New Way to Visualize

A lot of self help gurus out there are big on affirmations, and tell us to keep using positive affirmations.

I love to help  myself, so I started using them years ago.  I still do, but they are certainly the pale cousins to visualization.  So I started using visualization a while back too.  But I had certain discontent with visualizing as well.  The gurus said (notably in secret related self help materials) that if we could just visualize the outcome, it would come out.  Sounds easy, huh?

Well, I don’t know about you, but visualizing an outcome that I have zero experience with isn’t easy.  Especially if you, like me, have certain doubts about things.  I call these beliefs.  Most of our beliefs are preconscious.  We made them years ago, when we were young, then started to live with them and forgot about them.  They tend to be related to all sorts of things in our lives like our abilities, and quite often they end up limiting us.

If you don’t believe that you can do something, you probably won’t even try.  There.  You are limited.  So, what to do?

I just read about a new way to do visualizations that helps us out with this.  Its called process visualization.  Just visualize doing the process you need to get to the next goal.  If you want to write lots of articles, but you don’t think you can write well, this will help.  Just visualize yourself sitting down to the computer, and writing the outlines, and then the filling words.  Repeat this visualization quite a bit.  After a while, sitting down and writing outlines and filling words will come to feel more natural.

As you feel comfortable with it, you do it more and then you get the experience necessary to improve.  So you improve, and naturally outstrip the limiting belief you had that you can’t write well.  If you do this enough, you can actually become quite a good writer.  Then move on to the next goal.  Perhaps it is a book.

I want to suggest this to students in my class here at Ikoma Smith’s School of English (生駒).  Many of my students do not have experience speaking another langauge with a good degree of fluency.  They cannot imagine how it will feel. Plus, some students remind themselve how difficult English is.  That will not help them to improve.  Process visualization will help them.  Especially with their homework, which is to check the Smith One Point Lessons every week.

Try mentioning this to a few receptive students and see what they say.  It might really change a life!