Mental rehearsal – what is it and why should we use it for peak performance?
The power of the mind, and mental rehearsal, is well researched and documented, particularly in the sports arena. Many elite athletes mentally rehearse everything they do before a competition – a diver will rehearse the perfect dive and perfect entry into the swimming pool, a hockey player will rehearse scoring the perfect goal and a rugby player will rehearse scoring a try or kicking the ball over the post.
Each athlete will perform the perfect action repeatedly in their mind, each time rehearsing that action perfectly. What the athletes are doing is strengthening the neural pathways needed to reinforce those skills to help them become more automatic (the ball automatically goes over the post each time it is kicked).
Unfortunately, most of us have learnt to use mental rehearsal to practice the exact behaviours that we would rather avoid. Let’s imagine you are asked at the last minute to do a presentation in front of 30 people. You have 2 days to prepare. You vividly imagine all the things that can go wrong – you haven’t had enough time to prepare, so someone may ask you a question and you don’t know the answer; you may stumble over your words; look flustered; trip over on the way to the stand; drop your notes and so on… so for 2 days you are creating this vivid experience of messing up.
When you get to the meeting, you are on high alert for something to go wrong… you’ve spent two days “installing” a programme of various things going wrong and the minute one thing goes wrong (perhaps you stumble over some words), your mind takes over and it slowly descends into a situation where you make mistake after mistake after mistake.
You’ve focused so hard on everything going wrong, and mentally rehearsed this exact situation that it plays out so easily in reality.
Some people may call this “law of attraction”, others may call it a “self-fulfilling prophesy” … what you are in fact doing is strengthening all the neural pathways in your brain to programme “I suck at presenting”. In simple terms: your unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and your imagination, so if you’ve spent 2 days imagining everything that could go wrong, you’ve effectively been using mental rehearsal to programme your unconscious to fail.
To make matters worse, you now have a real-life example of failure which further reinforces your “I suck at presentations” mentality.
So how can we use mental rehearsal for a positive outcome instead?
Mental rehearsal works on two levels:
It strengthens specific behaviours (e.g. the athlete mentally rehearsing a specific skill)
It helps us design and reinforce our sense of identity - you may imagine yourself as talented, hard working and someone who gives great presentations… Or someone with low self-esteem, no self-discipline and gives terrible presentations...
See yourself as the person you want to be and mentally rehearse this and eventually it becomes your reality. Sound a bit kooky? Let’s take the presentation example…
Let’s imagine that instead of fearing the worst for 2 days, you take that knot of anxiety and you think – right, I need to get preparing. You use some calming techniques to keep calm, you say to yourself “I can do this, I’m well prepared”. You practice your presentation over and over again; you imagine yourself – mentally rehearse – stepping up to the podium, confidently taking your place, looking out over the audience, speaking in a clear voice, saying “welcome everyone”… and so on! You walk through that sequence over and over again, you practice the talk and you practice fielding questions. You also practice what you’d say if you don’t know the answer (after all, you’ve only had two days to prepare).
All these activities strengthen the neural pathway that says – yes, you can do this, you are confident, prepared and give a great presentation. You even mentally rehearse thanking everyone for their kind comments at the end.
Then, when the time comes for the actual presentation, your automatic processes kick in; though you feel nervous, you know how to breathe deeply, stay calm and unflustered.
Incorporate this kind of mental rehearsal into everything you do and over time you will create the reality you really want.