Have you ever had the rather amazing experience of looking around your life and realising that you have just about everything you’ve ever dreamt of?
While it’s true that even once we achieve even our biggest milestones, we want more, not because we’re greedy, but because the natural trajectory of our human experience is growth, there are those delicious moments in life where, if we take a few moments to savour and take stock of our achievements, we’ll realize that many of the things we once viewed as impossible are firmly ensconced in our reality. Yet how does this happen? The answer is: visualization.
You must have noticed how, when you’re focused on a topic, you start to see a lot of information related to it all around you. We have many such occurrences every single day. This is more than mere coincidence; it’s attributable to the power of our focus. This is particularly the case with those issues we feel strongly about, good or bad.
Think about it this way: how many things in your life right now once seemed like a far off dream? Perhaps you’ve landed your dream job, or car; or are recently married. All this became possible because you allowed yourself to dream; and while a lot of people will try to convince you that this is new age, hocus pocus, holding positive images about the future is vital to our success. If nothing else, positive imagery about our future increases our positivity.
According to research carried out by Ken Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky, people who visualize their future successes in great detail increase their positivity relative to those who engage in more mundane self-reflections. Try holding positive images of yourself in various situations and see what it does to your mood ÔÇô it’s bound to improve.
Even more striking, research carried out by Giorgio Ganis and William Thompson showed that visualization activates the same brain areas as physically carrying out the same visualized action. In other words, you don’t have to be on a golf course to practice your swing. For example, Tiger Woods’ caddie, Steve Williams, describes an occasion when “instead of spending hours on the practice field [Tiger] just tried to picture how he wanted to swing the club…He went about getting the right mental picture. He came to Firestone [tournament] having done little actual practice, but from that point on, he had a mental image of himself that he was able to relate to the movement of his body.”
Regardless of what you may think of Woods today, there’s no doubt that he is one of the greatest golfers the game has ever seen.
If you’re still not convinced, consider the decades of research done on the placebo effect, where patients are given inert, sugar pills instead of actual drugs. They were not told the pills were inert, only that they would improve their condition. The patients’ positive belief that the pills would lead to an improvement in their health actually resulted in them being healed. That is the power of our vision.
Consider also the Pygmalion effect. In the Pygmalion study, teachers were told that some of their students possessed exceptionally high potential, while others did not. They were induced to hold a positive image and high expectancy of some students and a negative image of others. In actual fact, the alleged high-potential students were all randomly selected; and all the student groupings that had been labeled as having high, regular, or low potential were equivalent in potential.
As the experiment progressed, the differences in the performance of the students quickly emerged, but not on the basis of their innate intelligence, due to the manipulated expectancy of the teacher! The students whose teachers held a positive image of them significantly overshadowed others in actual achievement.
This important experiment demonstrated just how much human beings are shaped even by the mental projections of others. Not only do others’ perceptions of us affect our performance, they also affect the way we view ourselves. So be careful of the image you hold of your children, your spouse, and even your country? It has a far greater impact than you might realize.
In other research carried out by Robert Markley and Lewis Morgan, they established that even the underlying images held by a civilization or culture had an enormous influence on its fate. Behind every culture there is a nucleus of images; and anthropologists have shown that certain tribes have actually allowed themselves to die out when their images of the future became too bleak.
What vision do you hold for your life? Would you be happy if it materialized, as it is bound to? If the answer to that question is no, try to come up with a vision that is suitably inspiring.
To help you with this, use this exercise adapted from that created by scientist, Barbara Fredrickson.
Imagine yourself ten years from now, after everything has gone as well as it possibly could. Visualize where and how you would be if all your dreams came true. Allow your deepest hopes and dreams to rise to the surface; and make sure the images in your mind truly inspire you. What are you feeling? Joyful and fulfilled? How about powerful and confident? Next, note down your dreams.
Every day for the next week, review what you have written and amend it as necessary. After a week, draw out from your dreams a life mission for yourself. Craft a short mission statement and consider whether, if you were to carry it out, your time on earth would have been well spent.
Finally, create a ten-year plan to help you meet that mission. Distill it into bullet points; and let your dreams guide you to a great life.
*Primrose Oteng is a Master of Applied Positive Psychology; and the Founder of the Positive Peace Project, an organization dedicated to creating positive change through personal empowerment. To find out more please contact [email protected].
