I first encountered visioning back in December 1997 in another life.
I attended a 2-day workshop led by Jack Black, the motivational speaker and founder of Mindstore, who has coached over half the FTSE 100 companies. Jack Black claims his techniques:
‘improve mental wellbeing, taking you to a new place where anything and everything can be considered possible.’
The workshop I attended was being run by Rolls Royce in Crewe for their workforce. As a business consultant working with Rolls Royce at the time, I was invited along to participate. Along with hundreds of almost-exclusively male workers, I sat in a large conference hall and listened to Jack speak. There were no videos, no soundtracks, no guest speakers, just pure focus and high audience participation.
The workshop focussed on increasing self-esteem; reducing physical and mental stress; developing an unshakeable positive mental attitude; and setting and achieving compelling goals. We quickly learned that:
‘Stress is not what happens to us. It’s how we respond to what happens. And response is something we can choose.’
We learned about the power of the mind; far from a new concept to me but one I had never seen so effectively illustrated as when, with the help of volunteers from the audience, I watched a petite woman try to move a very strong man’s outstretched arm and fail to have any effect whatsoever. Then Jack placed an unlit cigarette in the man’s mouth at which point, the woman was able to effortlessly push his arm down to his side. The power of the mind, his mind, telling him that cigarettes are poisonous and will destroy his health, had instantly made him weak.
Then we moved onto the big stuff.
Visioning my life
U sing meditation techniques that ‘harness the whole mind’, Jack led the entire hall, some 600 people, into the world of visioning.
We closed our eyes and visioned a river over which we crossed to the left bank. We walked to a house with a red roof and went in. In the hall was evidence of the life we dreamed of living. We walked into our wellness room where we washed away all our negativity, stress and anxiety. Then we allowed the room to re-energize us and make us feel brand new, filled with enthusiasm for the life ahead of us. Finally, we entered the cinema room where, on a giant screen, we played out our future while simultaneously recording it.
And it was done. What we had recorded would now come to pass. We thanked the house, left, and returned to the right bank of the river. Then we came back to the present.
At the end of two days during which we had honed and perfected our visioning techniques, as we were all leaving the hall, Jack asked if anyone wanted to ask any questions while we waited for the mass of bodies to exit. One man asked if he could use the techniques he had learned to give up smoking and Jack assured him he could, telling him in two or three sentences, the basic steps of how to do it.
Did my visioning work?
Y es it did.
As I left the hall, I vowed to quit smoking using the techniques I had learned in the way I had just heard Jack reply to the question. When I got home I told Jack I would be quitting smoking on the 9th January 1998 (about 3 weeks hence) and I would never smoke again. I went into work on the 9th and told my boss I had stopped smoking.
‘How long for?’, she asked.
‘Forever!’ I replied, genuinely shocked at the question.
‘No, I mean, how long ago did you quit?’ She asked.
‘That’s irrelevant,’ I replied. ‘I’ve quit, end of story.’
I never smoked another cigarette.
In terms of my career and my personal life, everything I had recorded in that room came to pass along with a lot more because I was open to seeing opportunities and to taking them. For the next five years I continued to use visioning whenever I wanted to achieve something that appeared to be outside of my control. My career and my personal happiness, blossomed.
When we left the UK to relocate to Tenerife, I gave up visioning. I guess I had accomplished all I set out to achieve and now here I was, living the dream. For nine years I didn’t go back to it until things started to go badly wrong and if you’ve read The Banana Road, you’ll know exactly how much stress we came under.
At the depths of my despair, I began to vision again. The day I saw that woman walking down the path towards our gate, I knew that my visioning had worked. I knew for certain she was about to tell us we had a way out, and I was right. I had visioned it.
Visioning revisited
A decade has passed since I last employed the technique and now I find myself in need of it again. Nothing huge or life-changing, just a number of small things that individually are nothing but cumulatively are causing me stress and anxiety. So I have started visioning again.
It’s fair to say my technique is rusty and so far, I have not been able to achieve a state of visioning. I’m still at the imagining phase and need to practice hard. In truth I probably need to listen to the tape that we all got when we finished the workshop but that has long been lost, along with the means to play it! So I’ll simply persevere.
But I already feel more positive, and my outlook and general wellbeing are definitely improving. I’m hoping Jack Black can continue to influence my life, as he has been doing ever since I walked into that hall 28 years ago.
