Hi friends,
Thank you to everyone who’s joined us since last week’s inaugural issue. Welcome to Ad Astra! It’s so good to have you here.
First: a quick announcement.
I modified the subscription model of Ad Astra a bit (bear with me please as I figure this out!). On February 2, 2020, I’m going to turn this newsletter into a mostly paid subscription: one issue a month will be available to everyone and three issues will be for paid subscribers only.
Ok, now onto today’s topic. We’ll talk about visualization and before you delete this email or skim through it skeptically, hear me out and let me show you why (and how) visualization works.
What is visualization anyway?
It is a process of imagining a future event in such crisp and full detail that you essentially are transported into that future event. It is also sometimes described as visualizing (or manifesting) your desired outcome that has not yet happened.
Visualization goes hand in hand with meditation, but it doesn’t have to. It can stand on its own as a practice you can adopt into your daily life.
Why should you? Several things happen when you visualize something you’d like to achieve or bring into your life:
First, if done consistently, visualization helps you focus on your goal and take small action toward it every day. Small, consistent action every day is what keeps you moving forward toward your goal, so you are making progress every day.
Second, by imagining yourself in this future event, you train your brain to ‘recognize’ the feelings, thoughts, and emotions that arise when you visualize something. You are essentially ‘training’ to become a different version of yourself that achieves the goal you are after. This is especially important if you’re working on something new or going after a crazy, seemingly unreachable goal that your brain has no experience with.
Third, visualization brings positive emotions into the day you do it so you can start your day energized and motivated to keep working on whatever it is that you’re after. This is important if you’re working on something novel or simply working in difficult circumstances.
I found visualization to be an incredibly powerful exercise that I now practice every single morning. My first brush with it occurred sometime after I quit my corporate job. That year, I went on a six month trip around the world. The trip was incredible but when I came back stateside, I was in for a rude awakening. My peers kept on with their corporate jobs, got promoted, and otherwise seemed like they had it all figured out. I, with my dream of becoming a travel photographer and writer, had no idea what my next step should be. I was flailing.
So one night, I sat down and decided to imagine what the next year of my life could look like. I did it not because of some wisdom, but because I simply had no idea what I should do next. So, I gave it some thought and then put to paper “the 10 things that Yulia will have accomplished by the end of next year.”
Looking back, I realize that doing this exercise was a pivotal moment for me. This 10-goal list provided direction and the next steps for me to move forward with. It gave me focus. And it reassured me that my dream is actually possible. A simple act of putting something to paper makes it concrete. And for our brains, it is easier to imagine something concrete than it is to imagine something nebulous.
A simple act of putting something to paper makes it concrete.
(Seven out of ten goals on that list came true. And the ones that didn’t? I rolled them over to the next year and kept working on them consistently).
I am not the only one who uses visualization to their advantage.
Elite athletes go through step by step run-throughs of their performances ahead of the actual competitions. Public speakers and negotiators imagine the situations they are about to walk into as part of their preparation routine. Oprah used it to imagine Barack Obama’s inauguration and top executives use it to imagine — and get to — their success.
Why does it work? When you visualize something that doesn’t exist yet in your current reality, you train your brain in creating new mental patterns.
New mental patterns = new behaviors that help you create a new reality.
Incredibly, studies support this. In one study, people who imagined exercising daily gained new muscle (!). How? The process of visualization activates the same mental processes in the brain that control the actual, real-life movement of the muscle. Think of it as tricking your brain into doing something without you doing it in the physical space.
(Side note: if you’d like to dig deeper on this subject, check out “Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One” by Joe Dispenza. It’s a fascinating read that explains visualization through the lens of quantum physics, a world we’re just now beginning to understand.)
When you visualize, you have to be specific about the ‘what’, not the ‘how’. For example, instead of imagining how you’re going to win a golf championship, focus on the scene where the championship committee awards you the trophy. Your brain, operating in current reality, may not yet know how to get to where you want to be, but once you give it a goal — the ‘what’ — it will start working on the ‘how’.
This Fast Company article explains it well: our brain picks up an incredible amount of information each day and then discards most of it (if it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to function well). Who controls what information we keep and what we discard? Most of the time, it’s an unconscious process. Once you start visualizing and giving the brain a new ‘what’, it will start focusing on the information that supports it and noticing opportunities that you previously weren’t aware of. Before you know, events will start to unfold that support your desired reality. Some call it ‘magic’, but we may say that our brain is now actively recognizing the information that benefits our new goal, our new ‘what’.
How do I incorporate visualization into my life today?
I still do the goal-setting exercise every year (I used this guide by a friend of mine to integrate what I learned in 2019 and set new intentions for 2020), but I also recently started a daily visualization practice to help me stay focused on my goals (I’m on Day 52 as of this morning!). I don’t always imagine the same scene. Instead, each day I focus on different aspects of what I would like to bring into my life (i.e. relationships, specific accomplishments, the human I’d like to become, etc).
I began by using an app called EnVision, which offers a seven-day trial of its paid services. It’s a ten-minute daily practice that guides you through imagining a scene from your desired future down to the specific sounds, sights, and smells. I kept re-running the seven-day trial audio lessons until I got comfortable enough that I now do these practices on my own.
So, here is my challenge to you this week.
Even if you’re not compelled to check out visualization further, see if you can find some quiet time during one of the next seven days. Find a space where you can sit comfortably (and preferably, straight) and where no one can bother you. Take a few deep breaths and think about a pleasant event that you’d like to see in your life. This event may be something that is currently not possible or it could be something that you are looking forward to as it’s already ‘in the books’.
Start imagining this event down to the smallest details. What are you wearing? Where are you? What can you smell, hear, or see? Who are you with? Focus on the uplifting, happy emotions that this pleasant event stirs up in you. Perhaps you can notice where in your body you feel these emotions. Sit with this event for some time and then see how you feel before and after this exercise. Did it make you smile or feel a little bit better? If it did, you may want to start incorporating visualization into your daily life as well.
Have feedback or your own experiences with visualization to share? Reply to this email (it goes directly to me), I’d love to hear from you!
Onwards!
Yulia
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P.S. Ad Astra is a weekly discussion on these four topics:
Living Your Boldest Life: tools, tips, and strategies on pursuing big projects, such as pitching National Geographic or launching a company
Going Pro: my tips on quitting the job you don’t want and becoming someone you want to be instead (in my case: a writer, photographer, and entrepreneur)
Putting Your Imagination To Work: insights on storytelling and creativity, i.e. creating a winning pitch or coming up with ideas, consistently
Personal Growth: how not to stand in your own way to your dreams and on being human with failures, doubts, and struggles (we all have them!)
The newsletter is going to be free for the first four issues.
On February 2, 2020, I’m going to turn it into a mostly paid subscription content: one issue a month will be available to everyone and three issues will be for paid subscribers only.
If you sign up in the four weeks following February 2, the subscription is going to be $5 a month, going forward, forever. Think of it as taking me out to coffee, once a month, and getting four opportunities to ‘pick my brain’ on the topics above while you’re doing it.
After March 1, 2020, the regular subscription is going to be $6 a month (or $65 a year if you choose an annual subscription).
Why am I doing a paid subscription?
There are two reasons:
I believe that what I have to say has value. I have accumulated the thoughts, tips, and strategies I am going to share with my readers in this newsletter in over FOUR years of experience going after my dreams and living boldly every day. This is a lived, breathed, and tried-and-tested insight that I am now putting out into the world. If you’re not willing to (or able to) pay for the subscription, that’s totally fine. After all, there is a lot of content already out there EVERYWHERE that you may search for on your own. But if you have $5 a month to spare and are looking to make some meaningful changes this year, then I believe this will be worthwhile to you.
As a freelancer and entrepreneur, I do not receive a salary from anyone :) Every minute I spend on this effort is a minute I could be spending on sending out more pitches, hustling, trying to figure out where my next dollar will come from… you get the idea. So, as someone who gladly and willingly participates in the creative economy (and supports other people pursuing creative work), I believe that there are other people out there willing and ready to support my work. If you are one of them, join us, hit subscribe, and welcome to Ad Astra*!
*What is Ad Astra? It’s part of a Latin saying ‘per aspera ad astra’ which means ‘through difficulties, to the stars’ ✨
Issue #2: Does Visualization Work?