Visualizing Your Way to Easy Test Taking – and Everything Else

At one time or another almost everyone develops false assumptions about themselves, or the universe in general, that act as blocks to their progress in some area. One of the most effective ways to get over such a block is to visualize performing the whatever-it-is perfectly. This isn’t daydreaming about thanking the academy as you accept your Nobel prize. There is a process for visualizing doing what you want to do better that will help you get past any blocks you may be setting up for yourself. Who knows? It may even help you get that Nobel down the road.

Here’s how you do it.

Find a nice, quiet place to sit. To be sure you won’t be distracted, turn off the television, sleep your computer, turn the ringer off on your phone – whatever it takes to get some time alone with your thoughts. Sit in a comfortable position. (Don’t lie down or you might fall asleep. As marvelous as naps are, they will not help here.) Close your eyes. Take a few slow, deep breaths that bypass your chest and go all the way down to your navel.

Now picture a movie screen. The movie starts to play. In the scene you watch, you are watching yourself do what you want to do exactly the way you want to do it in real life. If the action is short, put it all into one scene. If there are too many steps to your activity to put in one scene (more than 3 minutes), split the visualization into a number of scenes and work on only one scene at a time until you have it down pat. It may take days, or even weeks, to get one scene right. Don’t rush.

Put in as much detail as you can—what it looks and feels like where you are, who else is there and what they are doing, each individual step you take to accomplish the activity, what you do to handle problems and set-backs. The more details you include, the more effective your visualization will be. Play this scene every day, several times a day, for ten to fifteen minutes or more if you can. When you feel ready, move on to a new scene.

Let’s say you get anxious when you take a math test and your mind goes blank. In the scene, you will see yourself sitting down at your desk, getting your pencils out, and watching other people get ready around you. You see the teacher placing the test face down in front of you, then you turn it over, and start to read it. You go through the first question, remembering what you’ve been studying and without getting anxious in the slightest. Then you go on to the next question, and so on.

Be sure as you play your scene that it is going just the way you want it to go in real life. If you see yourself making a mistake in the scene, stop the movie, rewind the film to before the mistake, then play it again seeing yourself performing just the way you want to. Say you see yourself get stuck on a question and start to think about going skiing instead of moving onto the next question. Go back to where you read the question. This time, see yourself read it, realize you don’t know how to do it at the moment, then calmly move on to the next question.

Do the same thing if the emotion you feel as you watch the scene is not the emotion you want to have in real life. For example, if you find yourself feeling anxious as you turn the test over, stop the movie, rewind it to a point before you started to feel anxious (e.g., putting out your pencils, or maybe all the way back to before you walk into the room), and give yourself some more calming breaths until you feel relaxed again. Then replay the scene.

Do not keep going with a scene if something (either action or emotion) is off. Fix it before you continue. Once you get to the end of the scene, go back to the beginning and run the scene again. The more times you run it through in your mind without taking a misstep or getting anxious, the more likely that things will go swimmingly the next time you take a math test.

Research shows that someone who has visualized doing an activity successfully before performing it will do the activity much better than someone who never did any visualization before trying it, even though neither one has ever actually done the activity. It is as if the brains of the visualizers believe they have already performed the activity.

If you are having trouble believing that just visualizing doing something better in your life will help, I have a couple of stories for you. Once upon a time . . .

Actually, these are true, not fairy tales. The first is from the world of music. Liu Chi Kung, a young pianist from China, was just making a name for himself on the concert tour when his country decided to hold a cultural revolution. Good members of the proletariat did not get fancy educations or waste time on such decadent arts as Western music. So those intellectuals who weren’t killed were carted off to prisons and camps to be “reeducated,” including our friend the pianist. Not only did our pianist’s exile come without a piano, he had no Western music of any kind to listen to. The pianist spent seven years there.

After that time, the government decided that maybe having a few people with more education and special abilities around might not be such a bad thing after all. So they declared their cultural revolution a success, brought back our pianist from exile and put him immediately back onto the concert tour. He picked up right where he had left off seven years earlier. In fact, many thought he played even better than he had in the past. People asked him how he managed it. How could he go seven years without any music at all, and especially without practicing his instrument, and then go back to playing beautifully in front of large audiences?

The pianist’s answer was very telling. Every day of his exile, he explained, he imagined himself performing every piece in his repertoire, playing each note perfectly. So when he found himself again sitting in front of a keyboard, it was like he had never left. His brain believed he had been practicing every day.

The other story comes from the world of baseball. The home run ace on one team (don’t ask me which one; sports are not my thing) hit a slump. Apparently, that was all he could hit for a while since, as the saying goes, he could not hit the side of a barn. One day his coach found him watching tapes of himself striking out. “What are you doing?” asked the coach. Surprised that the coach couldn’t figure that out for himself, the ace patiently explained that he was analyzing his swing to see what he was doing wrong. It seemed like a good idea to him.

It didn’t seem like such a good idea to the coach, who told him never to watch those tapes again. From then on, our ace was to watch only tapes of himself hitting the ball out of the ballpark. Which he did. And, just like magic, he came out of his slump. Seeing himself swinging the bat the right way convinced his brain that he knew how to do it. That was all he needed to bring the home runs back.

That’s how powerful visualization can be. Give it a try.

Nancy Linnerooth, Stress Coach

206.459.1589