Just to let you know…
No matter what situations life throws at you, no matter how long and treacherous your journey may seem, remember … there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Understand and use the power of visualization.
This important key ingredient in making mental rehearsing successful is not very hard to understand but being associated with some sort of mental whacking exercise is rarely approached from the right perspective.
As I said before, knowing all these techniques of visualizing things and guide your imagination is fairly useless. What really makes a difference is actually when you do it, and it seems that what I’m about to describe has a sneaky way of cheating you out of the “doing” factor and superficially let you stuck at the “knowing” level.
Anyway, first of all, you have to distinguish between two kind of visualization techniques:
There is the kind of visualization where you see yourself in the images. It’s like watching a movie of yourself, so you see your image of what you are doing or experiencing, how you are acting, etc.
This image which is useful for motivation and setting an overall direction for your mind is called “disassociated”. It means you are watching your self go through an experience, but you are not actually in the image so you don’t feel very much, if anything, of the feelings of being there.
The second kind of visualizing is where you do not see yourself in the images, but you see what you would actually see if you stepped into the image and were really there, looking out through your own eyes. This is called “associated” imagery, and this kind of imagery is what is most useful for fully rehearsing new behaviors, responses, emotions and thoughts.
The key to proper mental rehearsal that really works is to first use a dissociated set of images; seeing yourself the way you would like to look, talk, and act and then to switch to associated images, stepping inside the pictures and actually moving, talking, thinking, and feeling the way you’ll move, talk, think and feel when you are actually in the real situation.
Does it make sense?
First seeing the disassociated images of the way you want to be sets a guide post and a direction for your brain, so it gets an overall idea.
Then, seeing the associated images and actually walking around making the actual physical movements, talking out loud the way you’d speak, doing what you’d be actually doing FILLS IN THE DETAILS FOR YOUR BRAIN.
Before you start to practice, remember that the process of re-programming your subconscious mind for change is just that, a process. That means it takes some repetition and practice for the new thoughts, attitudes, behaviors and feelings to take root and take hold.
Now, the good part is yet to come. I am writing these posts to kind of overlay some of this information that I gathered over many years of research. Yes, is all out there, yes, these are things that Richard Bandler started preaching more then 40 years ago when he put the foundation of NLP. But after I will be done with the theoretical portion I will share more personal experiences and stories of how it worked for me and how I intend to use it in the future. The idea is to write about personal live experiments on these life transforming techniques, and about what are the real visualizing exercises that I practice myself and what the real results are.