Using Optimism To Help Achieve Your Goals!

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

Long before Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Schiffrin, there was Billy Kidd.

Billy, along with teammate Jimmie Heuga, were the first Americans to ever win Olympic medals in alpine skiing. For the previous 28 years of Olympic competition and going back as far as the 1880s, American skiers were never seen as a serious threat to Europeans who dominated the sport.

Billy Kidd loves skiing! Today, at the age of 81, he is the director of skiing at Steamboat Springs Ski Resort. It isn’t uncommon for skiers to be greeted by Billy as they make their way to the gondola in the morning. He is a skiing evangelist with a contagiously optimistic personality. But passion and optimism alone weren’t enough to win championships and earn legendary status.

Billy used his optimism to visualize success, not just the triumphant finish, but every detail of a winning run. He studied each course he competed on and would memorize every turn and bump so that he could ski each of them in his mind. He was so serious about fine-tuning his memory that he practiced by memorizing phone numbers and grocery lists. According to Billy, visualizing the racecourse and how his body would react was just as important as the physical conditioning he did.

Visualizing our own success is something most of us practice regularly. We imagine outcomes that would make us happy and cause us to feel successful, and those outcomes become goals.

But how often do we visualize the entire route from where we are to where we want to be? Do we see all the turns and bumps we’ll encounter? Do we invest time in building the knowledge and skills we’ll need for success?

This week, I encourage you to:

• Visualize your own success.
• Set meaningful, challenging goals.
• See the entire journey from start to successful finish.
• Work on building the knowledge and skills you will need.

These don’t have to be grand outcomes, you could do this for your next sale, project, a work-related deadline, or some outside of work-related goal you have for your life.

I hope you have a great week!