NASA, famous basketball players, Olympic athletes. It’s what they all do to prepare for crunch time.

Yes, you’ve heard all about it. Visualize yourself in a future situation and everything will turn out exactly the way you visualized it. Works for some, doesn’t work so much for others, and works only a little bit for the rest. Why is that? Shouldn’t it work for everybody?

In order to really maximize the benefits of visualization, let’s dig deep and find out how it really works.

Visualization is real.

Your mind can’t tell the difference between what you see in your environment (which the majority of people deem as “real”) and what you visualize. It can’t tell the difference at all. To your mind, both experiences are truly real.

Information about the surrounding environment is taken in via your five senses to your brain where they are processed and the result is what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Your reality is nothing more than the electrical impulses in your brain. It just happens so fast that people fail to remember that reality is actually really all in their head.

Visualization is just a method to replicate the information you take in via your five senses.

So if visualization is real to the brain, then whatever you visualize must actually be happening. For example, if I jump physically, I mean actually jump up, and if I visualize myself doing the exact same jump, would it be safe to say that I actually jumped twice, once in “reality” and once in my head, which my brain counted as reality?

Absolutely.

The following is an excerpt from an article I found online.

“Paul Salitsky, a UC Davis lecturer in exercise biology, studies the psychological aspects of sports and exercise.

In competing in the Tour de France, Salitsky said, the best cyclists will concentrate and focus their minds, display mental toughness and a relentless sense of not giving up, and use visualization. Of the latter, he says, visualization is akin to using “the brain like a recorder.”

For example, the night before an event a cyclist may close his eyes and visualize how to successfully move through every step and detail of the next day’s course challenge.

“The brain doesn’t know the difference between the visualization and the real thing,” says Salitsky. “In visualization, the brain sends neural signals in the same patterns to the muscles, thus training them for the particular activity even though the muscles are not activated.”

Source: http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=8372

It’s all about the details.

For the rest of this article, let’s focus on using visualization to give a great speech. We know that visualization is real to the mind and that what you visualize is actually taking place as if you were doing the exact same thing in “reality”.

Remember that “reality” involves taking in information via our senses so we can process it and therefore experience. If that’s so, then it’s not enough just to “visualize”. What I mean by “visualize” is just to see. You’ve got to visualize as much detail as possible and what’s more, the detail has to be accurate.

Think about it. If you were to describe to your friend a beautiful waterfall you saw the other day, would you just restrict the details to what you saw? Or would you include the smell of the water and the forest, the sounds of the rushing water and the birds chirping, and the coldness of the water as you touched it. More details allow for greater accuracy in the mind.

What’s also important is the detail has to be accurate. Many speakers recommend going to the event where you will be speaking prior to giving your speech so you can take in all the details of the surrounding area, in terms of where the stage is, how it looks when you’re on stage, where the doors are, where the mike is, the feel of the podium, the acoustical properties of the room, etc. The more detail you provide to your brain when you visualize, the more “real” it is. The more detail there is, the more information your mind has to play with in order to factor in on how to make that happen the next time you see yourself in the same position.

So if you went to the place where you would be speaking, took in the details and used it to visualize in great detail, then when the time comes to give your speech, your brain would realize that this has happened a lot before because of the details you provided it and your brain would then send neural signals to the muscles that move your mouth to influence your speech, your mannerisms, tone of voice, etc. to reflect exactly what was visualized before.

Your brain sees that the same situation coming up when you give your speech so it reaches back and pulls all the information it learned from visualization “boot camp” to replicate the same situation.

Emotion is key.

Along with details, emotion is also important when you visualize. Emotion is the anchor so to speak that makes it easy to retrieve certain memories. Notice how we tend to remember the frightful moments, the happy moments, and the depressing moments in life, in essence, memories colored with emotion. Emotions make memories more “real” in a sense don’t they?

So how can we inject emotion in our visualizations?

By visualizing the end result.

Visualize yourself beaming after hearing thundering applause at the end of your speech. Visualize the great winning feeling of sinking in the game winning shot. Visualize the excitement of shaking hands as you close a major multi million dollar deal.

Notice how all these end results are extremely pleasurable. The brain moves toward pleasure. By taking emotion into account in your visualization, you make this memory more pleasurable and real, and anchor it so that your brain will refer to it when the situation arises in the future.

Practice leads to correction.

The more you visualize, the more action you will take to make that visualization come true the next time the situation arises. If your brain needs more information to make what you visualize happen the next chance you get, it will “nudge” you toward the right direction. The more you practice visualizing giving a great speech, the more action you’ll take. You’ll find yourself having an urge to stop by Borders after work and browse the store to find books on public speaking. You’ll find yourself asking advice from other people. You’ll sit down and edit your speech to make it easier to understand. These actions will come naturally as a by-product to your constant practice of visualization.

Visualization is nothing more than preparation for a repeat performance in the future.

• Understand that by visualizing, you are actually doing.
• Make sure to gather all the details as accurately as possible before you visualize.
• Visualize a pleasurable end result.
• Constantly visualize and you will find yourself naturally taking action to repeat that same experience the next time you find yourself in the same situation.

Then, when it comes to actually doing what you’ve visualized, you’ll realize that it’s not really crunch time, because you’ve done it so many times before already.