See it

For a period of over 10 years, volleyball was THE hobby for me.  I used to play several times a week and also tournaments on the weekend on a pretty regular basis.  Hell I even played some indoor night tournaments that used to get finished up around midnight or later.  I was all about it.  I made websites, videos and wrote about volleyball all the time.

Of course playing a lot of volleyball gave me a lot of physical practice at the skills used in the sport.  Through repetition comes improvement in almost anything in life, right?

My favorite part of volleyball was hitting. Nothing was more satisfying than timing the jump and swing perfectly so you could crush a hit so hard that even if your opponent got a hand on it, it didn’t matter.  I practiced hitting a lot but I also did something that I rarely have done prior or since my glory days of volleyball, visualization.

In my mind I would imagine the entire sequence of a clean approach, jump, and swing.  I would see the ball impact my hand. I would hear the sound. I would feel the satisfaction as the ball hits the ground, untouched, at a high rate of speed.  I did this mind practice most often before a tournament, when outcome mattered most to me.  It felt like it helped me.  The mental repetitions manifested into physical improvement.  I didn’t start doing this visualization because I read it somewhere, it just started happening.

I read somewhere recently that there was a study done where one group of test subjects physically practiced doing something over a period of time.  There was another group that only mentally practiced, visualizing they were doing this same skill.  At the end of the test the skill level difference between the group that practiced physically versus the group that just visualized they were doing the skill was very, very small.

So what is the point of me bringing this up you may ask?  It translates into some of the stuff I have been talking about regarding my continuing efforts to change some of the core thought processes I have been struggling with for a long time.  In a nutshell what I am trying to do is visualize a different, more positive outcome, time and time again until it imprints a lasting change on my default state of mind.  It works, I know it works from that time in my life when I unknowingly engaged my mind to help my physical performance.  I just have to get in those mental reps.  Have a great Friday.