In one hour… Visualise your success

Ready to devote an hour to improving your performance? Then it’s time to mentally rehearse the scene, with you in the starring role. It’s a trick used by top athletes who often use visualisation as the icing on the cake of their actual practice so that they can keep “training” while giving their bodies time to recover.

It might sound like wishful thinking, but one group of studies even found that you can boost muscle strength by simply visualising flexing your arm for 15 minutes a day, for six weeks. So visualisation is powerful, but only if you do it right. And it’s certainly not a quick fix – you’ll need to prepare thoroughly. You need to have written and rehearsed a presentation or interview answers, for example. Only then should you rehearse in your mind’s eye how you want your performance to proceed.

To get the most from visualisation, it’s important to see the scene played out from a first-person perspective and to focus on the process, rather than the result. So you imagine being in the interview performing well rather than simply being offered the job.