I want to begin this post with an exercise: look at the picture below for a good 10 seconds, and then close your eyes and picture the image in your head as detailed and clearly as possible.

Could you see the palm trees, the blue water, and the small shrubs? It’s remarkable isn’t it? Even without the sensory input from our eyes, we can still create pictures in our head.

I believe this isn’t even the most amazing aspect of our natural ability to create images in our mind. In the exercise above, I had you picture something that you just saw – in other words, you recalled a memory of the past, and put it in the center of your focus. What’s even more incredible, though, is that we can visualize our own future or events that have yet to occur in real life. There is real power in this ability – more so than we are even aware of.

One of the first books I read on personal development, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (my favorite book of all time for those who know me), contained a section about the importance of mental visualization in achieving success with a daily exercise. It says:

“Realize that the dominating thoughts of your mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action, and will gradually transform themselves into physical reality; concentrate your thoughts for 30 minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person you intend to become, thereby creating in your mind a clear mental picture.”

Personally, I was always skeptical of this. I was not content with the explanation that “somehow” my predominating thoughts in my head would turn themselves into physical reality. I figured that this activity would just help you focus on your goals at best and at worst just be a complete waste of time, since I could be using those 30 minutes of contemplation for something else, like finishing the actual tasks I need to do every single day to achieve my goals. I used to think that mental visualization only served as a nice but unnecessary tool at our disposal on the journey to success. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered its true power, and the ability to channel those images in our mind into actual energy, motivation, and opportunity.

Reality and Imagination are the same?

In March of 1977, Natan Sharansky was arrested in the USSR on charges of treason and spying for the US. He spent the next 9 years in prison, and half of that in solitary confinement. To keep himself sane during his times alone, he would rely on what he loved most – chess. He played chess with himself in his head to pass the time, saying things like, “I might as well use the opportunity to become the world champion”. After his release from prison, he went on to beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov 10 years later in 1996.

The story about Natan Sharansky is fascinating! Although he was a chess prodigy, spending 9 years with almost no resources, little to no physical practice, and a lack of challenging opponents is usually enough to stifle and end a career for good. However, Natan was able to keep himself sane and become the greatest on the planet – with the help of mental exercises of visualization.

Let’s unpack a little bit what’s going on here.

When you carry out a physical action in the real world, different cognitive processes in your brain are activated, including motor control, perception, attention, planning, and memory. Your 100 billion neurons turn on or off in specific patterns to create the instruction that is sent as a signal to your muscles to move. When you saw the picture above of the beach, areas involving attention, perception, vision, and memory were activated.

Now what happens when you imagine that you’re moving, or when you read a text that is describing the image of a beach like the picture above? In the first example, to imagine you carry out a physical action activates the same areas in the brain as actually carrying out the task! The reason is because your brain needs to understand what you know about the experience of, say, walking, to imagine walking! This is why you cannot really imagine something that you haven’t really experienced without invoking creativity.

In a study done by the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California of San Diego, they recorded brain activity via fMRI to map areas involved in execution, observation, and imagination of a reaching movement done by humans.

Similarly, when you read text on a page, the descriptive words can paint a mental picture in your head, and to imagine that, the brain calls the same neural functions that support vision! An interesting consequence of this is that it is pretty difficult to imagine something you have never seen before.

In the case of chess champion Natan Sharansky, he used the power of mental visualization to maintain his excellence in chess by thinking about practicing chess, and this actually invoked the same areas in the brain as actually practicing with a board and pieces in front of him. This allowed his mind to be sharp without ever having to physically touch a chess board.

Mirror Neurons

It’s neat that when you imagine something, you call the same processes in your brain as you would if you were experiencing it live, but there’s another key component that makes visualization absolutely awesome for achieving goals – mirror neurons.

In 1992, a team of researchers led by Giacomo Rizzolatti were recording the brain activity of movements made by monkeys in a lab. As they were recording one day, one of the researchers mimicked a monkey inadvertently. What they observed was astonishing; the monkey’s brain activity in response to the sight of the researcher mimicking it was exactly the same as the activity that occurred in its brain when the monkey made the action itself. Isn’t that crazy?

Have you ever watched a horror movie where someone was stabbed or shot? Did you wince, and retract your body from the screen, maybe even curling up and turning your head away – as if you were getting hurt? The fact that you can experience pain without any physical injury is one of the examples of human empathy. We can put ourselves in the shoes of others without going through the same experience.

The same way pain in a movie causes this reaction in you, is the same way that the mirror neurons work in Rizzolatti’s monkeys. These neurons “mirror” the experience you have just observed and they create an emotional, chemical, and physical reaction in your body.

What do I mean? To answer this, let’s touch on the topic of empathy. Let’s say you see your friend who is not doing well. They don’t say anything but you can see the frown on their face, their head is down, and their forehead is wrinkled from their distress. How does your brain understand that your friend is sad without them telling you?

Your brain observes that your friend has a frown, their head is lowered and their body language gives cues to your brain. Your brain then sends electrical signals to your muscles that imperceptibly create the same body language, in an effort for it to understand what your friend is feeling. If they’re frowning, your brain sends electrical signals to the muscles in your face, and it creates a frown also, even if it’s too small for you to notice. These are the mirroring neurons matching what it observes in an attempt to understand reality through you.

Visualization Turned Into Physical Reality

Rizzolatti’s discovery of the mirror neurons really deepened our understanding about why we are social creatures, why we have a capability for empathy, and in regards to this post, why mental visualization is so important. While Rizolatti’s monkeys proved that observation and physical action were linked, the same thing goes for imagination and experience. Both are linked and imagination can produce chemicals, emotions, and physical commands that can go undetected from our awareness.

In a study done by Guang Yue, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, he had a group of 30 young adults spend 15 minutes a day thinking about exercise. This included exercising the fingers by moving them in their mind and flexing the bicep with their thoughts. He found that over the course of 3 months, the pinky finger gained an average of 35% more strength and the muscles around the elbow required for flexing the bicep had increased in strength on average by 13.5%. He later concluded that in some cases, mental practice could be as effective as physical practice and that doing both together is more effective than either alone.

By imagining yourself performing an activity, you activate the thoughts, nerves, and neurons that would be required to practice that activity. This allows you to practice something without even needing to speak a word, move a finger, or blink an eye. Although it is not physical, by exercising your mind to go through the process, action, and thoughts needed to physically execute the action, it is still working itself like a muscle and this is the key to visualization. It is the process of exercising or training your mind to strengthen the connections in your head that produce that experience, as well as creating an emotional and physical reaction that is sent to your body. In other words, it is the training of the mind that prepares you to for who you want to become or what you want to achieve by letting you experience it now.

This is honestly so important that more people should know about this. There are so many practical applications to this, but I will only list the ones I feel are the most significant. Here are 3 powerful applications that will allow visualization to revolutionize your life:

1. When you visualize yourself achieving your goals, the fulfillment, success, and joy you experience in your head can serve as a huge motivator when things get tough, as you develop perseverance, grit, and purpose. If the vision is vivid, detailed, and immersive enough, the vision can become so consuming that you feel like you need to make it a reality at whatever cost.
2. When you visualize yourself performing the actions needed to get to where you want to go, you’re practicing without even doing anything! This can create confidence when you’ve run something through your mind so many times that you don’t even have to think about it anymore. It also develops skills and makes you aware of smaller details, something required for mastery.
3. Speaking of details, by spending more time visualizing something, your mind becomes hyper-aware of information in your day-to-day that will aid in the pursuit of your goal – thereby allowing you to become aware of more opportunities. This is the same concept as noticing a specific car one day, and all of a sudden starting to see a ton of cars that are just alike. With visualization, you’re training your mind to focus on what you really want – your goal.

To end this post, I’d like to add an inspiring video created by Jay Shetty, who perfectly brings together all the ideas presented in this post:

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