“…your brain sees no difference whatsoever between visualizing something and actually doing it.” — Jack Canfield, The Success Principles.

Visualization is a just a term for a principle that’s been around for a long time. Fifty or so years ago, Maxwell Maltz called it “Theatre of the mind”. Before him, Napoleon Hill wrote about it in Think and Grow Rich. Wallace Wattles talked about it his famous treatise as well. I’m sure we can go back to beginning of time if records were kept.

Whatever name you want to attach to the idea, it’s value can’t be ignored. Olympic athletes have used this technique to gain the podium. Golfers take many strokes off their games using this technique. Martial artists refine their forms or katas by mentally rehearsing them first.

“Seeing is believing” as the saying goes. There is a depth of truth to it.

How many times have you said:

“I can’t see myself doing that…”

“I can’t see imagine how that’s possible…”

“I don’t see how…”

Your own language reveals a process that happens unconsciously. You are using this technique every day without recognizing its potential.

The act of doing something is always preceded by the thought. The thought takes the form of an image or mental enactment. A mental mind movie of sorts.

If you are planning to go to the grocery store, you don’t imagine the words in large block letters “GO TO THE GROCERY STORE”. Nope. You likely conjure yourself strolling down the supermarket aisle picking and choosing items. Or imagining yourself driving into the parking lot of a large supermarket. The thought comes in the form of an imaginary scene.

Can this same process of imagining an act or event be used to create a picture of the thing we would like to accomplish? Is it possible to create a scenario in your mind of an event we want to make happen in the physical world?

In the aforementioned quote from Jack Canfield, he makes the statement backed up by research and proven to be effective in his own life. The power of the imagining process to bring about a result is fascinating. We unconsciously use this facility every day with little or no thought to what we do and how we do it.

Imagine if you decide to script your life. Whatever goal you desire, imagine and see the steps leading to the goal before you lift a finger in the physical realm. Your mind doesn’t distinguish between the imagined and the physical action. Whether you decide to do it or not doesn’t matter. Do it or don’t do it… the mind would still have the same set of preceding images because that’s the way the mind works.

More fascinating, when athletes were hooked up with a device that measures synaptic and muscular response, the same neural and muscular synapses fired identically when they ran the event in the mind. Incredible, yes?

You can literally run a race in your mind and receive the same training effect mentally as if you actually ran the race physically.

In part 2 we’ll continue the looking at this fascinating technique for developing skill and how we can leverage visualization in our favor.