Hey Paul here. Do you ever wonder what separates successful individuals from the rest? What gives top performers their edge? Today, we’re diving into two secret weapons used by high achievers across various fields - mental training and visualization. These techniques, endorsed by elite performance coaches, can help you sharpen your skills and excel in your craft, even off-stage, off-field, or out of the studio.
Several studies endorse their effectiveness, but they must be utilized correctly to reap the benefits. In this post, we’ll unravel three key strategies to optimize your mental training and visualization, drawing insights from the work of Andrew Huberman.
What are Mental Training and Visualization?
These are potent techniques that involve rehearsing skills in your mind to enhance them in reality. Regardless of your goals, anyone can leverage these methods.
Picture yourself performing an action like addressing a crowd or kicking a football, exactly how it would unfold if everything went perfectly. Rehearse this scenario repeatedly in your head. Doing so accustoms your brain to the experience and trains it for success, significantly increasing your chances of genuine success.
Let’s delve into the science-backed tactics to maximize the benefits of your mental training and visualization.
1. Keep It Brief and Simple
According to a comprehensive study conducted in 2011 on mental training, it’s optimal to spend approximately 15 seconds per visualization. If the action takes lesser time to perform, repeat it as many times as possible within the 15-second window.
For example, if you’re visualizing playing a guitar chord which might take merely 5 seconds, visualize this thrice in a row. Subsequently rest for 15 seconds and then repeat.
You might wonder about the number of repetitions per session. The study suggests that ideally, you should aim for 50 to 75 repetitions thrice to five times a week. But remember, any amount of mental training can still be beneficial. And once this training helps you build the skill in reality, those improvements persist.
Keep your visualizations simple. While it’s challenging for most of us to visualize complex stories involving multiple scenes and senses, almost everyone can accurately imagine something straightforward involving just one sense.
2. Label Your Visualizations
Assigning mental labels to our actions during visualization enhances the effectiveness of our mental training. We find it easier to imagine and remember detailed visual scenes if they have a label that we recognize from our real-world experiences.
These mental labels significantly assist us in visualizing them well. And mental training is most effective when we can easily transfer the labels we assign to our visualization to real-world experiences.
3. Blend Mental Training with Real World Practice
Although our brains find it hard to distinguish between imagining something and doing it for real, learning and performance are exceptions. We need to learn something in reality before we can visualize it effectively.
However, fret not if you’re using mental training to rehearse something that you haven’t practiced for a while. Even though mental training cannot replace real-world training, it’s far better than no training at all. Athletes commonly use mental training to stay sharp when they’re unwell or recovering from an injury.
There you have it – the secret sauce to using mental training and visualization to boost your skills and real-life performance.
Paul