Blog

Updated July 26th 2023

I’ve been talking a lot about habits recently; getting rid of the ones that are doing us no good and replacing with ones that are beneficial to our life, including health, work and relationships.

You may recall I mentioned that it takes the average person 66 days for new behaviours to become unchangingly automatic, with research finding it can take some people up to 245 days to change a habit. The reason for this is that it can take a while to strengthen the connection between neurons representing the new behaviour.

However you may not be this patient, I know I certainly am not! Consequently, I have frequently abandoned my efforts to establish new, beneficial, and healthier habits in the past. Some of my attempts have included many efforts to eat healthier, getting fit and staying fit, maintaining a level of contentedness and gratitude in my daily life, blogging weekly about Adaptas™ or topics of interest to clients and friends of Adaptas™, posting daily messages in social media that might be helpful to anyone who cares to read in the area of communication in the workplace and behavioural change. The list goes on and on…frankly, we could be here all day!

Consider this, have you ever envisioned the person you want to become, the knowledge you seek to acquire, or the goals you wish to achieve? Visualisation as a method of actualisation has been extensively studied in Cognitive Psychology and Sports Psychology. Accomplished athletes harness the power of visualisation, which involves mentally rehearsing physical skills without actual movement

Numerous studies with athletes have revealed that combining the mental visualisation of a skill with its physical execution leads to more effective learning and retention of the skill. Any elite athlete will emphasise the significance of mental preparation strategies in achieving peak performance. The underlying science shows that these techniques reinforce the neural pathways crucial for skill enhancement, as previously mentioned.

Having studied Psychology in-depth since my teenage years, I have acquired comprehensive knowledge about the reinforcement of neural connections and related aspects. In fact, my fascination with understanding human nature, our behavior, and the influence of experiences started at a very young age, around 8 years old (possibly even earlier, though I can’t recall those early years). Observing people and their responses to various environments has always intrigued me, however I must admit that my biggest case study has most often been myself.

Even though I knew all about visualisation, it really only hit me recently (i.e. that there are ways to speed up these neuronal connections), through conversation with my colleague Erika Brodnock (Erika Brodnock, CEO and Founder, The Centre for Positive Children Ltd), that if you actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, you can speed up the process of changing your habits!

If you want to learn about effectively visualising (not all of us find it easy!), keep an eye on our blogs in coming weeks.