imagination is everything!

 “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions”

Albert Einstein

Among UPNG JCU Twinning Project Team 2017@ Cairns 

I share some of my success principles I learned through reading different motivational books. Many of the books I read on personal development and motivation have brought success in my life.

Through the lessons gained from these books I made many important improvements in my life.

I also used the principles I learned from books to make radical difference in my personal life. Some of my successes are the direct application of some of the principles I learnt from reading motivational and personal development books.

In sharing these ideas I want to show how they helped me shape the kind of person I am now and how I got here from back there when I was illiterate about personal development or motivational ideas.

The book that had motivated me more than any other book is Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer’s The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be (2005). The book came into my hands through a chance opportunity of a lifetime.

 I was on a research fellowship with the Macmillan Brown Center for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury at Christchurch in New Zealand in 2006. It was at that time that I bought the book. It was only a year since its publication that I had my copy of the book. I read through the book in three days.

Since that day I believed in everything that Jack Canfield taught me through his book. I took action in applying some of the principles in my life with monumental results. I did some of the exercises Canfield recommended so as to achieve the dreams I had about myself.

The book had changed me in more ways than one. It has opened doors that were closed to me. The book has shown me more ways to achieve my dreams. It has given me some solid foundations to stand on to do impossible things in life. The ideas that made Jack Canfield and others what they are became my own. I breathed on some of the great ideas that made great men in history.

In my diary that year I made the following notes:

April 19th 2006.

I am reading Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You are to Where You Want to Be. Yesterday I read up to 165 pages. The book is irresistible. I can’t put it down. I even woke up and read it again. The book has so much affirmation of what I believed, do, and liked to do. Canfield gives practical advice and shows how to make things happen. He even gives real life stories of those who made it.

I am reading the book and doing some of the activities inspired by Canfield’s word. I am already thinking about what to do to get to where I want to be. And since 2016 I have moved mountains and made the world my own.

One of the inspiring thoughts that came to me is that now I will write about the positive things that happened to me. I will begin with writing about the mental visualization I used over the years to achieve certain milestones in my life.

I was unconsciously using this technique all the time and did not realize it. The first time I used this technique was when I was very young, may be around two. It was during a night of flying trapping with an uncle that I first said composed a one-line poetry. I said, “The flying fox are moving like a flood.” The description was about the sky filled with flying foxes. It was the season of fruits of certain trees that attracted thousands of flying foxes to the Prince Alexander Mountain Ranges, where I was born and spent the first few years of my childhood. I was later told about this experience.

Writer--Grade 11 Student ANHS @ Kundiawa

 I captured this in my first short story written when I studied my first creative writing course in Aiyura National High School. The story is called “The Night of Bad Luck” published in a school anthology of creative writing. The book was printed for a small circulation within the school only. I did enter the National Literature Competition, but lost the competition. The important thing was that I learnt to write and received my first mentoring on writing from Mrs. Sanderson, my Creative Writing Teacher. I had also began writing and illustrating my own children’s book under another mentor and inspirational teacher Mrs. R. Everest.

By time I started writing I began to write about possible outcomes. I imagined myself travelling the world as a writer. That I did and have been doing since I first began to travel out of my country to international conferences to read my work in 1986. I was merely 22 years old at that time. It was a big dream and I have not lost it yet. Sometimes I feel that it is more than a dream.

But it was around the same time that I did something so important in my life. I had written in a notebook my plans or goals. I wrote something like this.

·      I will complete my BA Honours two years down the line (which 1988),

·      then in 1990 I will complete a MA degree and

·      in four years time I will complete my PhD.

·      I will complete my MA in New Zealand and

·       my PhD in the US.

And I did exactly that. I was living my plans.

It also happened that even the house that I call home now was once visualized that it would become my house once I have become a lecturer. And that is exactly what happened to me. Now it is my house and I feel at home in my own space.

Before I became a lecturer at UPNG. I had some friends seated in the Main Lecture Theatre of the University of Papua New Guinea one day. With their cheering and full attention I pretended I was a Professor giving my lecture to a capacity crowd of enthusiastic students. I was doing my BA Honours degree at that time. And that imagined crowd would become a reality in 1992 when I first lectured in the Main Lecture Theatre in my first job as a temporary full time lecturer in Language and Literature. Since then I have enjoyed my job as a lecturer.

I visualized what I wanted to be long before I actually become the person I wanted to be. Jack Canfield says visualization simply makes the brain achieve more. Our brain sees no difference whatsoever between visualizing something and actually doing it. This same principle applies to learning anything new.

With Nehemiah Akia@ his Graduation JCU GCE Cairns 

I like the quotation from Albert Einstein cited here by Jack Canfield: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions”.

Visualization works to enhance performance. Jack Canfield writes: “When you visualize your goals as already complete each and every day, it creates a conflict in your subconscious mind between what you are visualizing and what you currently have. Your subconscious mind tries to resolve the conflict by turning your current reality into the new, more exciting vision. This conflict when intensified over time through constant visualization, actually causes three things: It programs your brain’s RAS to start letting into your awareness anything that will help you achieve your goals. It activates your subconscious mind to create solutions for getting the goals you want. You’ll start waking up in the morning with new ideas. You’ll find your self-having ideas in the shower, while you are taking long walks, and while you are driving to work. It creates new levels of motivation. You’ll start to notice you are unexpectedly doing things that take you to your goal.”

I am now convinced that this is what I will do more of.

The moment I read Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles I knew I was read to do the necessary things to get the results I wanted. Since the year I had acquired a copy of the book I made many changes to my life.

I have seen results that I would never had thought possible. I have accomplished some of my goals and realized some of my dreams. The experiences I had were incredible. I hope by sharing some of these experiences with readers it will help transform them also. 

Melbourne for the Melbourne Writers Festival 2017 
(Photo by Philemon Yalamu)

Many people around me noticed the different changes I made to my personal life. To many people the changes in my life were difficult for them to believe. I surprised many people with the developments in my life.

I had succeeded in accomplishing some of my goals. I began to see positive results in areas that I wanted change. I enjoyed the successes and the happiness that came with positive changes brought about in my life through careful application of the Success Principles. I cultivated these principles and banked on the changes to my life and status.

I am now documenting some of the changes and successes in my life. An important part of all these changes is on what and how I made these changes in my life. 

Don’t ask me why I made these changes! You can read in my memoirs.