Personal Growth From the Bottom Up – BroderickDurisseau.com
A Blog Dedicated to Personal Growth, Success and Goal Achievement

On October 1st I will begin a visualization trial. I really dove into visualization after I saw The Secret and it helped me take significant action. I used it A LOT to get my first blog off the ground and it’s a big reason this blog is here. If it were not for visualization and the awareness of the law of attraction, I might still be in my old, dirty apartment falling deeper and deeper in debt, not moving towards any of my own desires, and definitely not in a state where I could share anything with anybody.

I’ve used visualization every now and then, and as a consequence I’ve experienced “now and then” results. With this trial I am looking to establish a habit of visualization.

About Visualization

To anyone new to the concept of creative visualization, you’ve unconsciously already used it. When you build up the energy to go get your favorite food from a nearby store or restaurant or to go hang out with friends, you’re using the same concept. The only difference is that it doesn’t take that much visualization to go get your favorite food or hang out with friends. Those are both pretty easy to manifest, especially if you’ve done them a lot. However, the big ambitious goals that require consistent action take more visualization to manifest.

Wikipedia has a nice article about creative visualization, but basically it’s changing/creating your outside world by doing work on your inside world. Your inside world being your thoughts, feelings, but specifically your vibration. Creative visualization is living a vision in the present moment.

Pointers to Visualization and Vision

While consciously pursuing growth, I’ve come across so many sources that encourage visualization or advise “inside” work. Here’s just a few.

All Things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall receive them
- Mark 11:24

You will become as great as your dominant aspiration….Those who cherish a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in their hearts, will one day realize it.
- James Allen, As You think

What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve
-Napoleon Hill

“Begin with the end in mind” is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.
- Steven Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

From Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to Oprah, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer. I could go on for days with sources.

Making it a habit

As I said, even though I know visualization has been very beneficial, unfortunately it hasn’t become a habit yet and I know I could benefit immensely from making it one.

I know from my prior experience with visualization that the biggest benefit was the intense focus. It raises your awareness and puts you in a state to take laser-focused yet unforced action which allows you to build momentum. The good thing about that is that your momentum is now directed at what you want, so you don’t end up drifting playing video games, web browsing, watching TV or succumbing to any other distractions. And it literally does attract that which is consistent with your vision.

30-Day Trial

I got the idea of doing a 30-day visualization trial from this article by Steve Pavlina where he recommends visualizing for 20 minutes a day to experience a shift in equilibrium which should in turn create a shift in your reality. I’ve heard from many sources that 30-day trials are good ways to develop empowering habits, so this should be a good way to develop a habit of visualization.

Each morning at 8:30am I will spend 20 minutes visualizing. My days are pretty wide open so there’s a lot of space to attract what I’ll be visualizing. I will posting my results each day for the next 30 days.

Most of the visualization will be for this blog seeing as that is the number one goal I want to accomplish now. I want this to become a high traffic blog so I will be visualizing exactly what that looks like. Specifically, I’d like to build it up to at least 1000 unique visitors a day and at least be making $1800 a month. I may end up breaking that into smaller pieces, but we’ll see. I’ll post the results for this blog daily including traffic stats and subscriber stats. Right now I’m starting this off with basically 1 or 2 visitors a day and I just put my blog on this domain less than a month ago, so I’m pretty much starting from the bottom. If my predictions are correct my results should increase dramatically but I won’t be attached to that result. I’m just curious to see how much of an impact this will have.

Update: I finished the 30-day trial! To view the results go here.

The big, ambitious goals don’t necessarily require consistent action to achieve, but they will probably take an unreasonably long time without it. Persistence will get you there, but who knows how long it could take if you don’t consistently take action.

I’ll give you two personal examples. In the first example I didn’t take consistent action and the other I did.

Piano lessons

Many of my memories with piano lessons are memories frustration with an occasional feeling of accomplishment here and there. Though I believe I’m in a great place skill wise now, it took about 15 years to get here. Looking back, I probably could have shaved a decade off that if I had had any clue on how to set goals and achieve them. When you take piano lessons or lessons with any instrument, you’re creating a goal that you want to develop your skill to a certain level with that instrument. This is a big, ambitious goal. If you get to a certain skill level, it could have a big impact on your life.

When I first started piano lessons, the instructor told me that 30 minutes a day would be enough practice. That doesn’t sound like much, especially in the beginning when you’re excited and motivation is high. But after a while that motivation will decrease and 30 minutes a day could easily get cut to 30 min a week. Next thing ya know practicing piano gets pushed all the way to the back of the list of things to do behind homework, chores, playing with friends etc.

What hurt is that I didn’t realize that “practice 30 minutes a day” is a signal for a habit. I knew nothing about consciously building empowering habits and I would imagine most parents don’t either when they sign their children up for piano lessons. Since I knew nothing about building habits I wanted, I surely didn’t build a habit of practicing for 30 minutes every day. Instead I would practice every now and then. That caused me to have to repeat the same lessons over and over again which frustrated me and the piano teacher and no amount of nagging, motivational speeches, or threats increased my practicing either. I suppose a 30 day trial of just practicing 5 or 10 minutes might of helped tremendously.

I eventually got to a high level, so that was an enforcer of persistence. It’s a big reason why I won’t be quitting this blog. I know persistence will get you where you want to go but it’s crazy to think how much faster that goal could have been realized if I had the power to take consistent action every day instead of once in a while.

Off-Season Football

Here’s where I got to experience what can happen when you take consistent action. When I first started football I sucked. I came in the beginning of the fall semester when most of the players had had the summer to train. I was in the 10nth grade and it was my first time ever training and conditioning. That was probably the most challenging thing I had done in my life up until that point and I was a wreck. There were many embarrassing days where I couldn’t even finish certain workouts so the coach would come over and scream at me or other players would laugh. That public humiliation was a big motivator to take action. Within 5 months of training 5 days a week, I had drastically improved. It was like night and day. I became stronger than many of the people that were in there when I started. I knew I had really improved when a very good player who had seen me from day one came and patted me on the back and said that he was proud of me.

Consistent action in off-season football was a must. Everyday everyone’s stretching as a group. The whole team is working out together. You have a partner, a team, and a coach you’re accountable to. If you don’t finish, whole team knows it. Due to that level of accountability, things definitely got done. That was a great growth experience for me.

After that 5 months I decided I really didn’t like playing football, (especially my position at right tackle) but I did like the training we did in the off-season. Also after that 5 months I would have still considered myself a beginner, but it’s fun to think where I would have been if I had kept going with it at that rate for maybe a year or two.

Both of those experiences serve as examples to me now that consistent action is crucial if you want the big goals to be realized within a reasonable amount of time.

True desire is what you want. Period.

No matter what it takes to have it…
No matter who tells you it’s not possible…
No matter what the odds are of you accomplishing it…
No matter how many times you get rejected going for it…
No matter how many failed attempts you’ve had while trying to pursue it…
No matter what society tells you to want instead….
No matter what your family thinks you should strive for…
No matter what your friends say is a better fit for you…
No matter what people think of you because you want it…
No matter how big, small, short or tall it is….
No matter how far it is from you now…
No matter how much time, effort, thought, money, frustration, self-discipline or persistence it will take to get there…
No matter how much it defies logic, reason and understanding…

You want it.

Once you’re aware of your desire, what can you can do with it? You can bury it with fear, put it up for judgment, ignore it, maybe put in on the shelf to deal with later one day.

OR

You can dare to dream. You can thrive in the realm of possibility. You can accept and acknowledge what you want and use the power within you to move towards it one simple step at a time or by leaps and bounds. You can find others that will support you in your efforts to connect with it.

You can even change what you desire into something different. Many times you think you want something on the surface, but what you really want is a part of it or something unique about it.

You can do many things with desire but you can’t destroy it. Why would you want to? It’s such a great part of being human.

So you can choose to go for what you want or you can deny it. But understand that when you deny your desire, you deny the truth. When you deny the truth, you’re out of alignment with positive growth and you end up causing yourself more suffering anyway with your frustration/tolerance/apathy towards what you don’t want.

Don’t turn your back on what you want.

It’s been a little over a year (about 2 weeks over) since I began consciously pursuing personal growth. There have been several changes that I’ve experienced within the last year so I want to explore them and I also want to be completely objective.

Much cleaner and more organized

I love this change and it’s a very noticeable. It’s a lot easier to be clean and organized than to live in clutter. It’s a much freer and powerful feeling. I think the main problem with clutter is the reaction most people have to it – that I used to have. As soon as I would walk into a room filled with junk, food, clothes everywhere, immediately I would have an overwhelming frustrating feeling and the urge to find a distraction to avoid what I “needed” to do (clean the room). The answer was taking the “have to” and “need to” away and just focusing on what I want.

More of a reader

This is definitely a great change for me. Usually I would read maybe 10-30 pages of a book and put it back never to be read again and I would only pick up a book every now and then at that. After I wrote down my goal of reading 100 books, I said I’m going to start one book and finish it so I picked up A Road Less Traveled and read it all the way through. That was about a year ago and since I’ve read 17 other books and listened to 2 audio books. I guess I had to prove to myself I could start one and finish one before I was able to do the rest. That’s a pattern I see a lot in other areas of growth as well. Say you want to start earning money online. You have to earn that first dollar before the others come. You have to prove it to yourself that you can at least earn 1 dollar and then you can raise the bar. This year I’m looking to push it to finishing one book a week.

Seeing that I’m on my way to accomplishing that goal of 100 books evokes a powerful feeling every time I think about it, but that isn’t the biggest benefit of reading more. The biggest benefit by far has been the paradigm shifts. Every now and then I’ll find something that totally sends life in a new direction. For instance, if I hadn’t of read about the abundance mentality in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People this blog wouldn’t be going anywhere. I wouldn’t feel like I had anything to give. My cup wouldn’t be overflowing.

More authority over life

I feel it growing. There’s no feeling like progress and flowing with momentum and having that progress and flow be directed towards your goals. When you take more authority over your life, you say no more often. There are some things you just won’t do and you start living life more congruently with what you value and your vision for how life will be. Life is still pushing me around a lot but I know if I continue down this road I’ll be able to hold the reigns. I know as long as I keep following true desire, over the long haul authority will increase.

Increased awareness

I put this last, but it’s probably the most important because it affects all the other improvements. There are more moments throughout the day where I’m aware of how I feel both emotionally and physically, how I’m responding to people, what thoughts are going through my head, etc. When I become aware of it, I can consciously change it if it isn’t what I want to feel or think. I might drink some water or listen to something to inspire me or help someone else out some way.

Focused more on giving

I started this blog in November and it’s pretty much been my main outlet for giving. I want to step it up here too, but giving freely has already had nice benefits so far. This is my first year feeling like I had anything to give, so I’ll keep going with it and see how it turns out this year.

Improvements to be made

Consistent action for faster growth

For some reason it feels like growth is going very slow. The paradigm shifts happen very slowly. Progress happens very slowly. I see tangible results trickle in. What will make growth happen faster? —> not being afraid to think out of the box, facing fears/getting out of my comfort zone and consistent, positive, productive action towards my goals. Growth has happened slowly because I’ve slowly came out of my comfort zone in different areas and take action every now and then. More consistency and coming out of my comfort zone is in store this next year.

This is what happened with piano lessons and I think it’s where most people encounter problems when learning piano. If you don’t consistently practice you end up repeating the same lessons over and over again which frustrates everyone and has you second guessing yourself and feeling like you should quit. If you persist you’ll eventually get to where you want to go, but it could take a very long time without consistent action.

More focus on health

My health has actually declined. I’ve gained more weight and I can feel it physically. Much of it falls back on money. In many cases I know what to do, but I don’t have the money to follow through with it so many of my efforts now involve finding ways to earn more money consciously. Still, I want to establish some different habits here and also earn more money. There are empowering habits that take no money at all to build so money is not a valid excuse to take no action at all.

More giving

Giving takes time, physical effort, and thought so consistent giving takes consistent time, consistent effort, and consistent thought. The great thing about this is I can somewhat measure it. I will know when I have become more productive. For example, the main area where I want to give more is through my blog. So far I can see I’ve made 23 posts in a little over 9 months. At that rate after a year I would end up with 31 posts. I can do more than that. If I step that up to 100 posts in a year that would mean I would post every 3.65 days. I believe I can do that.

The reason why producing fresh content is so important is because it drives everything else about this blog. If I want to give that means I want to put value in people’s hands so if there’s no value (consistent quality content) then there’s less motivation to market so there’s no giving.

All in all this past year has been great, but I want this next year to be the best I’ve ever had. I know that takes daily consistency and going out of my comfort zone. The daily consistent actions aka habits produce the big results.