Lean Hybrid Magic

Isabelle and Emerson are my two oldest daughters. Like most children their age they like to play “make believe”.  They make believe they are princesses, doctors and mommies to their weird little plastic babies.

But yesterday their play was a bit different.

They decided, after watching “The Lion King”, that they were lions.

Along with their crawling on the floor, jumping and roaring so loud that the neighbors became annoyed, was an attitude.

With their faces mangled in fury and their eyes filled with aggression, they took on the attitude of an actual lion… King of The Jungle.

Emerson took on this role so well that she was on the verge of biting her older sisters cheek right off of her face.  If you think this sounds sick and scary, it’s because it is!  And as their father I was trapped between weather I should intervene to stop the whole charade or continue to let them express themselves.

Well, against my wife’s better judgment… I let the carnage ensue!

You see, I knew that they weren’t really going to hurt each other but what they were doing reminded me of when I played college football.

When playing college football I was a bit undersized for my position but I always seemed to whoop the asses of guys twice my size.  The reason why I was able to do this is because I had become very good at playing make-believe.

Before each game I would sit in my locker and imagine that I was a Raptor… you know, the small, quick, agile, meat eating dinosaur the would attack much larger prey than itself and win, featured in the movie Jurassic Park.  Sitting in my locker I would see, in my minds eye, myself as a Raptor and at the kick off I would sprint down field and attack my prey (the kick returner) as if I were a hungry prehistoric beast desperate for its next meal.

And as process would have it, I made practically every tackle on the kickoff team!

How is it that by playing make-believe that I created the reality?

Unbeknown to me at the time, I was using a very powerful tool called Visualization.

Visualization is basically playing make-believe in your mind about a goal or an event at which you would like to succeed, before the actually thing has taken place.  For some reason, when you combine these “mental movies” with the emotion associated with it, you increase the likely hood of the goal being met exponentially.

Just like when Emerson was playing lion and became so attached to the ‘game’ that she nearly ate her sister; and when I pretended I was a Raptor and practically removed the heads from kick returners, when you use visualization to complete a workout or get leaner through discipline… it works like magic!

I really don’t understand how much of this works, but I have seen it work and I have heard several wise men describe its use.  For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Do the thing and you will have the power!” Basically, DO what lean, muscular people DO and you will eventually be lean and muscular.  But notice, he doesn’t say “talk about the thing” or “think about the thing” or “make sure your ready for the thing”, he says DO the thing… you’ve got to just get up and DO it.

Even if it means pretending.

I think Brian Tracy calls this “The Law Of Association”.  Essentially, your subconscious mind really cant tell the difference between you acting a certain way out of “playing the role” or if it is really you!  So, if you keep playing the role of a lean and muscular person, your subconscious mind will associate with that and begin to attract all sorts of people, places, ideas, and circumstances into your life that correlate with being lean and muscular.

Intense Focus

It’s weird, I know… but try it out.

Next time you are begrudgingly working through a Lean Hybrid Muscle workout try to visualize yourself as the person you’d like to be.  And you can even use phrases such as “I am in great shape!” or “I am super lean and muscular” to support your vision.  It all helps!

Hey, have you ever used visualization (knowingly or not) to achieve a particular goal or vision?  Let us know… comment below.