Creative visualization is a way of bringing change into your life through your imagination. You can use creative visualization for many purposes, such as setting goals, changing attitudes, upholding health, and rewriting your past.
There are five basic steps. Set your goal, create a clear idea or picture, focus on it often, give it positive feelings, and congratulate yourself when you have achieved your goal. Let’s look at the basic process and specific uses in more detail.
These are the five basic steps to creative visualization:
1. Set your goal. Your goal may be a short term or long term outcome. When you are starting out, you may want to start with goals that are reasonably easy to achieve. You can add longer term goals as you progress.
2. Create a clear idea or picture. Create some scenarios as if you have already achieved your outcome. Think of them in the present tense. You may want to script some of these scenarios (see scripting in the Verbalize techniques), then summarize those scripts into bullet points you can use during a visualization.
3. Focus on it often (but not too hard). Set aside some time each day to focus on the goals you currently have. It doesn’t have to take long. Five minutes every day is better than half an hour a week (however both are better than none at all!). If you think of your goal during the day, simply relax a moment and expand that thought into a quick visualization then and there. Avoid trying to force the visualization.
4. Give it positive feelings. Use assertions to give your goal a sense of compelling inevitability. Use strong positive statements such as “this exists here and now” or “what I see I create.” Finish with a statement such as “life creates this, or something better, for me and for the highest good of all involved.”
5. Congratulate yourself when achieved. When you achieve your goal, congratulate yourself. Find a way to celebrate. Add the experience to a list of positive outcomes you’ve achieved. You can review this list later as a positive assertion that you achieve your goals.
You may notice that I’ve mentioned both scripting and assertions above. These are techniques I discuss in more detail soon. Visualization and verbalization are even more powerful when you combine them.
While the main purpose of creative visualization is to support you in achieving specific goals, you can use creative visualization for many other purposes. I’ve listed here just a few. Don’t let this list limit you though. You can find a wide variety of applications if you let your imagination guide you.
· Confirming goals. You can use visualization to imagine what a goal might be like, and whether it’s right for you. You may find, after you go through some possible scenarios, the goal you have in mind may not be so worthwhile or desirable after all.
For example, many people like the idea of “retiring early, living on the beach and doing nothing.” Do they know what that is like? Try a visualization exercise where all you do is wake up, have breakfast, lie on the beach, walk, have lunch, lie on the beach, eat dinner, and go to bed. It may sound good at first, but then visualize yourself after doing this for six months, a year, and two years (or more). Do you still feel like it’s what you want?
Use creative visualization to reduce the risk that a goal you have set out to achieve is not what you expect when you get there.
· Changing attitudes and behaviors. Many of our attitudes and behaviors come from a mental picture we hold of ourselves within our subconscious. We can use visualization to make changes to those mental pictures, which then filter through as changes in our attitudes and behaviors.
The way to do this is to visualize yourself already acting with those attitudes, or behaving in a certain way. See yourself going through scenarios where you have a choice of the old and new attitudes, and choosing the new attitudes.
At first, you may feel what I call creative dissonance when you have a choice between an old mental attitude and a new one. This tension is natural and is a step in changing those attitudes. Sometimes you may fall back into the old one, in which case just accept it and do some more work with the visualization. Have an expectation though that you will change. It’s certain.
· Maintenance of health. Visualization and imagery are now a legitimate part of western medicine. Medical researchers have approved specific uses of imagery in such conditions as psychological distress, chemotherapy related distress, pain control, insomnia, and immune system improvement.
There is much information out there on using visualization for both dealing with injuries and pain, as well as upholding good overall health. A basic visualization for general health would involve seeing your body and mind as being healthy, strong, and fit. You could then focus on any areas of concern.
· Rewrite your history. Another creative way to use visualization is to rewrite your history. Much of our view of our own history is less to do with accurate recollection of events, and more to do with how we reacted to those events. Our memories are just one of many subjective views that could have formed from an event. Feel free to change and edit your view of your history. Make some negative events further away, more distant, or non-existent. Exaggerate positive events or even invent new events in the past to support the goals you have in the future.