About Steven Aitchison
Update: Please click on this link for more information about The new Mind Alchemy course. All the links to the downloads have now been removed. I would like to thank all 800+ readers who expressed an interest in this course and for everyone who completed the course the first time round, it is becasue of you I could make the course better.
Before we start
You can still join the course by Clicking here
A few readers are now blogging about their experiences on the course, and it would be great to lend your support:
Stacy Claflin – Grow With Stacy
Marty BoneIdol – Living Life in Chapters
Stephen – New Life Starts Here
Read the interview I have done with Angela Artemis from Powered by Intuition
Read the interview I have done with Sandi Faviell from DevaCoaching
Watch an interview I made with Suzie Cheel on Mind Alchemy
Mind Alchemy Day 5
Today is going to be a great day as we look at all our outcomes for 2011 and beyond.
Outcomes are the things we want to achieve in our life. I use the word outcomes rather than goals as the word ‘goals’ implies something far off and not as close as we want it to be. An outcome is something we set our minds on, see it more clearly and has more of an urgency about it.
We are shifting our thinking when we look at outcomes and using more of our imagination, and what NLPers (Neuro Linguistic Programmers) call sub-modalities. When we think of something we want to achieve we’ve got to be able to see it in our mind, see it up close, colourful, vibrant, full of life, hear clearly the sounds associated with the outcome, feel the excitement. When we can do this, our thoughts about the outcome will have more of an urgency about it, more excitement surrounding it and will therefore increase our chances of achieving that outcome. A simple change of the word from goals to outcomes makes a big difference in our thinking.
Setting your outcomes
When you come to set your outcomes it’s important to realise that setting specific outcomes is great, but I would like you to try a different way from what you might have tried before.
Setting outcomes usually involves getting really specific and saying something like:
‘I now drive a top of the range, dark blue, brand new, Audi Q5’
What I’d like you to do is set your outcomes a little less specific and to let go of the outcome and focus on the underlying value and emotion that your outcome will bring once it has been realised..
So, for the above example we could say something like:
I now drive a top of the range, family car of my dreams. The underlying value here might be: ‘Too feel wealthy’, ‘To keep family comfortable’, ‘To keep family safe’.
The cocktail effect
When you set your sights on an outcome your mind will start to work it’s alchemy and get to work on how to bring about your outcome. If you’ve ever been on a night out at a club or a bar, the music is playing, lots of noise from people talking, laughing and generally having a good time. Then someone calls out your name, you immediately turn in the direction of the person calling your name. The explanation that psychologists give to this is called ‘the cocktail effect’ and speaks about the auditory system and how it is able to filter out background noise but still recognise familiar sounds.
I believe this is how outcome focussed thinking works. If we set our minds on particular outcomes in our lives, the other non essential, daily routines in our lives will be filtered out. In other words we will no longer focus on the day to day dramas in our lives, which are only dramas because our minds are bored and want something to do. For example have you ever been going about your day to day routine and you receive a piece of news, good or bad, that rocks a part of your world. Suddenly all of the day to day things that you do seem unimportant and you don’t give them a second thought, television becomes a nonsense, gossip seems trivial, people that previously upset you became unimportant and you no longer cared what they said or thought, you wanted your family around you, and appreciated them more, your thoughts were focused on that one piece of news, at least for a short period of time.
When you consciously inject outcome focused thoughts into your mind a lot of the other, unimportant things in your life will be filtered out, leaving room for your mind to be on the lookout for opportunities, for people to meet, for books to read that will all help you reach your outcome. This is what a lot of ‘LOA’ practitioners call ‘your thoughts become things’. Obviously your thoughts don’t become things literally but your outcome focused thoughts will help you realise your outcomes, by helping you take action, help you be on the lookout for opportunities, help you meet and talk to the right people.
Today’s exercise – daily routine
With that said, I’d like to offer you todays worksheet to download.
Download PDF Mind Alchemy Day 5 Your outcomes for 2011
Download Word Document Mind Alchemy Day 5 Your outcomes for 2011
Here is an EXAMPLE COMPLETED SHEET
When you download the outcomes PDF file you’ll see 8 components to it, which I will explain:
Category – This is the categories we used in our wheel of life yesterday. So there are eight categories to choose from: health, money, family, career, Personal Development, recreation, spirituality and [ ]. Work your way through each category and think about all the outcomes you’d like to achieve in that category. Some categories might have more outcomes than others.
Outcome – This is the end outcome written in the present tense. E.G. I now spend at least three, quality, hours per day with my family.
Values – What is the underlying life value that this outcome will fulfil? Using the example above the underlying value might be ‘Family’
Outcome picture – start collecting images from Google, from magazines, newspapers, and catalogues and paste them into the box provided. Or you can even draw the images of your outcomes. This is an important step so please don’t skip over it. Use specific images, but also use images that will portray your feelings of having achieved the outcome and your underlying life principle.
Vision Statement – Think about a vision statement, we worked on this on day 4 of the course. Incorporate emotions, feelings, and senses if you can.
Date to be completed – This is the date you will work toward completing your outcome.
Date completed – This is the date you actually completed your outcome.
Signature – Sign the sheet once you have completed all the sections (not including your affirmation). This gives you accountability, so think carefully about your outcome and know that you will commit to it.
Daily Routine 1
Once you have completed your outcome sheets, which can take a few hours if you are focused on them, they are going to be used everyday from now on. This forms part of your ‘Daily Routine’.
Every day, until you complete each outcome, you will be looking over each outcome in turn and giving them your attention for around one minute each. When you give them your attention, clearly see the outcome as being achieved and feeling the emotions, seeing the pictures clearly, hearing the sounds as clearly as possible and really immerse yourself into the scene.
If the images are far away in your mind, bring them closer to you, same with the sounds, the smells, the feelings. Bring them all as close as possible, make the sounds as loud as possible, feel the emotions as intensely as possible. The more your images fade in your mind the less chance you will have of achieving your outcome (this is important).
Also important is not to treat this daily routine as a boring task that has to be done, treat it as something that is going to change your life, even if you don’t believe it just now, it will happen.
Change requires change…
This will mean changing your daily routine. I know, I know you’ve not got enough time as it is, but do you truly want to change your life or truly just daydream about it?
I have made time by getting up at 5am every day, I work full time as an addiction worker, I have a gorgeous wife and two boys who I spend a lot of time with, I am fairly actively socially, do housework, cook meals, and I still find time to write for the blogs, email, use the social media sites, coach clients etc. If you truly want to change, something in your life has to be deleted or something has to be slotted in, in this case you maybe shave an hour off your sleep time if you feel you don’t have a lot of time.
I am not joking when I say that adding this into your daily routine, preferably in the morning, can turn your life around. If you didn’t do anything else in this course and just worked on your wheel of life and your outcomes you would start to see changes within a few months. BUT, I know you want to continue with the course to get the life you truly want a lot quicker 
There are a few reasons this works so well in bringing about change:
- you are infusing your mind with thoughts of the things you want to see in your life. You can’t think two thoughts at the same time so the more outcome focused thoughts you have, the more your actions will change, the more your actions change the quicker your life changes.
- Being outcome focused has a network effect on your other thoughts. If you have one thought that is focused on something you want, that would lead to another thought in the same direction, which leads to another thought. Then the negative thoughts start to creep in again: I can’t do that, I’m too old for that, what’s the point it’s never going to happen etc. But then you do it all over again, every day and pretty soon your outcome focused thoughts will outnumber your negative thoughts and soon you’ll realise you have changed as a person.
- Because you are going to be letting go of the specific outcome and focusing on the underlying values and feelings, you will reach your outcomes a lot quicker.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow we will be working on an exercise which will look at how you want to live your life. Until tomorrow my fellow Mind Alchemists……..
Action follows a thought…
This course is about taking action, and to become pro active in changing your life. Take time to do this exercise and really think about it throughout the day. You don’t need to wait until tomorrow to take steps to improve your ‘Wheel of Life’, but with the support and encouragement from all the members we can help each other and support each other, but ultimately ‘you have to bring something to the table!’
Your thoughts
As always it’s good to talk about your experiences and share it with the rest of the members of the course, so let us know how this exercise went for you and if you gained any insights or had any revelations about yourself or your life.
You can share your thoughts at Mind Alchemy Facebook Group
You can Tweet using the hashtag #MindAlchemy
Or of course you can leave a comment below.
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Good Day Steven!
I cant believe now I use to sleep 8 hours and thought thats the norm timing for my body to rest,while ago i switched to 6 hours and I can now say YES -Waking Up Early does mean a lot to me.It affects everything during the day positively and I actually realize Its not the time or how long We sleep but How..
Every Sigle Day I am learning something .Loving every subject all above here.
Its only day 5 and i’ve got so much going on with the changes in my life,
I will keep all the files and all the exercises to translate it and share with my sister and my mom,.:)
Thank YOU!
Regards D
HI Angeldadi, so glad to see you are enjoying life at the moment, and the course, and thanks for sharing this with your sister and Mom.
You have a great personality!
I would love to meet you & your lovely family one day:)
Helping billions isnt an easy task to do,and we are all connected mean while there is thousands of miles between and totally diffirent continents where we are at right now -It is something AMAZING!
I really appriciate -Your time and effort!
Thank You
D
Hi Steve,
I am enjoying your lessons (28 day challenge) I did not see any pdf download links for day 5 exercises. Would it be possible for you to send me the day 5 download links. I am keeping all of your pdf downloads in a folder for future print outs.
I also enjoyed your video on 4 steps to goal setting. Could you expand more on breaking down goals into chunks. How do you decide on the chunks or smaller sub goals. Could you give me an example of how you break down big goals into smaller chunks. Is there a step by step process for doing this? Thanks for your effort.
Ron
Apologies Ron, late night last night and didn’t vet it before going live. All is well now. Thanks for pointing it out.
To decide on the chunks – look at your end outcome, and then working backwards, decide on ALL the steps it would take to reach your outcome. when you have done that, each step then becomes a ‘chunk’ that you will work on, almost like a mini outcome. Hope that makes sense Ron?
Yes agree with Ron, I could download it too.I know you will to get back to us.:)
THANKS again
Have a great Day!:)
All sorted now Angeldadi
Thank YOU Steven!
I’ve got it:)
hei there steven…it’s me cynthia from malaysia…thank you very much for all the information and steps to go forward in life..It did get into my mind one at a time and well of coursse practice makes perfect..though I’m catching my to read the messages you send me but I manage to get what and how I suppose to do with my life…thank you very very much for alll your help.. again cynthia
Hi Cynthia, it’s amazing to see all the readers from all the different countries of the world participating in this, it blows my mind sometimes when I think about how the internet can connect the world. I am so grateful that you are here doing the course.
Hi Steven
Thank you very much for this course, although it tired me out yesterday, because I am having internet connection problems and here in South Africa service is sub-standard so that we can wait very long for it to be fixed. So, I could only get hold of everything yesterday morning and worked my ass off to get on par with everyone else, but I am with you now and enjoying the course.
Thanks again.
Enèth
Hi Steven, this is all good suff. I maybe jumped ahead last night on my blog by suggesting that you really needed to “believe you had already received” which is your point about focussing on outcomes. I am so happy and so grateful that you have worked hard to bring this course together and already positively impacting so many. cheers mate. Stephen
Stephen recently posted..Mind Alchemy Day 4 – Personal Vision Statements
You are right Steve.
This exercise does take a little longer. I’ve completed the first one for my health and I’m pretty pleased with it. I’m choosing to save these completed documents electronically for the time being. Cross between tree saving and the fact I’m short on ink!
I’m going to come back to the other areas later in the day and maybe do some of it tomorrow. It is, after all, my birthday today! 47 years of living and growing. On the journey I’ve got past some built up traffic and now on a straight open road for a while where I can see the horizon in the distance.
Marty recently posted..Will you take part in an experiment Im setting up
Hi steve,
I’m Hasseenah from Malaysia. Nice to see someone from Malaysia joining mind alchemy as well. It doesn’t feel so ‘lonely’ and I know someone out there in malaysia are perhaps thinking somewhat like me. Great!
Question- For Day 5 exercise, it means that I would have to make the same exercise for all the 8 categories in the Wheel of Life? This is what we call visualisation, right?
@Marty: Happy Birthday and have a fantastic day ahead of you
@ Steven. I am digging my mind into this, re-reading, trying to understand to do this exercise correctly, for example category: Money, could the outcome be I want to earn x amount of money per month? and then the value: could it be keep the family save, financial freedom, travel more etc? this is example.
I just want to know if I’m getting this right and can I use the outcomes from DAY 4 here too or is this somehow different? and finally date to be completed and date completed. Do you mean the time when we start working on this and when we complete this exercise? Hopefully you can shed some light on this.
It would be fantastic if you can write up a quick PDF document with examples from all the different categories. It’s time to keep working on these exercises.
Steven,
Thanks for the material – it is great! I confess though that I’m starting to feel overwhelmed. I’ve never been good at “goal-setting” and actually being able to set or follow through on goals.
I like how you’ve changed it to outcomes, but just the thought of looking at 8 categories of my life and thinking of outcome and vision statements for them, I feel myself resisting. What do you think may be happening?
Should I maybe just focus on 1 or 2? For example, I recently was laid off but my termination date isn’t until March 31st. But I “should” start looking for a job now, but I can feel myself resisting the process. My outcome is to find a great new job where I enjoy the people I work with and the work that I do is meaningful and effective and that is able to provide more than what I need so that I can be financially independent and generous.
Thinking of going through all 8 categories for this exercise feels overwhelming to me when I am having trouble following through on this one outcome above.
What do you think?
Thanks!
Hello again
,
This exercise is helping me see the big picture. My immediate goals are just small steps to the life I want to have, though the values and ideas are there. It’s good not to lose focus on that, because sometimes I get so wrapped up about what’s in front of me, I never look down the line to see where I am heading, and it can cloud my vision. Then I start over at square one again, trying to figure out what I wanted in the first place. And when I start over, I often have to rebuild the belief/faith that I will get there. Each day I’m learning something new, and taking a different step or approach to visualizing what I’m actually after.
Thanks Steven! This course is amazing thus far!
I’m not sure what the problem is, but I can’t download the example for the Day 5 assignment. It says it isn’t there. Looks like something zigged when it should have zagged. Could you email it to me, Steven?
Keep up the great work.
Thanks. Otherwise, I’m learning so much about myself. I’m starting to find out for the first time in my life what I want, and aspire to, and until this year I wasn’t able to. It’s a start and I look forward to the rest of the course. I’m still 2 days behind, but I’m getting there.
@Katherine Logan – Steven will fix this soon. The PDF file is corrupted. That’s why it’s not working. He will fix this for us when he get a change to do it.
@ The people who are participating in this course, should be proud of them self! I want to wish you the best in this challenge, never give up and keep doing this…
@ I have to continue to work on DAY 5 tomorrow because I need the PDF file Steven was so great to create for us but no worries, he will fix it when he can
Steve,
Thanks so much for doing this, I’ve enjoyed all the assignments, but I enjoyed today’s the most. I love how you used “outcomes” instead of “goals”. That really helped my thinking, it made it feel so much more do-able, if that makes sense.
To change the word goals to outcome is the best thing i’d have read today.They suddenly are more achievable and i can actually relate to everything id like to have. Instead of saying i want to achieve this…..i say the outcome i’d like..
it encompasses everything including the process of how to achieve what you want and see it as a part of you instead of a to do list away from you….
outcome.
thank you .
velisa