Sports Psychology Applied in Daily Life – Part 2: Imagination Is Your Reality

First, I would like to look back to my first article that was published in the May issue of Coromind, where I spoke about the key principles for a happier, more positive life. I am wondering if you have had the chance to experiment with your thoughts? If not yet, I have a simple suggestion: Next time you drive over the Tairua Hill (or any of our wonderful windy roads of the Coromandel) and you have a car, truck or camper van in front of you and he/she, meaning the driver of the vehicle in front of you, just won’t pull over! Just examine the energy that is currently in you: Are you in a hurry? Do you always seem to attract those bl**dy slow and/or arrogant drivers? Good! This is the best opportunity to experiment.

Next time you experience this, take a deep breath and send lots of love to the driver in front of you. I know this might sound silly because you just disliked him/her so much! And it also might take some practice. Even start right before you get into your car! Wish every driver on the road a happy and safe drive including yourself and observe what happens. ☺

Happy experimenting!

Another very important principle of our mind is: Your imagination is your reality. Did you know that your subconscious cannot distinguish between imagination and reality?

I’ve been working with athletes for more than 16 years and visualisation is one of the most common and most important techniques used in Sport Psychology. It means that you envisage a new sequence of movement, a race course or any sort of goal with all the details and with all your senses, mentally before you do it physically. This technique is so successful, because your subconscious mind cannot distinguish whether what you have just thought of was just imagination or actually real. Even your body will respond to an imagining with real-life symptoms.

Here another small test for you to prove that this works:

Step 1: Close your eyes and imagine yourself in your kitchen.

Step 2: Imagine how you take a lemon in your hand and feel the smooth skin of the lemon in your hand. 

Step 3: Imagine how you cut the lemon into two halves and then you take a big bite out of one half. 

Step 4: Observe what happens. Could you feel any physical change happening in your mouth/body, e.g. increased saliva flow? Or any other feeling as if you had actually bitten into a lemon?

Remember, this was just your imagination! 

Some people faint after only listening to someone’s horror story of an operation or accident because their subconscious takes it literally as reality. 

I remember an interview with a Swiss ski-jumper who had just become 3 times Olympic Champion. When the journalist asked him if he already realised what he had achieved, his answer was: “Slowly I realise that this is actually reality. I’ve been visualising this goal so many times that I couldn’t tell anymore if my visualisation was just imagination or already reality.”

Visualisation is a very powerful tool and can literally change your life. My own experience as an athlete with this technique initially encouraged me to become a Sport Psychologist. It is like programming your mind.

Whatever you feed your mind will eventually become your reality.

The best time to programme yourself is when your mind is in a relaxed state. This is also called the alpha state, when your brain waves are between 7 and 13Hz. To practise a visualisation, an athlete uses any sort of relaxation technique to get in this state of mind. 

The brains of children up to the age of seven are mostly in alpha state. This is the time when they learn the most. For adults watching them, it seems as if they are in a different world and it’s hard to get them out of it against their will. 

We adults often drift off into an alpha state when we relax in front of the TV or other device and just passively consume the content that is presented to us and sometimes even fall asleep with it. We think that watching TV relaxes us. This is true; at the same time our subconsciousness very easily absorbs content without any of the filters that a conscious mind would normally use to question things. The theme music for a programme helps us to get into the alpha state more quickly. This also works even if the TV or radio just runs in the background. 

There are so many things that influence our reality today: conditioning through our culture, religion, beliefs, dogma, etc. but we still have a fair bit of influence on what we feed/programme our mind. Becoming aware of this process is the first step in changing our reality and our fate. 

An exercise could be that you take your time to write down what you really want for your future and maybe even the future of this planet and then start visualising this future with all your senses every evening before you go to bed. Make sure you write your vision in a positive way without using negation, as I explained in the first article in May.