Imagination is the capacity to make stuff up. You can do it right now. I guarantee that you are. Just by reading these words, you’re creating relationships in your mind to try to understand what I’m saying and judge its usefulness to you. (Visualization is a little different – it’s the act of using imagination to “see” something in your mind’s eye).
We’ve known for a long long time that imagination is a powerful, and seldom-used, tool in living.
From the paper “Think of Capable Others and You Can Make It! Self-Efficacy Mediates the Effect of Stereotype Activation on Behavior”
Previous research has shown that activating a stereotype can influence subsequent behavior in a stereotype-consistent way. The present research investigates the role of self-efficacy beliefs in this effect. Specifically, we demonstrate that being primed with the stereotype of professors increases knowledge confidence compared to being primed with a less educated profession (Experiments 1 and 2), and that these higher self-efficacy beliefs result in higher performance at a general knowledge test (Experiment 2). These findings are corroborated in Experiment 3 that shows that participants primed with the stereotype of athletes show higher persistence in a physical exercise than participants primed with a stereotype less associated with persistence. Again, behavior was mediated by self-efficacy beliefs. The findings are in line with the active-self account (Wheeler & Petty, 2001; Wheeler, DeMarree, & Petty, 2007) that proposes that priming with a stereotype influences a person’s behavior through altered self-representations.
What do dat mean? It means that whatever you imagine, see, or visualize, will influence how you behave.
Story-telling
We are all constantly telling a story to ourselves. Choose your story. Make one up that makes you a super-hero. We did it as kids, and that story led us on all of our best adventures.
You can do it again. Get your pencil and paper.
You can have any qualities you want. You can do anything. Write it down. Draw a picture of it. Tattoo it on your arm. Look at it every day. Feel yourself become Superhero-You more and more every day, every second. Let every breath take you closer. Only move toward things that fulfill that image. Seek them out. Do them. And only move away from things that do not.
Do it now.
