Visualize Your Success
My coaches used to tell me that I could increase my chances of winning if I “visualized my success.” Many included careful instructions on what I needed to do. Start in a quiet place, think about your goal, imagine completing the task and build a detailed scene in your head about how it would all happen.
Motivational coaches told me to practice this technique at least 10-15 minutes daily.
When I get up in the morning, my mind races from one thing to another. I make it a habit to spend a few minutes calming down, meditating and focusing on how the day will go. It wouldn’t take much effort to add a couple of minutes onto that time, visualizing success.
That brought up two questions for me. First, has anyone ever researched to see if visualizing success works? Second, if it does, is there something specific I could do for better results?
Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor at the University of California in Los Angeles decided to test the idea. They divided 101 undergraduates into four groups. All the students were given a “daily calendar sheet and asked to indicate the days and hours that they planned to study for the exam and where and how they planned to study.”
The PROCESS simulation group was told to picture themselves studying for the exam. “Visualize when, where and how they might study for the exam to achieve a high grade on the exam.”
The OUTCOME simulation group was told to “mentally simulate themselves attaining a high score on the exam-that is, to visualize themselves having completed the exam and finding out they achieved a very high score.” In other words, they were supposed to imagine only the win or high score at the end.
The combined PROCESS-OUTCOME simulation group was instructed to “simulate BOTH the process of achieving a high grade AND the outcome.”
Finally, the self-monitoring (CONTROL) group documented the amount of studying each day before the exam and recorded how many hours they studied daily.
When the experiment ended, the student’s daily logs were inspected to see if the things they were told to imagine changed their study habits. They also compared the test scores of the four groups.
The process only group did best. The combination of process and outcome simulation were next. The control group followed that, and the worst-performing was the outcome simulation group.
How could that happen? How could the group that visualized their ultimate success do so poorly compared to every other group?
The first surprise was in how many hours students studied for the exam. The students who were told to imagine STUDYING for the exam (the process group) studied three hours more than those who just imagined getting a good score. The process group and the combined process-outcome groups studied significantly more than the group told only to imagine a good grade.
As you would expect, people who studied more got better grades, so the group that pictured the process of studying did better.
But there was more. Any visualization that included getting the test back and seeing the high score lowered the results. All that visualization of getting a test back with a great score created a feeling of overconfidence, which caused the students to study less and get a lower grade.
Researchers in 2013 came to a similar conclusion after studying seventy-seven fifth-graders from an urban middle school. Half were instructed to use “Positive Thinking.” In contrast, the other half used a technique called MCII, where they imagined a desired future but included potential obstacles they might encounter trying to achieve that future. The MCII students had to form if-then plans. If an obstacle came up, what actions would they take to overcome it?
The positive thinkers didn’t succeed; they wasted their time. The study found that it was more effective to mentally contrast positive thoughts about the desired future with obstacles standing in its way. Then prepare ways to overcome those obstacles.
Visualizing the process of becoming successful, doing the research, planning and working your plan are all good. Visualizing all those steps increases the chances that you’ll actually take the actions you need to succeed.
Instead of repeating “I can do it,” you should rather say “How can I do it?” and then mentally rehearse that strategy.
Reference Links:
From Thought to Action: Effects of Process-Versus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance
Lien B. Pham, Shelley E. Taylor
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, First Published February 1, 1999 Research Article https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167299025002010
From Fantasy to Action: Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) Improves Academic Performance in Children
Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri Kirby, Anton Gollwitzer, and Gabriele Oettingen
Social Psychological and Personality Science, First Published February 11, 2013 https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550613476307
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3/16/2022
