The Three Levels of Leadership - Scouller Leadership Blog » Leadership: The Power and Benefits of Mental Rehearsal
Leadership: The Power and Benefits of Mental Rehearsal
Research shows that mental rehearsal works. Several studies in the worlds of sport and neuroscience have proven it, yet few executive leaders practise it. So this short article looks at what mental rehearsal can offer to leaders.
Why Mental Rehearsal?
Mental rehearsal allows us to embed new beliefs, create new neural circuits in the brain and develop new habits of thinking, feeling and behaviour without engaging in physical practice.
That’s not to say you don’t need physical practice, but sometimes it is difficult to arrange it. For example, how would an international footballer practise taking penalties under pressure? How would he find a way of physically recreating the tension of the situation and the aggressive, offputting crowd noises? The answer is, he probably couldn’t. This is when mental rehearsal is so valuable.
Leaders in organisations face the same problem. How, for example, do you rehearse an upcoming confrontation with a difficult boss or an underperforming employee?
Clearly you can’t do it with the person concerned. Yes, you could practise it with a willing colleague who tries to mimic the other person, but do you have such a colleague and do you want to let them know what you are planning? Again, this is where mental rehearsal comes into its own – it’s something you can do on your own, confidentially and safely.
What Is Mental Rehearsal?
Mental rehearsal uses the imagination.
The idea is that you imagine yourself performing a certain act or expressing a chosen character quality or responding in a particular way to an outer event. You see and feel yourself experiencing and doing whatever it is you wish to rehearse… and doing it well. You can even imagine something going wrong and rehearsing how you’ll cope with it.
Mental Rehearsal Works
Research shows that mental rehearsal works. Several studies have proven it.
Neuroscience teaches us that when we vividly and repeatedly imagine ourselves performing an action, we activate the same neural circuits we’d use if we were physically performing it. We also know that mental rehearsal improves physical skill in action. Several sports studies have shown this.
A Harvard Experiment
Modern technology shows us what takes place in the brain when we mentally rehearse. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, use neuro-imaging to map what happened when he asked volunteers to practise a five-finger exercise on a piano keyboard.
He divided them into two groups. One group had to physically practise playing the tune every day for two hours over five days, while the other had to simply imagine moving their fingers to play the music for two hours a day (for five days).
At the end of the test period, scans of the volunteers’ brains showed that the area of the motor cortex governing their fingers had reorganised in a similar way for both groups. Just as important, Pascual-Leone also found that their playing skill had reached a similar level.
What this showed is that the brain (and physical skill) will change in response to repeated actions and thoughts. In other words, mental rehearsal works.
Mental Rehearsal Is Not “Positive Visualisation”
To be clear, mental rehearsal is not the same as positive visualisation. In positive visualisation – a technique you can find in self-help books – you imagine that whatever you are trying to do has a successful result.
For example, an Olympic class sprinter might see herself crossing the winning line with the crowd rising to acclaim her.
But mental rehearsal focuses instead on the experience of the performance, not the result.
So staying with the Olympics example, the athlete might see herself standing before the blocks, relaxing her muscles and beginning to block out external noise. Then she may imagine getting in to her starting position, feeling the sensations in her leg muscles as she crouches and the pressure of her hands on the ground. Then she would imagine the sound of a gun, her instant response and the feelings in her muscles as she started to surge upwards… and so on.
In other words, you are mentally rehearsing the experience, the performance – not the outcome. Why? Because you cannot fully determine the outcome; you can only fully control your performance.
Mental Rehearsal for Leaders
Elite sports men and women use mental rehearsal regularly, but in my experience as an executive coach it is rarely used by leaders in organisations.
Mental rehearsal is a key leadership skill. I suggest leaders take a leaf out of professional sports men and women’s book if they want to increase their leadership effectiveness in tough or tense situations. That’s why I have outlined the skill in chapter 9 of my book, The Three Levels of Leadership.
The author of this blog is James Scouller, an executive coach. His book, The Three Levels of Leadership: How to Develop Your Leadership Presence, Knowhow and Skill, was published by Management Books 2000 in May 2011. You can learn more about it at www.three-levels-of-leadership.com. If you want to see its reviews, click here: leadership book reviews. If you want to know where to buy it, click HERE.
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