The reality about visualisation is that it’s just one tool in the mental toolkit. Like meditation, practicing gratitude, setting SMART goals, and other techniques, visualisation can be a helpful tool in reaching your goals.
However, it’s not some mystical connection with the universe that works miracles; it’s simply a tool you can add to your planning and goal-setting strategies.
Is visualisation a Valuable Psychological Technique or Just a Gimmick?
In this article, we’ll discuss some genuinely effective visualisation techniques, avoid myths, and stick to scientific facts confirmed by numerous studies over the years.
Visualisation Works When You Imagine the Results
You’ve probably heard about visualising outcomes before. It's an exercise that goes like this:
Close your eyes and imagine you've achieved your dream of wealth, success, weight loss, fame, or whatever it may be.
- Now, see what you're imagining as if it's a movie where your wish has come true.
- Or a play or a book where everyone knows about your accomplishments.
- Or imagine what people will say about you in a eulogy after you've achieved your goal.
- Or simply enjoy a comprehensive view of your moment of success.
- Or right after your success.
This works, which is why this advice has been repeated for many years, but it doesn’t stop there. Psychologists have been working on developing more effective visualisation techniques for decades.
The new visualisation techniques aren't perfect, but they address some gaps in basic outcome visualisation. Before diving into some alternative and more advanced visualisation techniques, let’s see what the basic outcome visualisation technique lacks.
Drawbacks of Outcome Visualisation
One reason visualisation works is that it convinces your mind that something is possible. That’s why visualising outcomes can be powerful, especially for those who lack confidence.
When your mind envisions your success scene, it says, "If I can imagine this, I can achieve it," which boosts confidence in people who aren’t sure of their success. This makes this basic form of visualisation very useful. However, this type of visualisation fails when people are already confident in their success.
If the task seems easy, your subconscious doesn’t see the need to put in the effort to achieve success, so it ignores the task. What happens is that when you visualise something you know you can accomplish, your mind says, "This is easy; no need to worry about it," and spends more time thinking about solutions to more difficult and annoying things.
Studies show that people who are confident in their success before using outcome visualisation actually perform worse than the control group. Therefore, it’s pointless to use it if you’re confident in your success.
The second drawback of outcome visualisation is its impact by itself. In reality, it doesn’t have a significant effect.
There is a positive benefit to visualising outcomes, and when you exclude overly confident people, those who visualise outcomes always perform 5–10% better than the control group, but that percentage isn’t impressive. Therefore, improvements are needed in terms of how much visualisation impacts achieving the goal.
Visualisation Techniques to Help You Achieve Your Goals
Here are four visualisation techniques to help you achieve your goals:
1. Mental Contrasting
Mental contrasting is a visualisation technique developed by psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen. Basic visualisation often yields modest gains in goal achievement and simply doesn’t work for many people, particularly those who are already confident in their success. Thus, a better way to harness the power of visualisation is necessary, and that’s where mental contrast comes in.
Mental contrasting is a potent form of visualisation that significantly reduces risks and provides more opportunities for success.
How Mental Contrasting Works?
- Imagine Your Success: Visualise achieving your goals just as you would with outcome visualisation. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, the positive aspects might be attractiveness, longevity, increased energy, improved self-image, and reduced healthcare costs.
- Focus on the Most Important Aspects: Imagine the benefits in detail and how they will affect your emotions, then write them down to reinforce the connection between your thoughts and your mind.
- Imagine the Obstacles: Visualise the obstacles that could prevent you from succeeding. For instance, with the weight loss example, obstacles might include the temptation to snack, a lack of motivation to exercise, overeating, not preparing healthy meals due to time constraints, emotional eating, and so on.
- Concentrate on both big and Small Obstacles. Think about how to prevent these obstacles from derailing you, and write them all down.
Does Mental Contrasting Work?
Studies indicate that mental contrasting produces better results than simple outcome visualisation. However, it is not perfect. Mental contrasting is more effective than positive visualisation because it links obstacles to desired future outcomes, making the brain recognise that success will not be easy and allocate the necessary mental and physical resources to help you achieve your long-term goals. Therefore, mental contrasting is an excellent tool for helping people who start with high confidence in their ability to succeed.
Nevertheless, mental contrasting has a drawback that is opposite to that of outcome visualisation. Studies have shown that people lacking confidence in their chances of success perform worse than control and positive visualisation groups. So, while mental contrasting is a better method for many if you lack confidence in your ability to succeed, do not practice it.
2. Implementation Intentions
Implementation intentions are similar to mental contrasting, with the only difference being that you take the time to devise a specific plan to overcome obstacles. Writing down concrete plans for handling imagined obstacles prevents reliance on your subconscious and allows you to take tangible actions to help you succeed.
Implementation intentions are also one of the best-researched forms of visualisation, often yielding success. Approximately 700 different experiments have been conducted to determine the effectiveness of using implementation intentions in various ways.
How Implementation Intentions Work?
The informal name for this technique is the plan: "When X happens, I will do Y."
Start the same way as mental contrasting:
- Visualise your goal.
- Visualise the obstacles to your goal.
Then, identify a way to overcome each obstacle or habit trigger. For example:
- "When I feel distracted by noise, I will move to a quiet place."
- "When I feel the urge to press the snooze button, I will get out of bed immediately."
- "When I feel the urge to eat chips, I will eat the apple I brought to work."
What you are doing works on two levels:
- First, you create a practical strategy for dealing with all the major obstacles.
- Second, you create a psychological intention to use the strategy when the obstacle presents itself. Creating this psychological intention increases the likelihood that you will recognise when you are about to face an obstacle or habit trigger and increases the probability of taking appropriate action in response to this obstacle or trigger.
3. Process Visualisation
Process visualisation is a specific technique that can be used alone or with other visualisation techniques. It's not about focusing on the end goal but rather about mentally practicing the process. Think of it as mental training.
One of the most famous studies on process visualisation involved people making free throws in basketball. The control and experimental groups were taught the correct way to make free throws.
However, the experimental group was also given time to visualise themselves making free throws correctly. They mentally practiced the shots without ever touching a ball and showed a 24% improvement in their shooting compared to the control group. These are very significant and impressive results.
This visualisation process can also be used with the implementation intention technique. All you need to do is imagine yourself facing obstacles and how you will overcome them.
For example, if you imagine having a strong craving for a piece of candy at work, visualise yourself refusing it repeatedly. Repeat this mental exercise, and you might refuse the candy without thinking about it.
4. WOOP Technique
"WOOP" stands for:
4.1. Wish
This means having a desire to achieve your goal. However, you must choose a realistic goal because this technique fails if you think you have no chance of success.
4.2. Outcome
What do you want to achieve with this goal? Visualise your success in your mind.
4.3. Obstacles
What are the obstacles that could prevent you from achieving your goal? Visualise the obstacles in your mind.
4.4. Planning
Create a plan in your mind, such as "When X happens, I will do Y," and write it down, or "When I face this obstacle, I will take this action."
In reality, this technique is just a combination of mental contrasting and implementation intention. By combining mental contrasting and implementation intention, you achieve a better result. In almost every study that compared a control group, an implementation intention group, and a WOOP group, the WOOP group achieved the best results, followed by the implementation intention group, with the control group trailing behind.
These are some remarkable results if you are looking for a tool to help you set and achieve goals. So, the next time you think about your goals, don't just imagine success; use the WOOP technique.
Final Thoughts
There is a heated debate about visualisation, and we often hear terms like manifestation, vibrations, and alignment with the universe. Do these techniques really work? Can visualisation enable you to achieve a mysterious connection with the universe? Can it allow us to get things just by wanting them?
Absolutely not. For visualisation to succeed, your dreams must be realistic. If your goal requires a lot of luck and skill, like becoming a movie star or a pop singer, you will need more than visualisation to guarantee that you will achieve it.
Visualisation can help you do the right things, practice, hone your skills, and perhaps slightly increase your chances of success. Once again, visualisation is just a tool; it is not magic. However, if you choose realistic goals, these practical visualisation techniques can help you increase your chances of achieving your goals.
Add comment