Have you let your mind wonder today?

My whole life I have always had a very active imagination, and over the years I have consciously exercised it as a means to building confidence and strengthening my ability to overcome challenges and visualize and achieve my goals.

When I was a little girl, I used to imagine how my future would be, and I would daydream of a day when I would have my own car. Of course that was always a flying car that I parked on the roof of my parents house. Parking it on the roof made for easy access, and also kept it from being stolen. The car would have a call mechanism, that would fly it down from the roof on my command.

I was also, in my own mind, a synchronized swimming champion during the summers. My parents would take us to the pool club on the weekends and I would spend the entire day swimming around mostly on my own living through the exciting experience of a tournament, and the difficult moves I had to make to win the competition. The hardest moves were the ones that required me to stay under water for long periods of time - but with practice I got better and better, and eventually won first place. All of that was, of course, in my own imagination, and I can only picture how silly I looked for the people around me that happened to pay attention to what I was doing.

I would also spend hours on my own, talking gibberish, pretending to be speaking English. I imagined what it would be like to carry on a conversation in a foreign language, fluently, and what it would be like to live abroad. Little did I know... but it didn't stop me, and it made me feel happy, and wonder...

While I still don't have a flying car, nor have I ever performed any synchronized swimming, the practice of allowing my imagination to wonder has been crucial to my personal development, growth and success.

Now you're probably thinking, how the heck can one's imagination help you succeed? Am I saying that if you think it, it will happen? No, I'm always an advocate for putting in the work, learning from your experiences. However your imagination is a powerful tool for helping you go beyond your experiences and open up your mind to a world that may not currently be your reality.

More often than not, our experiences, can be limiting, and can hold us back from taking a chance, taking a risk, or trying something new. Using our imagination to visualize situations that are unknown and experience the situation through the process of inventing partial or complete personal realms is an invaluable tool that will build your confidence to explore beyond your current known world.

Albert Einstein once said ... “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

My favorite personal story that illustrates this concept is from when I was 18 years old. I had just returned to Brazil from a 6 month exchange student program in the United States, where I finally learned to speak real English (or at least better than the gibberish I was used to). I knew I had loved my experience in the US, and I knew I wanted to go back for more. I just didn't have any personal experience on how that could be done. So I started to imagine myself living in the US, going to college there, going to the mall, and meeting new friends. I would picture what classes I would take, and how I would approach my class mates about joining them in group assignments. I would picture Friday nights, and what they would be like. It is very tempting and natural to build negative imagery specially in unknown situations like these. But I was very careful about where I let my mind wonder, because I knew that I wanted to go back, and those negative images pushed me further away from my goal.
So was I delusional and creating false hopes? No, I was focusing my imagination on what could be and through that process, started to identify questions that I didn't have the answers to. It was almost like a safe dry-run of what my future could be.

As I would picture me going to college in the US, one of the first things that came to mind was the questions about how I would get to school. I didn't have a car in Brazil, much less in the US. The key then was to never allowed these challenges to block my imagination from going forward. I would then picture me with a car. I would not worry about how I would get the car, and where I would get the money for it - because those are actions that I would figure out later, and during the time where my imagination was active, didn't matter how it would happen, it just needed to happen so I could continue to visualize how the rest would be.

Sounds simple, but it takes practice. I can't sit here and tell you that my mind has never wondered into a negative place. That would be a lie. But I'm very careful about how I talk to myself during the moments when my imagination is active. I talk with care, and acknowledge the challenges and carefully place them out of the way, reminding myself that "the how" isn't important at this time, and I will figure it out later.

I encourage you to let your mind wonder too.... It may take you places you haven't consider yet and may open your mind to a new future of opportunities. If you imagine yourself as a business owner, or a manager, or mother, or whatever.... exercising your imagination to build the positive realm will help you build the confidence you may be lacking to pursue it further.

Give it a shot!