My husband and I had been working toward a long-term goal for several years. At times, when the vision of its accomplishment began to fade, we sat down together to check in. We asked ourselves: Is this goal still important? Do we need to refocus our efforts? During these conversations, we reimagined the outcome—what it would look like, how it would feel, and even what stage of life our children will be in when it’s achieved. This exercise rekindled our excitement and reminded us why we began.
But at one point, I felt like we were drifting off course, so I took extra time to envision the goal in greater detail, immersing myself in the feelings of its completion. Then, during a date night, I brought it up, and together, we refined our shared vision. This practice didn’t physically move us closer to the goal, but it reignited my sense of purpose and increased my belief that unseen forces were aligning resources and opportunities in our favor.
A simple shift in focus can make you feel more successful right now.
The more you dwell in that mindset, the more energized you feel, and the more brilliant your ideas become. As Dave Ramsey describes it, achieving big goals often requires “gazelle intensity”—a single-minded focus that lets nothing distract you. I’ve experienced this kind of intensity before, and while it’s demanding, it’s also invigorating. It has often led to success, and part of me believes that no major goal can be achieved without it.
That said, I’ve also reached extraordinary milestones by taking a gentler approach—visualizing the goal clearly, feeling its reality, and then moving forward at a sustainable pace. Both methods can work, but since our particular goal at that time had been five years in the making, with little visible progress, I felt a renewed need for focused determination. So, we had another “check-in” conversation, emerging with clarity and a recommitment to our target.
A few days later, my husband started talking about a truck he wanted. He described its size, style, and how he imagined making it happen. But I couldn’t share his enthusiasm. Hadn’t we just decided to focus on our original goal? I couldn’t understand how he could seem so easily diverted, and the thought of abandoning our shared vision left me feeling deflated.
Eventually, we talked it out. He explained that he wasn’t ready to act on the truck; he was just “trying it on”—imagining it as a possibility and exploring how it felt.
This distinction was a revelation for me.
He wasn’t abandoning our shared goal; he was simply daydreaming. Knowing this eased my concerns and helped me recognize the difference between two essential types of dream-building:
The first is what I call “Daydreaming.” It’s a playful, exploratory process where you imagine possibilities, test how they feel, and gather details to enrich the vision. It’s an important part of goal-setting but lacks the commitment needed to guarantee results.
The second is “Staking Your Claim.” This is the decisive act of choosing a goal and committing to its fulfillment. It’s like planting an arrow in the bullseye of your target, attaching a string, and then rolling it in until you reach the mark. Even if you veer off course, the string pulls you back, guiding you instinctively to the goal.
Understanding this distinction brought us clarity. My husband reassured me that our shared goal was already claimed, and the truck was just a fleeting daydream. Both mental exercises are valuable, but they serve different purposes. Daydreaming sparks ideas and adds detail, while staking your claim sets the intention in stone and fuels your progress.
Both have their place in the journey, but it’s vital not to confuse the two. Success isn’t inevitable if all you do is daydream. At some point, you must stake your claim and start moving toward your goal with intention and purpose.
To reiterate, there are two kinds of Dream Building. Let’s talk about the difference:
Day Dreaming: envisioning yourself experiencing the goal achieved. You might envision one thing one day, and something totally different the next day. Whenever you entertain a dream, all that you’d need to accomplish it begins to gather. But when you change your mind and decide that you don’t need to achieve it after all, everything needed to accomplish it begins to dissipate.
Staking Your Claim: envisioning yourself experiencing the goal achieved, and committing yourself to seeing it through, no matter what. It looks the same as Day Dreaming but there is an added level of determination and commitment. It comes with a decision to reject all thoughts of failure. It’s refusing to give attention to anything that threatens to take you off course.
Surprisingly, you CAN achieve a goal by Day Dreaming without resolved intention, without Staking Your Claim. As long as there is a picture in your mind, and a feeling as though it is real, it can be accomplished without resolved intention, so long as you don’t throw the idea away before it’s realized. Day Dreaming without Staking Your Claim only becomes fruitless if you keep changing your mind, or when you allow yourself to doubt too much.
If the thing you need is urgent and important, you can achieve it by simply pausing to see it done, and feeling what you expect to feel when it is. This moves your thoughts up to a higher-level where the solution to that problem is already being broadcast. Take action on that new idea, and you’ll achieve the goal. You don’t need to stop to decide if it was day-dreaming or stake-claiming, because it really doesn’t matter. Sometimes the urgency alone turns a regular daydream into a staking-your-claim moment because you already know exactly what you need, and the purpose of your visualization is to find the solution quick. Sometimes you demonstrate resolved intention simply by stopping your efforts long enough to “see it done”.
Case in point:
This actually just happened to me. I had been spending the last couple days trying to balance my checkbook in one of my accounts, and no matter how many times I ran the numbers and double-checked each transaction, I was still $25.77 off. I gave myself a horrendous headache trying to find the error, and I feel like I wasted a whole lot of time with no progress. There was obviously a bug in the program, because I only had 42 transactions selected, but the total at the top of the page said there were 44 transactions selected. Customer support was closed, so I nursed my headache and planned to call them in the morning. This morning I woke up to an email notification, that one of our Mindset Mastery program participants had two experiments that proved successful all in the same day. I was reminded of the power of visualization, so I stopped and pictured the reconcile page with a green checkmark and a big “ZERO” in the discrepancy field. I kind of chuckled, smiled, and thought, “Okay, here we go.” I went back to the screen and thought that maybe I should expand the search parameters. And bam – in less than 30 seconds I found two transactions from over 6 months ago that were throwing everything off. It never ceases to amaze me. I had given myself a headache for two days, but when I finally stopped to picture and feel success, I had it solved in thirty seconds.
The distinction between daydreaming and staking my claim is something I wish I had understood 25 years ago.
We had been taught how important it was to Dream Build. To imagine better circumstances, to see ourselves in happier situations. But I never understood the point. I never understood what it was supposed to do for us. So we’d go to the home shows, and we’d test drive cars. We’d imagine family vacations, and rich, rewarding relationships.
But all it did was make me hate my life all the more, because it was only a constant reminder of how things WEREN’T.
We were only Day Dreaming. We would imagine things, but didn’t know how to protect those dream-seeds. We envisioned, and then got frustrated. We pictured what we wanted, and then got angry that it wasn’t true. We planted seeds, and constantly pulled them back out of the ground.
Now, when I picture what I want, I know exactly what I’m doing and why. I know that I’m planting a seed, and I know exactly how to let it grow.
Read Hidden Treasures (free) to learn more about that.
I’d say that at least 90% of my mental exercises are Day Dreaming, and 10% or less are Staking A Claim.
It can take time on some of the longer-term goals to figure out what you really want. It can take time to figure out whether the thing you want is good for you, or whether it will lead to pain. (There are enticements in this world that look attractive on the surface, but which can keep us from finding true joy, and fulfilling our true purpose. Seek for the things that will bring you the greatest joy, and which will last the longest. Trust me, seeking treasures in heaven can sometimes take just as much Rare Faith as it does to pay your bills when money is tight. The good news is that practicing Rare Faith in meeting your temporal needs can give you valuable experience and increased confidence to do God’s will in other areas of your life.)
So be honest with yourself:
When you imagine success achieved, are you only Day Dreaming, or are you Staking a Claim? If you haven’t experienced the results you want, maybe it’s time to step it up and bravely make that quality decision. It’s a scary thing to do; what if it doesn’t work? What if you fail? What if you put it all on the line and nothing happens? Scary indeed. But I promise, the principles are true. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can test it for yourself.
I’d like to help. If you want help Staking Your Claim effectively, learn more about Mindset Mastery and you’ll see how we got our start with all of this.
“We put [it] to the test for one week. I [did as we were taught] for $2,000 dollars… I had just lost my job the week before and our current balance in the account was $100 dollars… We had no idea where $2,000 dollars could come from but felt if there was ever a test this would be it. …As soon as a despairing thought came in my mind like ‘How can you get another $1,000 dollars in just one day, I would [do as you taught]…’ On the last day of the test my wife called me … the test was a success because, the goal was achieved and ‘…God is never late’. Thanks again for helping me learn the missing piece. Chris Pierson”
“My wife and I found Leslie … in 2006 when our lives were shattered. We excitedly worked through the 15-week program and saw immediate changes in our lives. We repeated the second half of the course to solidify the teachings. We saw success in many areas of our lives as we applied the principles we learned. We made $100,000 in a network marketing business. I used these principles to discover my true passion and purpose in life and against incredible odds was hired in my dream job competing with more than a thousand other qualified applicants. We used these principles to find a beautiful home that we now live in. We continue to achieve our dreams and goals because we now know how. Success is predictable!” Ken and Debbie Carroll, Sandy, Utah.
It’s a great time of year to make some quality decisions for your future!
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2 Responses
What an inspiring article, thank you Leslie.
As I was reading, I was wondering if it’s possible to stake your claim on multiple goals at once, since I have two major goals I’m working toward. Is it more effective to stake your claim on one goal at a time, or could it be even better to stake your claim for multiple goals at the same time?
Thanks again for your wonderful insight.
I stake my claim on multiple, but then I only focus on one at a time. That might mean that I focus on one for several hours on Tuesday, but then I focus on another for a while on Wednesday (trusting that while I work on one, the other is taking care of itself until I get back to it). The difficulty comes when trying to focus on more than one at the same time in any given moment. Hope that helps!