“Pistol" Pete Maravich.
He, maybe you know him, I didn't, honestly,
but he was a very successful basketball player in the 80s
and in practice when he would shoot three pointers,
he did not look at the moment when the ball reached the hoop.
He was just like, he turned his head away
and he was already preparing for the next shot.
And that really confused people,
and especially his coaches, and they asked him like,
"But why don't you wanna know,
"if you scored or if you didn't?"
And his answer was that he is so locked
into the technique of throwing a three pointer
that he knows if he hits the technique,
if he's doing it right, the ball should find the hoop.
Like, he knows.
And I thought I was such an interesting example.
I read it in a book and I thought it was such a beautiful
example of how focusing on the process
rather than on the outcome can be show helpful.
And Pistol Pete also mentioned that he uses the technique
of visualizing in his training in his rehearsal.
And the combination of these things,
I thought were worth mentioning here.
And I love the technique and the method of visualization.
It's such a accessible,
tool that we can use, all of us can use
that is going to empower us and push us forward
in incredible ways.
And especially when it comes to athletics,
there are so many top high-end athletes
who have talked about visualization
and how they use it as a tool.
And I always believe, you know, I wanna see what the best
people do and then learn from them.
So there must be something in it
if all of the top athletes are doing it.
And one very, very famous example of that
is Michael Phelps, the swimmer, who visualizes every race,
every tournament, every competition.
And not only that, but he also visualizes potential things
that could go wrong and how he deals with it
and still succeeds in the end.
And he has had races where things went wrong
and he won them anyways.
So I feel like it's worth looking into that.
And that is exactly what we're gonna do today
in this episode.
So welcome to the healthy & aligned podcast.
My name is Lisa.
I am the host of this podcast,
but I am also a mindset coach and a tapping coach.
And I love to research, think about
and learn about all things mindset
and then share it with everyone else
because I truly believe that we all deserve to live the life
that we really want the life that we dream about.
And we can certainly get there with the right mindset.
And so I share all the things that I discover
and that I learn here on this podcast.
And I'm really excited that you're here with me.
And today we're gonna look into visualization, as I said.
We understand what it is as a mental practice,
how it works, how we can learn it.
I'll talk about specific practical tips
that we can use to become better at visualization.
But most importantly, I really wanna anchor in the idea
of how powerful of the tool it actually is
for our life, for whatever we wanna do in life.
So what is it?
What is visualization?
Well, basically it's a technique that can be used
where we mentally rehearse a situation
where we create a detailed, very concrete image experience
in our head that about something that we want to do
about something where we want to succeed in.
That is important to us.
I mean, obviously you could visualize anything,
but I would really focus on the things that are important
to us, some things that we want to achieve,
that we set out to do for ourselves.
And the goal is to, in the end, create this sort of
like virtual experience for ourselves
that feels like as if we were in it,
as if we are doing it right now,
even though we might be sitting on a couch, you know?
And that's it.
So it's, I mean, I guess the majority of us,
they know what visualizing means.
And there's nothing like secret behind it
or hidden behind it, it is visualizing.
That's that.
Like what you think it is, that's what it is.
(laughs)
But there are still some beliefs, maybe around visualization
that I wanna clean up with.
It's often we are told to visualize the outcome only.
So visualize the gold medal around your neck.
Visualize crossing that finish line or, you know, those things.
And while that is beautiful and definitely a very useful tool
that's not what I wanna talk about today,
I wanna talk about visualizing the process
and the experience that brings us to that outcome,
that gives us that gold medal or the finish line
or the personal best or whatever we go for.
And also, visualizing is not daydreaming.
And I am a huge daydreamer.
I love it.
I love building castles in the sky.
I love just letting my thoughts run with it.
And, you know, the amount of real estate,
I have bought mentally, you know?
And vacations I've had and, you know, like clothes I wore,
things I bought, riches I had.
Like all of these things that I just daydream about
specific situations, beautiful.
I love it.
I think it's such an important thing to do to let, you know,
to allow ourselves to do because this is also what feeds
our dreams and gives us, you know, ideas of what might
actually be possible and where we really lock into
what really it is that we want to do.
And again, as much as I love it,
it's not what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about visualizing as a tool
to mentally practice, to mentally rehearse.
Because what I'm talking about is linked in neuroscience, right?
It's not just wishful thinking.
It's not just, you know, oh, yeah, it's nice.
You know, I thought about it and, you know, now I'm going to do it.
No, no, this is, this is basically,
let me say that differently.
So for our brain, whether we do something actively
in 3D reality in real life,
or whether we visualize doing the thing for our brain,
it's almost the same.
There is no big difference between doing it in real life
and doing it just in our minds.
So the more realistic we create a visualization,
the more our brain thinks,
I'm actually doing it.
It's not crazy.
And the beautiful thing that lays behind it
or that we will actually use for this
is called neuroplasticity.
It's a neurological concept that I have talked about before
and I will continue talking about
because it is such a fundamental concept to understand.
The neuroplasticity is basically what describes our brain
reorganizing itself and creating communication channels
between different neurons inside our brain.
So whenever I do something, whenever he do something,
neurons are communicating with each other, right?
And the more often I do a specific thing,
the more often these specific relevant neurons talk to each other.
And the more they talk to each other,
the stronger the channel, the connection
between those neurons gets.
So what that means is strong good channels,
neurological pathways, they're often referred to
mean that the communication is less prone to mistakes,
it's much more efficient, it's faster,
it's more reliable and it takes less effort, right?
It's the difference between a small footpath and a highway.
So on a footpath, you'll be slower, you know,
or even when you drive a car on like a dirt path,
you're gonna have to drive a bit slow,
it's a bit bumpy, you pay attention to it,
you're more focused on it, you'll be fine,
you'll get from A to B, no worries,
but it'll take you more time,
it'll take you much more energy and focus.
Whereas when you're on a highway,
you know, the street is smooth, ideally, you know?
And straight and you can just like speed through it,
you don't have to think about it as much
and you manage to do it much more efficiently
than if you're on a dirt path.
And it's pretty much the same
with our neurological pathways, right?
So we wanna build highways rather than have those dirt paths.
The stronger those pathways are,
the stronger those channels are,
the less we have to actively use our attention and energy
to do it, for example.
As a kid, when we learned how to eat with forks and knives,
it was a bit of a hassle, you know?
We had to figure out like how to hold the fork,
how to find the mouth with the fork, you know?
How to not drop the food on the way from the plate
to the mouth, you know, like there's so many things
that you need to learn and that you need to consider.
And if you've ever seen a kid eat,
you can tell that it's not an easy process, right?
It's a combination of a lot of different things
and a lot of details that you have to pay attention to
when you learn how to eat with the fork
and or with cutlery or whatever.
Now our days, when I eat, I do not think about that.
Like I'm pretty certain that the fork will meet my mouth
and that I will most probably not drop the food
along the way, you know?
Yeah, sure, accidents happen,
but usually that process is pretty much on autopilot.
I don't have to think about it as much
and I have to focus on it as much, you know?
So that's what we want.
We want to create pathways that allow us to then
in the moment be able to do other things,
pay attention to different things.
Like when I eat, I can have a deep meaningful conversation,
right?
I can maybe watch a movie and follow the movie
and you know, understand what is happening.
Like I have the mental capacity to do other things.
So that is your plasticity for you.
So that is beautiful, that's what we want.
That's why repetition and training and rehearsing
is so important because it strengthens
those communication channels and allows us
to have more capacity to deal with other things.
Now, when we talk about visualization
and I mentioned earlier, for the brain,
when we visualize, it feels like pretty much
like we're doing the thing.
So through visualization, without being on the field,
without being in the pool, on the court,
in the boardroom, like just from the comfort of your couch
or your bed or your chair, we can practice the thing
as if we were doing it.
So we get to strengthen those communication channels,
those neurological pathways in our brain
without actually doing it.
So there was, there are countless studies around this.
It needs my blowing to me.
I hope you find this as fascinating as I do.
But there are, there's one study I want to mention.
It was at the University of Chicago
and they looked at basketball players.
Again, it's those basketball players today
and it's again three pointers and they had three groups,
they had one group which was practicing
three pointers by standing on the court
and throwing the ball.
And that's how they practiced.
And then they had one group visualizing
throwing three pointers.
So they were not actively on the court,
but they just visualized it.
They imagined it.
They were there mentally doing it, practicing it.
And then there was a control group
which didn't do any of those things.
And then afterwards when they had finished their trainings,
whether it was visually like in their mind
or physically on the court,
they tested the improvement and the success rate
basically of throwing three pointers
and the visualization group was almost as successful
as the group that physically rehearsed.
And yes, I hear you, like,
but they were not as good.
So physical practice is still more important.
Sure, sure, no question about it.
But let's put that aside for a second.
The fact that just sitting somewhere
and visualizing throwing three pointers
will allow me to be almost as successful
as if I was doing it physically is incredible.
That is crazy.
And that shows how powerful our mind is
and the connection between our minds and our bodies
because we were building muscle memory.
We were building the pathways that would allow us to think
less about where to put my hand on the ball,
which leg I should put my weight on,
when I throw the ball for the three points on
and so on and so on.
Those things we can practice mentally.
And that is something that I really want you to think about
and let it sink in because that is powerful.
There is also this other thing,
this other general study I want to say
that by visualizing a specific situation,
a specific event,
we can inevitably lower our anxiety around that event
because anxiety is when we look at the future.
So anxiety is future oriented
and we want it to go perfectly, right?
We don't want it to go wrong and we think about,
oh my God, but I'm not prepared.
All the things that could go wrong
and you get really anxious about things.
And it is a future thing.
So the more we visualize that specific situation,
that we're anxious about and we look at our self-succeeding
in it, the more we get to decrease the anxiety around it
and the stress around it, which then in turn,
on the day off, when the situation is there,
we are actively less anxious about it
because we've kind of lived that already.
It's not necessarily a purely future event anymore
for us because we've done it a couple of times mentally
in our mind.
We've been there so often that we kind of,
we're okay with it, you know,
like we're not as nervous about it anymore.
There are not so many unknowns about that situation
that were there before.
And knowledge, understanding, insights
is the best antidote for anxiety and fear.
So there you go.
You can actually lower your anxiety,
you can lower your doubts or insecurities, your fear
with visualizing something
and visualizing yourself, succeeding, right?
It's not about visualizing the plane to crash, you know,
when you are scared of flying, for example, obviously not.
It is about visualizing you being calm,
being happy, being relaxed inside the airplane
and, you know, going through the whole experience.
I don't know why I use that example,
but I can as well say, it's not about you visualizing,
missing the penalty shot.
It's about you visualizing hitting it, you know,
like scoring that penalty shot.
So that in the moment, you know, you can do it.
You've done it before.
And overall, there's another, like,
I wanna say general study that was done
which was published in the Journal of Consulting Psychology,
you must know.
And it just shows that through regular practice,
we get to build confidence towards achieving our goals.
And last week, I had an entire episode about confidence
and how we can build confidence
and more importantly, what it is.
So confidence is basically the going from a thought
to an action, believing that you have the capabilities
to turn that thought into an action.
That's what confidence is, right?
It's the glute between thinking about something
and doing it.
So it is fed by action because it's the more we do something,
the more confident we are that we can actually do it, right?
So when we mentally practice something,
we prove to ourselves that we can actually do it,
which then in turn increases our confidence again
and confidence then allows us to do it.
So it's a positive reinforcement, right?
And the more we do something, the more we practice,
something the more confident we are
and visualization is a form of practice.
So evidently, what I'm trying to tell you here is
visualization can make you very self-confident.
I hope that makes sense to you.
So this is all like research and scientific background
information that I feel can be so helpful
in understanding why visualization is such a powerful tool
and how it actually works.
Because when I first heard about it,
I thought it was a bit vague, like, yeah, sure,
I visualized things, but now I understand that it actually,
like, I don't want to say tricks the brain
because that feels very manipulating,
but it makes the brain feel like as if it was doing it.
So it's like, re-house-one.
I hope I convinced you with all of these insights
with all of these definitions and my excitement
around the tool that it is powerful
and that it is so working useful to succeed in life,
to do the things that we want to do.
Because ultimately, I said an introduction.
That is the thing for me.
I want us all to live our best lives.
I want you to live the life that you dream of,
whether that is a successful entrepreneur,
a great CEO, whether it is a, like, being a parent,
whether that, like, I don't care.
If you are going to be the fastest runner on this planet
or when a super bowl or like, you know,
all of these dreams that you have,
I want you to live it.
I want you to experience that and to allow yourself
to go after them, you know?
So, goals and dreams are very important
and that is sort of the fuel and the motivator
why I do what I do.
And anything that can help us get closer to that,
make it easier for us is super useful to me.
And that's why I am so passionate about this.
That's why I talk about this so much
because I feel that visualization
as a tool and technique in and of itself
allows us to get closer to that dream life
because we get to mentally rehearse the things
that will get us there, that will get us closer to that life.
Step by step.
And that is just for a beautiful, I believe.
So, let's talk about the techniques itself,
the technique itself, like, how do we,
how do we do visualization?
And I want to kind of like split it into basic and advanced.
So, basic visualization would be,
let me give you an example.
Like, you take your goal, you wanna run a marathon.
That is your goal, that's what you wanna do.
You wanna cross that finish line of that marathon, right?
And you make sure that you are calm
and I'm disturbed and a quiet place,
you know, make sure that you close your eyes
and really like anchor into where you are, get calm,
you know, remove all the stress and blah, blah, blah, you know,
like find a quiet spot.
And then mentally you start seeing yourself run.
And you really sink into that feeling of running.
And maybe there are some crowds cheering around you, you know,
and you really sink into the moment of what it feels like
to run a freaking marathon.
And you can picture yourself doing it.
You can feel it, you know, you're happily,
calmly focused running that, whatever,
42 point something kilometers, point six kilometers.
And you feel great, you feel energetic,
you feel excited, very proud of yourself
and you just stay there, you just stay in that moment
of you running.
I mean, you'll be doing it for a couple of hours, right?
So you can just visualize yourself doing it
and feeling good doing it.
And that's the essence of it.
That is the baseline of visualization.
Feel yourself do it.
Feel yourself doing it well, feeling great about it
and succeeding at it.
Now, if you wanna take it up a notch,
if you wanna bring it to the next level
and we talk about the more advanced if you want
or just, you know, you get more experienced with it,
you wanna add detail.
That's it.
You wanna make it a really,
take a central, visual experience for yourself.
You feel the street or the floor, the ground
under your shoes when you run.
You feel the texture of the fabric of your outfit.
You feel your arms moving and rubbing against your outfit.
You can actually hear the crowd specifically.
You hear what they say.
You see what they look like.
The signs that they're holding up or, you know,
the music that you hear along the way
and the parties that are happening and just,
I mean, Marathon days are just great days
also for the audience, right?
It's a big party.
So you experience all that.
You feel all that.
You smell it.
You taste it.
You know, maybe you taste the salty sweat, you know,
sorry, TMI, but, you know, maybe that is what you taste
or you smell the sweat.
You know, just taste it, you smell it.
But I mean, there's so many other things
that you experience while you run, you feel your muscles,
you feel your heart race, you're breathing
that is maybe a bit heavier than usual.
And you get as detailed into the situation as possible.
You really employ all of your senses
and make it a full body experience
'cause that's what it will be on race day.
It's a full body central experience.
And I say central, I mean, not sexual,
but senses are activated experience.
And that is what you want to rehearse, right?
The closer you can get to the real experience,
the better, the more you will feel afterwards
that you've done it before.
And the more you work on those neurological pathways, right?
The realer it is, the more you're brain thinks
that you are actually doing it and it's actually happening.
And then there are other ways of visualizing
or techniques, additional techniques that you can use.
You can, for example, visualize race day.
What time do you wake up?
How do you wake up?
What do you do first thing?
Like how do you feel?
Which music do you turn on?
Like you go through your day, you know?
And follow every step, experience every step along the way
until you have the warm up area before the marathon
until you stand in the crowd at the starting line,
you know, like all of these things,
like really go through it.
Step by step by step and experience it.
And focus on the process.
Focus on each little step, each little thing
that is happening rather than just look at
how you finish that marathon.
It is part of it, right?
Eventually, if you go on race day
and you go step by step,
eventually you will cross that finish line
because we're visualizing success.
We don't visualize failure.
We visualize what we want to experience, right?
And if you want, be more like Mike Phelps, for example,
like I mentioned earlier, what you can do
because we know things come up.
We know life is not, you know, unicorns and rainbows
all the day, all the time.
So you might have trouble coming up in your marathon.
We don't hope for it, but it might happen.
You might have a cramp or your shoelace gets loose,
and you need to fix it or you drop the water cup
or whatever, you stumble, something happens.
Like make a list of potential things that could go wrong,
the realistic ones like don't go crazy.
Like we don't wanna overdo it here,
but things that are somewhat potentially likely to happen.
And then you visualize yourself experiencing that,
feeling it, like what's the emotion coming up?
Like what is the sensation that you feel?
And then you see yourself dealing with it
and still succeeding in the end, right?
Because we want you to finish that marathon
even when you dropped your water cup,
even when you had a cramp, you know?
And now is the time to think about what you can do,
how you plan to feel around it
when it happens.
And sure, it might be that on race day,
you actually do have a cramp
and it hurts more than you visualize, you know?
And you start to panic, you know?
And you never visualize yourself panicking,
but because you have been in that situation
a couple of times before in your mind,
it's much easier for you to catch that,
to be like, ooh I'm panicking.
I don't need to panic right now.
It's best like I've rehearsed to stay calm
and to, you know, whatever.
Follow the steps that is laid out for yourself,
like ask someone to help you release the cramp or whatever, you know?
So the more you've done it, the more confident you are
in dealing with things going wrong.
And even if something happens
that you have not visualized before,
you can still draw on that confidence
that you have visually shown yourself
in other situations where things went wrong, you know?
Like you can use that.
It's all there for you.
It's all possible for you.
So yeah, it's a beautiful technique to use
to prepare yourself also to prepare yourself
for things that you cannot necessarily practice.
Like if you are, for example,
a soccer player, whatever,
a handball player, a volleyball player,
and you go to different matches and tournaments
and you have trouble dealing with the crowds,
the home crowds that are not so nice towards you
and they're booing and they're saying nasty things.
That is difficult to rehearse at home, right?
But that is something that you can mentally rehearse.
You can go to that place
where these people are being mean.
Where these people are saying things
you don't like to hear and that make you feel insecure
and you can rehearse how you react to that.
And the more you do it,
the more you rehearse your reaction, your emotion,
your experience of it, the easier than again,
it will be for you to react this way when it happens.
You know, it's mental practice.
And that's why this is so useful and so powerful.
It doesn't cost you any resources.
You don't have to, you know,
whatever, pay for the entrance
or the, you know, book the materials or you know,
like it's, no, you do it on your couch.
You do it in your bed.
You do it under the shower,
on the train, in the bus, on the way to practice,
on the way from practice.
Like it doesn't matter.
Whenever you have a calm moment,
you can use that to visualize whatever it is
that you want to do.
And I keep using athletic examples,
but it could also you,
I'd be you giving a presentation in a boardroom, you know?
And prepare yourself, going through the script
over and over again and prepare yourself
for nasty questions from other people
or what would happen if your laptop doesn't work
and you cannot show your slides, you know?
For me, during my studies,
since we talk about presentations,
during my studies, we had, I studied, I studied
International Business Management,
that's what I want to talk about.
And we had presentations all the time.
Like I'm pretty sure we had to present
two, three times a week for years, right?
And during that time, everything that could go wrong
went wrong.
Like I had slides not working,
I had my laptop not working,
I had the projector not working,
I had people being late,
I had, you know, me not remembering
what I was going to say,
I had me presenting with the nastiest hangover,
I had teammates not showing up
because they were hungover, you know?
Like I experienced so many things
throughout my studies that could go wrong
in a safe environment.
And that's the great thing about it.
That's what I'm grateful for them to, you know,
put us through this,
because I could practice it in a safe environment
then when I messed up, nothing would happen.
You know, my future wasn't threatened because of it,
but I would figure out how to do it better.
I would figure out that even though this happened,
the world is still moving and, you know,
not everything is horrible.
And that is so helpful for me until this day.
Like in my corporate career,
when I then had those presentations that mattered, you know,
where money was behind it or whatever,
new clients or something,
I was so confident in my skill
that I could deal with whatever would be thrown at me
that translated into me,
given good presentations, giving good talks.
And to this day, I'm very confident
that I can deal with shit going wrong.
Even if it hasn't happened before,
I know I can handle it, you know?
And while in my example,
I have gone through all of these things in real life,
going through it through visualization
will have the same or at least a similar effect
and it will make you freaking confident in your skill
and in who you are.
So the more you practice visualization,
the easier it will get.
And for someone like me,
who is not necessarily very visual,
like it's sometimes difficult for me to visualize a thing,
right?
It doesn't come easy to me.
And honestly, why is that?
Because I don't visualize much.
I mean, after this episode,
I will definitely start doing it much more,
but I haven't practiced visualization.
And that in and of itself is a skill, right?
Visualizing things,
visualizing experience is a skill that we can learn
where we can also strengthen those pathways in our brain.
And that is something that if you are like me,
if you think it doesn't necessarily come easy to you,
well, start practicing, start rehearsing,
to it like me, you know?
And there are ways to do that.
You can go on YouTube,
there are countless guided visualizations
on YouTube that you can use to start,
getting used to this thing,
getting used to the technique,
to the idea of seeing things in your mind,
experiencing things that are actually not happening.
And you can also start with like easy things,
like start imagining in animate objects,
like an apple.
Start like, you know, take time,
becomes it somewhere,
throws your eyes and start picturing an apple.
And then you go more into details,
like what's the texture of the apple,
what are the colors of it,
what's the size of it,
can you touch it,
what does it feel like,
what does it smell like,
can you bite into it,
what does it taste like?
So you start practicing that skill.
And the goal is not to just have images in front of your mind,
but the goal is to create experiences for yourself.
And again, the more we do it,
the easier we get,
because the more we create those connections,
in our brain to do it.
And then, I mean, we can visualize anything on that point,
you know, and consistency is key.
So let's create those strong, neuro pathways in our brain
when it comes to visualizing
and create those experiences
so our brain, things were actually doing it.
And I wanna point a special spotlight towards sports again,
because I feel in that environment,
visualization is so powerful.
Again, repeating myself there.
The thing is,
there's only so much physical exertion
that we can put our bodies through.
Right?
So there are only so many times a week,
you can physically practice something
without causing your body harm,
without overtraining your body and so on.
Or, you know, maybe shortening your recovery
and things like that.
So, while physical practice is super important,
no question about it, right?
Then, doing the same thing through visualization is,
it's so helpful because we can then still allow our body
to relax.
We don't physically put it through that,
but we, like, we don't have to physically run the marathon
to practice a marathon, right?
Because that takes a toll on your body.
And through visualization,
we don't have to have our body go through this,
but we can just practice it mentally.
And that's why I feel like, especially when you are in a recovery,
you know, a physical recovery period, you can still practice.
You can go through those tactics and the playbook
and the strategies and the moves and the how you wanna do this
and you just go over and over and over again
and still work on that muscle memory,
still work on your expertise on your skill level
when it comes to that and reinforce that muscle memory
without the physical exertion.
And also, if you're injured, you can do it visually.
You can do it through visualization
while still allow your body to heal, right?
Because when you go back to training,
you don't wanna start at zero again.
You don't wanna have everything forgotten.
You want to use the time that you are injured
to still practice as much as you can, right?
And that's where visualization is also super grateful
and not grateful, a super great tool to use in that context.
You can, as I said earlier, make sure that you decrease
your anxiety, maybe you have performance anxiety,
pre-game jitters, like all of these nerves that come up,
you can reduce that through visualizing the match day,
the race day or day of competition or whatever.
And become more resilient by overcoming specific challenges
that might come up over and over again.
And you come back stronger every time.
So mental rehearsal, skill development, I mean,
I've been very positive about this thing.
I hope that some of my excitement came across to you.
I am sold to this method for sure and I feel like
I should have done it much more in my life.
But now that I know all of this,
now that I've prepared this episode and talked about it
and starting to use it more in my own life,
I am definitely going to work on those neurological pathways
in my own brain that allow me to become a master visualizer
because heck yeah, I mean, I know that this allows me to
really be the successful person that I see myself at.
And why would I not do that?
Like why would I ignore this tool?
So I hope you are as enthusiastic about this inside
I am and that you enjoyed this episode.
And these insights that I share here,
and if you did, make sure that you subscribe
to the Healthy and the Nine Podcast
because that really allows me to do more of this
and to it allows other people to have the same insights
and just to discover this podcast, you know how this works.
So help me out and make sure that you're subscribed.
And next week we will talk about stress management
and how we can maybe flip the script
on stress a little bit and use it to our advantage.
So I'm excited about that one as well.
So until I see you again, I wish you a beautiful rest of your day.
