The Tools All Top Performers Use To Be Their Best: Visualization

The RAS is a network of brain cells that lies deep in the brain stem located between the base of the brain and the top of the spinal cord. Particular functions it manages include regulating our level of consciousness, our alertness, concentration and also the regulation of slow-wave and rapid eye movement sleep. It activates the pre-frontal cortex which is responsible for being attentive and alert to learn and take in new information.

This system also performs a particularly clever function as a filter between your conscious and your subconscious minds and navigates your conscious mind to be selectively attentive to what you direct it to look for. Your RAS directs your conscious mind to filter in what is important to you… those pieces of information that are in alignment with what you believe and feel to be true. What comes through the filters are what you have chosen to focus on.

If you’ve ever noticed someone attractive…that person caught your attention in a way that was more than just a fleeting glance and they end up in your dreams that night or a night not so long afterwards, chances are your RAS is filtering information back into your subconscious about the person who satisfied your beliefs about what is attractive.

You can test your RAS, if you wish. Put it to task and give yourself a challenge.

When you think of a car you’d like to own, (for me, the epitome combination of sporty, luxurious comfort and performance would be a gunmetal-grey Aston Martin Vanquish from the James Bond films) perhaps an everyday car that you simply want to upgrade to, think of the color, the finishes, the details of the interior, the mags on the wheels, what it feels like to sit in the car, how the engine purrs as the car almost floats and hovers just above the road as it passes you. Over the next two weeks, chances are…….you’ll start seeing this car!

Why, all of a sudden, is this car popping up everywhere I go?

In magazines, I pass them when I am driving, I hear people talking about them…...

What’s happening, is your brain has followed your instruction to look for information in alignment with what you told it is important. You can positively program your brain to do this for virtually any topic, but you must learn how to be a masterful engineer to create and orchestrate the fine detail of what you want, not what you don’t want, in order to truly maximize the potential of what it can do. You need to choose wisely.

The subconscious part of your mind is an instinctive hub with no filters that work 24/7 to direct your behavior toward satisfying what your beliefs are and what you think is right and true. Whether your beliefs are actually true or not is irrelevant….it’s your perception that’s important.

At night your brain sifts through the information it finds to be no longer important and wipes it from memory, keeping the things that are deemed most valuable and are most strongly connected to your beliefs and thoughts. It keeps you acting in a manner consistent with what you have done and said in the past…established patterns.

Our subconscious mind works automatically to protect us and keep us safe emotionally, mentally and physically. It keeps us operating in our comfort zone of familiarity. We feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable when we attempt to change behavior patterns or try something new. Your subconscious is actually functioning exactly as it was designed to.

Elite performers learn to know and expect to feel discomfort. They understand that familiarity is a necessary part of the process and make a concerted effort to implement the necessary changes until the new changes become familiar….a new comfort zone.

“The mind, once stretched to a new idea, can never return to its original dimensions”

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Too often I hear that people know what they don’t want, and that they’re not sure about what they do want. And herein lies the problem.

Your RAS will not register such information as not, don’t, can’t, no. If you tell yourself not to think of the gun-metal grey Aston Martin, you can pretty much guarantee that’s exactly what will come to mind. (Anyone who says it doesn’t is probably applying a secondary conscious process to negate this fact, just for the sake of argument! Or they really don’t like Aston Martins!!)

Knowing this, it could serve us just as well to say “I don’t want to win a million dollars!” however, we are often referencing those things we actually don’t want. We are actually directing our brains to dedicate time, energy and attention to what we want to move away from because we’re not yet skilled in being able to identify what we want and how to reframe such statements.

This is a problem.

"Visualization simply makes the brain achieve more. And though none of us were ever taught this in school, sports psychologists and peak performance experts have been popularizing the power of visualization since the 1980s. Almost all Olympic and professional athletes now employ the power of visualization." ~Jack Canfield

In his book Psycho-cybernetics, cosmetic surgeon Maxwell Maltz referenced a research study that reported how three different groups of basketballers achieved different improvement results undertaking physical practice, no practice whatsoever and visualization rehearsal. The results over a 20-day period showed:

Hundreds of research studies repeatedly demonstrate the power of visualization not only in performance for sport but in many areas including public speaking, theatre and musical performance, sales and areas of personal life. Anywhere people have desires to experience a better quality of life, visualization and imagery serve to help them achieve their definition of the change.

Visualization does not just entail imagining something and expecting and waiting for it to manifest. Skills training and technique refinement involve learning how to selectively activate different parts of the brain and apply consistent regular practice which, over time, reorients the subconscious to direct behavior to unfold in a different way.

We learn how to orchestrate and channel through the filters, powerful images which the brain has great difficulty discerning between what’s real and what’s imagined. It will still send the same signals throughout the body to act in alignment physically, mentally and emotionally to satisfy the messages the imagery or visualization is generating.

However, the key to unlocking the combined power of the RAS and the subconscious mind using visualization is clarity. This is where correct, emotionally intelligent goal-setting is fundamental.