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The Importance of Visualization Techniques and Guided Imagery to Enhance Internal Imagery
What in the world does Maxfield Parrish have to do with visualization techniques, guided imagery or mental imagery?
Nothing... per se. I just like his art.
But on the other hand, practically all art, business, innovation, creation, and inspiration taps into one's inner reservoirs of creative visualization. Even Apple and Microsoft (okay maybe that's debatable...) have teams of 'creative types' churning away at software and hardware concepts.
Visual Thinking Strategies and Visual Communication Require Creative Visualization
Developers in the field of NLP were possibly the first to address the concept of submodalities (the finer distinctions of subjective experience). Remember, with NLP, it is just a 'map' of reality - a way of making sense of how people generally make sense of the world about them...
In our subjective realities, we have a stream of consciousness that we direct (or is directed for us) to focus upon a specific context for a few seconds or minutes at a time. Proactive visual thinking strategies and effective visual communication (art, technology, innovation) require enhanced degrees of creative visualization, but for the most part it has been assumed that there are 'creative people' and those who are not.
However, what creative visualization really comes down to is understanding how to adapt and transform your perceptive faculties. The author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards has really broken this process down in a way that is applicable to artist. From an NLP perspective, I believe that similar principles can be applied to one's mental imagery and internal imagery by learning how to recognize submodalities and adapt them using the specific visualization techniques I guide listeners through in the How to Visualize series.
Mental Power, Visualization Therapy, Mental Visualization, and Mind Power Techniques
Typically when people ask me about mental power, mental visualization or mind power techniques, they're referring to their individual capacity to create and hold internal imagery. For many, it happens unconsciously and is fleeting. One second it is there, the next second it is gone. More often than not many people struggle with clearly defined pictures of what they do not want but illusive mental imagery of what they do want to experience or create. The How to Visualize guided imagery program applies specific visualization techniques that can be used to construct the foundation and framework of what you want. Consider it like building a house (your own automatic mental imagery has to start in order to process the instructions):
- Create the big picture plans for the overall structure
- Dive down into the details of each room in the house
- Now you lay the foundation
- You frame the perimeter of the house
- You frame each room of the house
- You add the roof
Obviously, this is a Lincoln log house (another mental imagery association, right?) and a quick overview of a very complex process, but isn't most everything else the same? If you want to enhance your sports practice, then you apply visualization techniques for sports. If you're an entrepreneur then you apply your mental imagery to the products, services, systems, and distribution to your business. As an artist, you learn how to go into a flow state to follow your own internal guided imagery. In any situation it is a process of big picture (the overall context) and the sequences of cumulative smaller details (the chunks) that will result in your finished product both in your internal imagery and in reality.
Do Visualization Exercises and Positive Visualization Techniques Like a Visualization Board Help?
Can a visualization board help? Sure. It might give you some ideas and these are typically archetypal in nature (generalized patterns) if you use pictures from magazines or internet images... But have you ever considered that a visualization board might be a bit more effective if you created all of the images yourself? Pick up a book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and combine it with my How to Visualize series to create your own visualization content that stems directly from your unconscious mind.
Why borrow something that already exists when the point is to create your own unique experience...? After all, it all begins in your mind so apply these visualization techniques to generate the content that wants to get out of your mind and into reality.
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