Did you know that to your sub-conscious mind, fantasy and reality are one and the same?
And did you also know that this fascinating truth can be the secret sauce in life and business that allows you to live your dream experience?
In this week’s Thursday HotSeat, we looked at practical applications for harnessing our subconscious minds to visualise and imagine our dream experiences into being. And although this might seem a bit far-fetched in the land of day-to-day business operations, this powerful strategy is far from make-believe.
A fascinating article in Psychology Today, Seeing is Believing: The Power of Visualisation, by A.J. Adams (MAPP), has the following to say on this phenomena:
‘Brain studies now reveal that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as actions. Mental imagery impacts many cognitive processes in the brain: motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory. So the brain is getting trained for actual performance during visualization. It’s been found that mental practices can enhance motivation, increase confidence and self-efficacy, improve motor performance, prime your brain for success, and increase states of flow—all relevant to achieving your best life!’
And it gets better, as studies also show that visualisation creates physical and real-world responses to the imagined stimuli. The article cites a 2004 study from Ranganathan et al, looking at brain patterns in weight lifters. It found that:
“the patterns activated when a weightlifter lifted hundreds of pounds were similarly activated when they only imagined lifting. In some cases, research has revealed that mental practices are almost effective as true physical practice. For instance, in his study on everyday people, Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist from Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, compared results of those who did physical exercises to the results of those who carried out virtual workouts in their heads.
In the physical exercise group, finger abduction strength increased by 53%. In the group that did “mental contractions”, their finger abduction strength increased by 35%. However, “the greatest gain (40%) was not achieved until 4 weeks after the training had ended” (Ranganathan et al., 2004).
To experience the truth of this for yourself, indulge me for a minute and follow this short process:
Imagine that you are holding a big, fat, juicy lemon. You place the lemon on a chopping board and cut it in half with a serrated knife. Notice how the juice squirts out as the knife passes through it. You pick the lemon up and tilt your head back, squeezing all that tangy juice straight into your mouth.
Notice what happens to your mouth – Did your tongue tingle? Did your mouth start to salivate? How did you feel, knowing that the juice was coming?
This is the sub-conscious in action.
As far as it’s concerned, you just drank fresh lemon juice, and your physiology responded accordingly, creating a real-world result from your imagined experience.
So how can we access this innate ability and use it to bring the results we’d love in our everyday businesses and lives?
The simple answer is that the more we can practice experiencing our desired reality, in our minds (living it, feeling it and fully experiencing it with all of our senses) the quicker we can achieve it. The challenge is that when we have a situation that is not how we really want it to be, it is easy to become focussed on changing what we don’t want, instead of being grateful and appreciative of what we already have, as a way to bring more of that into our lives.
Remember.. what you resist persist and what you appreciate appreciates, so trying to get away from your current and less desirable situation, may in fact be keeping you embroiled in it.
For example, if you want to increase your personal wealth, it would seem natural to focus on where you want to get to and how you will create more income to get there. But that puts focus on what is lacking in your current experience.
A more effective way to bridge that gap would be to live the experience of already being where you want to be and having the income you would like to have, now, as if it is real – and to your subconscious mind, it is.
This will support your abundance mindset and your ability to identify and leverage opportunities to get you to your goal.
