This used to happen to me all the time: I’d get an email with a link. I’d go to the page, I’d love the results the guy is having, I’d want it. I’d buy it… then… I can’t use it. Even the tutorial videos don’t help: I lost my “vision.”

How come we buy things. While we watch the sales video, we feel clear about our need to have this, we feel clear about how it’s going to fit into what we are already doing, we feel clear about what to do.

Then the magic moment comes: we are sitting in front of the product, and we have no idea about any of that.

I hear that only one to two percent of buyers, on average, use the products they bought. Whether it is a software, a marketing method, a workout regimen, the Water Energizer®, a meditation program, a spiritual practice… whatever it is, the results are the same.

What happened? They nodded.

Up until two days ago, this had been my story for the previous 12 years, in the area of most anything I bought. And I bought a ton of stuff.

Then two days ago I had a breakthrough… and with the breakthrough came a 20/20 hindsight, that showed me why none of those products were used by me.

Thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of dollars wasted on something I could not use.

You have heard of intangible capacities, I have been harping on them for six months now.

A month or so ago I discovered the capacity of creating, building Mental Representations of things I wanted.

Mental representation is a detailed image, or a detailed map of something done… ready… achieved… perfect.

I muscle tested, and I have the capacity to create these… but I haven’t had the foggiest on how.

But I was really interested, really “craving” this capacity, because I saw that seeing what it looks like when it’s done, I would avoid making the millions of trials and errors I have to go through every time I want ANYTHING done, and would be just able to get things done. Instead I quit… a lot.

Then two days ago I bought a marketing product, and I was surprised that I could actually SEE how to get it done… maybe for the first time in my life.

Then I bought another product, and, gasp! I could see how it is used… for my business.

So, what I say happened, after poking at the capacity for about five weeks, it finally relented, and started to work, as if it had always worked… which it never did.

When I look at you, I see the same with you… when I explain it to you, when I show it to you, it seems clear. But left alone, you can’t see that you can do it. It all disappears.

One of my students whose dissertation was due yesterday, still cannot see how to get from the title to writing the darn thing.

So, what is going on? How can we be so wrong, how can we be so off? Why does the seeing disappear?

• When there is a sales video, it masquerades, for our minds, as a Mental Representation. But it is borrowed. We see it because someone has built it, but it is not ours.Building one is very different from looking at one made by someone else.You don’t own it, you didn’t actually do the work, didn’t actually shape your beingness to be able to match what you want to see. Your beingness doesn’t match? You can’t do it.

  The result is disastrous.

• Same thing happens with our carrier, our looks, our houses: we didn’t build the mental representation… we live in someone else’s ideal of what to do, how to work, what job to do, how to look, etc.
• Even when you make a vision board, you take a newspaper or magazine and put on the board someone else’s ideal of beauty, peace, wealth, love, etc. Not yours.Because you don’t know what you want, because… to want what you want, a cohesive picture of what you want is a mental representation, and you don’t have the capacity, or like me, I hadn’t used the capacity… so it was just sitting there.
• You are asked to visualize something, to manifest it, or to heal some issue you have in your body.But the picture you conjure up from thin air is nothing like a full picture, it is, at best, and the opposite of what you don’t want at worst.I remember being mortified when I tried to imagine what I wanted with regards to work, and the only things I could see were: 1. I wanted to see a tree from my desk, and 2. I didn’t want to wear shoes.
• When I asked a friend what he saw when he imagined himself as a millionaire, he said: He was climbing on the steps of a private jet.Anything worth having is more than a line drawing of one aspect of that thing.
• If I asked my love-starved student what having love in her life looked like, I am sure he would not have an answer.
• Just like if I asked you what being healthy looked like, you would have a one-sentence answer.

Rock climbing to the rescue…

I had a health call today with one of my coaching students this morning.

He is the one who can’t see his way to writing his dissertation to graduate from college.

I have known this guy from some time, and I like him. So I suggested that he looks at an area of life where he is successful and he enjoys the process.

He loves rock climbing. He is giddy when he talks about it.

In rock climbing, unless you are in the process, you fall.

You need to look at the next handhold, and not further.

You make sure that before you go for the handhold, you secure your position, you stand solidly where you are standing, so you can move one hand off a handhold.

And then you climb to the next handhold.

If at any point you see that you are on a dead end, you backtrack, and go back to a level where you had options.

You don’t imagine yourself being on top… it’s deadly. No, you do what you need to do.

Of course the goal is to get to the top… but through climbing.

If you don’t have the capacity of Mental Representation, this is how you climb any project… you know the end result, somewhat, and then you edge towards it.

What if you had clear Mental Representation?

Having a clear Mental Representation is like standing on the top of the mountain while you are climbing, giving instructions to the Doppelgänger of yours that is doing the climbing.

Dead ends, false starts are eliminated, and a certainty creeps in… because you see the process from two vantage points: from the climber’s point of view, and from the winner’s point of view.

Now, given that in all my search I could only find four famous high achievers who have this capacity… capacity means you can use it anywhere, not just in one area of life… I dare to say that it’s a very rare capacity.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bill Clinton, and Frank Kern… Frank Kern is a marketer.

What should you do if you don’t have the capacity?

If you see that you have a lot of false starts… and you are burning to have something succeed… if you suffer for lack of Mental Representation, please contact me.

I expect one in five will be someone who actually needs it.

The rest of you: do what I suggested to the student with the dissertation to write: do the writing project exactly how you do rock climbing.

You’ll be done in no time, with time to spare.

Choosing the meandering path can be really useful and rewarding.

I would not be where I am today had I built a mental representation of my life as a famous architect. I am happier (and poorer) than that famous architect I never became.

I choose happiness over money any day.

Read the original article: How to get things done, even if you don’t quite know what you need to do?