The Importance of Pictures and Images

This lesson is about visualisation. Not some mystical, mind-over-matter nonsense you might have heard from self-help gurus, but something more practical and, done properly, more useful than most people realise.

The reason is practical. It gives you a destination. It gives you something mentally to work towards rather than letting your mind get stuck in what’s wrong, which can happen all too easily if you let confirmation bias run amok in the wrong direction. Your brain is a problem-solving machine. Give it a clear target, and it’ll work on figuring out how to hit it. Give it nothing but complaints about your current situation, and it’ll just find more things to complain about.

If you can’t picture yourself working towards a goal, in fact any goal, if you haven’t got a clear image, then you haven’t got a good model of your future yet. Your goal needs to be more than a feeling or a concept. It can’t be “I want to be successful” or “I want to be happy” or “I want more confidence.” Those are nominalisations, as we discussed in an earlier lesson. They’re fog. They’re nothing you can grasp hold of or work towards.

Your goal also can’t just be a material gain or an amount of money in the bank. “I want a million pounds” sounds concrete, but what does that actually look like in your life? What are you doing with that million pounds? How does your daily life change? What time do you wake up? What does your morning look like? Who are you with? These details matter because they transform an abstract number into something your brain can actually work with.

Let me give you an example from my practice. I had a patient who came to me saying he wanted to lose weight. Fair enough. That’s a common goal. But when I asked him to describe what achieving that goal would look like, he couldn’t do it. He said he’d “feel better” and “be healthier.” Both nominalisations. Nothing his brain could sink its teeth into.

So I pushed harder. What would your morning routine look like once you were living this differently? He thought for a moment and said he’d wake up feeling energised, he’d go for a run, he’d shower, he’d cook a proper breakfast instead of grabbing something on the way to work. Now we were getting somewhere. I asked him to close his eyes and describe that morning in detail. What time is your alarm going off? What’s the weather like when you step outside? What route do you run? What does that feel like in your body? What are you cooking for breakfast? What does your kitchen smell like? What do you see when you look in the mirror?

By the end of that exercise, he had tears in his eyes. Not because it was emotional, but because for the first time, he could actually see it. It was real. It wasn’t just “lose weight” anymore. It was a specific morning, a specific life, a specific version of himself that he could now work towards becoming.

That’s the power of having a clear image. It makes your goal real before you’ve achieved it. When you repeatedly picture yourself carrying out the behaviour that gets you there, in detail, you’re building a much clearer sense of what you actually need to do day to day, and that clarity is what your brain can act on.

Athletes use a version of this technique. They mentally rehearse the specific movements of their performance before they compete, in detail. Not just thinking “I want to win,” but rehearsing the actions that lead there. This is a genuinely well-studied technique in sport, though it’s mostly been tested for rehearsing specific physical skills rather than for imagining life goals in general, so treat it as a useful practical tool rather than as guaranteed neuroscience.

Here’s the part that matters most, and it’s easy to get backwards. It’s tempting to spend all your visualising time on the finished result — the moment you’ve already lost the weight, got the job, built the business. That feels good, and feeling good is exactly the problem. Research on this consistently finds that dwelling on the achieved outcome, on its own, tends to lower your energy for actually doing anything about it. Your brain gets a little hit of satisfaction from imagining you’ve already arrived, and that can quietly take the edge off your motivation to leave the house.

What works better is to spend most of your imagining on the process, not the outcome. Picture the actual steps: lacing up your running shoes on a cold morning, opening the spreadsheet, making the phone call you’ve been avoiding. Then add one more ingredient that most visualisation advice leaves out entirely: picture the obstacle that’s most likely to get in your way, and picture yourself dealing with it. Not just “I’ll go for a run,” but “when the alarm goes off and it’s raining and I want to stay in bed, I’ll get up anyway, because I’ve already decided that’s what I do.” This combination, sometimes called mental contrasting, is what turns a pleasant daydream into something that actually changes your behaviour.

You need to do the same thing with your goals. Whatever they are. If you want a better job, what does the day-to-day of that job actually look like? What’s your office like? What time do you arrive? What kind of work are you doing? Who are you working with? How do you feel at the end of the day? And, just as importantly, what’s the first obstacle that’ll turn up, and what will you do when it does?

If you can’t answer these questions with specificity, you don’t have a goal. You have a wish. Wishes don’t come true on their own. Goals, properly defined, visualised in process rather than just outcome, and paired honestly with the obstacles in your way, do.

Here’s another reason why clear images matter. Your mind will sabotage vague goals. If your goal is just to “be successful,” your brain doesn’t know what to do with that. Success means different things to different people. Your subconscious mind needs something concrete to aim for. Otherwise, it’ll keep you exactly where you are because where you are feels safer than moving toward an undefined target.

But when you have a crystal-clear image of the steps, your brain knows where it’s going. It can spot opportunities that move you toward that image. It can make decisions that align with that vision. It can filter out distractions that don’t serve that goal.

Again, we’ll come back to goal setting later in more detail. For now, I just want you to get used to mentally being able to bring up a clear image of the process of getting what it is you want to achieve, obstacles and all. That’s all you need to do right now. Just practise creating that image. Make it vivid. Make it specific. Make it real.

Sit down somewhere quiet. Close your eyes. Pick one goal you have, just one. Now, instead of only picturing the finished result, picture the first specific action you’d need to take today or tomorrow. Where are you? What time is it? What are you doing? What can you hear? What can you smell? What does your body feel like? Now picture the thing most likely to stop you, and picture exactly what you’ll do about it.

Spend five minutes building this image. Add details. Change things if they don’t feel right. Make it clearer. Make it more real. Do this every day for a week, and you’ll notice something interesting happening. The next step will start to feel manageable rather than impossible. Not because anything external has changed, but because you’ve changed how you’re holding it in your mind.

To really change your mindset, you need clarity, both about where you’re going and about what’s going to try to stop you along the way. You need to picture yourself taking the actions, not just enjoying the destination. You need to make it as real as possible because if you don’t, you’ve got nothing more than a nominalisation dressed up as a plan.

Make it concrete. Make it visual. Make it something you can see, hear, feel, smell, taste. Make the process and the obstacles just as real as the outcome. Then watch what happens. Watch how opportunities start appearing. Watch how decisions become easier. Watch how your behaviour naturally starts aligning with that image without you having to force it.

This is how change actually happens. Not through willpower alone. Not through motivation alone. Not through hoping and wishing. Through having such a clear picture of the road, obstacles included, that taking the next step stops feeling like such a leap.

So do it. Create that image, process and obstacles together. Right now. Before you move on to the next lesson. Because everything that comes after this builds on that foundation. If you skip this step, if you try to move forward with just a vague idea of what you want, you’ll end up exactly where most people end up. Stuck. Frustrated. Wondering why nothing’s changing.

Don’t be most people. Create the image. Make it real. Let your brain do what it does best, which is figure out how to get you there. Ready?

Further reading

• Oettingen, G. (2014). Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Current.
• Pham, L. B., & Taylor, S. E. (1999). From thought to action: Effects of process-based versus outcome-based mental simulations on performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(2), 250-260.
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance. Prentice Hall.
• Feltz, D. L., & Landers, D. M. (1983). The effects of mental practice on motor skill learning and performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Sport Psychology, 5(1), 25-57.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.