You have probably heard that athletes visualise winning moments in their minds to help prepare them for a big game. It helps calm their nerves, they know clearly what to do, and it can increase success. But have you thought about doing this for your personal life? Or in your career? Mental imagery or visualisation is a powerful tool to have in your toolkit of personal development. In today’s episode I’m going to go over how it works, what the benefits are, and how you can use it in your own life. Let’s get started!

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Have you ever used a mental image to help you? You might have focused on an activity in the future, when you’re thinking of possible outcomes. Or maybe you have imagined a task going well, to help with nerves. Maybe you imagined a future outcome so you knew more clearly what you wanted, and so were more motivated to work towards it. Maybe you even imagined your dream holiday location and then booked that trip. We’ve all done it! And I want to unpack what’s going on here and why visualisation so beneficial.

Mental Preparation

When I was younger, I would get nervous about going to new places or doing something new. I would think What would it be like? What was going to happen? And I just had this general feeling of unease. And if I knew what the place looked like, I felt more relaxed. This also happened as a young adult if I had to give a presentation. If I knew what room it was in or knew who would be there, it felt easier. A lot of this was to do with visual imagery and mental preparation. Imagining myself in that space removed the worry that was associated with the unknown.

Mental preparation for a future event is made up of things like self talk and relaxation techniques and visual imagery. There is a lot of benefit of all these elements, but visualisation is really interesting because your brain is using some of the same circuitry to recreate a future event in the present. Self talk focuses on your beliefs, and relaxation focuses on your current physiological state, but visualisation puts you in the same environment as you will be when you’re performing, and it allows you to more clearly see exactly how a scenario might play out. It recreates the elements of the event, and so your brain can practise different scenarios and then prepare for those.

Relevant Scenarios

When might this even be relevant? You want to use visualisation in scenarios where you want a positive outcome, and you want to make sure that you have more control over what you are doing so that you can push the odds of success in your favour. Some examples of things that you might be planning to do in your life are things like…

• Giving a presentation or public speaking
• Having a meeting at work with difficult personalities or discussing something that might be controversial
• Talking with your boss about a promotion or having your performance review
• Having a difficult conversation in your personal life, like with a family member
• Maybe you’re studying and you want your exam to go really well
• You want to do a really difficult physical activity, like a long hike or climbing a mountain or learning to lift heavier weights
• Maybe you’re trying to get fit or improve your diet and you want to see yourself eating and moving differently
• You might be planning to ask someone to marry you and you’re nervous about it
• You want an interview for a new job to go well
• You’re meeting with investors to pitch an idea
• Or maybe you’re organising an event that you want lots of people to turn up to and have fun at.

So you can see that the applications for visualisation are really wide, and include both work and personal facets of your life.

The Science of Visualisation

I want to talk about the findings in the scientific literature about what visualisation can actually do for you. Then I’m going to deep dive into exactly how to visualise, based on one of the psychological models. I really want to explain this well, because I feel like some people talk about visualisation, and they really just say “visualise yourself doing the thing” and that’s about it. But the more specific you can get, the better it will be for you, and it will actually feel effective! So read on and I’ll definitely cover that.

The Definition of Visualisation

Alright, so what do we know about visualisation? As always I’m going to list a bunch of scientific articles in the shownotes, so that you can read more if you are scientifically minded. But let me go over some of the best points for you here. Visualisation is defined as the mental process of creating imagery, generated from information in memory, that represents an experience of any kind. It’s about using your imagination to create and recreate and practice an experience without any external action.

Visualisation and Performance

Most of the research in visualisation is in the topic of sport – sports psychology. The focus is on physical performance, so the idea is that if an athlete can accurately imagine how to physically do a movement, then it will increase that athlete’s ability to carry out that movement in real life, and therefore improve performance in competition. But the research has also expanded on this, beyond physical movement. It’s also expanded beyond the outcome of just improving athletic or physical performance. And that’s good news for us because we want to apply visualisation not just to competitive sport but also other areas of our life.

So there’s a huge body of work that shows that visualisation of movement improves performance. And visualisation combined with actual practice of the sport is more effective than actual practice alone. You might have heard top athletes talk about visualising their performances – this is why.

Further research has looked at what else might be imagined in visualisation, like the environment that you’re in, goals you want to achieve, strategies or routines you want to carry out, other sensory perceptions like hearing and smelling, emotions, your motivation, doing a task with mastery, how much control you actual have in the visualisation (so, are you doing the thing or is something happening TO you), and even things like the angle at which you are viewing the event in your mind. Then researchers have looked at outcomes. Not only is performance-outcome important, but so are things like degree of anxiety that you’re feeling, confidence, mental toughness, and improving motivation for doing the task or event.

Visualisation and Psychological Outcomes

Now, I want to mention a couple of example studies that focus on outcomes that are not physical. Then we can make them more broadly applicable to situations that you might want to improve with visualisation.

Confidence

In one study by Callow and colleagues in 2001, they showed that visualisation that focused on various technical actions and things like being in control of each situation improved confidence in badminton in three out of four high-level badminton players. In this study the players had two longer sessions per week for three weeks. They were also encouraged to visualise for 5 minutes daily over this period. The fourth player that didn’t really improve was actually very unstable in their confidence before learning visualisation, and was thought to play harder players afterwards, but when interviewed the person felt that the visualisation helped stabilise their confidence so that they didn’t have such wild up and downs as before.

Anxiety

There was a study my Mellalieu and colleagues in 2009 that looked specifically at imagery that was focused on anxiety and arousal symptoms in five rugby players. The players went through a visualisation training program which emphasised that these feelings and physiological arousal symptoms were normal and expected and helped them focus. Then they were found to actually re-interpret the anxiety symptoms as normal. And they all saw this technique as helpful in their performance. So this is really interesting because the anxiety symptoms didn’t actually lessen, they were just seen in a new light. So with practice of these visualisations, the symptoms were expected to occur as part of the sport and as part of doing well in the sport.

There is a great quote from this article too, from one of the participants, and it goes like this:

“Seeing yourself performing the kick successful, even though you have all the same old nerves and worries, it builds your confidence so that you really believe you can do it no matter what you’re feeling. So the usual worries I get before hand aren’t as destructive, I see them now as helpful as I’m confident I know I can make my kicks even with the pressure.”

So this shows that visualisation can help with uncomfortable feelings or nerves associated with doing things outside of our comfort zone, because your comfort zone is actually changing with the visualisation, right?!

Lasting and Individualised Effects

Now these couple of studies only had a few participants, but the specific improvements were quite substantial. Also, we also know from a summary of the research by Simonsmeier and colleagues in 2021, and this is called meta-analysis, that visualisation is effective, and actually has a lasting effect on outcome too, it’s not just a short-lived change.

There is another theme that came out in the research that I need to mention. Visualisations were most effective when they were specific to the individual doing the visualisation, and when the individual had input into making the details their own. So even though I mentioned a visualisation training program in the previous study, you don’t need someone to directly help you with this. You can create visualisations on your own.

What We Can Learn From Dancing

There is a fascinating study of the nature of imagery that is used in elite dancers to improve their craft. This study is interesting because it goes beyond the more common types of visualisation like visualisation of movement, of anxiety, of the event or environment. I thought it was worth mentioning because it’s closer to some of the scenarios that you want to improve.

The study is by Nordin and Cumming in 2005, and in terms of why the dancers were using imagery, reasons included learning and memorisation, changing thoughts and feelings, to find motivation, to seek inspiration on what dance choreography they might use, communicating a character or meaning to the audience, and for pain management. When the researchers investigated WHAT imagery the dancers were using, the more obvious ones were technical execution and environment, but they also mentioned metaphorical images to help them dance. These were things like “big pillows of air underneath your arm.” “Imagine your arms are touching either side of the room.” “Your feet [feel] huge so you feel really grounded and rooted to the floor.” They also imagined characters, and not just what the character looked like, but the behaviors and emotions of a character.

Now I love this descriptive study. It moves away from the stricter performance aspects of sport and into more artistic and cognitive and psychological elements of visualisation. I think we can take these ideas and apply them to situations for you that are less physical-based and more focused on self-improvement or performing better in social or emotional contexts. These might be situations like getting your message across in a meeting, speaking on stage or doing a presentation, being more confident in a certain circumstance, or when we are developing parts of our identity.

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A Cognitive Model of Visualisation

Now I want to give you a more specific set of steps on how you might go about visualisation:

There is a model that summarises visualisation and it’s by Cumming and Williams in 2013. It’s quite a simple idea, let me run you through it. The elements of effective visualisation are:

When

Where

Who

Why

Meaning

What

How

Ability

Outcome

That’s 9 components to the visualisation. Most of them might be pretty straight forward but let me explain them.

When Where and Who

When and Where actually explains when and where you are when you are visualising, not what’s in the imagination. So, it’s things like how often are you visualising? How long before an event are you doing it? Now there’s not really a right or wrong time period with this, it’s more about thinking about what’s most relevant for effective visualisation. You might want to use it whenever you are feeling nervous, or well before an event to help you consider plans and strategy. And also directly before an event to help calm nerves and practice your actions.

The next element is Who, which refers to the type of person that is doing the visualisation. For example, you might be someone who has no experience with the event, and so your visualisation would perhaps be more general in nature. Whereas an expert might have more fine-grained or specific details in the visualisation.

Why and Meaning

The next two are Why and Meaning, and these are really important according to the literature, because if you don’t know why you’re doing it then it’s hard to actually carry out the visualisation. Think about your outcome – is it performance based, is it emotional based, or something else? Then you can use those elements to focus on in the visualisation. The Meaning refers to what meaning you are placing on your own visualisation – the visualisation should be relevant to you. One example that is given in the literature is that imagining a tennis ball very close to but outside the line would be unhelpful for an expert tennis player, because the ball is out. BUT it might be helpful for a novice who is trying to bring the ball closer to the court.

What and How

The next element of the model is What – and this is where you can build the content of the visualisation, while keeping your Why in mind – what are you seeing? What are you experiencing? Think about all those facets of a visualisation I mentioned earlier. For example, what angle you’re viewing it at, what are you hearing, where are you, what are you feeling in your body? The more vivid the better.

The most important thing here is that the visualisation is as close to how you want the experience to be as it possibly can. But you can play with some of the elements. When different types of visualisations have been explored in athletes, there is the idea that if you manipulate different elements of the visualisation, like slowing it down, or viewing it from a different angle, or anything really, then you can get a different insight into the experience that will help you to come up with new ideas and see the experience more clearly and change what happens.

The next element is How – how are you generating the visualisation? There are a couple of points to mention here. One is that you can definitely model the experience from something else that you can watch. For example, you might like to watch videos of people role-playing constructive feedback if you want a meeting to go well. Then you can incorporate these new elements into the visualisation. There is also an acronym here that might be of use, and that is P.E.T.T.L.E.P. This stands for Physical, Environment, Task, Timing, Learning, Emotion, Perspective. What this refers to is that you can take elements of the desired outcome and incorporate them into your practice, such as wearing the same clothes as you would wear, being in the same space as you will be when you are doing the event, and thinking about and feeling the emotions that you want to feel.

Ability and Outcome

Another important factor is the Ability – and the key here is that people who are naturally better at visualisation tend to do better at this, of course, but also, people have been shown to improve their visualisation skills with practise, so start easy and keep it up.

Ok, the final element of the model is Outcome, and I talked about this when I mentioned the Why – and I mentioned earlier that the majority of the research shows that physical performance can absolutely be improved with visualisation, but so can motivation and emotions, so try to make sure that your desired outcomes are in one of these areas. Be sure to make your outcome a positive one, it might seem obvious to avoid imagining negative outcomes, but sometimes we can do this more automatically, so try and reduce this, because there is research that actually shows that it can lessen performance and self-efficacy.

So to summarise this model of how to visualise, it’s When, Where, Who, Why, Meaning, What, How, Ability, Outcome.

Now It’s Your Turn!

So, get imagining. Work out your why, build your content, and find a quiet place where you can close your eyes and imagine every element of that really important event going as well as it possibly can. Practice. Practice in your minds eye, over and over, until this is second nature in your mind. Then your brain will be prepared to do what you want it to do when the time comes.

I hope that this episode has been helpful, and quite a fascinating one for you. As I always say, Mary Oliver said “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” See you next time.

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References mentioned in the post:

Callow, N., Hardy, L., & Hall, C. (2001). The effects of a motivational general-mastery imagery intervention on the sport confidence of high-level badminton players. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 72(4), 389-400.

Cumming, J., & Williams, S. E. (2013). Introducing the revised applied model of deliberate imagery use for sport, dance, exercise, and rehabilitation. Movement & Sport Sciences-Science & Motricité, 82(4), 69-81.

Mellalieu, S. D., Hanton, S., & Thomas, O. (2009). The effects of a motivational general-arousal imagery intervention upon preperformance symptoms in male rugby union players. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 10(1), 175-185.

Nordin, S. M., & Cumming, J. (2005). Professional dancers describe their imagery: Where, when, what, why, and how. The Sport Psychologist, 19(4), 395-416.

Simonsmeier, B. A., Andronie, M., Buecker, S., & Frank, C. (2021). The effects of imagery interventions in sports: A meta-analysis. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 14(1), 186-207.