Visualisation: how to do it, in 3 minutes

Visualisation means picturing, mentally and precisely, something that isn’t there yet. It has been served up in every possible way, to the point of becoming a sort of order placed with the universe. Let’s bring it back to what it is: a short mental exercise that helps when done well, and does nothing when done badly. The difference between the two comes down to one detail that research has measured.

What visualisation does, and what it doesn’t

Picturing a scene in detail prepares the brain to live it. Athletes have known this for a long time: mentally rehearsing a movement improves the movement. It isn’t magic, it is repetition, the same as in training, only less intense. For a life goal, visualisation does something similar: it makes familiar what is still abstract. When you have seen the call you dread twenty times in your head, the real call is less frightening.

What it doesn’t do: it doesn’t replace action, and it changes nothing about what doesn’t depend on you. Visualising a flat doesn’t make a listing appear. Visualising the moment you send off the application, on the other hand, makes it more likely that you send it. That is where everything plays out.

The process, not the outcome

In 1999, two researchers at the University of California, Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor, tested the question with students before an exam. One group had to visualise the outcome every day: the good grade posted, the pride. Another had to visualise the process: themselves revising, at their desk, with their notes. A control group visualised nothing.

The ‘process’ group revised for more hours, felt less anxious, and got better grades. The ‘outcome’ group did no better than the control. On some measures it did slightly worse.

The explanation fits in one sentence: seeing yourself arrived gives a small immediate satisfaction, which resembles the feeling of having succeeded, and which releases the pressure to act. Seeing yourself doing, on the other hand, stages the concrete movements, which makes them easier to start. It is the same difference as between looking at a photo of the summit and looking at the path.

Visualise yourself doing what leads to what you want. Not only having it.

The method, in three minutes

No need for more. Three minutes is enough to build a scene and too short to drift into vagueness.

1. Choose one precise scene. Not ‘my life in a year’, but a moment: you writing the first page, you at the workshop door with the keys, you on the phone saying yes. A place, a time, an action.
2. Close your eyes and set the scene. Where are you? What is around you? What is the light like? Take twenty seconds just for that.
3. Go through the senses. What you see, fine, but also what you hear, the temperature, what your hands are touching, a smell if there is one. The more senses, the more real the scene is for the brain.
4. Do the action. See yourself acting in that scene. Not frozen, in motion. You type, you speak, you walk, you sign. Stay on the action until it is sharp.
5. Open your eyes, and note the next action. One line. What you are going to do today that resembles what you just saw.

The last point isn’t a bonus. It is what stops the exercise becoming a pleasant daydream. You have just seen yourself doing something; you do it, or you do a piece of it.

The mistakes that empty it out

The most common one we have seen: only visualising the end. The beach, the cheque, the graduation. It feels good, and it doesn’t help.

The second: aiming too big. A scene that contains your whole future life contains nothing precise, so nothing your brain can prepare for. One scene per session, small, sharp.

The third: doing it for too long. Beyond a few minutes, attention wanders, the scene dilutes, and you end up bored by an exercise that should stay vivid. Three minutes every morning beat a quarter of an hour on Sunday.

The fourth: going in with no material. If you don’t know what you want, you have nothing to visualise. The clarifying work comes first, on the board, by naming the vision and breaking it into steps. Visualisation comes afterwards, to make those steps familiar.

Where to put it in the day

Morning works well, because the next action can still be done that day. Right after looking at your board: you have the scene in front of you, you close your eyes, you step into it. It slots naturally into a short routine.

Evening works too, if you prefer, with one nuance: the scene to visualise becomes tomorrow’s, the first thing you will do. That prepares the next day rather than a distant future, and it is very effective for the actions you keep putting off.

What doesn’t work is doing it ‘when I think of it’. Like any mental exercise, it holds through regularity, and regularity holds through a fixed place.

Common questions