The Benefits of Optimism are Real, in which the view is presented that “meaning makers” are healthier in large part because of the special stories they tell themselves.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s contention that positive thinking is a “total crock” argues that relentless optimism has undermined America. I completely disagree. Delusion about what undermines America is the problem, and positive thinking and delusion are not the same thing. In order to be effective as a powerful tool for transformation, positive thinking has to start with a recognition of reality, not a sugar-coated dreamscape. When Kaylin Richardson visualizes herself on a mountain, it is the actual mountain she needs to ski, and the visualization gives her a sense of the hard work she needs to accomplish in order to successfully compete. When Alexandra visualized herself as a successful recording artist and writer, both of which she has since achieved in the time I’ve known her, she didn’t rely on fantasy alone to get her where she wanted to go.

An imagination visualization, which starts in the present, blooms from authentic awareness about the difficulty of the road ahead but contains within it the path to success for those who are willing to pair reality and vision with the focus and commitment to make them real. Oprah didn’t snap her fingers and have her empire appear. Kaylin (shown above) had to actually put herself at risk to beat those mountains. Nobody wrote Alexandra’s books for her. But it’s imagination that kept their engines running when things got monotonous and difficult. The tedium of creativity is the hardest part, and the most rewarding.

Images: Kaylin Richardson at skiracing.com, Oprah courtesy of Harpo Inc., Alexandra by Neal Preston.

@RitaJKing