Learn from a champion

For years in my presentations and in my book It Works with Simple Keys, I stress the importance of writing down your goals, envisioning them and taking action.

This year Michael Phelps revealed how he had a piece of paper, his intention list in his bedroom and after his remarkable wins at the Olympics in an interview with Bob Costas: “What was on that much talked about piece of paper? You wish lost or your intention list?”

Phelps:” I think you saw it. It was all there, I think the only difference was the 200 fly, but other than that everything was pretty close to, pretty close to identical to what was written on the piece of paper.”

When you write down your goals and desires onto paper, and you embody them - your potential to achieve them substantially increases.

Phelps talks about using his imagination to fuel his goals:” The biggest thing that I've been thankful for is that I have been able to use my imagination. When some people said it's not possible and it can't be done, I think that's when my imagination came into play.“

"I think it really shows that no matter what you set your imagination to, anything can happen. If you dream as big as you can dream, anything is possible. I saw so many quotes saying it's impossible to duplicate it, it won't happen. It just shows you that anything can happen.

So after writing it down, and envisioning it – he did another critical step: He took action, he trained.

Phelps: “ I’ve been able to have a lot of hard work and Bob (his coach) and I have gone through a lot together. It's all paid off."

One more behavior he adopted was to only share his goals with the one person he trusted to maintain that vision (His coach). Doing this he could prevent naysayers from attempting to tell him why it couldn’t be accomplished and perhaps this also helped him to replace the message a middle-school English teacher once told him that he would never be successful.

Write it down
Read it daily – envision it
Take action
Accomplish your dreams