Does Visualising your Goals Work?
I’ve long been a fan of visualising your goals and using this as fuel to make extraordinary things come to life. A friend challenged me on this recently and asked does it really work? The answer is of course packed with nuance and in this article, I’d like to unpack some of the ideas and science that I’ve found in my research and travels.
What is Visualisation
It’s about imagining the future and being super clear on where you want to go, either as a team or individually. My friend Kevin Gaskell, the leader who turned around the fortunes of Porsche talks about the importance of going out into the future and asking what will we see, what will we hear, what will we feel. It’s getting crystal clarity on what the end outcome looks like. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you want to go, how on earth will you get there!
So the first notion of visualisation is to spend time getting so clear as a team of what that future picture looks like.
It’s not just business leaders who recommend this, it’s academics too. Professor Kamal Munir at the University of Cambridge in his work on Digital Disruption recommends a process that has many similarities. To paraphrase his recommendations on how to adapt to a world that is continually being disrupted:
Imagine the world in 5 years. Imagine it without what you do today. What does it look like? Where are the trends pointing? Who are the players? Now imagine where you’d like to be and orient your model to that.
This is serious work. This is not light fluffy psycho babble. It’s taking your best bet on the future and spending time thinking about it and orienting your strategy around it. The more clearly you can see it, the more tangible your plans can be to make it happen.
Focused Relentless Execution
One can imagine a trap that some could fall into is that all it takes is to visualise a better future and then to wait for the magic to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. The period that follows this is of course breaking it down into smaller chunks and the relentless execution of those plans. This is the hard yards. The focused work, the experiments, finding what works and doing more of it and discarding all the failed experiments. This is where you need your planners, your organisers and the doers who make things happen. Dreaming alone will never make a plan come to life.
How Can Visualisation help with Relentless Action
The work of Emily Balcetis, Associate Professor at NYU has much to say on how visualisation can be practically applied. Two things really stand out to me from her book Clearer, Closer Better which I think add real nuance and depth to making visualisation work better.
The first is the switching between a Broad Focus and a Narrow Focus. Using the example of running a marathon, Balcetis talks of starting with a broad focus at the start of a race and then to be able to narrow in as the race progresses to “focus on the shorts of the runner in front of you”. In my own work, I use the lens of Past Present Future and encourage people to have what I call time dexterity - to be able to consciously shift between a future focus, a past focus and a present focus.
Visualisation is about where we focus. Whatever we focus on is what draws our energy and resources. Bringing this focus under conscious control and out of what I believe is so often an unconscious bias is a very powerful tool we can have in our arsenal of weapons to make things happen.
In Clearer Closer Better, Balcetis shares research on athletes who significantly improve their performance by this narrowing of focus at certain times.
The second point that stands out to me in her work is the finding that it is far more helpful to focus not on the outcome of achieving the goal, but on the process of achieving the goal. By visualising the specific actions you will take rather than just taking a gold medal you increase your chances of getting there.
I think this is a very important nuance and one worth paying attention to. My interest in this field began with practicing visualisation for my first circumnavigation in 2000 where we did this as a team. You can see this technique being applied in the superb recent Netflix film, Untold, The Race of The Century about the 1983 America’s Cup Yacht Race.
I found this technique later again in the working world with the work of Professor Maxwell Maltz and his book PsychoCybernetics. I used the ideas in this book to great effect as a I turned my failing business around and created multiple new ventures (some worked very well and some didn’t).
I think the notion of bringing to front of mind the exact actions you will take is far more effective at steering and guiding your activities and believe that Balcetis’ work helps breathe fresh energy and light into this very important area when it comes to achieving audacious goals.
Isn’t Marginal Gains Enough?
The field of marginal gains, of building incremental improvements over time is a widely popular technique for achieving huge goals. It’s an important tool in my kit bag for sure. But I truly believe that it’s not enough and that there are times when we need to stretch ourselves. To stretch our imaginations and to venture into the unknown. When we do this and we stretch what we believe is possible, we create the space for fresh thinking, new ideas, creativity can be unleashed. And it’s in this aspect, that effective visualisation needs to be in the toolkit of every single ambitious leader.
I’ll wrap up with the words of legendary Steve Jobs, a man who saw things no one else saw and executed brilliantly to bring them to life:
I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.”
Steve Jobs
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