The Baseball Observer - Mental Skills Issue
Mental Imagery - Can You?
The problem a lot of athletes have when they say they can’t do mental imagery is due to the fact they set high expectations as to what they think should be involved. That it has to have a certain level, a certain quality. They put a pass/ fail criteria on it.
Mental imagery doesn’t have to be Ultra High Definition. It’s not a “pass/ fail”. Even though good imagers (as determined by a questionnaire) generally have better results than poor imagers, the poor imagers still have more improvement over ones who don’t do any imaging.
So what if you “aren’t good” at mental imagery?
So what if you “aren’t good” at mental imagery? This section will help you start out.
First, don’t call it “visualization”. It’s really only imagination and we all have an imagination. We’ve all imagined winning the lottery and been briefly swept away in our own thoughts about what we would do with all that money. How it would feel, what it would look like and what we would do. If not the lottery then hitting the game winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning in the seventh game of the World Series. Sweet.
So take a moment and realize you have done mental imagery. Daydreams, night dreams, goal setting, etc. they all consist of images, thoughts, meanings and feelings.
Secondly, mental imagery doesn’t have to be vivid to be effective. I personally have a hard time consciously creating really vivid images. But what I have found for myself, and several others I have worked with, is that even just thinking of what I want to picture has a profound effect.
Over the past 25 years, I have heard this countless times, "I've tried to do mental imagery (or visualization)* and I can't. It's just so hard to do."
While it's true that some people can create really vivid images while others seem to have difficulty with it, the fact is we all can produce mental images. What do you think dreams are?
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