One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Mind Sculpture: A Total Experience
You may already have heard of guided imagery, a concept that predates mind sculpture. Traditionally,
psychologists instructing patients in guided imagery would ask them to close their eyes, breathe deeply,
and imagine themselves inside a movie theater facing the screen. The patients were then supposed to see
themselves on the screen, performing with perfection and confidence whatever skill they wanted to
improve, whether it was swinging a golf club or giving a presentation. That kind of guided imagery
achieved only limited results. Later, Position Emission Topography (PET) scans confirmed that this
exercise lit up just a small portion of the brain, the visual cortex (where visual information is processed).
Mind sculpture, developed by Ian Robertson, is a newer technique that involves total but still-
imaginary sensory immersion. It requires its practitioners to pretend that they are actually engaged in the
action, not just seeing but hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. In mind sculpture, people imagine the
movement of their muscles, and the rise and fall of their emotions.
My favorite example of effective mind sculpture comes from the extraordinary Olympic swimmer
Michael Phelps. With twenty-two medals—eighteen of them gold—Phelps is the most decorated athlete in
Olympic history. During his training regimen for the 2008 Games in Beijing, Phelps’s coach asked him to
practice mind sculpture while still lying in bed. He instructed Phelps to picture himself on the starting
block, hearing the signal, pushing off the block, guiding powerfully and smoothly through the water, and
making perfect turns at each wall. So, instead of seeing himself on some inner screen, as if he were
watching a video clip of his performance, Phelps imagined that he was actually inside the aquatic center,
competing in his events. Like those who’d tried guided imagery before him, he used his visual
imagination. You can try something similar now by imagining your feet on the starting block, the swim cap
fitting snugly on your head, and the roar of the crowd in the stands.
Phelps rehearsed mentally every day before he actually got in the pool. The payoff came when, during
one of his events, he had water in his goggles—a problem that could have slowed him down and cost him
a victory. But Phelps was prepared, having envisioned this potential snare during his mental imagery
exercises. Thus, the gold medal for that event was his, bringing his total golds at the Beijing Games to
eight.
Ian Robertson, one of the world’s leading authorities on brain rehabilitation, theorized in his book
Mind Sculpture
that during mind sculpture, the brain doesn’t understand that it’s not really performing the
imagined activity. Phelps’s brain sent the precise messages to his muscles that were necessary to propel
him to Olympic history. In effect, his brain and body were practicing the events, over and over, without
mistakes.
Within minutes of “practicing” a task mentally, using all your senses, the brain’s chemistry begins to
change. It rewires its cells and the connections between the cells to create complex motor or verbal skills.
With enough practice the new patterns are mastered. Research supports this idea: In one study, people
who practiced a five-finger piano exercise for two hours a day showed a similar increase in brain activity
as those who performed the exercise solely in their imaginations—without ever touching a keyboard. In
this way, you can approach a difficult task with a purely mental rehearsal, avoiding the unproductive fear

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that comes with the “feet-first” strategy. You can train your brain by small increments to develop the new
set of skills it needs to actually engage in this task.

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