Coaching Yourself With Visualization

One of the tools in my bag to help people improve performance is the suggestion of incorporating visualization. It’s a strange one really because most successful people especially those in sport use it on a regular basis already but when I bring it up I nearly always get a strange look as though I have suggested mixing some eye of bat, monkey gland extract and lizard tail and slowly cooking it all over an open fire for 6 hours. 

The conscious human mind can only deal with 7 + or – 2 pieces of information at any one time, therefore, most of the banal day to day stuff is dealt with by our unconscious mind. Think for a moment of all those necessary jobs such as maintaining blood pressure, breathing, blinking our eyes and many more things that we simply do at an unconscious level and without any thoughtful intervention for most of the time. Without our ability to do this we would go into sensory overload and simply be unable to cope with all the information being thrown at us both internally and externally.

The unusual thing about the unconscious mind is that it has a really hard job determining reality from fantasy. It is that ability or drawback (depending on your view point) that allows us to relive events in our mind as though they are happening again. This can be a good thing when recalling pleasurable events but it can also be a bad thing when people relive traumatic events with the same intensity sometimes years after the original event took place.

So what has all this got to do with visualization and success?

Whenever we visualize an event (see what we would see, hear what we would hear, feel what we would feel as well as any smells and tastes associated) we are creating an internal reality that allows our brain to believe it has actually already done something. Now this maybe true or it may not be true it really doesn’t matter, the only thing that is important is that we see ourselves performing a task successfully. As we continually do this over and over again in our minds eye it eventually becomes routine and then when we actually need to do whatever it is we need to do, the brain says “ok I know what this is, I know how to do this successfully, so let’s do it” and you perform as you had imagined and desired

Visualization helps us achieve many things we want, it can help improve performance, reduce nerves, improve memory, accelerate learning and much more. The only real limits are within your own imagination.

Successful athletes and business people know about visualization and embrace it, so presuming you want to be successful, why don’t you?

Enjoyed this post? Please share it!

Digg it | Stumble it |

 

Post a Comment

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail