Movie In Your Mind

It took me two days to blow through John Milton Fogg’s The Greatest Networker in the World recently and it was an absolutely fantastic read. It is easily one of my top ten favorite self-help books of all time and I went out and purchased a copy for me to mark up with my trusty highlighter even before the copy I had read came due at the library.

I could easily spend a few articles on this one alone and I probably will over the course of this year, however, I tend to write what’s on my mind at a given moment. And what’s on my mind at this moment is a particular technique from this book that I am finding most helpful and may be the most valuable technique that I have ever come across.

It is called the Movie In Your Mind and it is a very powerful form of mental imagery. Essentially, you allow yourself to daydream about what you would like the ultimate movie about your dream life to me. You quite literally watch it play in your mind and you control all the scenes.

Do not let the simplicity of the concept dissuade you from its importance. I actually have a tough time daydreaming about myself. It is more than likely a self esteem issue. I have been an avid daydreamer since I was a young boy and I still am now, which, quite frankly, helps me to be a pretty decent fiction writer.

I just seem to have a much easier time daydreaming about other people and situations. I have never been able to hold an image of myself for very long in my head without quickly changing the mental subject.

Watching my Mind Movie has taken a lot of practice. I think I had kept the movie going only about fifteen seconds the first time I tried it in earnest two days ago but I’ve kept at it and now I am beginning to enjoy it again.

I remember using the technique when I was a youth hockey player. Back then I had heard it called simply Mental Imagery. I had a goaltending coach when I was about ten or eleven years old (I think his name was Gene Stankowski but I may be recalling incorrectly) who sought fit to educate and prepare our minds as well he did our bodies for competition. Now, at ten or eleven most kids don’t care to read a bunch of articles on Mental Imagery printed out by there coach but I held on to them.

I remember the one in particular that quoted a study on three groups of basketball players and their statistics for foul shooting. One study group practiced every day shooting foul shots for a defined period of time. A second group was kind of the control group, they really did no practicing at all. The third group practiced only in the Movie In Their Mind. They imagined making perfect foul shots over and over again in their mind for a defined period of time.

I am sure you know where I am going with this but the three groups were then brought together to see how many foul shots they could make out of a hundred. Group one did very well, group two did poorly and the mental imagery group scored as well as the group that had been physically practicing every day.

So every night before bed, and before every game, I practiced this mental imagery of making perfect saves as a goaltender in hockey. I was an excellent youth hockey player. My career stalled in college for many reasons, but I can’t help but think that had I continued to use mental imagery instead of shelving it as childish before entering college, that I may have continued to have a great career far beyond where I had gone.

Lost athletic dreams are not the point of this blog. Rather, I know this technique of The Movie In Your Mind is very powerful. I had long ago lost my ability to do use my mental muscles for good in my life. I certainly have no trouble imagining the worst-case scenarios in my mind.

That is going to change from now on. I am making a choice to watch the Movie In My Mind every night while drifting off to sleep. I fully expect my real life to start resembling my movie over the course of the next year and beyond.