Learn to overcome challenges using these 8 incredibly mental hacks. These mental hacks focus around your senses.
- See it: Spend time before each challenge or task, visualizing yourself completing it. See every aspect of that task, from start to end, as if watching a movie in slow-mo. Involve all of your senses.
- Smell it: Smell your challenge. Suppose your challenge revolves around giving an interview for a job. Then, a night before, smell the chair’s leather at your home, the clothes you will wear, and the tie you will don. Invoke any memory that will make the vision come alive as you smell it.
- Taste it: On a random weekend, taste that one meal you want to eat after reaching your goals.
- Hear it: Go to Youtube and hear the noises of the crowd, the sound of people randomly shouting and cheering, and picture yourself in the middle getting all the attention.
- Feel it: Notice every little aspect. How will accomplishing your goal feel? Feel the drop of sweat, the grip of your office bag, and the pounding of your heart. Experience the intensity of the emotion that comes from reaching your desired goals.
- Review it: Each time you see yourself happily succeeding, you will increase your odds of actually doing that when you are in that situation. Because of the RAS (Reticular Activating System) in the brain, you strengthen this meaningful synaptic connection. Your mind only knows what you repeatedly tell it. If you tell the brain something regularly, it will work to make it happen.
- Detach from it: When the work doesn’t play out as you have envisioned it, you must practice detaching yourself from it and moving on. Once you start internalizing that failure happened to you, then it starts affecting your life. Then it affects your future, and not in the right way. The next day must start fresh. You have to keep your mind from associating itself to that failure. Detach and let it go! Keep your head in the “here and now” perspective only.
- Build it: Achievers always prepare, and they build healthy routines around their plans. Whether in researching, practicing, warming up, or working, most achievers will tell you they have a routine they religiously follow. Start to develop your own routine that allows you to feel comfortable and at the top of your game. Consider adding these visualization techniques to build even more control into your life. When starting to create these visualizations, start with small sessions, maybe one specific play. Find a silent spot where you can be relaxed but alert. You may want to put on headphones and play an incredibly upbeat song (if that doesn’t divert you) and then start creating the video in your brain of the task going perfectly. Keep replaying it in your head, adding more and more conscious details until it is so vivid you can’t imagine that task or the work going any other way than how you just pictured it.
