Balance your mood.
Visualisation is the act of mentally rehearsing an event before it happens in order to make you more prepared when challenged in real life. In the process of visualising success, you will start to produce positive feelings – almost as if you were experiencing that success in real life. Mentally rehearsing events can often help you plan for an upcoming challenge. Visualising a positive outcome may help you to recognise and then plan for achieving success.
OVERVIEW
THE WHY
Research shows that visualisation is an effective supplement to physical practise – in other words, those that undertake a combination of visualisation alongside physical practise will outperform those who rely on physical practise alone.
Most athletes will use an element of visualisation as part of their training regime. It may be to establish a sense of calm, to boost confidence, to practise a complex movement, to reinforce the physical aspect of their training or more likely a combination of all of these.
Some sports personalities report that they link their visualisations with different movements, postures or gestures in real life. This could be pinching the end of your little finger, tapping your heel with your toes – any small movement that could be replicated during or just prior to your challenge. This movement or gesture anchors those feelings established during visualisation and, when repeated, they help to bring them back to the surface to assist in generating a more positive outcome.
In summary, visualisation is an extremely powerful and effective tool that will help you to plan ahead, unlock potential and perform at your best.
We are more likely to unlock a higher level of our potential and perform better at a task to which we associate positive thoughts and feelings and in which we believe we will achieve success. So if you are able to visualise a successful outcome and generate positive thoughts and feelings as a result, you are more likely to approach a challenge positively and with a greater chance of success.
It might be useful to look back at the Cognitive Behaviour Model and remind yourself of how our thoughts and feelings influence how we perform.
The act of practising a task allows your body to create ‘muscle memory’ – most of us don’t need to think about writing our signature or tying our shoe laces because we have done it so many times…but at one point using a pen or tying our shoes required a lot of thought indeed!
It is now understood that the brain can establish elements of muscle memory by visualisation alone. Therefore, the mental rehearsal we conduct can be translated into a more fluid and practised physical action when it comes to doing a task for real.
Like many of the Peak State tools, Visualisation works well in conjunction with other techniques. Why not check out Goal Setting, Problem Solving and Positive Self Talk?
Exercise
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CHECK: Do you feel fully prepared for an upcoming event?
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CHALLENGE: Can you see how it will play out and do you imagine yourself succeeding?
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CHANGE: Imagine yourself performing the task you need to achieve. Try to imagine as much detail as possible about the situation and bring as many senses as possible into the visualisation. What can you see, smell, hear, touch, taste even?
Imagine yourself succeeding – how does this make you feel? How will you respond?
One of the most important things to remember is always to visualise in the first person. Imagine every detail as though you’re looking at it through your own eyes. The more you can connect with how that experience feels, the more powerful and effective the visualisation will be.
LISTEN TO THE TOOL