Getting Your Imagination to Work for You

By Denis Waitley

ONE of the wonderful aspects about human imagination is that it can see things not as they are now, but as they can be.

It can foretell the future, based upon our beliefs and expectations, in an almost uncanny way; it can draw the colorful mental images that we hope someday to turn into reality. 

Imagination is the beginning of creation. 

Dr. David McClelland, former professor of psychology at Harvard University, demonstrated this through a series of “projective tests”. In these tests, McClelland used photographs or drawings depicting basic scenes. 

For instance, in one photograph, a man was lying in bed with his eyes closed. His hand was raised and extended over an alarm clock on the table next to the bed. 

A window in the background was bright with the rays of early morning sunlight.

  Motivation

McClelland asked his subjects to either describe the scene or tell a story about the person in the picture. To be sure that the responses were solely a function of motivational levels, the subjects for each test were people of the same sex, age, social background, and level of education.