Beyond the Power of Your Subconscious Mind (11 page)

As we learned in the previous chapter, “Affirmations and Affirmation Techniques,” you:

1. Say the affirmation to yourself in the first-person present tense as though you had already achieved the goal. Examples:

“I look good and feel good at
(goal)
pounds.”

“I like
(person)
unconditionally and enjoy a very good relationship with him/her.”

2. Create a visual picture seeing yourself having achieved that goal.

3. Feel the emotion of how good you feel having accomplished this.

Highly effective people have a
very
clear picture of what they want and where they are going. Their pictures are
laser
sharp. If it’s a better home, they have a clear picture of what that home looks like: The number of bedrooms, one story or two, pool, choice of neighborhoods, price range, etc., etc. Those who often fall short of their goals lack the intensity of a clearly defined picture of what the accomplishment of that goal may look like. The affirmation, “I want a better home” unsupported by the clarity of what that home looks like dissipates the energy required to bring the goal to fruition.

As a small boy, I use to take a magnifying glass on a hot summer day and hold it steady over a piece of paper that would suddenly erupt in flames. What is interesting is that if I held the magnifying glass up to the sun and just passed it aimlessly over my arm (wandering), I wouldn’t feel a thing, not even a small amount of heat. But, if I focused it on, say, a freckle on my arm, within a matter of seconds I would quickly move the magnifying glass or suffer a severe burn. Why?

Think about this. The source of the energy, the sun, is constant. But the magnifying glass when properly focused, harnesses that energy and
magnifies
its power manyfold. The same thing happens when we are
crystal
clear
on what we want and continue to relentlessly hold that thought (picture) and the emotional intensity associated with that picture. We then both harness and magnify the power of the subconscious to manifest this picture and bring it into reality in our lives. In Chapter 13, “The Supraconscious and Creative Problem Solving,” we will learn the
basic operating principle
that states, “Any thought held on a continuous basis in the conscious mind
must
be brought into reality by the supraconscious mind (positive or negative).”

As we proceed through this chapter, we will provide
specific
examples of how this happens.

The important thing to remember here is that what records in our subconscious mind is not the words that we impart, but rather the pictures (images) the words create
and
the emotions associated with those images. This has now been proven scientifically by Montreal neurologist Dr. Wilder Penfield. Dr. Penfield would take a person and put him under a local an
a
esthetic. The person is awake. Dr. Penfield then removes a portion of the skull over the area of the brain that stores memory. He probes into the brain and the subject recites an earlier experience in their life as though it is actually happening
NOW
! If it is a happy event, the subject is smiling and laughing. If it is a sad event, the subject is despondent and crying. If Dr. Penfield removes the probe and inserts it in exactly the same place, the subject will express the same subjective experience. It is as though someone punched the rewind button on a recorder.

As we have learned in Chapter 7, everything we have experienced in life and the
images
and
emotions
associated with those experiences are all stored in the subconscious area of our mind and effect our current behavior.

The following is further scientific evidence of how visualization can effect performance.

Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone is Professor of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School.

Referring again to Dr. Doidge’s book,
The Brain That Changes Itself,
Dr. Doidge writes how Dr. Pascual-Leone has transcended the technology developed by Penfield through the process of transcranial magnetic stimulations, or TMS. As Dr. Doidge writes,

Wilder Penfield had to open the skull surgically and insert his electric probe into the brain to stimulate the motor or sensory cortex. When Pascual-Leone turns on the machine (TMS) and makes my finger move, I experience
exactly
what Penfield’s patients did when he cut open their skull and prodded them with large electrodes.

Dr. Pascual-Leone had great success in accelerating the learning of Braille by blind people using his TMS techniques.

Dr. Doidge continues to discuss Pascual-Leone’s success in proving the power and relationship of directed visualization and performance:

His next venture would break ground in a new way altogether, by showing that our thoughts can change the material structure of our brains.

He would study the way thoughts change the brain by using TMS to observe changes in the finger maps of people learning to play the piano. One of Pascual-Leone’s heroes, the great Spanish neuro-anatomist and Nobel Laureate, Santiago Ranon y Cajal, who spent his later life looking in vain for brain plasticity, proposed in 1894 that the organ of thoughts is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercises. In 1904 he argued that thoughts, repeated in “mental practice,” must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones. He also had the intuition that this process would be particularly pronounced in neurons that control the fingers in pianists, who do so much mental practice.

Ranon y Cajal, using his imagination, had painted a picture of a plastic brain but lacked the tools to prove it. Pascual-Leone now thought he had a tool in TMS to test whether mental practice and imagination in fact lead to physical changes.

The details of the imagining experiment were simple and picked up Cajal’s idea to use the piano. Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had
never
studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played. Then members of one group, the “mental practice” group, sat in
front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and
imagined
both playing the sequence and hearing it played. A second “physical practice” group actually played the music two hours a day for five days. Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward. Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.

Pasqual-Leone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes. Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece. By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imaging players were as accurate as the actual players were on their third day.

The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however, substantially was not as great as in those who did physical practice. But, when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group’s performance at five days. Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.”

Dr. Doidge continues,

One of the most advanced forms of mental practice is “mental chess,” played without a board or pieces. The players imagine the board and the play, keeping track of the positions. Anatoly Sharansky, the Soviet human rights activist, used mental chess to survive in prison. Sharansky, a Jewish computer specialist falsely accused of spying for the United States in 1977, spent nine years in prison, four hundred days of that time in solitary confinement in freezing, darkened, five-by-six-foot punishment cells. Political prisoners in isolation often fall apart mentally because the use-it-or-lose-it brain needs external stimulation to maintain its maps. During this extended period of sensory deprivation, Sharansky played mental chess for months on end, which probably helped him keep his brain from degrading. He played both white and black, holding the game in his head, from opposite perspectives— an extraordinary challenge to the brain. Sharansky once told me, half joking, that he kept at chess thinking he might as well use the opportunity to become the world champion. After he was released, with the help of Western pressure, he went to Israel and became a Cabinet minister. When the World Champion, Garry Kasparov, played against the prime minister and leader of the Cabinet, he beat all of them except Sharansky.

. . . One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they seem. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter “A,” the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subject were actually looking at the letter “A.” Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.

Thank you, Dr. Doidge.

Now let me share with you an actual life experience that further documents the power of directed visualization.

In 1975, while flying home to Portland, Oregon, from Los Angeles, I read
The Inner Game of Tennis
by W. Timothy Gallwey. I was so impressed with Tim’s writing that I tracked him down and invited him to come to Portland to talk with our company’s management team as well as the Oregon chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization.

As a result of that encounter, Tim and I developed a friendship and association, and to this day I consider him one of the greatest mentors/teachers in my life. He really taught me the inner game of performance in any area of my life for which he simply used tennis as a metaphor for such teachings and insights.

In 1976 Tim invited my wife, Jeri, and me to join him and a group at Copper Mountain, Colorado. With co-author Bob Kriegel, the Copper Mountain ski experience was to become the basis for Tim’s next book,
Inner Skiing.

My wife and I have both been skiing since early childhood. I was on our high school ski team and raced competitively in pro-amateur events until the age of 50. Even as I write these words, my wife and I are enjoying the month skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. My point being that I am not a stranger to skiing or conventional ski instruction.

Approximately 30 of us gathered together at Copper Mountain to experience a week of “inner skiing.” As those of you who are skiers know, conventional ski instruction is very linear where the instructor observes you for a couple of ski turns and then says, “bend zee knees,” or “put more weight on the downhill ski,” etc., etc. The whole process is very mechanical.

None of this occurred at Copper Mountain, and yet our skiing proficiency increased dramatically. We began each day by grouping together after breakfast in one of the hotel’s ballrooms where we were staying. We were in our ski attire and were invited to lie down on the carpet of the ballroom. We experienced a group deep relaxation exercise and then with our eyes closed we were asked to visualize ourselves skiing. We were given several different visual scenarios such as different terrains, moguls, smooth slopes, steep slopes and gentle slopes. In each scenario we were instructed to visualize ourselves skiing in that situation. We did this exercise for 30–45 minutes. We then adjourned and gathered with our respective groups, put on our skis and hit the slopes.

Once on the mountain, our
instructor
(really more a facilitator) would tell us he was going to go down the mountain making 10–15 turns, and then we were to follow and ski to him, one at a time. As each of us arrived, he only asked one question; “How was that compared to your visualization this morning?” The skier would respond, “I think I was bent over too far at the waist,” or, “I was using too much upper body movement,” etc. The instructor would simply say, “Good, just become more aware of your picture this morning.”

There was no agreeing or disagreeing with our own assessment. There was no correctional instruction—simply, “be aware of your mental picture this morning.”

Note: Very Important:

When you internally visualize yourself performing, you don’t see yourself making mistakes. In skiing you don’t visualize yourself falling, you see yourself skiing flawlessly. If you are visualizing your golf swing, you don’t see yourself hitting the ball out of bounds, you see yourself hitting the ball down the center of the fairway or hitting the ball on the green next to the pin. If you are visualizing yourself playing the piano, you don’t see yourself hitting the wrong keys. You see yourself playing the piece perfectly.

This is a very important fact associated with visualizing performance, as it becomes the subconscious recorded picture and instruction to your subconscious of how you are to perform.

As we skied our next 10–15 turns, once again the instructor would ask, “How was that?” We might answer by saying, “I wasn’t as bent over at the waist and my upper body movement was more centered.” The instructor wouldn’t say, “good” or” bad,” he would simply say, “Great, just continue to focus on your image during our visualization this morning.”

Throughout the day and the week our performance continued to improve with
no
instruction. We were our own “instructors.”

One very impressive exercise occurred one day when we stood at the top of a Double Diamond run. These are the most difficult and challenging of all the ski runs on the mountain. Our
instructor
completely unbuckled his boots and then asked each of us to do the same. He said, “When I get to the bottom, each of you ski down to me one at a time.” He then took off skiing the terrain masterfully and when he got to the bottom of the hill, he came to a sudden stop, planted his poles in the snow, and leapt completely out of his boots landing softly with his stocking feet in the snow. We were all flabbergasted.