I was supposed to have a teleconference with a friend of mine this past week.  We get together every once in a while and talk about our businesses.

She e-mailed me the day before our call to say that she had come down with the stomach flu and might need to postpone our call.

Well, of course I understand, I have had the stomach flu and let me tell you, it was not fun!  I’m not going to go into any details, and I’ll explain why in just a minute, but it is much worse than the regular flu virus that goes around every year.  If you’ve ever had it, you know what I’m talking about!

I heard a motivational speaker talk about this concept once a long time ago, and I’ve heard sales seminar leaders discuss it as well:  Be careful what you cause others to visualize.  The reasoning is this:  When someone you’re speaking to gets a clear picture of what you’re talking about, if he thinks about it for very long, he starts vibrating in that direction.

Now, this can be a very good thing.  It’s a great way to get students interested in a particular subject and to maintain their interest.

However, it can also be used to lower someone’s vibration.  Let me explain.

My first inclination with my friend was to say, “Oh, I understand.  I had the stomach flu about three years ago and it was —————————-,” detailing my gross symptoms and experience with the illness.

Luckily for my friend, I caught myself in what I was about to do and stopped.  Thank goodness we were communicating by e-mail instead of by phone!  So I simply replied with, “I completely understand.  I hope you are feeling better soon.  Don’t worry about calling me, we’ll reschedule for another time.”

If I had given her all the details, and again, I’m not even giving them to you here because I don’t want you to picture them, her visualization of my symptoms could have brought on worse symptoms that she might not have been having, or even prolonged her illness.  The best thing you can do when you’re feeling bad physically is think thoughts like, “Well, I know I’m going to survive this, and it will be over soon.”  Then do your best to get your mind completely off of your ailments.  This is when watching lots of television can be a good thing; watch repeats of your favorite sit-coms.  Just do your best to remember what it feels like to be well, and living your life the way you want to be, and you’ll be back on track in very short order.

For the flip side of this, a better way to have helped my friend, in that perfect, 20/20 hindsight, would have been to have made something up like, I had the stomach flu three years ago and what really help me recover quickly was re-reading all of my favorite books.  (Something to occupy her mind in a good way.)  The problem with the stomach flu is that food is not your friend for a couple of days, and it’s hard to steer completely clear of it, even in books.  Magazines and TV are covered with food ads.  But if your friend is pretty sharp and you can tell her what you’re doing, she’ll get it, and she can protect herself from non-uplifting images.

You can do this as a point of influence to everyone around you, by the way, sick or not sick.  If your daughter dreams of being a doctor when she grows up, buy her the play clothes to go with it – whatever her imagination comes up with – help her play it out.

I will often ask my husband, “Do you ever see yourself [doing this or that] . . .”  The answer tells me what his desire is and how I can best support him.

This is another reason why watching the news and seeing all those negative images is so damaging to us – it causes us to picture something that is not in alignment with who really are and want to become.  We feel bad about those stories and then we start to worry about, “well, what if something like that happened to me?”  Then we recount the story to our friends and neighbors and on and on the discord continues.  Do you see?

So the next time you’re feeling bad, on any level, whether it’s for yourself, or someone else, stop and think, “what am I picturing?”  You have control of the pictures in your mind’s eye.  And when you want to help someone else, you can either ask them point blank what they are picturing, or you can make an educated guess and then try to turn it around for them.

Until next time,
Picture good things!

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