When you make your hopes for your talent visible, you immediately boost your prospects for success. As we say, if you want to learn how to play the guitar, you’ll be more likely to pick it up and play it if it’s visible in your living room rather than tucked away in your closet. Simple, visual reminders keep our minds in gear to find ways to accomplish what we hope to achieve.
Stanford football coach David Shaw wanted to get his team charged up for the annual rivalry with Notre Dame. The winning team gets possession of the Legends Trophy. As reported in a recent Associated Press news story, Shaw said, “The first team meeting on Monday I showed them a picture of the trophy. The freshmen hadn’t seen it. It was there for three years, and it was gone. I wanted to make sure they looked at it. We talk about it, people can jump on and off our bandwagon, tell us they love us and tell us they hate us, but when there’s trophy on the line, all you do is point to the trophy. There’s no defense, there’s nothing we can say or they can say about us. You win a game and you get a trophy.” Stanford’s rousing 27 to 20 victory provided tangible evidence of the team’s talent and success.
Think about what you can do to make your hopes visible. Here are a few of the many ways that people have told us help them visualize their hopes and realize them:
- A collage of all the rewards you’ll get when your hope is realized
- A nametag or business card with your desired new job title
- A screen saver with phrases or pictures that inspire you
What would you like to do for yourself?
The companion to making your hopes visible is making the use of your talent tangible. What will help others get past the “talk” to see the concreteness of your results? How can you create proof points of your talent in action? These can be systems, checklists, and guides that demonstrate the best practices you’ve learned. Often, people overlook ways to make their talent tangible. Find people who will listen to what you’ve done and what you’ve created and have them reflect back what they hear as the themes. It’s amazing how quickly they can help you identify ways you’ve made your talent tangible and how to present those so that they resonate with others. When your talent is tangible, you can leverage it as an asset for your success.
