See it, be it

As a follow-up to talking about the importance and power of focus, here’s a great article by Srinivasan Pillay on why and how visualization works — what happens in the brain, and in our lives, when we visualize.

Visualizing works. And it’s an enormously important skill for managers. It goes hand in hand with focus. As Pillay points out in the article, feeding your brain a “plan in a thousand words” is less successful than giving it a single, specific image. The real work is getting to that single image.

But that’s all it is — work. We can all do it. It’s a process. Most of us start with a jumble of ideas, feelings and thoughts that don’t really draw together into a coherent set of goals — that’s perfectly normal. Like anything else, it gets easier with regular repetition. We can teach ourselves to visualize focused goals, and we can figure out the right steps to take in pursuit of those goals. And along the way, we’re also fighting the paralysis of fear for ourselves and our teams, making our businesses more successful, and making our brains more healthy and our spirits more resilient.

Part of the science behind visualization that Pillay describes (see his second paragraph) is mirror neurons. You’ll find some exercises to help you and your team understand the power of mirror neurons in Session Two of the Humans At Work program. And at the end of Session One, you’ll find some questions you can ask yourself to begin visualizing the best manager you can be. You can make that a long-term visualization — or you can adapt the questions to consider how your “best manager” self would respond to your specific team or company situation right now.

And finally, here’s one of the article’s most important points for me:

Remember, a failure is not a final statement that you will not succeed. It is information that your vision has to be changed, refined or repeated.

In work, as in life, we do not have to be perfect the first time out in order to be successful. We just need to keep working on it.