As I stated in my first post, I have begun a Life Experiment involving a focus on positive outcomes. 

For well over a week I’ve taken time before the majority of my day’s major activities and focused on what I wanted to do, what I wanted to get done, and how I wanted to experience and move through the activity or event itself.

Some of the times I felt as though I was wasting my own time (part of my mind was saying “let me just DO things, come on!”), while other times I felt as though I had benefitted myself through the habit.

After a short while of practice and reflection, I think I’ve come to understand visualization and imagining positive outcomes a little bit better, and here’s the breakdown:

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Reticular Activator System:

Before getting into this project, I was already aware of positive visualization (imagining ideal scenes, imaging ideal outcomes, etc…) as a tool that would gear our mind towards that which we desired most.

The portion of the brain called the reticular activator system is generally thought to be the place in our minds that determines what we pay attention at any given time. If we focus on hair styles and think of nothing but styling hair, we will notice hair styles everywhere, we will pick up on details about the styles of hair that we see on anyone we meet or even everyone we see. That’s what we focus on, and so our reticular activator system shows us that information in as many ways as possible.

The idea is, if you focus on failure, your mind will only notice the millions of ways to fail and will not open your mind to methods of success. It will keep you trapped in behaviors and thoughts which bring about what you think about – failure. 

Hence, if you think success and your mind is geared towards what you actually want in your life, your filters will align to let you see all those factors which will lead to your success – it will bring you to manifest behaviors and notice new perspectives that will further your objectives.

That’s the premise.

 

The Value of Visualization:

During my personal experimentation, I noticed that positive visualization is useless unless it serves one of two functions:

• Enhances the experience you feel (brings about happiness or charisma or compassion, or whatever emotional resource you deem to be best)

For instance, sometimes my visualization was not very specific or even particularly sharp, but I only thought of positive outcomes while listening to some fun music. This might not give me a clue as to what I should actually do during the event or activity, but it would bring me into an energetic and outgoing emotional state, which I would experience along with my visualization of the event – and also with the event itself.

Essentially, this is about involving feeling into the visualization process. Wether that involves getting pumped about an outcome you really want, or moving around energetically, or listening to some good music tracks.

• Enhances your meaningful objectives (clarifies what needs to actually get done, brings you to follow through on actions towards your goals)

For instance, a few times I barely visualized at all but wrote down different tasks to accomplish in a certain context or during a certain activity. This by itself was able to structure my experience of the event and make it more enjoyable and more geared towards my purpose.

I find that a simple check involving the question “what is my purpose?” will often yield steps towards that purpose. I did this at meetings, before teaching Jiu Jitsu class, or before going to the beach – all to just make note of exactly why I was going there and what I could do there in terms of my highest aims. This might be talking to someone in private, or asking a specific question, or buying something at the store, or dropping something off to someone I thought I was going to see. 

The Habit of Success-Thinking:

Additional future value of positive visualization is the fact that it aids in developing the habit of thinking about positive outcomes.

If we are able to gear our minds towards imagining absolute success in terms of any activity or event, we are on the track of getting towards those desired outcomes. We will help to gear our senses, our emotions, and our intellect towards what is best for the achievement of our ideal future.

We are what we think. We bring what we think into the world in far more ways than we are consciously aware of. Imagine if that entire process worked FOR us!

However, visualization needn’t be done during a pause before an activity in the way I did during this activity. It can be done far ahead of the activity, and most importantly during the event or activity. For this reason, my experiment (which I will provide the result for in a different post) isn’t an accurate measure of how much I “positively visualized” about a particular situation.

This brings us too:

 

An Ever-Present Function:

So long as we alive, our mind filters information to some degree. Wether we are walking on the beach, working on the job, or going to a social event, we are almost always thinking – at least to a slight degree, but often to a very noticeable one. 

If these thoughts swirl around failure, it will be difficult for us to achieve success (and if we do achieve it, it will be harder to notice). 

For example:

You plan to attend a social event with the goal of having fun and sharing stories and adventures with new people.

Before even leaving your house you think of how awkward you will feel trying to have fun with new people. You think about how people might react to you, you think about how that might feel. Your mind flashes with mental pictures of you off in a corner by yourself. 

When you enter the party, you remind yourself that you are here to meet fun new people and have a blast with them, but you can’t seem to achieve that end.

We might not consider what happened here to be formal “visualization,” but nonetheless, the reticular activator system was responding constantly to your thoughts. 

Since the inner pictures and dialogue were about failure in the given situation, you would have worked against yourself in two separate ways:

 

1. You would have brought your mind to notice mostly the information that would be related to your thoughts – and since your thoughts were about social “failure,” your lenses of perception would be likely to let through just that information to bring you to social “failure.”
2. You would have associated socializing – or that social scene in particular – with “failure,” with “rejection,” with pain. Doing this continually will bring you to generally fear these experiences in those given context, hence permanently keeping you from the attainment of your ideals in that realm.

Now let us imagine you think and feel a bit differently:

You plan to attend a social event with the goal of having fun and sharing stories and adventures with new people.

Before you even walk into the event, your mind spins with excitement around who you will meet there and all the fun you’ll have. You see yourself walking around and talking to everyone, spreading the party out and having a blast.

When you’re at the party itself, you feelings and thoughts are 100% aligned with your objective to have fun and meet new exciting people. You’re living your ideals because your mind contains no thoughts that aren’t congruent to the ideals themselves.

We might not consider this to be formal “visualization,” either, but the fact of the matter is that our emotional state and perception lenses were completely on “success,” and so we found it effortlessly.

Here you are aligning our thoughts with our ideals and so living out our ideals as an extension of your mental activity (which in this case is an excited, charismatic expression). You are also coming to associate social scenarios with pleasure, since that is the emotion that swirls in your body as our mind swirls with pleasurable thoughts.

To conclude, I have decided to slightly alter my Life Experiment to adjust for the details of how I believe the reticular activator system to genuinely function.

In my opinion, the most important thing about “visualization” is its effect on our perceptual lenses – which in turn affect our intellect, thought, and action. The subtle stream of thought before, during, and after an activity is likely to be far more important a determiner of our experience than a few minutes of visualization beforehand.

Hence, in addition to recording the duration and intensity of my visualization before an activity, followed by a rundown of my experience of the activity itself – I will do something different.

For at least one activity a day, I will also record something about the state of my mind during the activity. I will write about my focus during the activity, the inner dialogue I experience, and how I take control (or don’t take control) of it.

This might be a challenging task, since I will intentionally getting in my own head – which might bring about negative consequences since the most positive “flow” states (from my experience and from evidence in my psychology research) involve a certain letting go of self-awareness, a certain out-of-your-head-ness. 

This experiment will be longer than expected, but I’m sure it will be worth it in terms of insight and experience. I’m excited to dive into the understanding of the reticular activator and gain a better understanding of how we can come to control our perception and our experience!

 

 

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