4 Ways to Harness Visualization to Accelerate Achieving Goals
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Visualization is simply a purposeful daydream – a way to use the imagination to rehearse a performance, practice skills, build a repertoire of best responses, see yourself at your most fascinating, picture your life at its finest, or where you’d like it to be at a future date.
Visualization has been used by:
- successful athletes to enhance their skills and mentally train muscle performance (see Arnold Schwarzenneger’s 2 Principles for Success)
- billionaires, beginning with William Wattles who wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910 to today’s Tony Robbins and Bill Gates
- famous stars such as Steve Harvey and Will Smith
Visualization works by:
- challenging you to know what you want from life & how to get it
- creating hope for the future so you see yourself & your life in a positive light
- stimulating fresh ideas for goals that excite
- opening you to recognizing resources & new opportunities
- pumping up your motivation to do whatever it takes to get the desired end result
So . . . you’re telling me that changing how I see things will change how they are?
Yes! Absolutely. But don’t believe me. Try this 3 minute exercise RIGHT NOW and see for yourself.
Do it while watching the video the first time. Watching and then doing spoils the effect.
- Follow the instructions in the video, step by step.
- Stop the video and do what Tony Robbins instructs, then continue video.
- Do the next instruction, then the next.
- You will prove to yourself that visualization works.
4 Ways to Practice Visualization
There are 4 ways to practice visualization. You can do one – or do them all – to accelerate change so you can achieve your goals.
Mental Rehearsal
Mental Rehearsal of your performance internalizes skill development to master behaviors.Creative Visualization
Use your imagination to form vivid mental pictures, using all your senses to heighten your motivation to achieve your goals.Self Hypnosis
Use the scientific psychological procedures of self-hypnosis to make changes in your life.Vision Board
A vision board is a poster, logo, or collection of images that represents your goals for the future.
Each way to practice visualization is explained in detail below.
1: Mental Rehearsal
Leo Babuta, author of the blog Zen Habits and book Zen Habits Handbook for Life says:
Visualize your successful outcome in great detail. Close your eyes, and think about exactly how your success will look, will feel, will smell and taste and sound like. Where are you when you become successful? How do you look? What are you wearing? Form as clear a mental picture as possible. Now here’s the next key: do it every day. For at least a few minutes each day. This is the only way to keep that motivation going over a long period of time.
The 3 Minute Mental Rehearsal
Athletes mentally rehearse before they participate in their sport to enhance their performance.
- Block out all stimuli.
- Run through your performance step by step. Concentrate on what your body is doing, how it feels while doing it, and the response of any equipment.
Interestingly, athletes will mentally rehearse their performance again after they’re finished. This is when the feeling of performing is fresh in their mind and easier to recall.
This is especially important if there was an error in their performance. Daily Shoring says, “This is a retrospective version of mental rehearsal – they are cognitively “fixing” the error in their minds, which means they focus on the correct way to perform the task, not the mistake. This also helps them avoid associating that task/their performance with failure.”
They also recommend mental rehearsal for other life situations like a job interview, date, business meeting, presentation, or performance of any sort. “Visualize yourself going through the process and feeling calm and confident. If you can anticipate specifics (like an anecdote to share in a job interview, your speech in a presentation) practice these out loud in front of a mirror in addition to visualizing yourself performing at your best.”
Mental rehearsal helps you get over a poor performance. In a situation that wasn’t up to your usual standard, visualize a perfect performance, then let it go. You’ve rewritten the situation in your mind and can have the confidence that it will go better next time.
2: Creative Visualization
Try this 3 step creative visualization by Jack Canfield, founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul® and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success.
Canfield calls visualization “reprogramming our automatic pilot.”
The 3 Step/5 Minute Self-Visualization Technique
Go through the following three steps:
- Imagine sitting in a movie theater, the lights dim, and then the movie starts. It is a movie of you doing perfectly whatever it is that you want to do better. See as much detail as you can create, including your clothing, the expression on your face, small body movements, the environment and any other people that might be around. Add in any sounds you would be hearing — traffic, music, other people talking, cheering. And finally, recreate in your body any feelings you think you would be experiencing as you engage in this activity.
- Get out of your chair, walk up to the screen, open a door in the screen and enter into the movie. Now experience the whole thing again from inside of yourself, looking out through your eyes. This is called an “embodied image” rather than a “distant image.” It will deepen the impact of the experience. Again, see everything in vivid detail, hear the sounds you would hear, and feel the feelings you would feel.
- Finally, walk back out of the screen that is still showing the picture of you performing perfectly, return to your seat in the theater, reach out and grab the screen and shrink it down to the size of a cracker. Then, bring this miniature screen up to your mouth, chew it up and swallow it. Imagine that each tiny piece — just like a hologram — contains the full picture of you performing well. Imagine all these little screens traveling down into your stomach and out through the bloodstream into every cell of your body. Then imagine that every cell of your body is lit up with a movie of you performing perfectly. It’s like one of those appliance store windows where 50 televisions are all tuned to the same channel.
When you have finished this process — it should take less than five minutes — you can open your eyes and go about your business. If you make this part of your daily routine, you will be amazed at how much improvement you will see in your life.
3: Self-Hypnosis
All decisions take place in the mind, and the human mind is much like a computer. Paul McKenna helps people reprogram their minds using the latest psychological techniques to transform the way they think about about a specific thing like food or smoking forever.
Self-hypnosis is a relaxed state where we are highly focused, concentrating on one particular thing.
We use self-hypnosis to absorb positive suggestions, practice behaviors that help reach our goals, and train ourselves to be relaxed and control our thoughts. In fact, both the Mental Rehearsal and Creative Visualization discussed above could also be considered forms of self-hypnosis.
Paul McKenna practises the guided form of self-hypnosis. The subject is in control and creates the images under the guidance of the speaker, who knows what to say and how to say it to keep you in a relaxed state.
He is the number one hypnotherapist in the world. The Times of London called him “the world’s most important modern self-help guru.” McKenna is the UK’s most successful non-fiction author. I Can Make You THIN is the best-selling self-help book in UK history.
Here is a {free} full-length example of his “mind programming technique that will help you feel happier in yourself, focus on success, release your true potential, and create more abundance in your life.” Give it a try! It suggests that you use this self-hypnosis program for 7 days in a row.
On YouTube, he also has {free} sessions for:
- Sleep: deeper, longer sleep
- Instant Confidence
- Radiant Health
- Overcome Emotional Eating
- Quit Smoking
- I Can Make You Rich
If you find success with these, you try others available on Amazon such as the Hypnotic Gastric Band, Control Stress, Get Control of Sugar, Instant Influence & Charisma, How to Mend a Broken Heart.
I ‘ve only used 3 of these personally, so please use your own discretion.
