Your three KEY ingredients to success

If you look through any ordinary cookbook, you’d discover that there are a few basic,

essential ingredients that are found in almost every recipe. Most dessert recipes contain sugar. Many breakfast recipes contain eggs. The majority of recipes contain flour or salt or butter.

No matter which recipe you select, there will be three or four key ingredients. They form the foundation of every recipe. If you try to leave out any of these key ingredients, your creation will likely fall flat and in the end, you will fail— no matter what other secret ingredients you might add.

When it comes to any type of success, what are the key ingredients?

The First Key Ingredient

Although it seems obvious, the first key ingredient in EVERY recipe is a clear vision of what you are trying to create. We don’t know about you, but we both find it easier to follow a cooking recipe when we can see a picture of what the ultimate dish will look like after it comes out of the oven. We can more easily imagine it—taste it, smell it, experience it—as we try to recreate it. Do you have an image of the lifestyle you are attempting to create?

Any book on success will tell you the importance of imagining your ultimate objective. Although this is important, we’d like to share with you our “secret sauce” when it comes to visioning.

It’s a process that we call Wow Now.

Have you ever been “wowed” by something you experienced in your past? Scan back and remember something that “blew you away.” Maybe it was a special moment in an important/meaningful relationship. Maybe it was the experience of receiving a unique reward or extraordinary acknowledgement. Maybe it was the birth of a child. Maybe it was a well-earned accomplishment—a diploma, a degree or a certification. What was it about that experience that “knocked your socks off?”

As you remember that special experience, we encourage you to remember it more vividly. Remember it as if it was happening again, right now. Remember what it felt like—what it feels like. Remember what sounds were (are) going on all around you. Remember what you smelled, what you tasted, what you saw. See, smell and taste it. Step into that special memory and experience it in all five senses. Now. Become so absorbed in the memory that you begin to notice details that escaped you the first time. Make the colors more vivid. Remember part of it more precisely. Make it MORE real than you remembered it.

Why do this?

This is excellent practice for a visioning process which we call “virtualization.” It’s more intense than visualization—which just uses visual inputs. To virtualize it, you imagine it in all five senses—as if you were virtually experiencing it. This drives the memory deeper into your psyche. It imprints your brain and body with what it feels like to be living your ideal lifestyle. It makes it more real.

Scan forward in your mind to five years in the future. Skip over your current money worries and income challenges. Fast forward through your credit card pressures and short-term cash crunches. Imagine living your ultimate lifestyle of financial freedom—of freedom in every sense. Freedom to live the life of your dreams. Nevermind “how” you might have accomplished such a lifestyle. Just imagine that you’ve found an honest and ethical way to achieve your dreams.

Imagine what kind of house you live in. Walk up to the front door, open it and walk inside. Imagine what you might see as you enter. A chandelier? A grand staircase? An open view to the ocean?

It’s your dream, so imagine it exactly the way you want. Smell something cooking in the kitchen. Your favorite recipe! As you walk down the hall toward the kitchen, feel the flooring beneath your feet. Is it wood? Or carpet? Or marble? Follow your nose toward where the chef has created a masterpiece for your taste buds. You enter the kitchen and the chef offers you a taste on a silver utensil. It’s even better than you thought! You smell deeply. How delicious!

You absorb yourself in the sensations of your surroundings. You've created a space where the best of your love of life can grow and flourish. You hear music. The sound of laughter. The warmth of a crackling fire. The view out to the back lawn. Down to the stream or river or ocean or lake or forest or golf course. Step into the image as if you were experiencing it NOW in all five senses.

Wander the rooms of the home in your dream lifestyle. Notice how every room is a special place for the special people in your life. What kind of relationships do you want to nurture and enhance? Who do you picture enjoying each room? Your home is the center of your world. From this center, your influence spreads to bless those around you.

See it. Feel it. Smell it. Taste it. Hear it. Make it virtually real. As if it had already happened.

Don’t concern yourself with how you did it. For now, just imagine having already achieved it.

Without question, it’s fun to imagine the ingredients of an ideal lifestyle. But that’s not the only reason we do it. There’s a deeper reason.

There is an unwanted ingredient that most people add to the recipe of their life that ruins almost every meal. That dangerous ingredient is fear. Fear is a destroyer. It’s like adding gasoline to your recipe. Fear entices you to vividly imagine the worst possible outcome.

How real are your fears? Have you ever hesitated in the moment you decided to move toward your goals? Have you ever been burned by the fear of rejection? Has the fear of failure ever stopped you? Just the thought of failure can cause even a courageous person to hesitate. These fears are real! Your palms sweat. The bile in your stomach starts to burn. Your brain goes blank. Your heart begins to pound like a brass drum. The voices in your head begin to shout, “You can’t do it. You've never done anything like this before.Who do you think you are?”

You feel it. You hear it. You smell it. You taste it. You see it. Most of us “virtually” experience our fears—IN ALL FIVE SENSES!!!! That’s why fear is so real. Fear is intense. Fear is absorbing. Fear virtually seizes every cell in your body. Are your dreams MORE REAL than that? Most of your dreams are just fleeting fantasies—nice images of possibly positive outcomes. But do they WOW you?

This is the secret.For you to achieve your dreams….

Your dreams must be more real than your fears!

If your dreams don’t WOW you, then they aren’t real enough to combat the fears that will eventually arise to stop you. Your dreams MUST be more real than your fears. Your dreams must be connected to your soul. They must EXCITE you. Simply thinking about them must cause you to stay awake at night.

When a fear comes in contact with such a dream, the fear itself must be WOWed into submission.

Therefore, when we say WOW NOW, we mean for you to go out into the future and create a vision that WOWs you. The first step in this WOW process is to virtualize your ideal dream lifestyle. Make it as real as possible—in all five senses.

I’ll share with you the second and third ingredients in the days ahead.

Now, go WOW your day. 

Adapted from the book, Cash in a Flash, by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen