2. Visualize Yourself as Highly Efficient
The second technique that you can use to program your subconscious mind is visualization. Your subconscious mind is most immediately influenced by mental pictures. In self-image psychology, the person you see is the person you will be. Begin to see yourself as well organized, efficient and effective.
Recall and recreate memories and pictures of yourself when you were performing at your best. Think of a time when you were working efficiently and effectively, and getting through an enormous amount of work. Play this picture of yourself over and over again on the screen of your mind.
In athletic training, this is called “mental rehearsal.” This requires practicing and rehearsing in your mind before you actually engage in the physical action. The more relaxed you are when you visualize yourself performing at 17
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your best, the more rapidly this command is accepted by your subconscious mind and becomes a part of your thinking and acting later on.
The Practice of Mental Rehearsal
The method is simple. First, you sit or lie in a quiet place where you can be completely alone in the silence. You then imagine yourself going through an important upcoming experience, such as a meeting, a presentation, a negotiation or even a date. As you sit or lie completely relaxed, create a picture of the coming event and see it unfolding perfectly in every respect.
See yourself as calm, positive, happy and in complete control. See the other people doing and saying exactly what you would want them to do if the situation was perfect. Then, breathe deeply, relax and just let it go, as if you had sent off an order and the delivery is guaranteed, exactly as you visualized it.
The best time to practice mental rehearsal is at night in bed, just before you fall asleep. The last thing you do before you doze off is to imagine yourself performing at your best the following day. You will be amazed at how often the upcoming event or experience happens exactly as you imagined it.
In becoming excellent at time management, practice mental rehearsal by continually seeing yourself as you would be if you were one of the best organized and most efficient people you could imagine. Eventually these pictures will “lock in.” When they do, you will find yourself easily and automatically using your time efficiently and well in everything you do.
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3. Act the Part
The third mental technique you can use to program your subconscious mind for efficiency and effectiveness is to act the part of a highly efficient person.
Imagine that you have been selected for a role in a movie or stage play. In this role, you are to act the part of a person who is extremely well organized in every respect. As you go through your daily life, imagine you are an actor who is playing this part, who is already very good at time management. Act is if you are already using your time efficiently and well.
Pretend that you are an expert in personal efficiency. Fake it until you make it. When you pretend that you are excellent in time management, eventually the action, which is under your direct control, will develop the mindset or the belief in your subconscious mind that is consistent with it.
4. Benchmark against the Best
The fourth mental technique you can use for becoming a highly efficient person is called “modeling.” Modeling requires you to pattern yourself after someone you know who uses his or her time well. Think of someone you admire for good time management skills. Use that person as your standard or your model. Imagine what he or she would do in any given situation, and then do it yourself.
Many of the most effective men and women in America reached their positions by modeling themselves in their earlier years after someone who was already extremely effective, someone whom they admired and respected 19
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for qualities they wanted to develop in themselves. Because of the Law of Correspondence, you always tend to become on the inside what you most admire in other people.
5. Become a Teacher
The fifth technique for programming your subconscious mind is to imagine that you are going to be teaching a course in time management one year from today. This technique comes from the discoveries in the field of accelerated learning. What the experts have found is that if you think about how you would teach new material at the same time you are learning the new material, you seem to absorb it and internalize it far faster than if you just thought about learning it and using it for yourself.
As you take in these new ideas on time management, think of how you would teach them to someone else. Think of someone in your life who could benefit from practicing what you are learning. Just as you become what you think about, you also become what you teach. Just thinking about teaching something to someone else increases the speed at which you learn it yourself. And you always think about teaching those things that you most want or need to learn for yourself.
One of the fastest ways to learn new ideas and techniques permanently is to share them with other people immediately after you learn them. Each time you come across a good idea in this book, take a few moments to share it with someone nearby, either at home or at work. The concentration you require to explain the new principle in your own words to another person 20
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seems to drive the information deeper into your subconscious mind where it becomes a permanent part of your long-term memory.
6. Be a Role Model for Others
The sixth technique you can use to program your subconscious mind is to imagine that others are looking up to you as an example of excellence in time management. Imagine that you are setting the standard in your company or your organization. Imagine that everyone is looking to you for guidance on how they should plan and organize their own time. If others were watching you, what would you do differently each day? How would you behave in your daily work? How would you organize your time if you felt that everyone was looking up at you to set the standard, to be the role model?
When you see yourself as a model, an example of excellent performance, you will always do better and accomplish more than if you just thought of yourself as personally trying to be more efficient. The more you think about yourself as an excellent time manager, the more excellent you become. The more you see yourself as a role model for others, the better you become in organizing your own time and life.
Your Self Esteem Determines Your Life
Perhaps the most important part of the psychology of time management, and the role that your self-concept has in determining your performance and 21
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behavior, is the impact of your self-esteem in determining everything that happens to you.
Most psychologists agree that self-esteem is the critical determinant of a healthy personality. The best definition of self-esteem is, “how much you like yourself.” When you like and respect yourself, you always perform and behave better than if you did not. The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have. The more you life yourself, the more efficient and effective you are in each area of your life. Self-esteem is the key to peak performance.
Your self-esteem is so important to your emotional health that almost everything you do is aimed at either increasing your feelings of self-esteem and personal value, or protecting it from being diminished by other people or circumstances. Self-esteem, the feeling of liking and respecting yourself, is the foundation principle of success and happiness. It is vital for you to feel fully alive.
The Key to Peak Performance
The flip side of self-esteem is called “self-efficacy.” This is defined as how effective you feel you are at doing or accomplishing a task or job. When you feel that you are really good at something, you experience positive feelings of self-efficacy.
One of the greatest discoveries in psychology was the discovery of the connection between self-esteem and self-efficacy. Now we know that the 22
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more you life yourself, the better you do at almost anything you attempt.
And the better you do at something, the more you like yourself. Each feeds on and reinforces the other. This finding is what makes time management so important for every part of your life. The better you use your time, the more you get done and the higher is your sense of self-efficacy. As a result, you like yourself more, do even higher quality work, and get even more done.
Your whole life improves.
Three Self Esteem Builders
There are three additional factors that affect your self-esteem that have to do with time management.