You’re Not Putting Yourself into the Script

All too often, we think we’re helping if we put someone like a celebrity into our visualization. After all, your weight loss goal starring the latest and greatest seems a lot more exciting, and even inspiring…right? Wrong! By not making it about yourself, you’re setting yourself up for a dismal failure. This visualization is about your life—starring you! Focus on what your goal is and why it’s essential to you personally. From there, work the steps to reach your eventual success. Now you’re back in business!

You’re Too Hard on Yourself

Your visualization didn’t leave room for bumps in the road, or your own personal failures. As a result, you feel like you ruined the whole thing when you slipped up and have thrown out the entire idea. The better solution? Acknowledge the mistake but focus instead on the parts you’re doing right. Then dig back into your visualization and start from wherever you are now. Also, you might want to layer in a little love by putting in a contingency plan for when things go wrong…so long as you put the emphasis - as always - on the outcome and eventual result you’re aiming for. Eyes on the prize, remember!

You Aimed for the Stars

We all get a little overexcited sometimes, and while great big goals are fantastic, you sometimes need to add in a dose of reality. Some goals aren’t possible. Or might be further off than you thought. Rather than becoming discouraged when faced with the impossible, take a step back. Identify what the next best goal is (maybe it’s a step on the way to the big lofty goal?) and ask yourself what the steps are to get there. Don’t forget to figure in the problems likely to come up, along with some solutions. Then get back to work. There’s nothing wrong with adjusting your visualization to reflect the current reality.

Visualizations gone wrong don’t necessarily need to be scrapped wholesale. Remember, you can always keep what works. The key here is to pick yourself up and keep going rather than stopping altogether.

It Starts in the Vision

MMA fighter James Te Huna said, "I visualize what I'm going to do on that day, walk out to the fight. I'll go over and over it inside my head so when I do actually do it, I've been there 100 times before, so it's nothing new." By having a clear goal from the start, you've already won half the battle. What's your goal?

Focus on the Success

You're never going to make the goal perfectly. Visualization can start hurting you if you get super-specific on what you want. For example, picturing the perfect shot in a soccer game might leave you so hung up on doing it a certain way, you'll miss a better shot you're already set up for. Instead, focus on the outcome when it comes to things involving factors out of your control.

Focus on an Image

On the other hand, it's good to focus on hard on things you can control. A study done on professional basketball players asked one simple question: Do they visualize themselves making a basket before shooting the ball. The answer was astonishing. Those who visualized the shot, made it about 67% of the time. Those who didn't? 54%. By picturing your outcome in your mind, you are that much more likely to make it.

Do it Often

Professional soccer player, Alex Morgan, had this to say: "Pregame, I eat pancakes for a meal. I always do mental visualization before the game to prepare myself." She's made visualization part of her routine. So should you. By repeating the visualization, you're much more likely to attain the success you desire.

Don't Forget the Work

Don't rely entirely on the visualization to get you through. These athletes still practice daily. You still have to put the work in, no matter what it is that you want. Success comes through many channels. Practice, self-talk…all of these things are important. But if you don't succeed first in your mind, you're never going to get anywhere. As every one of these athletes would tell you if they could, their most significant success started right here in visualization. The rest just followed naturally.

You Feel More Motivated

Just the act of visualization is going to generate positive emotions immediately. After all, you’re staring at your success. Who wouldn’t feel motivated by that? The funny thing is, this feeling of motivation will follow you throughout the rest of the day so long as you don’t allow it to become buried under negativity. Guard this feeling well and use it to throw yourself into the next step toward your goal.

You Create a Clearer Goal

Maybe you weren’t entirely sure what you were hoping to achieve at the beginning of the visualization exercise. The thing is, if you did the exercise right, you’re going to know exactly what you want at the end of it. Why? Because to create a solid visualization, you need to layer in all the details, using every one of your senses. You have to see your success, and you can’t see what you don’t know.

Your Internal Dialogue Improves

We talk to ourselves all the time. Unfortunately, a lot of what we say to ourselves is negative, driving down our goals and ambitions by pointing out the flaws and all the places you’re likely to go wrong. Visualization answers those concerns. When you spend time working through what you want in this much detail, you’re also going to consider the possible problems – and their solutions – as part of this visualization. You also become surer of yourself and your success, which silences this inner negativity once and for all.

Performance Improves

Even practicing in your head is still practicing. The use of visualization helps you to work through what you’re doing, all the way to the successful outcome, making you confident as you step up to do the work. It’s always easier to do something you’ve already done before (even if the only place you’ve done it is in your head).

You Relax

Visualization is one of the surest and quickest ways to calm stress and kill anxiety. Using a quick visualization designed to ease tension will leave you feeling relaxed in mere minutes. Now you’re truly ready for whatever comes next.

Go Somewhere Else

Feeling especially fearful? It’s time for a trip to feel someplace safe. For some, this might be the beach. Or perhaps you’d feel more at home by a mountain lake or city café sipping coffee. Wherever you feel the safest and most at home, you want to go there now in your mind. Start by sitting back and making yourself comfortable. Close your eyes and picture yourself in your favorite place. Add in every detail you can to make this experience as real as possible. Include all your senses in the background. Breathing deeply, holding yourself in this place until you feel calm and somewhat refreshed.

Unwind with some String

Feeling all tense and coiled up inside? This usually comes when you’re holding back too many emotions. Picture yourself carrying around all these knotted emotions tangled up with words you’ve wanted to say all day but couldn’t. Make all these feelings into an imaginary ball of yarn. Now sit back and take several calming breathes as you withdraw this ball of yarn and hold it in your hand. Do you feel the weight? Good. Now drop it on the floor, holding onto the end of the string so that the ball rolls away from you, unraveling as it goes. Watch all the strands of yarn unwind, disappearing as they do. Stay in the vision until the entire ball is unwound and gone, and you’re feeling lighter and more relaxed.

Shut it Out

Our thoughts can be noisy things. We hear so many voices in our heads, reminding of us deadlines, things to do, and people to see. Add to this the negative self-talk which creeps in occasionally and the half-heard phrases we’ve carried with us, which sound suspiciously like our parents, and you’ve got a lot of chatter and no peace. For this kind of problem, visualize yourself in a room with a big open window. Set all these voices outside the window. Now, take a deep breath and shut the window firmly. This is a nice thick double-paned glass. You can no longer hear the voices when the window is closed.

With visualizations like these, you tell your mind to calm. You take back control where you need it most and set your feet back on a better path. Remember, you’re in charge of what goes on in your head. Don’t let anxiety set the tone for you.

Attack at the Heart of the Habit

What causes you to reach for the cookies? Knowing just what the motivation is for the behavior you want to change is more than half the battle. Once you get to the root of the problem, visualize the trigger in your mind. Include the words, situations, smells, whatever you can picture, which normally lead you right into the behavior and visualize a different action over what you would typically do. For example, if you eat cookies when your mom calls because she leaves you frustrated, visualize yourself taking a walk, breathing deeply the fresh air instead as a way to work off the stress.

Rewrite the Emotions

We all have emotional triggers where bad habits are concerned. In this method, identify what you feel before you dive into the habitual activity. For example, you might feel sad or jealous whenever you see your friends are doing something cool while you’re staying at home, so you reach for a beer to help bury the emotion. Instead, visualize your initial emotional response and calm it through meditation or deep breathing. Once you’ve dissipated the negative emotion, call up a positive one alternatively. What would you instead feel? Maybe you can feel content or even a little bit smug because you’re not going out and spending money. After all, you’re saving for a fantastic trip of your own.

Start Over

Forget the bad habit entirely in this one. Instead, you’re going to picture the habit you want. Are you anxious to visit the gym? Picture yourself going in careful detail. Layer in positive, happy emotions about going. Make this a visualization you can desire and even crave. Create this scene often. You’ll find yourself wanting to change your action, to experience in real life what you’ve been imagining. Tada! A new habit begins!