The Power of Creative Visualization

What you think, you become. What you concentrate your attention on, you can attract. What you visualize, you can accomplish. Visualization can help you to direct your thoughts and to steer all your actions in one direction. It will help you to live your life with more clarity, focus and purpose. Visualization is therefore a fantastic technique to utilize the creative force of your thoughts. It enables you to direct this powerful force to improve every aspect of your life. Every single individual that is successful visualizes, be it consciously or unconsciously, to attract success and prosperity into their lives. The following will introduce you to the magnificent power of creative visualization. It will show you what visualization is and how you can use it to affect beneficial change in your life. You’ll also find in the following some easy visualization techniques to achieve the best results. Let’s use creative visualization to transform our lives!

Creative visualization is a powerful technique. It can be seen as a kind of rehearsal that you repeatedly conduct in your mind. In doing so, it helps you to use your imagination to affect positive changes in your life. If applied correctly, the power of visualization can transform your life. It will aid you in attracting to your life what you’ve ever dreamt of.

“To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan… believe… act!”
Alfred A. Montapert

Visualization, however, is not magic. It is not that you visualize something and it will magically appear. Instead, visualization helps you to lay the important fundament for the accomplishment of your dreams. It has a profound impact on your subconscious. And this is where the true power of visualization starts to kick in. Visualization influences the subconscious mind beneficially, which in turn enables you to actively accomplish your dreams and wishes.

Creative visualization can help you to manifest your dreams.

In this sense, visualization will not make things appear miraculously out of nothingness. Instead, it will enable you to accomplish these things on your own account. Visualization creates the right mental beliefs and attitudes that help you to do whatever necessary to accomplish your aims. It can entirely change your thinking processes and helps you in erasing self-limiting thoughts.

The power of visualization

Table of contents

What is creative visualization?
How does visualization work and why?
How to visualize?
3 easy visualization techniques
Visualize success

If done correctly, visualization can attract the right circumstances into your life. It has the power to change your environment and to invite certain opportunities. By intensively visualizing specific objects or situations, you lay the foundation to make things happen. But it certainly is not magic. It always requires action on your part. But if you are willing to combine visualization with the diligent pursuit of your dreams, you will unleash the creative power of your thoughts. And it all is accomplished by applying natural mental laws everyone of us can use.

What is creative visualization?

Visualization is the process of purposefully creating intense mental imagery in order to affect beneficial psychological changes. It can be considered as a form of rehearsal that is continuously performed in the mind. By visualizing vivid sceneries of the accomplishment of certain goals, you condition your subconscious mind to act upon it. The reason for this is that the subconscious mind is unable to tell the difference between a real-world experience and something that is just imagined, as scientific research suggests.

By means of constant repetition, the subconscious starts to accept the visualized thought. When this happens, mindsets, beliefs, habits and behaviors are changed accordingly. As a result, every thought and action is directed towards the accomplishment of the specific aim. Furthermore, the beliefs, mindsets and mental strength necessary for reaching your goals are established within you. They will allow you to keep pursuing your goal, even when confronted with difficulties.

At the same time, visualization has a beneficial influence on your neural pathways. By continuously visualizing certain actions, the behavior will feel more familiar once it’s actually performed. The reason for this lies in the fact that real-life action and visualization activate large parts of precisely the same neural networks. Even more surprising, scientists found that the sole act of visualizing a certain exercise has helped athletes to attain almost the same strength gains like someone who performed the exercise in real life.

How does visualization work and why?

Visualization greatly influences the subconscious mind. This is due to the fact that the subconscious cannot distinguish between something that is intensively imagined and real-life events. As a result, if you repeatedly visualize certain thoughts, the subconscious mind will start to accept them. It will begin to act upon the visualized suggestions, which in turn starts to manifest changes in your life.

Visualization can therefore assist you in quickly establishing the necessary mindsets, beliefs, habits and actions that help you in accomplishing what you’ve visualized. It further enables you to develop the same confidence that usually could only be acquired by regularly experiencing a sense of achievement in real life. Visualization can therefore increase your confidence and encourages you to believe in yourself, which increases the likelihood that you will pursue your goals until realized.

This is the magnificent way visualization works. But why does it work?

While scientific research has countless times shown that visualization works, it struggles with explaining why exactly it works. Yes, scientists understand that visualization conditions neurological pathways and influences the subconscious mind, but they have great difficulties at explaining why this has such a powerful impact on a person’s life. They absolutely struggle to explain why the visualization of a physical exercise produces almost exactly the same gains in strength as actually performing this exercise (link to the scientific study can be found in the above).

One possible explanation lies in the tremendous power of thoughts. Visualization allows us to apply specific mental laws that govern the creative power of thoughts. By visualizing, we focus on and intensify specific thoughts. Thoughts are made of energy, and by focusing intensively on a specific idea, we nurture it with attention and emotional energy. This process can affect internal changes that are reflected in the world around us. We can therefore change our reality by changing the way we think. Why exactly this works is up for speculation, but it works.

How to visualize?

The process of visualization is really simple. It does not even take longer than five for 10 minutes. However, it takes dedication and regular practice to manifest results. This is the central aspect many people struggle with. They visualize for two of three days, but give up quickly as they haven’t become millionaires. Be patient and stick with it, then you will see results.

In the beginning, it is important to find something that you want. Preferably, it is a meaningful and realistic goal. Once you’ve found something that you want to attract into your life, the visualization can begin.

Seat yourself somewhere comfortable. Make sure that your environment is quiet and free of distractions. Then close your eyes and start imagining in great detail how you accomplish your goal. See yourself having or experiencing whatever it is you desire. Repeat this movie in your mind again and again.

Keep these guidelines in mind:

• Make it seem as if it were real. The key to visualization is to intensively imagine how it actually feels like to be successful or to have what you want. It is not enough to simply create mental images. Even though visualization is described as the creation of mental imagery, it does not consist only of creating visual images. Instead, it is important to get all your senses involved. Visualization can only be truly effective, if you creatively manage to use all your senses. Don’t just see yourself victorious, feel it. Feel the excitement, the joy and happiness. Feel how the adrenaline rushes through your system and how your heart beats. Feel, hear and smell how it feels like to have finally accomplished what you’ve desired for so long. The goal with visualization is to create such an intense mental image that it seems as if it were real.
• Don’t just watch, participate. When visualizing, many people make the mistake of observing their actions from a third-person perspective. They see themselves accomplishing their goals, but not from the first-person perspective. It is as if they’re watching a movie, without being engaged in it. It is important to keep in mind that visualization must always be done from the first-person perspective. Otherwise, you simply imagine seeing someone accomplishing all these things you’re dreaming of. For this reason, participate and engage in your visualization. Don’t be an observer, be the focal point of the whole movie.
• Be specific. In general, it’s advisable to visualize specific goals. Seeing yourself getting a promotion might not produce quick results. Instead, try to visualize how exactly you’re going to earn this promotion. Visualize every single step you’re going to take on the path to a better career. See the actions you are going to take.
• Practice regularly. Mastering the skills of visualization takes time. Many beginners struggle with creating and maintaining the mental imagery. It is therefore important to be concentrated while visualizing. Refocus your attention whenever your mind drifts of. At the same time, be aware that it takes practice to manifest results. Only visualizing a goal that is difficult to obtain once or twice will most likely not do the trick.
• Be patient. As a rule of thumb, visualize realistic things and keep visualizing until whatever it is you want has come into your life. If it isn’t there yet, it requires more time and effort.

If you follow these guidelines, you will see results. The more intense and real the visualized imagery feels, the better can you trick your mind into believing it’s real.

3 easy visualization techniques

There are many powerful visualization techniques you can use. If you wish, simply use the basic visualization practice described above (the technique is called “receptive visualization”). But if you are looking for some other techniques to spice things up, the following is for you. Use these powerful and proven visualization techniques to attract what you desire into your life.

• Treasure mapping. This powerful technique creates, as the name indicates, a treasure map that shows the reality you seek to create. It’s a large physical picture that outlines in great detail how you envision your future. The map can be created by drawing it, but you can also use Photoshop/Gimp or even pictures from magazines. While you spend time creating the trash a map, your mind will visualize your dreams over and over. And once the treasure map is finished, you can use it to maintain a high level of motivation simply by regularly reminding yourself of your dreams and ambitions.
• Altered memory visualization. Instead of focusing on a desired state in the future, this technique specializes in helping you to better cope with the past. Basically, the technique seeks to assist you in modifying past memories. In doing so, you can actively create a more positive memory of what happened. The goal of this technique does not lie in changing the past or making things undone. It’s also not meant to suppress bad memories. Instead, the technique is designed to help you resolve negative memories. It will help you to let go of the pain and resentment you associate with the memory. If you manage to change how you think about the past, you can build a brighter future.
• Visualizing while meditation. If you know how to meditate, you can make use of it by beginning to visualize after you’re meditating for a certain while. It will help you to begin the visualization once you’ve reached a deep level of relaxation. Your concentration will also be much higher, which helps you to focus more intensively on your visualization.

Visualize success

Visualizing success can be extraordinarily powerful. It’s something that top performers habitually do before actively pursuing their goals. Many of them visualize in greatest detail how they intend to succeed, long before they start taking action. Visualizing success can provide impressive results, if done correctly.

• Step 1. Break the road to success into smaller segments. Unless you intend to visualize yourself succeeding in one particular situation, it’s always advisable to divide your entire plan of becoming successful in life into smaller sections.
• Step 2. Once you have smaller segments, create goals for each segment. For instance, a young person that dreams of becoming a successful lawyer or a renowned judge will first have to successfully graduate from high school (segment 1), then attend university (segment 2) and so on. It makes therefore sense to create specific goals for the time during high school first.
• Step 3. Begin visualizing the outcome of the first sub-goal. When visualizing success, it’s important to create an intensely detailed experience. Visualize every little detail. Don’t just picture yourself succeeding, picture your entire environment. See how the people around you react. Visualize in great detail what it feels like to succeed. Picture every action of the entire situation. Visualize the whole event from beginning to end.
• Step 4. You can spend visualizing each goal for about 10 minutes, or longer. After you’ve finished visualizing one goal, start with the next one.

“If you can see yourself doing something, you can do it. If you can’t see yourself doing something, usually you can’t achieve it.”
SEAL

I hope you enjoyed reading this article about the power of creative visualization. What are your experiences with visualizing your future?

Stay victorious!