Visualization can be a very useful tool to relieve stress, improve performance, and create a positive outcome scenario. Athletes use it to ‘practice’ perfect form, sales people use it to get over nervousness about cold calls, and stressed out people can use it to bring about relaxed feelings or to rehearse potentially difficult situations and reduce their stress.
I will be introducing some specific visualization practices in a few days, but for right now I am just going to talk about visualization in general.
I’ve always had trouble with it. I just don’t have the power to see myself in my mind’s eye. I don’t know if that is because I am more of a word-oriented person or if I haven’t honed the skills to visualize in that way.
But, like I usually do when I can’t do something, I read up on it. And not only did I discover that a rich description (no problem!) that you repeat over and over can serve a similar purpose, but thanks to Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization I discovered a way to put myself into my mind’s eye.
Now when I visualize something, I write a rich description first, and then I use Gawain’s suggestion: I visualize the situation around me and instead of trying to see the whole thing like a movie, watching myself, I visualize it like I was there. I am seeing the richly described location through my eyes, I can feel the textures and fabrics, I can hear the noises, and I can see my hands doing the actions I am trying to practice.
This is different than trying to picture my whole body in the scene, because unless I am in front of a full length mirror, I rarely see myself that way. But I always see my hands doing things, and I feel things like blowing air upwards so my hair puffs out of my eyes, so I can more easily imagine doing things if I create a scenario where I watch my hands, or feel that common action.
That’s what I suggested for a friend of mine who was having trouble with stress at work last year. She was juggling so many projects with so many details that she was bringing her work home with her, in her head. Here’s the basic scenario that I created for her:
I suggested that she imagine herself doing the usual things she does when leaving work, except before she stepped out of her office she was to imagine picking up a heavy stack of binders that contained all the notes, mental and physical, that she had made on each project. I told her to think about how heavy they were, to think about how her arms would ache from holding them, how she would rest her chin on them to hold them in place while she walked.
Then, when she stepped out of her office, she was to imagine she was in a long corridor that had appeared between her door and the door outside, and that the walls of that corridor contained a number of small alcoves, the perfect size for a binder. As she came to the first alcove, she was to shift the weight of the binders to one arm, and use the wall to support them so she could take the top binder off the pile and place it in the alcove. When she did that, a label would appear above the alcove so she could identify what binder it contained when she came back for it.
I told her to repeat that for however many binders she imagined she needed. And then when all her binders were safely stored, she was to imagine stretching her arms, or rolling her shoulders to relax from the effort of carrying the binders and then walk out the front door, relaxed, knowing she could pick up where she left off when she returned to work.
Of course, she had to fill in the details herself, what her office looked like, what she was wearing, the sounds of her shoes on the floor, what her office smells like, so she could visualize it more fully, make it more real. But the scenario helped because she had a concrete, if imaginary, way of putting down the burdens of work before she went home. And she didn’t have to be able visualize her whole self to do it.
I’m going to have lots of visualization advice on this site over the next while, but if you need something more I offer a paid service for custom visualizations - click on the ‘Services’ link above.
