I was about fourteen when I first became aware that what I do inside my mind can strongly influence reality. For better or worse.
I remember it as if it were yesterday.
I was a kid, and at that time LAN gaming halls, internet cafes, were the fashion in Bucharest. For the younger among us, picture large rooms with ten to twenty of the latest PCs, where you could go and play games with whoever else happened to be in the room.
Roughly how multiplayer games are played online today, except few of those halls had good enough internet back then, so the PCs were wired to each other and you could only play competitively against the people in the room.
I skipped school to go there, and often I asked permission to go at night, because the hourly rate was lower and we could afford to stay from 11pm until four or five in the morning.
Mostly we played shooters. Quake 1, Quake 2, a bit later Counter Strike, and so on. I moved later to military strategy games, which I still play today.
Essentially you entered the game at the same time as another 5, 10 or 14 people and chased each other around a more or less complex map, trying to eliminate the others with various weapons before they eliminated you. Largely a contest of dexterity and strategy. At the end you saw the scoreboard, showing the ranking and where you had finished.
I wanted to win
And I wanted to be at the top. I played reasonably well. My fingers moved fast on the keyboard, I still type faster than most people I know, and I had good aim with the mouse.
So I regularly finished in the top 5 players, in every game, no matter who was in the room. Before long I started entering the championships that were organised now and then, where boys came from the neighbouring districts who normally played at other gaming halls.
A few times I even came first at those competitions, to the frustration of the other players.
The frustration of the best among them came from the fact that they rarely saw me around the hall playing. They played almost daily, hours on end, and I turned up with my friends once a week. And in these games practice really does matter. However good someone’s reflexes are, if you have five times more playing experience than they do, you should be able to beat them comfortably. So why were they losing and I was winning?
My secret
Well, I had a secret. It was mine alone, I had not even discussed it with my friends. On the days when I was not playing, in the evening, when I turned off the light in my room in Pantelimon, Bucharest, and lay down to go to sleep, I closed my eyes and started playing the game in my mind.
First I chose which map I wanted to play on, I chose the level. Then I went through every room and building on that map in my mind, remembering exactly what it looked like. That was the easy part. The maps played in tournaments were few, and I had played each of them hundreds of times in real life.
Then I started the game. I ran across the map, I saw in my hands the weapon I started with, then I moved from one room to another, jumped over obstacles, met an enemy, he fired at me, I tried to dodge, I fired back, and so on.
The interesting part, looking back now, is that in these films I also made mistakes. I did not dodge fast enough and took a rocket or a grenade to the face, I was fighting someone and someone else appeared behind me out of nowhere because I had not been paying attention. And so on. A perfect simulation of reality.
Sometimes I won the fight, sometimes I lost, but always, always, at the end of the imagined match, in my mind, I saw the scoreboard with me in first place.
Do not judge that ambition too harshly. I was a self conscious boy, bullied at school and at high school, who at fourteen was learning what protection money meant and who you had to stay on the right side of in the neighbourhood so you did not get beaten up. Being the best at something looked like the way out of mediocrity. Looking back, it genuinely was.
I wanted to be the best, I wanted to win, so the matches in my mind ended with me winning. Otherwise why would I have played them?
Do not misunderstand me. At the time I had no idea what I was doing with these exercises of imagination. I was just a kid who wanted to play that game right then and could not, either because of money or because of school the next day.
So I closed my eyes and “dreamed” a few of these games every evening, until sleep took me. And what do you know? A few days later I would go to the hall, in real life, and play much better than the last time. More than that, there were moves and techniques I knew I had played in my head many times, and I was pleased to notice I had got better at them.
It was as if the games in my mind had happened in reality, in physical, real hours spent playing.
Without realising it, I had discovered the power of mental rehearsal, and of what I use today in hypnosis sessions with my high achiever clients. Today I call it imagery, or forward pacing.
Mental rehearsal: why your brain treats the imagined as real, and how you build neural motorways
This idea, that our brain does not distinguish clearly between something imagined and something that happened in reality, shook me the first time I read about it as an adult.
Once we have closed our eyes and imagined a scenario in detail, step by step, for our brain it is as if that scenario happened for real. The memory of an imagined event is almost as solid as the memory of a real one.
And if we imagine it fifty times, then the neural pathways being created are no longer footpaths. They have become motorways. And guess what happens then?
In the micro decisions of daily life, when we are tired or stressed and willpower is low, the brain starts taking its own decisions about which road to take to get what it wants. And as usual, it will prioritise the familiar road. It will prioritise the motorway, because it knows, or believes, that it has been that way before.
Even if in fact we have only been there in our imagination.
What comes out of this is a mechanism that people more inclined towards magical thinking than I am call manifestation. It is actually neuroscience and neuro linguistic programming. There is no magic in it.
When mental rehearsal becomes sabotage: anxious loops and inner noise
So why does it not work for everyone?
- First of all, it does work for everyone from time to time. It is just that most people run this kind of mental rehearsal with the negative things, not with what they would like to happen. How many times have you seen and re-seen a negative scenario that might happen in the future? How many times have you run it in anxious loops until it ended up happening? We do it, we are just never taught to do it with the things we actually want.
- Secondly, and unfortunately, doing this mental rehearsal once is not enough. You need tens or hundreds of repetitions for that neural footpath to become a motorway. Hundreds of mental repetitions of the same film, with what you want to happen in it. Most people do not have that level of discipline. They do it twice, then forget and move on to something else.
Hypnosis as an accelerator for emotional regulation under pressure
And this is where hypnosis comes in.
The main benefit of hypnosis is that one or two controlled mental rehearsals, guided by someone who knows what they are doing, weigh as much as hundreds of ordinary repetitions you could do on your own. Because you are working directly with the subconscious.
And you already know that your subconscious is responsible for many of the things you do, or do not do. That is why hypnosis is an accelerator. Possibly one of the few genuine shortcuts that exist in psychology and personal development.
Through hypnosis we manage to build a motorway in one or two sessions, and the brain behaves as if it had been that way hundreds of times.
And if you have already managed to go that way hundreds of times, you will certainly manage it once more. Except this time, in reality.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.