Visualization involves creating a mental image of something in the future. Usually, the achievement of a goal or positive outcome.
It has many applications and is frequently used in sports. For instance, before the start of a match basketball players might imagine themselves scoring the winning point. Or, during play before taking a penalty kick, a soccer/football player might visualize where to place the ball to score.
In the video below, swimming legend Michael Phelps describes his use of visualization to ensure he’s completely prepared well before getting to the pool to compete.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a world-class sportsperson to benefit from practicing visualization. Anyone can do it and there can be huge payoffs.
Why Use Visualization?
Let’s say you’ve got an important presentation to give at work. The company is counting on you, senior management will be there and it’s a chance to impress for a future promotion.
Perhaps you’re nervous and are concerned about a technical glitch happening. You might even be worried about speaking clearly, projecting your voice, or stumbling over your words.
These things happen. And most, if not all the time, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s good to be prepared!
Instead of falling into a negative mindset and letting the fear take over, use visualization to create a mental movie of a successful presentation. Imagine delivering it confidently and competently, impressing those watching. See yourself giving insightful and well-received responses in the Q&A. In your mind’s eye, picture the technology working as it should for those physically in the room and anyone tuning in remotely.
As you can probably see, visualization can be applied to any number of situations.
Visualization and Manifesting
Many of the quotes below relate to manifestation, where visualization is one of the pillars of achieving successful outcomes. Getting clear on your vision by creating vivid mental images happens right at the start of the process. It sets the stage for aligning your thoughts, emotions, and actions with what you want to manifest, giving you the best chance of making it a reality.
The guidance is clear… to engage all your senses to make the visualization as detailed and realistic as possible. Feeling the emotions associated with what you’re visualizing helps to raise your vibration and sends a clear signal to the universe about what you want to attract, for example, a new relationship, job, or home.
Practicing Visualization
There are different ways to do visualization. There are vision boards – a collection of images and words that relate to an outcome. Those are popular for illustrating lifestyle outcomes in particular. They can be done physically or there are phone/tablet apps.
The way a lot of people practice visualization is to do something like this… close their eyes and create those mental images in as much detail as possible. Then imagine all the steps involved in reaching that successful conclusion. For example, revisiting and adding detail to the visualization as part of a daily practice. Combining it with meditation is another popular approach.
75 Powerful Vision and Visualization Quotes
- “Visualize what you want to do before you do it. Visualization is so powerful that when you know what you want, you will get it.” – Audrey Flack
- “When developing an idea, I remind myself not to start with compromise. I envision the ideal manifestation of the idea, as if I had no limits in resources, materials, or permission.” – Janet Echelman
- “Make sure you visualize what you really want, not what someone else wants for you.” – Jerry Gillies
- “Top athletes visualize religiously because they know it unlocks potential at a level that analysis and even physical practice don’t reach.” – John Assaraf
- “I’ve discovered that numerous peak performers use the skill of mental rehearsal of visualization. They mentally run through important events before they happen.” – Charles Garfield
- “Your purpose explains what you are doing with your life. Your vision explains how you are living your purpose. Your goals enable you to realize your vision.” – Bob Proctor
- “The great thing about visualization is that you already have everything you need to start. You can do it anywhere, for as long as you like, and as often as you like. It literally is limited only by your imagination.” – Nick Trenton
- “Don’t censor your dreams or limit your vision with practicalities and probabilities.” – Jack Canfield
- “Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible.” – Cherie Carter-Scott
- “Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within us. Though conscience, we can come in contact with universal laws or principles that with our own singular talents and avenues of contribution, and with the personal guidelines within which we can most effectively develop them. Combined with self-awareness, these two endowments empower us to write our own script.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “If you keep a clear vision for your future, it will pull you like a magnet through your toughest times.” – Tony Robbins
- “The Stoics used negative visualization to train themselves to maintain equanimity and cope well even in challenging situations. They prepared to soften the shock of reality and achieve greater tranquility, but also to rehearse the philosophies core principles.” – Jonas Salzgeber
- “Dreaming is not enough. You have to go a step further and use your imagination to visualize, with intent! Forget everything you’ve ever been taught, and believe it will happen, just as you imagined it. That is the secret. That is the mystery of life.” – Christine Anderson
- “You must first clearly see a thing in your mind before you can do it.” – Alex Morrison
- “Visualization is the process of creating pictures in your mind of yourself enjoying what you want. When you visualize, you generate powerful thoughts and feelings of having it now. The law of attraction then returns that reality to you, just as you saw it in your mind.” – Rhonda Byrne
- “You are more productive by doing fifteen minutes of visualization than from sixteen hours of hard labor.” – Abraham-Hicks
- “The key to visualizing your ideal life is to see it in pictures that are so real that you actually form an emotional relationship with what you want. What would you be feeling as you wake up in your dream home, spend a productive day in your dream career, enjoy your closest relationships, and reflect on the financial wealth you’ve accumulated.” – Lisa Nichols
- “Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan… believe… act!.” – Alfred A. Montapert
- “It’s so important to see things in our minds first as if they have already happened; it just does something in our subconscious mind that makes the unbelievable believable. The old saying ‘seeing is believing’ is so true, and visualizing your goals and dreams as if they have already happened is a great way to trick our minds into believing that anything is possible.” – Jason Wolbers
- “Meditate, visualize and create your own reality and the universe will simply reflect back to you.” – Amit Ray
- “Visualization is the mind’s eye view of any creation. Every time you visualize and get your thoughts and feelings in alignment with it, that is the time of its manifestation. All that you visualize, can materialize.” – Anand Patwa
- “Set your intention to manifest the solution, instead of obsessing over the problem. Visualize the cure, don’t feed the calamity.” – Anthon St. Maarten
- “Many people use visualization to inspire and motivate themselves. More than just thinking about your desire, visualization is the most effective tool to harness the power of your subconscious mind to help you manifest your desire.” – Victoria M. Gallagher
- “The key to visualizing is choosing something vivid to you that matches (as closely as possible) how it might be in real life. But it’s also extremely important to stimulate this experience in your mind WITHOUT it feeling like a struggle or a chore.” – Andrew Kap
- “You attract good things into your life by believing that you can achieve them. Never get into a mindset that makes you think that you are not worthy of a goal. Visualize the goal in your mind. And believe that you are capable of achieving it.” – Avijeet Das
- “When you visualize, then you materialize. If you’ve been there in the mind, you’ll go there in the body.” – Dr. Denis Waitley
- “The key to effective visualization is to create the most detailed, clear and vivid a picture to focus on as possible. The more vivid the visualization, the more likely, and quickly, you are to begin attracting the things that help you achieve what you want to get done.” – Georges St-Pierre
- “I believe that visualization is one of the most powerful means of achieving personal goals. To have an idea or dream, and then see how you can make it happen, helps shape your plans and defines your goals more clearly.” – Harvey Mackay
- “The easiest and most obvious way to formulate an idea is to visualize it, to see it in your mind’s eye as vividly as if it were alive. You can see with the naked eye only what already exists in the external world; in a similar way, that which you can visualize in your mind’s eye already exists in the invisible realms of your mind. Any picture, which you have in your mind, is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. What you form in your imagination is as real as any part of your body. The idea and the thought are real and will one day appear in your objective world if you are faithful to your mental image.” – Joseph Murphy
- “I would visualize things coming to me. It would just make me feel better. Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.” – Jim Carrey
- “If you spur your imagination with belief, desire and expectancy, and train it to visualize your goals so that you see, feel, hear, taste and touch them, you will get what you want.” – José Silva
- “See with a different eye, visualize with a colorful mind, manifest your thoughts with the energy within.” – Michael Bassey Johnson
- “We lift ourselves by our thought. We climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere.” – Orison Swett Marden
- “Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in the material realm.” – Paramahansa Yogananda
- “Dare to visualize a world in which your most treasured dreams have become true.” – Ralph Marston
- “Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build.” – Robert Collier
- “Having a mental snapshot of where you are, where you are going, and what you are moving toward is incredibly powerful.” – Sara Blakely
- “Tapping into high-vibe emotions–such as happiness, abundance, gratitude, joy, and peace–when visualizing your dreams will allow you to feel the existence of your dreams before they physically manifest into reality.” – Ingrid Clarke
- “You can create the life you desire by concentrating on what you wish to attract. Once you master the idea surrounding this concept, you won’t want to use your mind for the purpose of excuse-making. Instead, you’ll prefer to use it to really consider what you want to manifest into your life and then visualize it as coming true.” – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
- “Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.” – James Allen
- “To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real – a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.” – Peter McWilliams
- “Emotions have a lot of energy, and when we mix them with visualizing what we want, they act like magnets that bring good things to us.” – Gabrielle Townsend
- “A very important part of the whole creative visualization process is developing a sense of prosperity. This means having the understanding, or consciously taking the point of view that the universe is abundant, that life is actually trying to bring us what our hearts and souls truly desire – spiritually, mentally, emotionally, as well as physically. Almost everything you truly need or want is here for the asking; you only need to believe that it is so, truly desire it, and be willing to accept it.” – Shakti Gawain
- “It’s important to have a vision of the long run and make wise decisions for our highest good in the present moment; however, we don’t want to become attached to how everything must look. When we show up in good faith, life provides. And when we trust, we are always in the flow of manifestation.” – Alaric Hutchinson
- “The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
- “As far as the Law of Attraction and your power vision go, once you’ve come up with what you want to manifest, don’t worry too much about how it’s going to happen. Instead, put in regular effort doing your envisioning.” – Art Rios
- “Visualization is daydreaming with a purpose.” – Bo Bennett
- “Thoughts become things. Consciously change your thoughts when you have a negative thought pop up. To change your subconscious thoughts use affirmations and visualizations to help reshape limiting beliefs that might be holding you back.” – Michael Beckwith
- “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
- “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” – Cecil Beaton
- “The universe always bends reality to our wish when we hold the vision of what we want with unbending intent.” – Curtis Tyrone Jones
- “In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.” – Dalai Lama
- “Every entrepreneur begins with a desire and a vision. Along the way, one inevitably encounters the difficulties of manifesting one’s vision in the world. But that’s part of the journey. It isn’t easy, but with one step at a time and one day at a time, you will get there.” – Dipa Sanatani
- “Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.” – Florence Scovel Shinn
- “You must have a vision before you can manifest – anything.” – Germany Kent
- “If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.” – Zig Ziglar
- “The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart – this you will build your life by, this you will become.” – James Allen
- “Your life is rich with possibility, and you are the only one who can discover the opportunities that will allow you to live your dreams. You must open your eyes to what can be, envision the life you want, and take the steps to get yourself to that place.” – Jason Harvey
- “Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” – Joel A. Barker
- “Remember Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile? No one believed it was physically possible for human beings to run the mile in less than four minutes, yet he created his own sense of certainty through imagined references. He visualized over and over again breaking the four-minute mile, hearing and feeling himself break the barrier until pretty soon he had so many reference legs that he felt certain he would succeed-as certain as other people were that accomplishing this task was impossible.” – Tony Robbins
- “Standing in the inspiring vision of my future, I boldly take every step – large and small – with courage and intent.” – Jonathan Lockwood Huie
- “The idea is the first currency of the Universe, so pay attention to the ideas that are in harmony with your vision.” – Mary Morrissey
- “Every time you meditate, every time you do visualization for healing, every time you say something for healing the whole planet, you are connecting with like-minded people all over the planet who are doing the same thing.” – Louise Hay
- “Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melodie Beattie
- “The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an actualizer. He can visualize something, and when visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.” – Robert L. Schwartz
- “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs
- “A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.” – Brian Tracy
- “Picture yourself in your mind’s eye as having already achieved this goal. See yourself doing the things you’ll be doing when you’ve reached your goal.” – Earl Nightingale
- “A vision needs to be strong and unwavering; no one makes it upstream with just a mere wish.” – John A. Andrews
- “Happiness is a choice and a conscious creation. It comes from a vision of happiness and a happy life driven by a desire and determination to achieve it.” – Michele Moore
- “Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” – Napoleon Hill
- “Now, having seen the differences between where you are and where you want to be, begin to change – consciously change – your thoughts, words, and actions to match your grandest vision.” – Neale Donald Walsch
- “Life isn’t complicated if you don’t break your concentration on your true vision.” – Robert Randle
- “Live the Life of Your Dreams: Be brave enough to live the life of your dreams according to your vision and purpose instead of the expectations and opinions of others.” – Roy T. Bennett