I trust by now you have taken the time to plot your success
by way of writing your goals down and preparing a well thought out plan of
action . You’ve been looking at your goal sheet often, if not daily, and
you’ve even audibly verbalised these goals occasionally. This is key in the
process of training your mind to accept the goal as fact – reality. I cannot
stress how vitally important this is to your success.
This month we look at the second step to taking successful
action: Visualization.
Step # 2: See your
Success: Visualize your process and outcomes
The great achievers all have one thing in common. They were
able to ‘see’ their respective successes long before they achieved them. For
many it was co-incidental ‘day-dreaming’ while for some it was a focussed
deliberate practice. We call this visualization.
Simply put, visualization is the art of making visual to
ones mind that which is not visible to the eye. In the case of sport, to
imagine your event, your detailed technique, aspects of your play at various
times in a game etc.
I believe visualization must be focussed, detailed, specific
and practiced often.
We were all born with an imagination. All day long we picture
things and situations in our minds eye to match up with the words we hear or
thoughts we think. Often and sadly so we spend more time ‘imagining’
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why those negative images eventually materialize and manifest in our lives.
Somehow it is so much easier to think the negative than the
positive. We must be disciplined in our thoughts, words and actions if we
really want to be successful, no matter what it is you are trying to achieve in
life.
Fortunately for us, what is true for the negative is also
true for the positive. So, we have the power to create our destiny by way of
our choices, our thoughts, our imaginations and the words we speak. We must
choose wisely.
Realise that visualization is just as vital as your actual
physical training and pursue perfection in your minds eye every time. That is
why it helps to watch and see the greats in your given discipline do their
thing. We need to see the action done perfectly, then we need to project that
image onto our own selves and rehearse the perfect action in your mind, seeing
yourself executing.
Some people visualise their given action like someone
watching a movie… and that is ok, however, it is better yet to both ‘see’
yourself doing the action as well as feel yourself executing. This is the most
powerful form of visualization, and in my own career, the method I always
practiced.
For a period of three months prior to the Atlanta Olympics I
daily visualized my 100m breast- stroke race over and over. It got to the stage
where I could close my eyes, hear my coach say, ‘Take your marks, Go!’
I would imagine myself dive into the water… feel the cool
sensation, begin my underwater pull and breakout … swim and count every stroke,
turns and touches, from start to finish. My coach would start the stopwatch on
‘Go’ and stop when I said ‘touch’.
The times were eventually within a few hundredths of a
second of my eventual real time swum in the race three months later. I saw the
details and swam the race daily in my mind. By the time race day arrived in Atlanta, it was merely a formality
to physically execute what I had already done hundreds of times before….
Exactly as I had seen it and practised it in my mind.
Recently I read an article in Time magazine where they were
discussing how the brain rewires itself. In the article they outlined an
experiment done at Harvard
Medical School
by Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone.
To paraphrase, he took two groups of volunteers. One group
was asked to learn and practice a simple five-finger piano exercise. Each
volunteer was measured with an instrument that could measure or map how much of
the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the exercise. As
the volunteers continued to practice daily, scientists proved that greater use
of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to
it.
The second group of volunteers were asked to merely think
about [visualise] practicing the same piano exercise. They played the simple piece
of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they
would move their fingers.
When scientists compared the data of the two groups – those
who actually played, and those who only imagined doing so – they glimpsed a
revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the
physical structure and function of our grey matter.
What the tests revealed was that the region of motor cortex
that controls the piano playing fingers also expanded in the brains of the
volunteers who merely imagined playing the music, just as it had in those who
actually played it.
Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization of the
brain. Scientists concluded that if these results hold true for other forms of
movement, then mentally practicing a golf swing or swimming turn could lead to
mastery with less physical practice. Ultimately and most profoundly, the
discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical
structure of the brain.
I have furthermore heard it said that your brain cannot
distinguish between imagined reality and true reality, so …. Visualization
lends itself to ‘fooling’ your brain into thinking it has really competed and
physically achieved or executed the actual routine or goal imagined.
I come back to the fact that what we think and imagine can
ultimately make or break us… so choose wisely what you focus on mentally and
speak only the outcomes you desire.
Best wishes as you practice this technique.
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