Visualize to improve skills and stop thinking so much
Stress for Success
April 28, 2009


Let’s move beyond the ubiquitous financial stress and address something truly important: your golf game – or any skill that’s important to you. Here are two ideas to help with anything from improving your tennis game to being more assertive.

First, research shows that rehearsing mentally, like athletes do, can enhance your performance just as well and sometimes better than actually physically practicing.

In a Texas A&M study medical students learning to suture received guided physical practice followed by either:
* 30 more minutes of practice;
* 30 minutes of guided mental imagery;
* Or no more training;
When tested, the first two groups performed better than the third, and just as well as each other.

Mental rehearsal can be better than physical practice because it only “exercises” neural representations of physical skills. So, after a golf lesson if you physically practice ineptly you might hamper relearning the right technique later. Mentally practicing a bungling swing isn’t muscularly detailed enough to hurt your proficiency. (Obviously, visualization is most helpful when you rehearse correctly.)

When rehearsing any behavior change:
* Visualize the changes you want to make in as much detail as possible;
* Instantly re-visualize correcting mistakes;
* With new tasks imagine the detailed moves slowly; speed up as you improve.
* Observe others performing the same moves to activate the same motor programs in your own brain to progress.

Frequent visualization doesn’t ensure you won’t mess up, however. Here’s another idea that researchers recommend to avoid choking.

When you’ve practiced something so well that you don’t need to think about it, your subconscious takes over. Slowing down to focus on automatic responses, though, can interrupt your subconscious and cause you to stumble.

The part of your brain that’s most involved in learning a new skill is the cerebral cortex. As you rehearse a piece of music, a tennis swing or a speech over and over, you gradually transfer control to another area of the brain, the cerebellum, which orchestrates the lightning-fast motor activation needed to perform complex action. (This must explain why a well-rehearsed piece of music plays endlessly in my brain; it’s moving to my cerebellum.)

The cerebral cortex is consciously accessible. The cerebellum isn’t. So if you think slowing down your presentation will help you focus, it may actually do the opposite by tripping up your subconscious.

“It’s actually better just to get on with things if you’re well rehearsed,” says psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. In a 2008 study Beilock divided novice and skilled golfers into two groups. Those in the first group were instructed to take their time while those in the second group were told to swing as quickly as possible. Their results:
* Novice golfers performed less well when swinging faster and better when they took their time.
* Skilled golfers performed better when swinging quickly and less well when taking their time.

So, use repetitive and detailed visualization to speed up your learning curve. Once you’re skilled stop thinking so much and let your cerebellum do its thing.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., of InterAction Associates, is a trainer and a Stress Coach. E-mail her at www.jackieferguson.com for information about her workshops on this and other topics.