Mental Rehearsal –

Stress Relief Tip No. 1

As you may have noticed, three of our last four posts dealt with some aspect of the plan for Bee Wild’s future. By planning and doing mental rehearsals of the year as a whole and various projects, we take most of the guess work out of the equation.This reduces our stress and angst considerably. Even if something unplanned comes up that is temporarily stressful, we have enough structure in place to keep moving forward.

What Is a Mental Rehearsal?

You may have heard of mental rehearsal when watching the Olympics. Mental rehearsal is a Neuro Linguistic Programming technique where an athlete imagines starting a race, running it well, and crossing the finish line and receiving the Gold Medal literally thousands of times. I can remember a Gold Medalist being interviewed after she won an event. When the interviewer asked, “How did it feel crossing the finish line?” The athlete’s comment was, “It felt natural. I’ve done it in my mind a million times.”

How Can Mental Rehearsal Benefit You?

Let’s say you have just accepted leadership for a project with a lot of moving parts. You’ve been in meetings for awhile, so you know what the finished project looks like. A good place to start your mental rehearsal is with seeing the project complete, everyone involved celebrating, and you being acknowledged for your leadership. Run the “movie” you’ve imagined over and over again until the results feel natural and you go into celebratory mode every time you think of the project.

Then, you can break the project down into logical action steps and mentally rehearse each one of those steps until each feels easy, flowing, and doable. Connect each of your action steps to your mental rehearsal of the celebration at the end of the project. Then, you can release the action step to the appropriate person to complete.

What you’ll find is that dealing with the people involved will be more pleasant, you will be more effective, and goals will be easier to accomplish timely.