How to Visualize Your Way to Success

with guest Vinny Shoreman #MakingBank S5E48

What does success look like to you? Can you picture all the details, all the people there with you, what your surroundings will look like, and how profound your contentment and joy will feel when you get there? If you don’t know what success will actually look and feel like, it’s going to take a lot more time and energy to get there. Making the time to invest in yourself and your future by frequently practicing visualization can be one of the best habits you develop as an entrepreneur. Of course, like anything worth doing, learning how to effectively visualize from a world-class expert will save you time and spare yourself frustration while giving you confidence and an actionable toolkit to jumpstart your new skills today. 

Vinny Shoreman is an expert Hypnotherapist and Mindset Coach, and he’s on a mission to help his clients train their mindset to streamline their success, come to terms with their past, and ultimately feel inspired, happy, and fulfilled. Vinny believes in the deep power of the subconscious mind, and reminds Making Bank listeners, “The mind controls the body, not the other way around.” In his work as a renowned hypnotherapist, he’s been featured on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast multiple times, and has even hypnotized Joe Rogan himself. He’s worked with countless athletes, entrepreneurs, artists, and thought leaders all over the world to help them each master their mindset on the path to success.  

During his interview with Josh on the Making Bank podcast, Vinny explains the power of visualization and the mysterious workings of hypnotherapy. Whether you’re hoping to soothe anxiety, make peace with your past, heal from emotional trauma, or shape a success-driven subconscious mindset, applying Vinny’s inspiring visualization techniques will help more than you may imagine.  

Visualize the Victory, not the Effort 

Often, when you think about visualization, you’ll feel like you should visualize the action. If you’re training to run a marathon, logically it makes sense that you’d also be visualizing running the marathon. However, Vinny says it’s most important to focus your visualization muscles on “15 minutes after you’ve won.”  

Instead of spending precious energy imagining yourself exerting all that effort, feeling every footstep, breathing heavily, sweating bullets, and looking ahead toward the finish line, skip to 15 minutes after you’ve already crossed it. Visualize feeling your heartbeat slowly return to normal, the adrenaline and endorphins from the run mixing with the pure joy and pride of knowing you’ve won, the medal around your neck, your friends and family surrounding you with support. Focus on the blissful victory, not the grueling journey it took to get there. 

Try to picture every small detail as vividly as possible. Focus on soaking up the way you feel while you’re in that visualization: victorious, joyful, grateful, content? All those rich emotions are crucial to rewiring your subconscious mind toward a success-driven mindset, rather than an autopilot mindset prone to doubt, fear, and self-sabotage. Your mind is an expert at warning you about perceived dangers and risks; it’s why humans have survived and evolved to where we are now. So, it takes persistent training to override the fear and anxious tendencies we all have. Routinely feeding your subconscious mind confident, positive emotions during visualization is the key. 

Use all Five Senses 

When you’re crafting a visualized experience for yourself, make sure to include as much detail in as many senses as you can. It’s easy to get tunnel vision (no pun intended) about what victory will visually look like, so be mindful to include the rest of the experience too. What will you hear? Who will be there with you, and what will they say and do? What textures will be around you, what will your body feel, what will you be wearing, what will the weather be like? What will you taste and smell? Most importantly, what emotions will you feel in that moment? 

Once you know all the details, you can queue up your visualization like a movie. Fully immerse yourself in the moment, feeling and seeing every vibrant detail as if it’s really happening. Watch yourself live that moment again and again, feeling the full extent of those victorious emotions as if you’re really there. 

The more vivid your visualization becomes, the more easily your subconscious will latch onto the experience as truth and begin to lay the groundwork for your success. The trick to effective visualization is genuine belief, as cliche as it may sound. With practice and consistency, the goal is to get your mind to wholeheartedly believe that those rich, positive emotions and luxe visions are absolutely true, and already exist in real time.  

Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind for Success 

Your subconscious is complex. It’s main priority is to keep you safe and healthy, and sometimes its methods aren’t too conducive to taking risks and doing hard (albeit rewarding) things. Visualization allows you to open up a dialogue with your subconscious. By spending time in your richly detailed visualizations, you’re telling your subconscious, “Look, there’s nothing to worry about. See how great things are?”  

Vinny insists that success always comes down to mindset above anything else. He tells Josh, “It’s all to do with your mindset and to do with focusing on what you want to get, what you want to have, and get where you want to get.”