How To visualize Your Dream and Avoid Fantasizing About It

A guide to stop fantasizing and ‘just do it’.

We all have been here before. We dreamed about our glorious days when everyone will notice you or your achievements.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We all have something we always dream of and that’s healthy. You should and must dream about it, to know how you want to see yourself in the future.

However, the problem arises when you don’t visualize that dream.

Are you ONLY dreaming of that glorious moment? Did you realize the hard work you must put through for your dreams to come true? How much pain you must go through?

In other words, are you fantasizing or visualizing? What the difference? Let’s go to the easiest one first that most of us do:

Fantasizing

According to the Cambridge dictionary, fantasizing is thinking about something great that may not happen.

In other words, you are dreaming of the day you will be glorious, but you have no intention to get there. This is very very dangerous, especially for the ones who want to start their own business or make a difference in their lives. It’s very addicting to do it, I have done it before and before I knew it, I wasted a lot of my time when I could’ve been doing something else more important.

Let’s take an example: you dream about getting the girl you love, you get the job you love and everyone loves you. But do you think about how to get there? Are you learning something to get there? What are the steps you need to get there? Do they involve unicorns and dragons??

Snap out of it!

If you keep doing this, you’ll never reach how you want to look like in the future because all you keep doing is dreaming without doing anything about it.

However, when you put action to your dream, that’s when you visualize your future.

Visualizing

This is where you break out of the illusion of glory and put action to your dream. You are determined to make your dream come true and willing to put effort, whatever it takes.

According to Cambridge, visualizing is to form a picture of someone or something in your mind, in order to imagine or remember him, her, or it. So as you can see here, this definition neither said that it’s true nor false.

In other words, you can still make that dream to reality. But are you determined to make it happen?

This is why the definition is not telling you whether it will or will not happen because it all depends on how you visualize it, just like in what most companies would have in their core. What is your goal? What are your missions? What is your vision?

This is why every business must have a vision and mission because that is how they keep their strategies straight. It gives them goals to set and what tasks must they accomplish that help them have meaning and motivate the employees.

Here’s an example, I’ll choose Cinepolis. Their vision and mission is quite something:

Cinepolis Mission Statement

To be the best entertainment option, strengthening our leadership in the film industry, offering fun, innovation and stellar service.

Cinepolis Vision Statement

We illuminate the movie of your life with smiles and unforgettable moments.

I love their Vision Statement. It’s something I can relate whenever I watch movies, which is why for the people who have been following me, you all know that I posted a lot about movies. Today, Cinepolis is the fourth-largest theater chain in the world.

I hope that Cinepolis will keep following this vision and make the best out of their cinemas.

So what should I do to avoid fantasizing?

We are all avoiding fantasizing, this is a trap that will get us nowhere. So what must you do?

1. Dream about how you want to see yourself in the future.

Close your eyes and dream. See yourself as an entrepreneur? A leader? Manager?

Whatever it is, think about how you want to see yourself in the future. Think about the great things you want to achieve and obtain: rewards like big bonuses, rich and famous, new titles. These are the drive of your dream. That way, you have a picture of where you want to get to, leading to my next point:

2. Write down the goals/steps to get there.

This is the strategy part. Picture(visualize) the steps you must take to get there, what you need, what are the goals/tasks to achieve. Everything needs a strategy, and there may be a lot of tasks to get there.

So write them down. This helps you to look back and remind yourself what you are doing in order to make that dream to reality, it makes you self-conscious about yourself and your purpose in life (at least for this particular part, I felt like my eyes have opened and realized that the world is so much bigger than I imagined.)

That way, you know your steps to take, leading to my next point.

3. Get started.

This is the part where you put action into your dream. Look back at the goals that you wrote about and think about how to logically accomplish that, then you put in the work. Do you need to take classes? Need a partner?

These questions can only be answered when you do your research well, and let’s face it: this will mean that you are going to have to start ‘disappearing’ from your friends for a while in order to accomplish your dream, which will be discussed in my final point.

4. Just do it.

It means that your every Friday hangouts with your friends will need to pause for a while and replace it with your goals until you reach your dream.

This part is the most irritating because when I started this, I look at all my friends partying on Friday nights and I didn’t go because I want to make this writing business part of my main job. Of course, I got very jealous.

I must work late at night to think about my next topic to write, learn about investments, etc, whilst my friends are having fun. There were disappointments, losses, failures. Here is an example: I tried to get all my writings curated but still haven’t got one yet. I’m still learning, but I don’t want to give up on it even if that means I must isolate myself because I have gone this far.

A good friend of mine, who finally was able to reach his dream of creating his own business, told me he had a similar experience with me. So he told me to use that jealous as a drive for you to reach your dream.

He told me to: work hard, be honest, don’t be lazy, be patient. As long as you are already starting, then you have won.

The Take

To summarize:

1. Dream about how you want to see yourself in the future.
2. Write down your goals/steps to get there.
3. Get Started.
4. Just do it!

So as you can see, your dream will only be fantasies if you don’t put any effort into it. JK Rowling pictured a dream to write a story about Harry Potter for everyone to read, it took her years of suffering and failures to make it happen. Look where it got her now.

So, are you visualizing it or fantasizing about it? Everything depends on you. I hope you all visualize your dreams that will be your future.