Imagine any ordinary day in your week, getting ready to leave your house, perhaps on your way to work, or to a meeting.  As you prepare to walk out of your door, imagine the journey that lies ahead of you.  As you head to your front door, I wonder what you see?  What colour is your front door?  Is the lock situated on the right or on the left?  How many locks are there?  Does the door open in wards or do you push it out?  Do you hold your keys in your right hand or in your left.  What will you see when you step outside of your front door?  What do you expect to see?

Now unless you were born clinically blind, you have just made a series of pictures in your mind.  You used your imagination to visually construct something that is familiar to you, something that you have done many many times before.  If you travel on the same route to work each day, to the gym or to a particular place, you will also be able to see that easily.  In fact making pictures in your mind is something you do all the time.  When you imagine anything you go into an altered state.  In Hypnotherapy we call this state 'Trance'.  When your conscious mind is involved in any kind of process of imagination then you begin to transition into an altered state.  When you watch television you do exactly the same.  When you take a long car journey and you realise that you are not sure what happened to the last 20 miles, yet somehow you got to where you wanted to get to, you have slipped into an altered state. 

Now just imagine how easy it is to do something really well, when you remember how you well you did something else, once upon a time.  Imagine doing something with ease, enjoyment and satisfaction.  You remember how satisfied feels don't you?  You see changing states is all you really need to do to achieve the simplest and the most difficult things.  You change your state countless times throughout the day.  You can easily go from feeling calm to being frustrated or perhaps from apathetic to enthusiastic or from angry to fits of laughter.  Now when you next think about something you really want to do well and you are not entirely sure about how you want to do it, just let your imagination show you what you need to know.  Imagine how powerful your mind is when you let your imagination run away with you.  Go on, try it!  Imagine having the confidence of a great speaker of presenter, the imagination of brilliant film maker, the creativity of painter or an architect and curiosity of an excited child.  In the words of the author Clement W Stone "what the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve".