The law of attraction is not unlike this Axe ad

If you’ve read the book or seen the movie called, ‘ The Secret ’, you know about the law of attraction, or the idea based on quantum mechanics that explains how, at the molecular level, we are all energy, and if we can get our energy vibrating at the same resonance as other people, we can create change. It sounds funny, but if you can get your energy vibrating in a positive way you’ll create more positive vibes.

Are you afraid that by sharing your ideas, someone will take them? Forget it. The reason you put them all in writing and then give them away is that it your Painted Picture doesn’t show how you’re going to do it. You’re not giving away your secret sauce.

What you’re giving away is what the future looks and feels like so everyone in the room conspires to help you make it come true. ‘The Secret’ is about telling people what your dreams are, and if you’re dreaming about building a great world-class culture, or a company with a great work/life balance, then sharing that with people will only serve to attract others with a similar mindset.

Creating a Painted Picture in order to reverse engineer your success is something that made intuitive sense to me.

I’ve since learned that it’s far from intuitive for everyone else.

Most people don’t think about the steps that are needed for personal or business success, and those that do can become easily frustrated with the planning process.

In 1998, when I was first exposed to visualization at an Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) meeting.  I started to think of this whole process as ‘leaning out into the future,’ which many people find helpful when they’re trying to understand this process. Eight years later, I heard another Vancouver entrepreneur, David Chalk, describe visualization as ‘leaning out into the future,’ too. Obviously, it made sense to people to think about the process this way.

A few of the other entrepreneurs from my EO Forum Group also got excited about this process and began to use visualization and the reverse engineering it in our own ways.

Once you’ve leaned out into the future and created your Painted Picture, reverse engineer to make it happen. A good example of how this works is the custom home construction process. In this specific scenario, the finished product—the home—is the equivalent of our Painted Picture.  But before creating it, home builders meet with clients and ask them to describe all kinds of areas of the home they want built or renovated. They get photos from clients and draft sketches based on these photos and other materials. After a few discussions to determine precisely what the clients want, the desired home begins to take shape visually. The plans, the builder and architect then draw up show a clear, painted picture of what the home should look like.

Using the plans as a guide, construction workers, electricians, plumbers and other team members build the client’s dream home, or ‘reverse engineer’ it. Custom home construction is the perfect example of reverse engineering in action: by starting with what the home should look like, all of the players on the team, from construction workers to the folks putting the paint on the walls, know exactly what they’re supposed to do. Everyone’s role is clear and the desired outcome is, too. It should work the same way in your organization and it can—but only if you use a Painted Picture as a guide.

An organization’s Painted Picture should serve the same purpose for you and your employees as the plans for a custom home: it should show you the way forward in reaching your ultimate objectives for your organization.

Don’t forget: Draft your Painted Picture with care, attention, and detail. This way, everyone on your team understands his or her role.

Years after working with an Olympic coach, I realized that the process of visualization was a lot like building a dream home.  If you can visualize what the dream house–or your designer kitchen–looks like, then you can talk to an architect and explain the vision you have in your mind.  You can even tear photos out of magazines to help explain what you see in your mind.  Once the architect can ‘see’ the same vision as you, he or she can create the blueprints for your dream home.

When you have a blueprint for success, you are more likely to achieve your desired goal, whether it’s building a house, winning a sports competition, or growing a business. That’s why it’s essential that you communicate what your business is going to look like at every stage of its growth, but most importantly, what it’s going to look like in three years. I like this timetable because people will have a better idea of how to incorporate over-arching goals into their day to day work, since it doesn’t seem as far away, but isn’t in the same category as other daily tasks.

Just so we’re crystal clear: This blueprint or ‘Painted Picture’ isn’t a to-do list, a five-year plan, or a vision statement.  Vision statements are when everyone gets in a room and you pull together the words that best describe your business, and you create a one sentence vision or mission statement for your company that no-one reads and no-one cares about ever again.  This is different. This is when an entrepreneur, CEO or whatever you are plants one foot in the present, and then dips the other into the future, into what ‘could be.’

When you peer into the future, what do you see? What do you want to be there? What materializes in front of you as the epitome of success? Don’t worry about how you’re going to build it, just focus on describing what you see over the next three years. One exercise that can be helpful is to imagine you’re filming every aspect of your business: your employees, customers, supplier relationships and so on. Once you’ve completed this exercise in its entirety, you’ve created a ‘Painted Picture.’  Scroll down here to read the Painted Picture.  This is where I start my CEO Coaching of all the Entrepreneurs I mentor.

At 1-800-GOT-JUNK? we did a great job of making the Painted Picture come to life.  Brian Scudamore was the visionary who would write down what he saw ‘in the future.’  He handed me the first Painted Picture in October 2000, after spending some time sitting on his parent’s dock on Bowen Island. It was a vision of what the company would look and feel like by the end of 2003.  He didn’t know how he’d build what he saw that day from the dock, but he wrote down everything he could conjure up. He knew if he could see it, we could build it.

In later versions of Brian’s Painted Pictures, he began asking employees and Franchise Partners what they saw in the future.  Some of their ideas got baked into the Painted Pictures created for the years 2006 and 2009.  Many of their visions were placed in large vinyl letters on what we called our ‘Can You Imagine?’ wall.  We included brief descriptions of our ideas for the future, too. For example, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, we called our office the ‘Junktion,’ and envisioned it becoming a famous tourist destination,  an idea generated by Katie Dunsworth.  Then there was Lindsay Peroff’s vision of seeing our company on Dr. Phil, which she later made a reality.

What we proved was that the visualization techniques taught by an ex-Olympic and sports psychologist were as applicable to business as they were to high performance athletes. We didn’t worry about how, and instead, focused on the end result, the vision of success.  By building on that concept, and involving employees, we enlisted people to help us create that vision, and make it a reality.  Then we figured out how to reverse engineer it to make it happen.  Scroll down here to read my Painted Picture for BackPocket COO.  Do you have yours in writing yet?

Have you ever observed an athlete right before a competition? The next time you watch the Olympics take a look at the high jumpers.  You’ll see many of them standing very still just before they start running to the bar.  Then they’ll close their eyes and you’ll see their head bobbing up and down as they imagine running up to the bar—but they haven’t even moved.  Sometimes they even throw their head backwards a bit as they jump over the bar in their mind.  Then they open their eyes, stare at the bar intently, and begin to recreate in real time what they just visualized.  Downhill skiers do this too–they’ll use their gloved hand to pretend to ski the entire course (some imagine it quite realistically in their minds, and you’ll see them respond physically to imagined obstacles on the hill). Whatever the sport, these athletes are using visualization to achieve their desired results, and by imagining the obstacles they might face, they prepare themselves mentally and physically for the challenge.

The visualization techniques used by athletes should also be applied to business. I’ve had enormous success with the process after learning about it from an Olympic coach and sports psychologist. This coach worked with high performance athletes to help them visualize their task prior to the event taking place.  He showed us a variety of examples of where athletes using a process of visualization would so strongly ingrain the success and actual performance of the event into their mind, that when they competed, they simply recreated the vision they’d burned into their memory bank.  They could, in fact, ‘see themselves’ competing, and as a result, their vision of success became a reality.