Visualizing your goals is not simply day dreaming or wasting time.� It is a well-documented tactic for accelerating progress toward your goals and improving performance.
The Science.� In the 1980's, Dr. Denis Waitley discovered in working with the astronauts at NASA that your brain does not tell the difference between a real and an imagined experience.� Through a process called "visual motor rehearsal" at that time and using sophisticated biofeedback machinery, he discovered that when you visualize an event, your brain produces the same pattern of impulses and sends instructions to your biological systems just as if you were doing the event.
The Facts.� Dr. Waitley went on to use this process to improve the performance of Olympic athletes.�Surgeons, successful business people, and elite athletes, such as Michael Jordan, have reported using visualization techniques to reach their goals. Virtually every team at the Beijing Olympics will be employing the services of multiple sports psychologists to continue training these athletes to visualize their success among other things.
When I first started training as a professional coach, the power of visualizing was totally lost on me. I wasn't very good at it. It seemed like a waste of time. Why sit around and think about my goals when I could be actually doing something? To complicate things, I felt foolish trying to craft images in my head and I often was unsuccessful in conjuring up even a limited picture of what I wanted to achieve. While some of my associates could visualize with incredible, beautiful, clear and rich detail, I could often only hear my own words as if I was reading a book to myself, a book without pictures.
But seeing yourself in your mind's eye, actually achieving your goals, is a significant success factor. And there are important ingredients to making it a useful and productive process.
First, you must understand that this is a proven technique and accept that it is worth your time. Let go of the idea that visualizing is not "doing" something to contribute to your progress. It most definitely is!
Your visualizations will be most effective if you practice them regularly for short periods of time rather than long, less frequent periods. Daily practice and regular preparation produce superior results to cramming at the last minute. Remember, you are training your brain here. Work it out regularly.
There are two schools of thought on what exactly to visualize. One idea is to only visualize the end result. The other is to visualize the steps. I recommend that you do both. The important thing when doing either is that you tap into the feelings and sensory information that emanate from the images.
Add sensory information to your images. Even if you are not successful at first in seeing an image, you can add sound or tactical information. When you can create images, make them rich with detail and color.
And this is really important, don't just look at your image. You must fully associate with it. That is, put yourself into the image and see things from your own point of view. For instance, the Olympic athlete would see the crowd as she looked out from the podium. Looking down she would see the gold medal around her neck and to her right and left she would see other athletes who had received the silver and bronze. To really add juice, see yourself as part of a movie, a moving picture, rather than a still shot.
A word of caution about visualizing overcoming obstacles and solving problems which you will no doubt have to do in achieving your goals. Visualize yourself being totally resourceful when faced with difficulty. See yourself getting to the other side of a challenge with grace and ease. However, do not associate with the obstacles. You want to view the obstacles as if you were watching them on a screen, from a distant. You want the image of the problem to be black and white with very little sensory data, maybe a little obscure. Then, you can watch yourself in the picture solving the problem. When you visualize all of the things that can go wrong with rich detail and fully associate with the vision, you actually increase the likelihood of difficulty and failure. This is what happens when you choke so to speak.
If this is new to you, test it out. Invest a little time in strategic visualizing and check out the results. Time and energy spent visualizing is an investment in your outcomes and will pay dividends in productivity and effort as you move toward your goals.
