This was originally posted in 2010 on www.YourChangingDirection.com
“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”
(Steven Covey)
You may have noticed that there is a small football (or soccer depending upon where you are) competition happening in South Africa. Certainly where I am the media is full of football related contents. Which is how I came across a professional footballer giving his guide to taking a penalty shot.
The first thing he said was that you needed to visualise the ball going into the net. You’ve probably heard that sort of advice before, because it’s not just confined to football – or sport for that matter.
I know that to some people visualisasing sounds a bit “woo-woo” and new age. But don’t get caught up in the “label” of visualisation. I can ask someone who refuses to do any visualisation to tell me what they think will happen at an event coming up and they are more than capable of giving detailed answers.
Regardless of how you want to label that process – visualisation or thinking through what could happen, the outcome is often the same. Those who tell themselves a story about an event going badly often feel nervous/bad about the prospect of that event.
Often the “argument” or reasoning for doing this is that they are basing it on past experiences, with the logic that if it’s happened like that in the past, that it will always happen like that in the future.
This often means that what is being imagined ignores the possibility that things may naturally go differently (it’s like imagining a tossed coin will always land heads and ignoring the 50:50 chance it may land tails). It also eliminates the opportunity to come up with solutions ahead of time if things don’t go as you planned.
This week I invite you to play with something that you have planned in the future.
- Imagine that this event goes well, from start to finish
- As this is possibly an unusual way of you imagining the event, repeat that a couple more times!
- This time imagine that everything doesn’t run smoothly but you handle the situation calmly and successfully regardless.
- Notice the difference this makes when you come to the event in reality.
Have a week full of fun imagination
Love
Jen