The Power Of The Brain – The Power Of Visualization
19/01/13“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Albert Einstein
Visualization – or the act of creating compelling and vivid pictures in your mind – may be the most underutilized success tool you possess because it greatly accelerates the achievement of any success in three powerful ways:
- Visualization activates the creative powers of your subconscious mind.
- Visualization focuses your brain by programming its reticular activating system (RAS) to notice available resources that were always there but were previously unnoticed.
- Visualization magnetizes and attracts to you the people, resources, and opportunities you need to achieve your goal.
When you perform any task in real life, researchers have found, your brain uses the same identical processes it would use if you were only vividly visualizing that activity. In other words your brain sees no difference whatsoever between visualizing something and actually doing it.
Sports psychologists and peak performance experts have been popularizing the power of visualization since the 1980’s. Almost all Olympic and professional athletes now employ the power of visualization. When you visualize your goals as already complete each and every day, it creates a conflict in your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind tries to resolve that conflict by turning your current reality into the new more exciting vision, by doing three things.
- It programs your brain’s RAS to start letting into your awareness anything that will help you achieve your goals.
- It activates your subconscious mind to create solutions for getting the goals you want. You’ll start waking up in the morning with new ideas. You’ll find yourself having ideas in the shower, while you are taking long walks, or driving to work.
- It creates new levels of motivation. You’ll start to notice you are unexpectedly doing things that take you to your goal. All of a sudden, you are volunteering to take on new assignments at work, asking more directly for what you want, etc.
At any one time, there are about 8 million bits of information streaming into your brain – most of which you cannot attend to. So your brain filters most of them out, letting into your awareness only those signals that can help you survive and achieve your most important goals. It lets in anything that will help you achieve the goals you have set and constantly visualize and affirm. It also lets in anything that matches your beliefs and images about yourself, others and the world. When you give your brain specific, colorful, and vividly compelling pictures to manifest – it will seek out and capture all the information necessary to bring that picture into reality for you.”
Jack Canfield: The 25 Principles of Success