Visualization for Success


By Jim Tessman,
Marketing
ChampionsWay Inc.


Visualization is an important part of many martial arts – but does it really work?

It works better than most people could ever realize. Its power has been documented for thousands of years, and has been proven in industries from martial arts to medicine to quantum physics and can be used to perform a perfect spinning back-kick or to heal cancer.

Done properly, it can increase your speed, strength and stamina, and it can make you capable of maneuvers that practice alone could never accomplish. Of course combining it with appropriate physical training is also important to ensure that your body can keep up with your mind!

What is Visualization? In the most basic form, it is simply imagining yourself completing an action or having particular emotion associated to a given situation. It is the process of mentally creating an image or intention of what you want to do or feel. Visualization is used in meditation, katas, affirmations of success and in many other systems in order to control the physical body with the mind.

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Visualization is the use of imagery, which is the way the mind communicates with the body. You can’t talk to your hand and tell it to heal itself, but if you picture the wound shrinking and healing, studies have shown that it will heal significantly faster. There is actually a biological connection between the mind and the body that you can take advantage of with this process.

Picture your mind as a wild animal. Untamed, it will act on impulses, run free and can be dangerous to you. Trained, it will be calm, make your life easier and will make you capable of incredible things. Your mind can is dangerous when it wanders and focuses on negative emotions or actions, as those affect your body by releasing hormones and chemicals because your body thinks the thoughts are reality. When it’s trained, as many martial artists have discovered, your mind can make you capable of doing things that others thought were impossible.

To use visualization to practice a maneuver effectively, you must first know exactly how the action should be performed, because visualizing it incorrectly is the same as physically doing it incorrectly, which sets you back. When you visualize, use deep breathing and picture yourself performing the action flawlessly. Imagine how it feels physically and emotionally as well as how it appears. Visualization is more than a snapshot of what your maneuver is supposed to look like, it’s an experience.

When done correctly, visualization can be just as effective as physically executing the maneuver.

One theory is that your mind is afraid of unknowns and considers them to be “pain”, while it considers “knowns” to be pleasure, regardless of how unpleasurable they may actually be. This means that once you have put that maneuver or into the “knowns” category in your head, your brain will stop fighting against you and will do everything possible to make it happen. This can work for physical or emotional challenges.

An emotional challenge may be anxiety before a test, fear of public speaking or apprehension to commit. Once you can visualize the association of calmness or excitement to be connected to being tested or public speaking, you will physically begin to feel different in that situation. By appropriately using visualization to associate positive emotions and outcomes with these situations, your feelings of anxiety, fear or apprehension will fade away.

For powerful visualization, you should use a combination of all of your senses and feelings as you walk yourself through a mental scenario. You need to visualize exactly how each move looks and feels while you play it through in your mind as if it was actually happening from start to finish. Your brain will believe that whatever you are imagining is actually taking place as if you were actually living through that situation.

Visualization has been shown to cure disease, treat stress, boost self-esteem and to relax the body and mind.

This technique can be used for almost anything, whether it’s to step into the ring and face an opponent, to speak in front of a crowd or to use a new software application that you are nervous about trying.

I will walk you through a short visualization for feeling confident when public speaking, as most of you reading this will be teachers in one form or another and you probably have students with some anxiety when they are asked to teach a class or a maneuver. Now, while this may not apply directly to you, the idea is to be able to use the steps for visualizing just about anything.

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First, sit comfortably, close your eyes and begin breathing deeply. Clear your mind of any other thoughts and focus only on the matter at hand. Imagine yourself standing in your martial arts class - your instructor asks you to teach the class to do a spinning back kick. If you are a person who has anxieties for being in front of groups, your stomach may have flipped just at the thought of being asked the question.

What you need to do now is to run yourself through the scenario as if you were there, but you will replace those feelings of fear (terror for some), with feelings of excitement or calm. In order to do that, you must know how it feels physically and emotionally to feel excitement. Picture that teacher telling you that you just won the lottery, that you’re the student of the month or picture your significant other telling you some great news. How does that feel? Now, you need to associate that emotion with having your instructor ask you to teach.

Before replacing the emotion, you’ll need to work through the problem. If your fear is failure, ridicule or simply being in front of people, you’ll need to visualize teaching the class flawlessly, having the class extremely supportive and receptive, you’ll have to see yourself demonstrating the move flawlessly to a class that learns it quickly. Basically, you need to visualize things working out without a hitch.

Once you can picture yourself teaching the class flawlessly, you need to feel the positive emotions of accomplishment and pride. Feel them in every way possible. You should be able to smell the classroom, feel the cold mats under your feet and see and hear the class being impressed at your skills and abilities. Now, once you can visualize that, insert the positive emotion of winning the lottery into the visualization when your instructor asks you to teach.

Just like learning anything worthwhile, this will take practice and the more time you spend practicing these techniques, the better you will get and the more parts of your life you will be able to affect with it. Once you’re good at visualization, there is nothing you can’t accomplish!

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By Jim Tessman,
Marketing
ChampionsWay Inc.