We were lucky to catch up with Elliott Lyons recently and have shared our conversation below.

Elliott, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

About 10 years ago, I decided to do an ironman triathlon – I was in a place in my life where I wanted to figure out who I was and what I was capable of, so I picked one of the hardest things I could think of to push myself.

I’ve been intentionally visualizing for the last 15 years, so at that point I had already been visualizing for 5 years. But really I had only been doing it sporadically and situationally up until that point.

Reading the books from the world champion triathletes, they all spoke to the importance of visualization in their journey to winning the championship, so I started incorporating it into my daily routines, making it more of a practice.

I would visualize running across the finish line, I would visualize getting stronger with each bike ride I did, with each lap in the pool, but most importantly I would walk through the entire race day in my head over and over.

Starting with visualizing waking up, eating my breakfast, getting my stuff together in my hotel room, walking down to the racetrack, setting up my gear just right, seeing myself get into the water with 3000 other athletes, hearing the cannon go off as all 3000 of these competitors start the race at the same time.

I would walk myself through every single little step of the entire race. I even visualized things that could go wrong and what I would do in those circumstances – like if my tire went flat or if goggles came off while I was swimming – I would know what to do instead of panicking or getting thrown off.

My goggles did actually get kicked off during the race, and without thinking, because I had prepared myself through visualization for that exact moment, I calmly dumped the water out, put my goggles back on and kept swimming before I could even think or worry about it.

Finishing the race was one of the most amazing things I had ever experienced before and it happened EXACTLY how I visualized it.

This was when I first realized how necessary visualization was to create real and lasting change in my life. After my ironman, I started to take visualization more seriously, and I wanted to bring it into my everyday routine and the rest of the goals I had for myself.

So, being a millennial, I opened the app store on my phone to look for a tool that would help me get consistent with my practice…and I found nothing.

There was content available on YouTube and in blog posts and books, but I had to piece all that together myself – and they didn’t really teach me what to do in my day-to-day.

I was already using apps for mindfulness and meditation, but these helped me calm my mind and create mental space. I didn’t want to settle my mind, I wanted to engage it and focus it on my goals. So I started to work with a success coach, which was more effective in learning visualization but was extremely expensive at $200-300 dollars per hour and that’s not a viable option for most people.

All of this helped me realize that there was a complexity to visualization, and finding the right combination of techniques was really the key to turning it into something more than just daydreaming.

The problem as I saw it was, here’s this scientifically proven technique that helps you improve your life, but there was no easy, practical, or effective way for most people to access it.

So I created it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My mission is to empower people to ‘go for it’ – whatever the ‘it’ is for them. Through the EnVision app I hope to bring the success tool of visualization to the wider world, giving people a powerful tool to help them fulfill their potential and achieve a meaningful vision for their life.

The above question “How did you come up with the idea?” does a good job of detailing my journey with visualization over the last 15 years and how I started EnVision.

Before founding EnVision though, most of my career has been in sales. I was fortunate to work for companies very early on that taught and promoted personal growth and success tools. I read success books, worked with coaches and visualized my goals from the beginning of my career.

One book in particular that shaped my mission was a book about the top 5 regrets that people have at the end of their life. Regrets like working too much, not spending more time with family, and not following their passions. The essence of the book however, was that there is nothing we can do about it at the end, we can only ever do something about it now. This inspired me and drives me at my core.

I also found a passion for technology along the way and began to create mobile apps. I built a company called App Magna, which produced a mobile application called Sleep Aid Fan, which has over 3 million downloads and produces $20k+ in monthly revenue.

When I realized there was a market opportunity that combined my passion for personal growth, visualization and mobile apps, I founded EnVision.

EnVision is a company that is helping people get clear on what they want in their life and achieve their goals through the process of visualization. Our mobile app now makes visualization accessible, simple, and effective for anyone to do in about 10 minutes a day.

Visualization is a science based, powerful mental technique where you are guided to create images in your mind that the brain experiences as real. EnVision is more than this though, it is using visualization to effectively shift our state and mindset, then using that shift to improve ourselves and how we show up to each day, so we achieve our goals more easily.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn that taking a long time to do things “right” the first time, isn’t doing things the right way. I am at heart someone that wants to do things right. The challenge was that for a long time that meant perfect for me. Life is a beautiful imperfect journey and it took me a long time to know that we are meant to try things, make mistakes, learn, grow, get better, not work towards perfection and hardly act.

In the beginning of EnVision, I did what many founders do with a new mobile product. I tried to build a fully complete product, but still call it an MVP (minimal viable product). The first build of the app took a long time and even after that I loved big updates that took a long time to deploy. The truth is I had no idea if these updates were what the market wanted or if the specific changes were working or not.

Our Head of Product has been with us since 2018 and has had to painstakingly work on getting me to move towards a fast iteration model – build, measure, learn cycles. Which is essentially the opposite of a perfectionist mentality.

In 2019 we released 7 app updates and our lifetime value only rose a little bit. In 2021, with a combination of deep data analytics, constant user feedback systems and 2 week development cycles, we deployed 25 updates and doubled the lifetime value of our product.

The world moves too fast to operate any other way and even though part of me still loves the idea of perfection, I have let that go so we can move fast, learn and actually create something significant.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

When I was first starting EnVision, I wanted to ‘pitch’ the idea in various pitch events for new startups in my community. As part of my daily visualization practice, I would visualize pitching my idea and having it be received well, then I would visualize finding the right team members to build the company with.

When you visualize like this, the opportunity identification part of your brain (the reticulated activating system), starts to notice new opportunities that will help you towards you goals that you may not have noticed otherwise. This happened to me one day as I was scrolling through Facebook – I saw a post saying, “We have a couple more spots open for our 99-sec pitch competition, message me if you are interested.” I’m quite sure I would have scrolled right past it normally.

I reached out and got a spot in this event. The event was sponsored by an executive coach and was attended by many others in the startup community. As part of pitching, I received a free session with the sponsoring coach. This coach decided they wanted to work with me for free (we had no money) and she introduced me to our now Head of Content, who has been with us since the beginning.

That would have been amazing in it of itself, but there is more! From that event, from one other person I met there, I was introduced to our Marketing Manager, who has also been with us since the beginning. And this person introduced me to one of our very first investors, who also introduced me to our Content Manager, who has, yes you guessed it, been with us since the very beginning of EnVision.

All of this came from one Facebook post I noticed because I was visualizing for 10 minutes a day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://envision.app/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theenvisionapp/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/envisionvisualization
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/envision-visualization