Visualize The Process, Not The Goal
Most of us
have heard about visualizing our goals as a means of encouragement. We are told by numerous self help gurus that we should imagine exactly what we want to achieve as though we have already achieved it. Engage all our senses, make it as real as possible in the mind, because we cannot perceive the difference in reality vs imagination.
“The Secret” or Law Of Attraction (LOA) is a popular advocator of such visualizations.
But in this post I’m going to break down why these kinds of visualizations are extremely harmful in reality, and I’ll provide you with a more effective form of visualization.
I’m not going to bash the LOA like Mark Manson did (ok maybe a tiny bit), although he did have several stellar points in his article here (https://markmanson.net/the-secret). I’m just going to focus on the visualization aspect.
Athletes Do It!
So if you do a quick google search on visualization, you’ll find that the majority of articles talk about how every successful athlete uses visualization to great effect during their sports.
They supposedly spend hours imagining themselves (in every detail) crossing the finishing line first, or being in the headlines of the news, or being covered in gold medals, etc.
In doing these pre game visualizations, they heighten their chances of winning.
And this is great, if it actually worked the way these articles say they do. But here are my observations based on a solid month of deliberation and intensive research on the subject (in hopes of finding the most optimal visualization routine to help increase productivity).
Confirmation bias
The athletes that win a lot and link their success to their visualizations are just victims of confirmation bias.
For example, since visualization is such a popular practice in sports, let’s say all athletes do it before their games. They all visualize themselves coming in 1st place. But obviously there can only be one person in 1st place.
If an athlete wins, he’s going to think “Yes! My visualization worked!”, then when he’s interviewed about it, he’s going to talk about his visualizing process, and how it led him to winning the game.
But what about every other player who visualized just as hard but didn’t come in 1st place? What’s their excuse? Where are the articles about visualization that are written from their perspective?
It’s like the phenomenon of thinking about someone and suddenly they call you.
You might think, “Oh! That’s crazy! I was just thinking about that person, and they called! Must be some sort of mystical higher power that nudged that person to reach out to me because I was thinking about them.”. But in reality, how many times did you think about that person and they DIDN’T call?
Visualizing strengthens neural pathways
Psychologically, visualizing something supposedly creates and strengthens neural pathways in the brain that have to do with whatever event you’re visualizing. Essentially, visualizing is a form of practice for the mind.
So then, focusing on the end result of goals you want to achieve won’t really help you get to those goals will it?
I mean do you really need stronger neural pathways for breaking the finishing line tape? Or do you really need to practice living in a cliffside mansion? Or owning a boat?
Most end goals result in you bathing in glory, and bathing in glory doesn’t take skill, therefore it makes no sense to practice them in your mind. Visualizing the end goal in every detail is like telling yourself “Oh I’m so good at standing in my mansion’s living room!” or “Oh I’m so good at standing atop of this box and bearing the weight of these gold medals around my neck!”.
It is far better to visualize the process in which you must take in order to achieve your goals. Because visualizing is practice for your mind, if you vividly imagine running each step of the way instead of just crossing the finishing line, you’ll be training your mind in the actual process it takes to achieve the goals you desire. Here is a study on the subject that helps support my claims: http://www.llewellyn.com/encyclopedia/article/244
Happiness is waiting for me when I reach my goals
There’s a common misconception that you need to reach your goals before feeling fulfilled. But more often than not, when you finally achieve your goal, you find out it wasn’t as great as you thought it would be. And then you start working towards another goal, hoping it can bring you the sense of fulfillment that the first goal failed to give you. This cycle repeats over and over again, and you go through life feeling empty. This related heavily to an article I wrote on buddytation (http://buddytation.com/how-to-be-a-happy-person/), you’ll want to check it out if inner happiness is something you’re interested in.
The problem with basing your happiness on reaching certain goals is, that by the time you achieve the goals you made in the past, you are probably a very different person with different wants/desires/needs from your old self that made the goals in the first place.
For example, when I was younger (in my teenage years) I wanted nothing more than to be a ladies man; a smooth talking pussy getting player. I thought "If I can get all these girls then I'll be happy". So I embarked on a journey and fell deep into the rabbit hole that is the PUA (Pick Up Artist) community. It took a while and a ton of effort, but I managed to become pretty proficient. I was finally going on an abundance of dates with many different girls.
But I wasn't all too happy; in fact I was really stressed out struggling to keep up with too many dates with too many girls. My typical weekend consisted of 3-5 dates with a different person each time, so it was like repeating the same damn date over and over again. Getting intimate no longer felt special, more like a routine.
Long story short, there was a time when I wanted to be the guy with a bunch of girls. Then I became that person, and realized it wasn't what I wanted anymore. I actually wanted my alone time again (grass is always greener on the other side eh?).
Then when I got a girlfriend, it was difficult to transition out of the "OOH hot girl! Must talk to her!" mindset. It totally fucked me up because I put so much time and investment into developing that skill, it became second nature to me. Not a good habit to have when you're in a monogamous relationship.
Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun initially, but then I suppose I started caring about other things aside from random women's approval. Just to be clear, I'm not bashing PUAs or my pickup brothers (if pussy is at the top of your priorities then by all means go for it). I'm just saying that priorities change with time, and often people find themselves stuck doing things they don't really want to do anymore; mistakenly thinking it is bringing them happiness all while wondering why they are so miserable.
I hope that helps to show the contrast of what we wanted in the past, and what we want now. With this understanding you’ll see that most of what you want now, won’t even matter to your future self.
So how this ties to visualization is that the cadre of “imagine the future as it is now” folks (such as the LOA community) are telling you to think so much about your future self that you’re most likely going to lose your current sense of self. Which is the whole idea of LOA, basically delude yourself into believing you’re somebody else.
This has its merits in the “Fake it till you make it” mentality, however when you’re faking something you THINK you want, only to realize that you don’t really want it when you get it, you’ll come to realize you wasted a chunk of your life dedicated to a meaningless dream. Mid life crisis much.
Fantasy is usually better in the mind than it is in reality; something that Neil Strauss highlighted in his book “The Truth”.
Fantastic read by the way, for anyone who’s ever been in a relationship, this book will change your perspective on so many things.
I have to agree with him on that, because when you fantasize something, you only see what you want to see. But when you do things in real life, there are consequences and hidden aspects you have to deal with that weren’t in your fantasy image.
That’s not to say have no goals in life! You need a general direction in which you want to head, but it should be flexible. Just because you wanted to be a lawyer when you were in high school, doesn’t mean you have to force yourself through law school after you discovered that you actually hate the legal system. Reassess and come up with a new flexible goal.
More importantly than the goals you have, is the process. Without the process, no goal can be reached. And only through the process, will you know how you truly feel about your goal. Because at the end of the day, you always know how you feel about the work you did TODAY. But you’ll never know how you’ll feel when you achieve your fantasy goals until you get there. So holding out on fulfillment is very likely to be disappointing.
It’s like a game, you can either have 1 point of fulfillment guaranteed everyday, or you can have no points and work for years towards a possibility of a mystery bag of fulfillment potential. But you have no idea how many fulfillment points are in that bag at the end. You hope it’s big, but it could be empty. Seems like an awfully big risk considering how you only have one life to spend.
Be a smart investor in your happiness, consistency is infinitely better than random fluctuations.
Imagination vs Reality
Self-Help people like to say the the brain cannot differentiate imagination from reality, and while there’s a certain truth to that, I don’t think it’s entirely valid. Sorry Neo.
Example, when you’re on the brink of falling asleep and you have a dream that you tripped while walking down a road, suddenly you find your body in real life jerks in reaction to you falling in your dream. Here your mind actually thought you were falling even though you were just lying in bed the whole time. In this sense, then yes, what you imagine translates into completely real physiological reactions. But once again, people like to blow this way out of proportion and claim that it applies to anything you imagine.
If that were true, then imagining yourself getting shot in the head in every detail should lead to your immediate death, as your mind believes it’s been destroyed. Ok that’s a bit extreme. How about visualizing getting punched in the eye? Do it in every detail, then go look in the mirror, any bruises?
As you can see, there is a limit as to how much the mind can trick the body.
Personal Experience
As I always advocate hearing all sides of the story before making a decision, I actually have tried visualizing goals vs process.
In fact for most of my life I focused on visualizing goals, as I was introduced to the Law Of Attraction at a younger age, so I soaked up its message and believed it wholeheartedly.
The result was delusional positivity and blind “happiness” if you can even call it that.
And when you’re a victim of outrageous levels of confirmation bias, NOTHING CAN HURT YOU!!!! You’re invincible. Until something bursts your bubble, then you realize how much of an ass you’ve been narcissistically believing that your positive mindset is better than everyone else’s.
For example, I used to visualize the goal of being an entrepreneur/writer and travel the world and live in a cliffside mansion with an infinity pool, nice cars, and have a bomb ass wife and more money than I know what to do with.
All those mornings, waking up and visualizing just like the LOA said to do.
Didn’t actually do shit for me. All the work I’ve actually put into my goals, have been when I’ve screwed around doing meaningless things for long enough that I felt so bad about being unproductive that I forced myself to do work. And then I visualize and visualize and visualize, and my mind thinks I actually have everything I want already, and I become content and lazy again. Then I proceed to waste weeks on end doing nothing useful.
“The Secret” used its questionable pseudo-science (seriously that book is full of untested science and grossly out of context quotes from famous people) to convince readers to imagine success, and your end goal, and not to worry about the process at all. LOA claims that the process will naturally come to you, which sometimes it does. But because you’re so focused on your fantasy image of your future, even when you know the process, you’ll be highly unlikely to put any action towards it.
Having the map is one thing, actually going out there and digging in the dirt is another...
I had outlines and plans on exactly what I needed to do to get to where I wanted to be. They sat unused for the most part. I kept going back and revising them, and changing them. But I never did much implementation, because every time I visualized my goals as having them already, I got lazier.
The whole idea of how your mind has trouble differentiating between reality and imagination backfires here; if you imagine and truly believe yourself to have everything you’ve ever wanted, then you’re NOT going to have the drive to work towards that, simply because your mind is already pumping all those “chill dude, you’ve reached the top already” hormones through your body.
The effect visualization has on your drive to do things has actually been scientifically documented. An experiment regarding drinking water and visualization is detailed in this post:
After a few years of getting naught but a laughable amount of work done, I decided something had to change. I had to stop saying “I’ll work on it next month” only to never get it done.
I began reviewing my daily routine to see what I could tweak to make myself more productive. Then I narrowed down the source of my laziness to the feeling that I got after my visualization session in the morning. I just always felt like I could go do whatever I wanted instead of working, because, well that’s “The Secret” for you.
I did some research on the LOA, and realized how skewed all the “evidence” presented in the LOA community was. It was just confirmation bias, jacked up with the group bias, multiplied by the sunk cost fallacy of people who spent so much time following the LOA that they refuse to see the overwhelming statistical evidence against it.
Basically summed up in the video above. I couldn’t believe that I fell into that cultish belief that ran on “feelings” rather than fact.
Feeling somewhat stupid for having been such an advocator of the LOA for such a long time, I shifted to visualizing the process instead of the goals after readinghttp://expertenough.com/1898/visualization-works
Now this actually made sense. Going back to the section of this post about neural pathways, visualizing the process makes so much more sense in every way.
I replaced my cliffside mansion visualization with a detailed mental play through of how I wanted to go about my day. The work I was going to do, the food I was going to eat, my workout, my social interactions, etc. Then presto, I started to get shit done!
There were obviously some unforeseen things, as I’m not a psychic fortune teller, so while not everything goes according to my process visualizations, that’s beside the point! Envisioning the process is not to predict the future, rather, it is to get a general template of your day, and to see yourself in action.
Seeing yourself in action, unlike seeing yourself bathing in glory, actually stimulates you to want to get things done. When I finish my morning visualizations these days, I’m itching to get things done. I literally cannot wait to hop on my tasks and do things I used to dread.
I think this is because I’m competing against my imagined self in reality. Kind of like those racing games where you can race against your “ghost” from a previous match. The process imagery is race 1. Reality is race 2. It’s natural motivation to want to beat your ghost racer.
Can you beat your ghost? Only one way to find out!
Sometimes I beat my mental self and finish everything early, sometimes I take longer and I lose, but at the end of the day I’m still getting a lot more work done than I was when I was visualizing the end goal.
What should you do?
Stop shooting yourself in the foot with concrete goals. Have a general direction you want to go, then focus on HOW you'll actually get there. Life is in the journey, not the end. Because the end is just a tombstone.
Instructions
Here’s how I do my process imagery.
Firstly before getting into your visualization, you need to get yourself oriented:
Have a flexible/clear goal in mind. This is just to guide the process creation. My example would be financial freedom.
Break down the milestones you need to get there. To reach my goal, either I need to save large sums of money, or work on a stream of passive income. I’m currently doing both of those.
Chunk it down to sizable steps. Open a new savings account, activate auto transfers of specified sums of money from your checking account to your saving account every month, write an article, go treasure hunting for profitable products to arbitrage, finish homework for college so I can graduate and get my overpriced piece of paper saying I’m officially an intelligent human being.
Once you have the smaller steps defined, you can start plugging them into your visualizations.
Sit in a quiet place, close your eyes, and see yourself in first person, getting up in your mind, and carrying out your day while working on those important tasks. Engage your sense, feel the touch of the keyboard as you type away. Hear the click of the mouse you use to navigate your computer. Smell the fart you couldn’t hold in because you were too excited about getting your work done. Ok maybe leave that last one out.
Point is, visualize with as much detail as possible. In your mind you can speed up time as well, so you’re not sitting there with your eyes closed visualizing yourself writing an ENTIRE article.
Jump in and jump out kind of like how movies transition between scenes. Basically imagine a montage of your day.
Well, have at it then!
Now that you’ve read this, what’s your next move?
Hopefully you try it out, see if it makes a positive impact on your life. I’m curious to know, so definitely drop me a message and share this with someone who’s struggling with productivity if it helped you at all.
Till next time!
-Zacke
P.S., if you got this far in the post, I congratulate you, not everyone who attempts to read a 3,000+ word article makes it to the end.. Sadly many perish along the way. Whisked away by cat videos and the likes.
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