Act the part and you will become the part
William James

Visualization is a powerful technique that can help public speakers improve their skills.  Stanford University’s Dictionary of Psychology tells us that the ‘visualization experience resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli’. When you visualise, you imagine an experience, such as a presentation, by drawing upon your capacity to see, hear, feel and smell in your minds eye. This ‘mental practice’ technique can be used by public speakers to build confidence, realistically rehearse and to install new unconscious behaviours.

Why visualisation works for public speaking

Most of our behaviours in life are habitual and unconscious. For example, have you ever driven to work and found that you couldn’t recall the detail of the journey on arrival? This happens because your unconscious mind is able to drive the vehicle without your conscious awareness. So whilst you tune the radio and think about what you are going do at work today, your unconscious takes care of the driving.

The same effect can happen when you give a presentation. When you stand in front of an audience, you normally become very engaged in the presentation itself. You may enter a flow state where you very focused on the message you are delivering. One thing is for certain, you do not and cannot consciously manage all the behaviours that you exhibit simultaneously e.g. eye contact, facial expressions, hand movements, voice tempo etc.  Most of our behaviors displayed whilst presenting are actually unconscious.

Visualisation is a technique that enables you to ‘program’ new unconscious behaviours by practicing in your imagination. It works because our nervous system cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality. Imagine for a moment that you have a lemon in your hand. Feel the waxy flesh. Now, take a sharp knife and cut through it into quarters, feel that lemon juice flick onto your skin as you do so. Now take one quarter of the lemon and bite right into it. Most people’s mouth’s water with saliva at his point. This happens precisely because the nervous system cannot tell the different between imagination and reality.

In the same way, your nervous system cannot distinguish between a real presentation and an imagined one. Our brains are essentially a network of connecting neurons. When you practice in your minds eye you create new neurological pathways in your brain that are as real as those created through normal experience.

Read: Part 2 of this article

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Fear of Public Speaking, Confidence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.