Visualization is a powerful tool that is often used by athletes to help prepare them for tests of skill. What if we used our ability to visualize to better prepare ourselves for personal defense? Here’s a look at visualization as a tool and how it can be used for developing personal defense skills.
What exactly is visualization?
Visualization is a mental training technique. It is used all over the world by athletes to improve self-confidence, focus and control, and to eliminate fear, among other benefits, like improving the way a person thinks about performing an activity. All of these are benefits for sports, but those same benefits can be applied to activities outside of sport.
Personal defense, and the steps required to take action to defend oneself, are skills that need perfecting. Whether that is perfecting how we observe and practice awareness, or how we seamlessly execute the steps in drawing a concealed-carry firearm. The repetition required to ingrain a thought process or perform a physical skill can benefit from visualization.
It is even beneficial to visualize performing in stressful situations, in order to develop a plan for how you will face them.
How can you integrate visualization?
Just like any training scenario, repetitions of a task or skill are required when it comes to visualization. If the skill you most need to work on for personal safety is performing your draw, then visualize the draw. See yourself performing each step, as if you are actually doing it (think what you see while doing it vs watching a video of you doing it.). It takes about 1,000 repetitions of any skill to learn it. But if you can visualize 1,000 repetitions, or even 500, how much sooner will the physical skills improve?
There is a study on visualization titled, “The impact of sport-specific imagery on skill acquisition and performance” and the “study found sport-specific imagery's direct and significant impact on skill acquisition and performance.” Imagine if you didn’t have to perform thousands of draws, but instead visualized them? Saving on ammo, time, wear and tear on your body and holster…
Learning a skill takes time, but not by using visualization, you do not have to physically spend time doing the thing that you want to do better. Any skill you perform enough will become second nature, it will happen subconsciously. Visualization just speeds up that process. It’s adding reps without having to physically do the reps. It also means that you don’t have to travel to the range, find all your gear and put it on, etc. Now, this does not mean that you never dry-fire anymore, in fact, visualizing along with dry-fire will also improve your skills, but for the times where you want to make measurable gains in skill, but cannot get to the range or set aside dry-fire time, visualization is always available.
Two things you can visualize to help your personal safety skills improve: Awareness and Physical Skills
1. Awareness. One of the most important steps in personal safety is increasing our awareness of what is going on around us. We can visualize ourselves performing daily tasks with a fully present mind. One that is not diverted from what’s in front of us by cell phones or other distractions. Constantly practicing being aware of and focused on the present moment and our surroundings can create a clear head that doesn’t need to be jarred into awareness in an emergency—this is valuable in a personal defense scenario.
Your ability to survey an area around you should be second nature, When you pull into a parking lot, you’re not just looking for a spot to park; you should be considering the cars around you as you pull in, you should be looking at the people that are around you and the people in your line of travel as you enter your destination. You should be locking your door or setting your alarm as you exit your car and you should be making note of where your car is as you leave it so that you find it easily when you return. As you return to your car, you should be observing the people that are around, whether any cars are parked next to you and whether there are any people in them. To point all this out seems a bit much, but it’s just listing some of what you are doing while being observant of your surroundings.
2. Physical skills with personal defense tools. Perfecting skills with a firearm is probably the thing most people think of when they think about visualization for personal defense. But I would argue that it is secondary to growing your skills of awareness, because being aware enough could prevent you from having to use weapons for personal defense.
Your ability to use whatever tool you carry (gun, pepper spray, taser) as effectively as possible, depends on you being able to quickly and properly get it into action. Visualizing yourself drawing your concealed carry, or using pepper spray and the steps required to do so will give you valuable “reps” of the skill. All the other benefits discussed above: focus, control, etc., those will be other compounding elements of your personal defense “kit” that visualization gives you.
The simple repetitive actions we take day in and day out can be tuned by using our ability to visualize and run through scenarios until the steps we take, the things we look at, the focus we have, and list of items to pay attention to is so automatic that we don’t have to tell ourselves to think about it—it just happens.
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