What is visualisation?
For the uninitiated, put simply, visualisation is a technique whereby you create an experience that you want to have in your mind.
In some cases this experience is something you have already done, so visualisation can be seen as "mental rehearsal". For this, there is a lot of evidence that rehearsing an experience in your mind, for example successfully shooting a basketball hoop, can significantly improve your performance in that experience in reality.
In other cases, the visualisation may be of something that you have not yet experienced but want to experience in the future. This is actually something that most people do without even realising it, to some degree. For example, an artist will have some idea in their mind of what they are going to create; no matter what you do, you will have some kind of vision of what success looks like before you do it.
Visualisation in everyday life
Another example that you may be more familiar with could be driving into town: you know that you are going to take the car and that you will end up in town. You probably have some kind of idea of the route you will take, where you will park, and so on. This idea of the route and end destination may appear to you as images - even if just momentarily and without you really thinking about it, because it is so natural to do. Visualisation takes this a step further and is the conscious act of thinking through what you are going to do. Some people refer to it as a mental movie that you play to yourself.
There are various theories about the impact of visualisation, ranging from the idea that visualisation is just a way of planning and preparing but not much more, to the more extreme beliefs such as those expressed in films like "The Secret" and in books on the use of the subconscious, which suggest that just by thinking something we can manifest them in reality, and by visualising and end result your subconscious, or even the universe itself, will bend to make it happen.
The new term: Envisualise!
My wife has been talking about what we are going to do to the rooms in our new home and something she always does is to build a vision of what the new room will look like: colours, furniture, patterns and so on. It's the way she's always approached this kind of thing and has never read anything on visualisation or any similar techniques (although she may have heard a term or two like this from me).
She often talks about how she envisages the room and what her vision looks like. Recently, she said to me that it was how she had "envisualised" it. It made us both laugh, but actually I think it's a great term. It's a cross between envisage and visualise: it's the union and evolution of the two techniques.
Brilliant.
I hope you enjoy this new word and start using it to describe your envisualisations from now on!
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