AMISTAD-AALST: WHAT IMAGERY (also called "visualisation" and "mental rehearsal") CAN DO FOR YOU

zaterdag 18 mei 2013

WHAT IMAGERY (also called "visualisation" and "mental rehearsal") CAN DO FOR YOU

http://www.lulu.com/shop/dean-amory/the-magic-power-of-mental-images/paperback/product-21022668.html

http://www.lulu.com/shop/dean-amory/the-magic-power-of-mental-images-i-am-the-tigress/ebook/product-21022704.html

THE MAGICAL POWER OF MENTAL IMAGES

THE VISION OF THE TIGRESS

Compiled by Dean Amory

What Is Mental Imagery And How Does It Work?

Mental imagery, also called visualization or mental rehearsal, is an experience that resembles a perceptual experience, but which occurs in the absence of the appropriate stimuli for the relevant perception.

Mental images have the power to change your life. The mental images that you often visualize affect your life, whether you are aware of this or not.

If you visualize negative situations, difficulties and problem, and continue doing so, your moods will gradually become negative, you will alienate people, you will close your eyes to opportunities, and your self-esteem will go down. How can you achieve success if you are so negative?

On the other hand, successful people attract success, because they constantly imagine and expect success

What Can Mental Imagery Do To Enhance Your Life?

Mental images are like a movie or still pictures that you see in your mind. If you watch them again and again your subconscious mind will ultimately accept them as you reality.

Through Mental Imagery you can affect your thinking, behaviour and world. If you visualize what you really and truly desire and how you will achieve these goals; if you replace self limiting thoughts by inspiring and motivating thoughts; negative habits by positive habits; prepare yourself mentally for challenging and difficult situations and picture yourself as the happy, healthy and successful person you want to be, you will improve your skills and become more happy and successful in your life!

How To Use Mental Imagery

Practice Daily.
Use short visualizations during your daily activities and longer visualizations while relaxing and prior to meeting specific challenges.
Use visualization boards as a computer wallpaper, sleeping room decoration or at places where they will regularly remind you of what is important to you.

Use Different Techniques of Mental Imagery for Different Purposes

Mental Imagery is an excellent way to

Manifest your Dreams and Desires
Reduce Stress
Create a Mental Safe Place
Define Priorities and Strategies
Get Rid of Stumble Blocks
Eliminate Negative Behaviour
Perfectionalize your Skills
Improve Problem Solving and Decision Making
Clear your Mind from Emotional Clutter
Find Balance
Let Go and Break Free

Some Of The Things You Can Do With Mental Imagery

1. Manifest your Dreams and Desires

Dreams do come true, but first you have to dream them, Right?

If you aim at nothing you'll hit it every time.

Goals are dreams with deadlines: If you don’t set priorities, if your short term goals don’t serve a long term vision, if you don’t select strategies, and don’t take action: how will you reach your goals?

Prepare Success!

Achieving your goals, being successful and being who you want to be and living the life you want, is best visualized by mentally rehearsing the positive outcomes of future actions and events and by picturing the destined future stage.

Envision yourself achieving your goals vividly to remind yourself of your objective and what you need to do to reach it. Many athletes, actors, and singers "see" and "feel" themselves performing a routine, program, or play perfectly before they actually do it.

2. Reduce Stress

Reduce stress by visualizing yourself in peaceful natural scenes, by descending an imaginary staircase towards your sacred safe place, by becoming a leaf that travels the waters of a lovely creek, by pulling the plug and draining all your stress away or by imagining how you let loose on an imaginary punching bag…

3. Get Rid Of Stumble Blocks

Confront and eliminate irrational believes, fears and internal conflicts
and turn your stumble blocks into stepping stones

Take responsibility for your own emotions and actions:

Recognize that neither another person, nor an adverse circumstance, can ever disturb you.
Only you can.

Replace “must” by “strongly prefer”

4. Eliminate Negative Behaviour

Use Covert Sensitization:

Imagine engaging in some behaviour you wish to change, say, an addiction. Have this quickly followed by imagining a highly unpleasant event. Thus, the addictive behaviour becomes paired with a highly aversive event and therefore is less likely to occur in the future.

Next: imagine how your life will be without the negative behaviour.

5. Perfectionalize your Skills

Systematically visualize the desired correct coping behaviour and its benefits for you.

This technique has seen much use in sports.

Seeing yourself perform skills at a high level, the way you want to: confident, accurate, focused, … is a good way to build confidence and a feeling of readiness prior to a challenging task (public presentation, important meeting, …) or competition.

6. Improve Problem Solving and Decision Making

Choose an image to focus on to help you through a troublesome period.

Visualize yourself as a superwoman who can easily scale the highest skyscrapers or a marathon runner who outruns all of his competitors.

Put your problems inside a carton and imagine it getting smaller and smaller until it can easily fit into your pocket. You'll discover that your problem is easier to carry inside your pocket than the heavy weight of it sitting on your shoulders.

Or, you can visualize your problems magically disappearing before your eyes. There are no limitations in your visualizing. It can be magical.

When you are struggling with making a decision between two different options, try visualizing yourself involved in the two scenarios and imagine the results of your decision. This visualization exercise should help you in making the right decision.

7. Clear your Mind from Emotional Clutter

Too many thoughts and mental pictures can convolute the mind

Choose images that erase, filter, or organize your thoughts. Much like de-cluttering a closet, you can use visualization to reduce mental clutter.
There are three causes of mental clutter: Avoidance, Indecision, and Procrastination. Don’t avoid them. Confront them Now!

8. Find Balance

Use visualizations to help you ground and find balance. Because our energies are always in flux it is important to "check in" with our bodies routinely to adjust and centre ourselves.

If you find yourself stubbing your toes or bumping into things, you are not in balance.
If you are experiencing mental confusion or are all over the place emotionally, a centring visualization can help return you to calm and better focus.

9. Let Go and Break Free

Are you having difficulty walking away from a toxic relationship? Or do you tend to dwell on the past instead of moving forward in your life?

Choose images in your visualization sessions which will allow you to break free from problematic people and move past personal regrets.

We cannot change the past, but we can create our futures. Begin a new way of living by visualizing it first!

10. Familiarize

Mental imagery can be used effectively to familiarize yourself with the surroundings before an event, such as an interview, an important meeting, a sales conversation or negotiation, a public presentation, a competition site, a racetrack, a stage or a difficult play or routine prior to a competition ...

11. Do a Run-Through

Mental Imagery can be used as a cognitive technique to plan strategies, rehearse procedures or game plans, affirm what you want to occur, or as a coping skill strategy to stay calm and composed under pressure.

Athletes and performers often do a complete mental run through of the key elements of their routines. This helps them focus, eliminate some pre-performance jitters and be more comfortable. It also serves as a warm-up or mini rehearsal.

12. Build Confidence and Readiness

13. Stimulate Healing and Recovery

Repetitive use of positive visualization allows access to the mind-body connection. This lets the mind and body work together to foster the healing process of the body on a physical level.

Visualization puts your intention of what you want to work. The more specific the intention, the more specific the results. Remember whatever you believe is what your body will do

14. Help You To Emulate Your Role Models

An important key foundation in Neuro-linguistic Programming is modelling. To model, you emulate those who have already achieved success. You observe, analyze and then replicate the factors that contributed to the outstanding performance.

While there is no 100% guarantee that you can reap the same results, modelling helps you shorten your learning curve. You learn to avoid common mistakes and apply the essential steps and strategies that have helped your role model succeed. The idea is that it is much easier to follow a previously proven path to success.

15. Give You Access To Your Totem Power

Animal totems contain a natural power that can allow you to see and love and know more of the earth, life and especially yourself.

Animal spirit guide totems hold power and knowledge that we can use to be one with nature - all that is and will be and use the power of nature to achieve our goals. Many cultures of the past understood and used the power of animal totems.

Totems can be particularly useful in today's society where it is easy to forget the essence and true spirit of life and love in the midst of high technology.

Use your personal animal totem to awaken the natural balance with nature that you already possess. You can be healthier and happier physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in understanding and honouring your animal totems.

16. Borrow The Mind Of A Genius Or The Powers Of Your Hero

The truth is that you can be anything that you want to be—but you do have to work at it.