Using visualization to advance your music, theatre, or dance career: 6 tips and no hype
There’s a lot of controversy these days around the concept of vision boards and visualization exercises as tools for accomplishing your goals.
In attempts to measure the efficacy of these techniques, researchers have studied populations ranging from musicians, athletes, students, people with crushes, people who want a good job, and people who want to lose weight. Meanwhile, coaches, entrepreneurs, psychologists, and high profile personalities either swear by the use of vision boards (and similar techniques), while others claim they do harm when it comes to getting what you want.
People on either side of the debate use science, as well as a plethora of anecdotes, to back their arguments.
In this article, I summarize the arguments both for and against vision boards. I also make a case that - in an attempt to get your attention - both sides ignore the points on which they agree, misrepresent the science, and in many cases, attempt to answer the wrong questions altogether.
At the end, I offer up six practical tips you can start using today to make sense out of all the noise and begin exercising your own personal fulfillment.
No hype, and no magazine clipping necessary (unless you like that sort of thing).
ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF GOAL VISUALIZATION
The Secret is a popular book (endorsed by Oprah!) that brought the concept of the Law of Attraction into the public eye. The basic idea is that the Universe always gives us what we ask for - if you whole-heartedly visualize accomplishing or receiving something, the Universe conspires on your behalf to bring it to you (on the flip side, if you think about negative things, that’s what you get). This principle is founded in the scientific finding that, at the quantum level, energy and matter are more or less indistinguishable from one another. In this view, your energy (thoughts) can translate into something material (a Lamborghini).
THIS ARTICLE cites neuroscience to support the use of a vision board. It makes the case that images (as opposed to words) act as value-markers, and if you spend enough time with the images, your thought patterns will orient to focus on them and exclude information unrelated to them. The positive feelings you get from imagining the potential reality presented by your vision board may also help to reduce fear or anxiety associated with the actions needed to achieve a given goal.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST VISION GOAL VISUALIZATION
The majority of the arguments against the use of vision boards (and similar tools) are centered on evidence that visualizing or fantasizing about a positive outcome produces a false sense of accomplishment that reduces your motivation to actually take the action needed to achieve that outcome. Here’s a LINK to one of many articles that summarizes research studies, each having found that imagining positive outcomes trended towards a decrease in actual positive outcomes.
THE TROUBLE WITH BOTH OF THESE PERSPECTIVES
Each of these positions has issues, either in their presentation of their argument or the assumptions that underlie it.
One of the key points made by vision board nay-sayers is that action is almost always required to make a vision a reality, and they frame the Law of Attraction as a purely passive practice.
I agree that Law of Attraction advocates often under-emphasize the element of action, undermining the case for visualization methods. But I believe there’s more common ground here than those wishing to make a splashy claim are willing to acknowledge.
Here’s a short story to illustrate:
There’s a piece of performance art - a choral ballet of sorts - that I’ve wanted to produce ever since I became a choir director out of college. The piece is unpublished, and producing it would be a significant undertaking. After getting a few years of teaching under my belt, I tried to reach out to the composer, someone well-known who probably gets a lot of email. I got no response.
It wasn’t until seven or eight years later - when I was working a different job in a different city - that I mentioned this desire of mine to a new acquaintance with whom I was having an introductory meeting over appetizers at a restaurant. He told me he knew the composer, and that she would be in town the following weekend. He could introduce me.
I was scheduled to perform in a different city that weekend, but if I changed some of my plans, I could still perform and then rush back to be at the event she was leading. Long story short, I ended up driving her to her hotel after the event, allowing me to pitch her my idea.
The choirs I work with now will be performing the piece as soon as the pandemic has subsided enough for us to do so, and it actually promises to be a transformational project for that organization.
~ ~ ~
I don’t think that vision boards and other such tools allow us to assume a totally passive state of receptivity. In this example, I had been visualizing the production of this work for years, and I was finally presented with an opportunity to make it happen. The timing was finally right. But I still had to make it happen.
(In this case, that meant changing my plans, driving four hours home in a rainstorm, and mustering the courage to have a quasi-celebrity climb into my car.)
Herein lies the power of the vision. Because I had put energy into the idea for so many years, it happened to come out of my mouth when I was interacting with someone who could help make it happen. I saw the opportunity, I was energized by it, and instead of saying “Oh, that’s a long shot”, I decided to crawl inside that sliver of possibility and do what I could to expand it.
I’m a believer in science, but this is something I don’t think you can measure.
This is why I’d assert that a number of the studies cited in arguments against vision boards aren’t really designed to speak to the true power of visualization. For example, one study asked a group of students to visualize getting an A on a big test while another group was asked to visualize themselves studying. Of course, the group who visualized studying got the better overall grade.
Similar studies were conducted with athletes. Many athletes use visualization in their training. High jumpers visualize getting over the bar. Rock climbers visualize their path up a challenging wall. They do this to put the feeling into their body just as much as in their mind. However, the studies in question asked tennis players to visualize winning - this is measuring something very different.
Grades and trophies are, respectively, meant to be markers of learning and the accomplishment of great physical feats. They are symbols, and if you take away the learning or the accomplishment, the symbols become pretty flimsy.
Here’s another way to look at it: people focused on getting an A on a test are probably not very focused on learning; on the other hand, people who are focused on learning will probably do pretty well on a test.
This might be eye opening, but it shouldn’t be surprising. If anything, these studies serve to shine some light on the woes of our incentive systems, but I think more evidence is needed if we are going to debunk the efficacy of vision boards.
That said, for those using a vision board as an attempt to receive empty symbols of status or success, I’d say that the critics are right - it’s not going to work.
And as for quantum science, I’ll be candid and say that I don’t know enough about it to detail the ways in which it is and isn't accurately represented. But I do know there is a much deeper connection between our physical and spiritual selves than a modernist worldview would like to admit. I also know there are a bunch of people on the internet misquoting Einstein in order to promote the Law of Attraction - and they should cut it out.
SIX TIPS FOR MAKING VISUALIZATION WORK FOR YOU
If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you care more about your personal development than you do trophies, and you’re curious about how visualization strategies could work in your favor.
Here are six tips to using visualization to advance the goals you have for your career and your life.
Ask yourself WHY you want what you want. Sometimes - because of societal norms, expectations of others, and expensive marketing campaigns - we want things that are out of alignment with our core values. We don’t need a research study to know that the pursuit of status and possessions for their own sake is unlikely to lead to fulfillment. And if there is a Universe ‘acting’ on our behalf, perhaps it’s helping us learn that lesson, rather than just giving us what we want.Check in with your desires. Are you wanting for empty symbols, or true self-fulfillment that aligns with your core values?
Consider how you want to feel about yourself. After sharing with my own coach that I have a history of struggling to know what I want, he suggested I create a list of how I want to feel. Nothing that is dependent on other people. No big “I’ve arrived” type goals. In the morning, I have a look at this list and take stock of how I actually feel. I choose one or two areas in which I feel I could use some work, and then I meditate on ways I can act on those states of being throughout the day.
Visualize actions you can take, and give attention to the desires that may require some serendipity. As I discussed above in my critique of the pro- and anti-vision board arguments, our goals, dreams, and desires almost always require some action on our part if they are to become a reality. Picturing yourself taking these actions puts you in the driver seat. This is what makes visualization different from fantasy. The choral project I described above certainly required some serendipity. But all those years thinking about weren’t spent on imagining me winning some award for the performance, or the composer just showing up on my doorstep to offer me the unpublished score. I thought about the rehearsals, the planning, the partnership I’d establish with the dancers, the marketing - every aspect I would undertake if I was actually working on it.So don’t just picture yourself winning the audition or the big job offer. Think about the practice and preparation, what your performance will sound and look like, and how you will present yourself in a winning way. This is, perhaps, what we have to learn from the research studies mentioned above.But don’t ignore the hunches that really energize you, even if it seems like the planets would have to align for them to happen. When the timing is right, they just might.
Work in the short-term, and invest in your big dreams. It is easy to defer action on your “someday”-type dreams. If you ask yourself, instead, “What is my deepest desire for the coming day, or week or month?”, it is far easier to develop a plan and visualize the actions you can take to make it happen (I learned this principle from researcher, Gabriele Oettinger, when she appeared as a guest on THIS EPISODE of NPR’s Hidden Brain).I believe that when you do this, you’ll actually be investing in your big, long-term dreams as well. Consequently, you will feel a great sense of unity and integration in your life and work, and those big dreams won’t feel so far away.
Look for small signs of progress and hints of opportunity. On the flip side of becoming too passive, if you tend to be a perfectionist or experience anxiety when staring down a big goal, it can be important to celebrate small accomplishments. It can be easy to overlook the work you did on polishing a monologue while you’re feeling weighed down by the 20 pages of lines you have yet to memorize. But giving attention to your successes - and taking a moment to rest in them - is likely to give you more energy to approach those 20 pages tomorrow.Similarly, it can be easy to miss the small opportunities that present themselves when the Universe is letting you know that one of your aspirations has ripened. But if you allow yourself the time to dream every so often, you are more likely to notice when your spidey-sense is trying to tell you, “Now is the time to jump!”.
Love what already is. Learning to embrace paradox was a life-changing lesson for me. And this topic brings us to what I see as the king of all paradoxes:Life is perfect exactly as it is… AND we can work to make it better.This brings me to one more critique of the arguments against vision boards. These arguments draw the conclusion that, because picturing a positive outcome may relax us, they undermine our best interest. In a society that is obsessed with achievement and status, I would push back and argue that, sometimes, not being so driven to achieve is exactly what we need.My desk is messy. I will clean it someday soon, but probably not today. I could stress about the state of my desk. Or I could say, “My desk is clean enough for today. For today, it is perfect.” And then put ‘Clean My Desk’ on the calendar.
From my experience, loving what is is the only starting point from which we can actually know our deepest desires - those that align with our true calling. And it’s from this place of love and acceptance that our most fulfilling possibilities emerge.