Fifteen years ago, our company had annual revenues of $39 million. Last year, we bumped that up to more than $1 billion. Visualization — seeing and believing in a successful future — played an important role in our growth.

My first awareness of visualization happened while I was a college student reading about the success of professional golfer Jack Nicklaus. My dad was a big Nicklaus fan, and we saw him often at the ballfields where I played sports in the same league as his sons. Reading a book about one of golf’s greatest players years ago, I was intrigued to learn that he attributed a big part of his success to visualization.

Nicklaus spoke about vivid mental imagery that was important to his game and success; he would visualize each shot, from the swing to the ball’s landing. That visualization set the stage for innumerable athletes who followed him. Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Simone Biles, Cristiano Renaldo, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt, Lindsey Vonn — these are just a few of the athletes who have said visualization is an important part of their mental preparation.

Visualization is not limited to athletics. Actor Jim Carrey is known for writing a check to himself for $10 million when he was getting started; he labeled it “for acting services.” Others known to practice visualization include Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Visualization can help anyone achieve his or her goals, regardless of what he or she is working to accomplish.

Visualization also helps well beyond achievement or performance. There are reports of visualization helping with stress reduction, learning and memory issues, and overall health and healing.

This may seem like a lot of anecdotal evidence, but visualization has been well-researched. Studies published in the Journal of Sports Sciences and the Journal of Experimental Psychology have validated that visualization can improve sports performance. Studies published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine and the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology have shown that visualization provides health benefits, and the American Psychological Association acknowledges it can help with stress reduction. Finally, research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology demonstrated that visualization helps people achieve goals, whatever they are.

So how did visualization help our company, Correct Craft, achieve more than 25-times growth during the past 15 years? In short, it is an important part of our strategic planning process, which includes big goals, and makes up half of our secret sauce, the other half being culture.

We use visualization at the very beginning of our strategic planning process by back-casting. Back-casting is an effective tool that helps people unlock their thinking about the future. We use it at all Correct Craft companies when kicking off a new strategic plan.

Basically, it works by creating an exciting and optimistic future and telling the team that a bright future has already been achieved. I usually do this by creating a fictional newspaper article dated five years in the future, which might state something like: “The company has tripled its sales with all-time-high customer and employee satisfaction.” Presenting the future as already achieved helps the team think of creative ways to accomplish the fictional future. It is much easier for a group to think about and describe how it already accomplished something, even if it is fictional, than to think of how to achieve something in the future. It may seem odd, but I have seen this tool successfully used many times. It’s a powerful mind hack.

The second way we use visualization is by creating “big hairy audacious goals” (BHAGs). James Collins developed the idea of a BHAG in his book Built to Last. It is used to imagine and chase a goal that might seem unreachable.

During our strategic planning process, we develop a detailed situation analysis with input primarily from outside sources. Once we have a clear picture of our current situation, the leadership team of whichever company is working on the new strategic plan creates an overall BHAG for that company. This is important but not the end of the visualization.

Next, we identify the company’s primary functions, and there typically are about 12, including product development, production, supply chain, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, etc. The leader of each of these functional areas develops another BHAG specifically for his or her area of responsibility. The plan is set up so that if each functional team achieves its BHAG, the overall company BHAG is reached.

This may seem complicated, but it is actually very simple. The best part is that having our leaders visualize what their team can do during the next strategic planning period helps them improve their results. Combining back-casting and BHAGs helps our team picture what we can accomplish, and then the team goes out and does it.

Visualization has helped our team achieve 25-times growth. You may not reach that level of growth, but I guarantee you will do better using visualization than you would without it. I have seen it work repeatedly, helping people and organizations achieve great results.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine was preparing to speak at an important business leaders’ meeting, and I wanted to be helpful. I told her to visualize walking onstage and giving the best speech of her life, to imagine exactly how her amazing speech would go. She did that, and it helped a lot. Almost immediately after her presentation, I received a text from the event organizer saying it was the best speech ever given to this group. Visualization helps us be successful.

My challenge to anyone reading this is to visualize where you will be in five and then 10 years, and think big, really big. I have heard it said that people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in five. You can accomplish way more than you think; the first step is visualization. Don’t waste any more time; visualize a great future for you and your organization starting today.

Bill Yeargin is president and CEO of Correct Craft and the author of five books, including the best-seller Education of a CEO.

This article was originally published in the June 2024 issue.