Visualisation harnesses your minds natural tendency to create vivid mental representations of your beliefs, desires, experiences and goals.
When practised, visualisation can be used to help alleviate stress and anxiety, improve confidence, manifest success, and even enhance your ability to perform.
The images you create about your body, your physical senses, your potential, or your challenges can shape your reality.
Scientists believe that your brain responds to engaging in vivid visualisation almost as if you had the real experience. It’s not quite the exact physical reaction but incredibly similar, enough to make a significant impact. When you imagine something visually, your visual cortex is active.
Mental imagery is so powerful that it can have the opposite effect and hinder your efforts of achieving your goals or negatively impact your confidence. Your mind might replay you falling as you run out on stage in front of a big crowd, or you might envision yourself failing your exams.
Be conscious that if you replay these images in your mind, then they will most likely come to fruition.
Your emotions and behaviours follow your beliefs, so it’s important to be aware of the images you hold of yourself and develop new empowering images to help you achieve your goals.
How visualisation works
Your brain is amazing but finds it hard to differentiate between real action and mental action. You can almost “hack” your brain through creating habits and routines, mindset transformation and using tools like visualisation to achieve your goals; mental training can improve almost all your skills and fast-track you towards your goals.
Scientists believe that we experience real-world and imaginary actions in similar ways. Whether it be walking on the beach or just imagining it, we activate the same neural networks.
Neural networks are the paths of interconnected nerve cells that link your body and your brains impulses, like a set of algorithms, and is designed to recognise patterns.
You can use this knowledge to your advantage to achieve your goals. You can imagine yourself performing the task or the movement signalling to your brain how it feels and looks like. When you imagine yourself performing a task of movement repeatedly, you condition your neural pathways, and the task or movement will feel familiar when you go to perform it physically, like carving out a groove in your neural system.
Visualising also stimulates your sympathetic nervous system, it directs the body’s rapid involuntary response to dangerous or stressful situations, increasing your heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. Merely visualising a movement can elicit the reaction of your nervous system as if you were performing the task or movement.
You can use this tool in physical and mental situations. If you are handling a difficult conversation visualisation can keep you calm and focused. Envisioning you are relaxed during the conversation can decrease the physical symptoms of stress such as increased heart rate and stress hormones. This technique can help you gain mental clarity and give you back the reins to your thought process to respond clearly instead of becoming overwhelmed and flustered.
The benefits of visualisation
There are 5 significant benefits of using visualisation techniques to achieve your goals, you:
- Activate your creative subconscious – the more you use this tool, the more you will start generating creative ideas to achieve your goals, your mind will work harder to create solutions
- Program your brain to focus on your goals – visualising your goals frequently programs your mind to recognise the resources you need to achieve your goals
- Activate the law of attraction – when you activate the law of attraction you are summoning into your life the people, the resources and the circumstances you need to achieve your goals
- Build your internal motivation – visualising success, feeling the emotions of the process and how it will feel if your goal was complete can enhance your internal motivation to take the necessary actions to achieve your goals. You’ll notice yourself doing things you would usually avoid
- Boost your Reticular Activating System – when you use visualisation techniques, you activate your Reticular Activating System (RAS), your mental filter for the bits of information your sensory organs are continually throwing at it. Your RAS thinks in pictures, so daily visualisation feeds your RAS the images it needs to start filtering information differently. This technique trains your RAS to filter and focus on anything that might help you achieve your goals
Key basics of visualisation
As powerful and your mind is, you can’t just think your way to achieving your goals. Using visualisation techniques can, however, help you reach your potential.
Here’s how to put it into effect:
Use all your senses
Research has revealed when images or thoughts are paired with intense emotions they will stay firmly locked in your memory forever. The stronger the feeling, excitement and energy, you can muster during visualisation, the more powerful your results will be.
To get the most out of visualisation, you need all five senses. You should immerse yourself in the visualisation of your goals, feel what is happening around you, hear the sounds and taste it. Envision like it is happening to you.
Notice what you are doing and how you are doing it. Pay attention to every little detail of your habits and routine. See yourself as a confident, energised and successful person in as much detail as possible.
Effectively, you want to plant new memories into your sub-conscious, so you want to make what you are visualising as vivid and life-like as possible.
Write it down
Writing down your goals, the emotions you want to feel, the actions you want to perform, your goals as a whole.
Writing down what you are going to visualise gives you structure so when you feel as though you are struggling or if you become distracted, you have a plan to fall back on. You can simply open your eyes, re-read your notes and gently ease back into visualising.
Your notes don’t have to be detailed, just a few sentences to help you align with your goals.
Examples:
- I want to be my own boss
- Working from home
- Sitting at my ideal desk set up
- Creating empowering content daily
- Calling potential clients
- Landing my first paid client
A few dot points on what I want to visualise to help focus my mind.
I also suggest to write down the emotions you would want to feel.
Example:
- I feel proud to work for myself
- I feel energised as I wake up to work every day
- I feel confident in my ability to be successful
You can go in as much depth as you want, you may even add to the list as you go on your visualisation journey.
Pair visualisation with affirmations
Affirmations evoke not only pictures but the experience is if it has already happened. Repeating an affirmation several times a day can keep you focused on your goals and potentially strengthen your internal motivation.
Example:
- I will be my own boss
- I have the resources and knowledge to be successful
- I have what it takes to create and define my own future
- I am confident in my abilities to achieve my goals
Practising visualisation techniques and affirmations allows you to change your beliefs, your assumptions and your perspective of reality.
You engage your subconscious in a process that has the power to transform you forever. It is a long-term process and will happen over time as you put in the work and effort to visualise and affirm, practice your chosen self-development methods, create a positive environment for growth, read books and listen to podcasts for continued personal growth.
Create a visualisation habit
When you create habits and routines aligned with your goals, you set yourself up to take action by putting intention into the universe, stating that you’re going to achieve your goals.
To create a visualisation habit, try habit stacking. For example, if you meditate or/and journal in the morning, add visualisation after these practices.
You’ll condition your mind to be prepared and aligned for you to visualise your goals as completed. You will be more likely to keep the habit as your mediation or journaling will become your cue to visualise.
Morning routines are effective as you still have all your mental energy to focus on performing your habits. As you make decisions throughout your day, your mental energy depletes, and it becomes easier to make excuses not to stick with your habits.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create” Albert Einstein
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