The power of visualisation

If you’ve ever been anxious about anything, or excited about something – such as a potential experience or result – you’ve practised visualisation. You’ve more than likely created an image in your head, with the accompanying emotion, about how you will feel and what you may do, as you interact with this experience.

Our mind serves as a powerful engine of thought, imagination and blue-sky dreaming that, if utilised correctly, can help us through our long years of medical training and practice. Professional athletes are most adept at this practice.

They use high-order imagery in meditation and thinking about their training, competition and rehabilitation.

In pain medicine, ‘graded motor imagery’ is a powerful evidence-based intervention that utilises ‘imagined movements’ of painful and poorly functional limbs to engage the pre-motor and motor cortex, which helps with the rehabilitative process of moving again.

In medicine, imagery interventions have also been used in skill acquisition and stress management through imagined movements, meditation and mindfulness exercises.

Practising visualisation

I only had one goal in 2023 – to pass my Fellowship exam.

We’d moved as a family from our idyllic country life in Albany to Perth, for me to pursue a Fellowship in pain medicine.

Overnight, I was a trainee again. Scrambling to keep up with the chasing, calling, consults and chaos that come from being a subspecialty registrar in a tertiary hospital.

As the study began in mid-April, a gloominess, dread and guilt crept over me, coinciding with the cool autumn change.

“My winter is coming,” I thought as I sized up the enormity of my task ahead. But this wasn’t the first exam campaign or medical challenge I’d faced.

As a PGY-17, I’d learnt a few lessons through the experience of failing and falling short at exams, both at medical school and as a registrar. I was familiar with the temptations and distractions of life, and I had acquired a few skills that served me well.

One of those skills was developing a clear vision of what I wanted, and being certain about what I would do to achieve that goal. And it all starts with the power of visualisation.

As the days became shorter and the workload intensified, I practised visualisation.

I visualised two specific goals each day:

• The post-fellowship ceremony with my name being called.
• A hot Christmas day in Perth where shade was a premium; but despite the heat, I was immensely grateful for having passed my exam and not needing to study anymore!

Both these goals filled me with a positive and deeply satisfying feeling of achievement that helped to quell my worry.

More potently, this visualisation of the person I wanted to be – “Jonathan, who passed his Fellowship examination” – helped shape what I needed to do each day to achieve this clear goal.

However, consider the opposite circumstance – a person with no clear vision, thus no clear goal. Without a clear goal and destination, stress and worry can accompany a directionless path. Other tasks and priorities can derail our progress towards achieving the overarching goal.

In your early years of training, visualisation may be in the form of: “I just want to get through this term” or “I’d like to learn how to be better at this.”

Key lessons

Lesson 1: Our words to ourselves matter

Shad Helmstetter in his book What to Say When You Talk to Yourself describes the relationship between the conscious and subconscious as that of a captain on the ship and the engine-room worker respectively. The captain gives the order, and the worker follows his command.

If we are unkind and speak negatively to ourselves, for example, “I’m not very good at procedures” or “I’m not smart enough to pass that exam”, our subconscious mind will work to help achieve these outcomes.

Being careful with your language is the first practice in visualising the future you want.

In those winter months, I spoke to myself almost every day: “Jonathan, keep going. You are on the right track. This will be over soon.” And quite soon, it was.

Lesson 2: Be clear about what you want

The second lesson in effective visualisation is founded on what Stephen Covey famously said, “everything is created twice”. Firstly, it is imagined and birthed in our minds; and secondly, it is created and brought to life in our physical world.

Just like an architect first creates the vision for a home in their mind, and then sketches the design. Months to years later, the house is complete – the second creation.

Likewise, everything we desire and hope for is created in our minds first, before it is created in the physical world.

What is it that you specifically want? How do you want your working and home life to look? What type of medicine do you want to practise? What do you want from this year or this term?

For me, in 2023, it was passing my exam and being a good dad and wonderful husband. This shaped every decision, helping me to say “no” to several things and “yes” to only a few that got me what I wanted.

I imagined taking the ‘best bits’ of all the registrars and consultants who’d taken the time to teach, guide and nurture me through my training – with their words, techniques and emotional intelligence incorporated into my practice.

Be clear about the specific future you seek, the work-life you desire, and the exact goals you wish to achieve – because it all begins in our mind before we can savour them in the world.

Visualisation is a powerful tool, especially if you use it to steer your life towards what you want and the person you want to be. Live intentionally.

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