This post is part of a series about raising your level of awareness to facilitate long-term behavior change. See the previous post for an introduction to why awareness helps behavior change, and why mental rehearsal works.
First let’s talk about what mental rehearsal aka visualization looks like in practice, being used in advance of the behavior you want to change. The example behavior change I’ll use comes up often with my clients – getting better at advocating for yourself / your team. This is an essential skill for things like negotiating a higher salary or getting a promotion.
Let’s say this is a skill you want to develop – perhaps you’re sick of seeing your peers get promotions when you’ve leveled out, or your team isn’t getting the resources they need and you want to help make that happen. Whatever the reason, first we want to get clear on at least one specific behavior change you want to practice. For example, asking your boss for a raise instead of just hoping they’ll give it to you.
Now, before the opportunity to practice in real-time arises, we want to imagine it in our heads. And since imagining something happening is more or less the same as it actually happening (as far as our neurological pathways are concerned), we can also practice being aware just by imagining. Again, more on this in my previous post.
So let’s say we’ve got 5 minutes before the meeting with our boss to do some mental rehearsal. First you want to get very clear on the behavior you want to try – what do you want to say? How do you want to say it? We can remind ourselves – in the past, I’ve had a tendency to chicken out. Imagine yourself on the verge of chickening out. Then imagine yourself catching the old behavior (chickening out) and replacing it with the new behavior (asking for a raise). The more real you make it in your mind, the better. Imagine…
I’m sitting in the meeting with my boss. God this is so boring, when is he going to stop talking? Maybe I’ll just ask in our next 1:1, this time doesn’t feel right…
Aha! I’m chickening out. I can’t believe I’m doing this again, I’m such a loser…
Aha! I’m judging myself, which is also not helping. Phew. This is so uncomfortable. My neck is tense and my shoulders are all hunched up. I take a deep breathe, exhale, relax. I got this. When am I going to get a chance to bring this up? Fuck it, I’m done waiting for the perfect time, let me just blurt it out.
“Hey boss, I know our annual reviews are coming up. I’d like to talk about a more significant bump than usual to my salary…”
You could go on with this visualization for a long time. I would advise against trying to imagine every possible scenario – that would be an endless rabbit hole. Just imagine what you think is most likely to happen leading up to your target behavior. It’s not about trying to mentally prepare for every possibility. Rather, it’s about practicing breaking through whatever has held you back in the past. In the above example, I was calling it ‘chickening out.’ But a more scientific way to put it would be cognitive fusion – letting your thoughts get in the way of doing what you know to be important (“the time just doesn’t feel right, [therefor I won’t do the thing]”).
Be realistic – if this is a behavior you need to work on, that’s because there’s a part of you that resists the change. So imagine the resistance (often in the form of self-criticism and excuses), and imagine yourself breaking through the resistance, not allowing it to stop you. What would that look like? What would that feel like? Imagine as vivdly as possible.
The more vivid the experience in your mind, the more well-paved the neural pathways you’re building in your brain. And the more well-paved those pathways are, the easier it is for us to repeat that behavior in the future. This is due to neuroplasticity – the ability of our brain to change through growth and reorganization.
The opportunities for practicing ‘in advance’ are endless. In our example, you could practice right before your meetings. Or you could practice at some sort of regular interval – say, every day for 5 minutes before lunch. This is especially useful for bigger picture skills like self-advocacy, not just the specific act of asking for a raise.
You can also incorporate other techniques, such as journaling. I teach one specific technique that I like in this YouTube video (it’s an 80 minute long workshop). Find a way that works for you, and trust in your ability to do this.
Note – this type of visualization is not about anything mystical like ‘putting out energy into the universe’ that will somehow magically get your boss to say yes when you ask them for a raise. It’s about skill building. The better you are at asking for what you want, the more likely you are to get it. There are no promises that you will get it.
So the goal in my self-advocacy example is not to get what you ask for – it’s to get better at making the ask. The problem with being attached to an outcome like getting a raise is that there’s so much outside of your control (the economy, the company’s performance, what your boss had for lunch, etc.) that you would be setting yourself up for disappointment. It’s far more effective to focus on living your values and building skills that are important to you.
And to generalize this last point – behavior change will be more sustainable and meaningful if the focus is on becoming the person you want to be, as opposed to achieving a particular outcome.
In summary, to practice mental rehearsal in advance of a behavior you want to change, first get clear on what you want to do. Then imagine yourself in the scenario, and imagine what is most likely to stop you from doing that thing. Then imagine yourself doing the thing in spite of it. The more real the scenario feels in your head, the more likely you are to build up some awareness that you can leverage to make the change more smooth and easy.