An Amazing Mind

Imagine you’ve been invited to a party. You have to decide whether you will go.

First imagine standing awkwardly in a corner, surrounded by people you don’t know and have nothing in common with. Your least favorite type of music is playing way too loud in the background. How much do you want to go to the party, on a scale from 1 to 10?

Now imagine standing there comfortably, surrounded by people who are interested in spending time with you. Your favorite type of music comes on in the background at just the right volume. How much do you want to go to the party?

If you felt any difference at all between the two scenarios, you can see how visualisation can seriously affect the quality of your decisions.

Visualisation is very simple. It’s just images in your head. You can control them, and thus control the quality of your life. Yet most people aren’t even aware that they’re visualising, let alone that they can change the images!

Paul McKenna, a British psychiatrist, told a story of one rockstar he used to work with. The rockstar had an intense fear of flying. If you look at the pictures he made in his head, it becomes obvious why:

As soon as he even thought of going to the airport he’d make a big picture of the check-in desk in his head and say to himself, “This is going to be bad!” Then he would imagine boarding the plane. As soon as the door closed, he’d say to himself, “I can’t get out!” He’d imagine the plane taking off and the cabin filling with smoke, everyone screaming as it crashed to the ground in a ball of flames, and then his little daughter sitting at home saying “Where’s daddy?”

Ugh! No wonder he was bloody terrified every time he had to fly somewhere!

Paul took him through changing the images he was visualising, and soon the rockstar was looking forward to every flight! You’ll learn how to change the images in your head to achieve durable change later in this article.

Visualisation rocks your skills

Some time ago, American researchers did a study about visualisation on basketball players. They took a team, and measured everyone’s skill at shooting hoops. Then they split the team into three groups. One group would practice shooting hoops for an hour every day. Another group wouldn’t practice. And the third group would only imagine themselves shooting hoops for an hour every day, visualising successful throws.

After a month, the researchers measured how much the players improved. The first group improved. The second one didn’t. But, to the researchers’ surprise, the group that visualised successful shots improved almost as much as the group that actually practiced shooting.

Visualising success works at a subconscious level. It reinforces the neural pathways in your brain (like the right hand/arm/body movements for shooting basketballs). Positive visualisation also stops you from subconscious self-sabotage, which is a surprisingly common thing.

Lots of people say things like “Nah, I’m not going to try shooting the basketball, I would miss anyway…. Ok, ok, I’m going to try, but I tell you, I’m going to miss! … Ah, damn! See? I told you so!” - No wonder a person with that kind of attitude misses!

Visualising effectively

How you imagine the pictures in your head can dramatically change their impact. Like the sprinter who visualised himself winning from a third person perspective - essentially telling himself the winning was for someone else. And whenever he thought of his opponents he imagined big bright pictures of them looking confident. Not too surprisingly, he wasn’t doing well in practice. The day after he changed the way he visualised the above scenes, he went out and beat his personal best in practice!

So if you have images in your head and you want them to have LESS impact on you (like the rockstar’s fear of flying, or the sprinter’s opponents), here’s what you do:

Making your visualisations less powerful:
1. Freeze it
If you’re imagining a movie in your head, freeze it. Still pictures have less emotional impact.
2. Step outside yourself
Now step outside yourself, so that instead of looking at the scene through your own eyes, you’ll see it from a third person view. This dis-associates you with the scenes a bit.
3. Drain the color
Now drain all the color out of the scene until it’s black and white.
4. Shrink it and send it far away
Take the image you’re making in your head, shrink it down until it’s the size of a postage stamp and send it far away from you.

Then just imagine the scene this way a couple of timesuntil you do it automatically. You’ll find it has far less emotional impact now.

And for visualising positive experiences, you want to have the emotional impact as strong as possible! So here’s what you do:

1. Step inside yourself
See it through your own eyes, hear it through your own ears, and feel all the feelings in your body.
2. Make the colours brighter, the sounds louder, the feelings stronger
Big bright images and loud sounds have more emotional impact. That’s why movies look so awesome in cinemas. On the same note, you can also add soundtrack to your visualisations. It’s fun, and it actually further increases the emotional impact
3. Make the images bigger
Expand your visualisation until it fills your whole viewing area.

I used to suck at basketball. Now, I’m a tall guy, so everyone (including myself) thought I should be great. But I just couldn’t hit the basket for the damn of me. I succeeded maybe one time out of ten, even at close ranges.

Then I learned about the above visualisation techniques. I realized I always thought about the past failures before playing. So I took those images, and took them through the technique for reducing their emotional impact. Then I started visualising myself doing successful shots from everywhere around the basket. I essentially changed the kind of images that automatically popped out in my head when I thought of shooting basketballs. Which is often exactly what you’ll want to do - take out one set of images, then substitute another. And my success went through the roof!

It comes back to focusing on the right things. Don’t dwell on past negative experiences. Just play through them once or twice to extract useful lessons, and then instead play through your ideal success “movie” the next few hundred times.

So there you go. You now know how to reduce the impact that negative past experiences have on you, and how to rock your life through positive visualisations! Enjoy!