Something that Matt Morris wrote in a recent edition of the Success University newsletter about "goals" and "vision" really struck me the other day.

Here's what he said:

"We all know what a goal is, but vision is a topic of confusion for many. To put it in the simplest of terms, your vision is how you see yourself. You can set goals all day long, but if you cannot truly see yourself achieving them, your goals will never be realized. To accomplish a goal, you must truly expect to achieve it."

The key word is "see".

How many of us fail to achieve goals because we don't give them real substance in the subconscious by visualizing them taking place? I still have pages of old diaries full of "year goals" that were never achieved, year in and year out. They were worthy enough goals, but they lacked any deep vision of success.

The problem with setting your goals without first seeing your vision is that you are failing to appeal to your subconscious mind with pictures that compel. If you do not appeal to your subconscious with a clear picture it is unlikely that your life will change.

As anybody who knows Matt Morris will tell you, he grew up amidst poverty and low expectations. By constantly focusing on how broke he was his circumstances came to dominate his subconscious mind.

Matt writes:

"I had no idea that my vision, which is trained by my subconscious mind, was overriding my efforts to succeed."

The subconscious mind will draw on whatever is to hand. If poverty and failure are the only materials to hand, they will be drawn upon and they will certainly continue to show up in your life.

But you CAN change the vision your subconscious works with. The subconscious level of the mind is influenced by what other people say about you, by your experiences in life and by what YOU think about yourself.

So, here are three things to do if you want to prepare the ground and plant your vision deep in the fertile soil of your mind:

1. Hang around less with people who put you down. Look for one or more mentors to give you guidance and feed your vision. If you cannot find a good mentor, try an online mentoring programme such as Matt Morris's Success University, which is what I have been using.

2. Reinterpret your own history more positively. Turn your past into a source of strength, not weakness and self-defeat.

3. Change the way you speak and think about yourself. This is where positive thinking is important - in the thoughts you think about yourself.

Start to build your vision in thought pictures and impress them upon your subconscious mind as vividly and as often as possible. Again, the support of an organization like Success University will provide you with daily reinforcement and help in this area of personal reorientation.

When your subconscious is impressed with a clear vision it will work towards your goals through flashes of inspiriation, changes in posture, attitude and expectation, which will, in turn lead you to take action or respond to opportunities.

Your vision will lead you through the inevitable failures and false leads that will beset your progress and that would cause you to give up if you had merely set goals and not written your vision in vivid pictures on the tables of your subconsious mind.

Having a vision is ultimately about how you see yourself, and it is that vision that will bring you through whatever tribulations you must face on the path that is set before you.

The surgeon Maxwell Maltz, who wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, a bestselling "self image psychology" bible, discussed the way in which mistakes and wrong turns serve a vital function in the successful achievement of one's "self-image" or vision.

The first thing to understand is that,

"YOU make mistakes, mistakes don't make YOU - anything."

Tiger Woods, a man who has spent much of his life in the company of great mentors, talks about failure like this:

"The most we can ask of ourselves is to give it our best shot, knowing that sometimes we will fail. We are often defined by how we handle that failure."

So your mistakes should not affect your vision, your "great expectations" of achieving your clearly seen goals.

In fact, if you have a clear vision, your mistakes serve an important function which actually contributes to your eventual success, rather like a servo-mechanism in a rocket. Your "mistakes" are like "negative feedback" that tells you that "you need to take corrective action to get back on beam," as Maxwell Maltz explains:

"If negative feedback is working properly, a missile or a torpedo reacts to 'criticism' just enough to correct course, and keeps going forward towards the target. This course will be... a series of zig-zags."

Similarly, our vision provides us with an inbuilt "servo-mechanism" that gets us zig-zagging towards our goal, with the aid of negative feedback.

When Matt Morris discovered that "vision" was the key to achieving "goals" he "forever broke the shackles of poverty" from his life. He went on to found Success University and turn it into the most popular personal development website on the Internet in its first year of business.

You too, can do great things, provided that you write your own vision, make it plain upon on the tables of your subconscious and run with it until you see it made manifest in your life.