Visualization for Skill Development
The human brain is amazing. There are lots of things that could make me say that, so let me explain this particular one. In sport psychology, one of the skills we focus on is called “visualization” or “imagery.” Essentially, this means imagining yourself doing something successfully; see it, do it. It is a powerful tool, and is used by athletes - and musicians, actors, public speakers, and performers everywhere to help them achieve peak performance. But how, and more importantly why, does this work? In order to answer this question, we’re going to look at a different population: Children.
Kids are also amazing. Have you ever just watched little kids play? Try it sometime (without just creeping at a park). They create whole worlds out of nothing more than an open space on the floor and their imagination. A small child’s brain lacks the capacity for a lot of important things that develop later; what they lack in higher cognition, though, they more than make up for with imagination. And this brings us to why kids - and brains - are so incredible.
A child is not bound by the social or developmental conventions, activities, and conditioning that slowly turn off most of our imaginations as we get older (as an aside, this is why I think it’s a bit of a tragedy that parents plop their kids in front of an iPad so young; we are literally stifling their imaginations. But I digress). The capacity for visualization is built into our DNA and our physiology, and for children, their fantasy worlds can be complex, vivid, and very real. For performers, the goal is to tap into this ability that we slowly lose or bury as we get conditioned out of fantasizing.
Here is why a child’s fantasy world seems so real to them: The human brain cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Why aren’t we all schizophrenic? Because most of us have other cognitive and emotional mechanisms that keep us grounded in reality. However, in terms of the development of emotional and motor neural pathways, imagining something and actually doing it has the same effect: They build new patterns in the brain. This works better on a less-developed brain, but we all retain some neuroplasticity even as we age. The capacity of the human brain to physically restructure itself through repeated action or imagery is why therapy, meditation, training, and practice all tend to work.
HOW does it work? Visualization is used for several things in sport. We use it to find calm, to come back to the present moment, to reduce anxiety and stress, and to prepare for competition; today, I want to teach you the basics of how to use it for skill development. A few necessities:
Your visualization must be a vivid and multi-sensory experience. Tactile feelings, tastes, sights, sounds, emotions, smells, details, and context are all important. You are telling a story, so don’t leave anything out.
Your visualization must be positive. In other words, you’re trying to create something, not destroy it. You want to see what you want to accomplish, not what you want to avoid.
Your visualization must be controllable. You are the author of this story, this scenario, and no editor is going to go through and change it. In the case of skill development, you need to be able to see yourself performing the skill you want to learn, repeatedly and correctly. Often, you’ll have to go back and start over until you can see yourself succeeding; this is what I mean by being in control.
Ok, let’s try it!
First, set the scene: Where are you, what’s it like, how to you feel, what do you see/smell/hear/touch? What’s the environment like? Write it all down, in detail.
Next, write down what the skill is and what it’s like to perform it. Narrate the process of yourself performing the skill, in the first person. You are seeing this happen through your own eyes.
Finally, finish the scene with the correct execution of the skill. For example, if you are a basketball player trying to improve your free throw shooting, the scene is probably a gym, the process involves knee-bending and breathing and your pre-shot routine, and the execution involves the position of the ball in your hand, elbow and wrist motion, bending your knees, follow-through into your release, the arc of the ball and its fall through the net.
The last step is to turn this into a written first-person narrative that you can then record in a voice memo, at a pace that is appropriate to both keep you engaged and give you time to really immerse yourself in the scene. You can then use this script to visualize yourself, in detail, performing your skill, building the same neural pathways as if you were actually doing it and doubling your training reps without actually doing anything physically.