Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Happy Wednesday, founders,
Have you ever imagined a goal so clearly and believed it would become a reality sooner or later?
We hear stories from well-known figures about how they achieved their success by visualizing a specific goal.
Some call it ‘manifestation’, with a cult-like following and its many how-to practices and techniques.
Some roll their eyes and call out - you can’t achieve your grand goals by imagining it on a couch.
This has been on my list to dig deep for a long time - is it real? Is it backed by science or just pseudoscience?
Let’s find out.
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TL;DR
How mental picturing isn’t magic, but a mechanism. Your brain responds to vivid images in much the same way as it does to real events.
Classic and modern research shows moderate performance gains from mental practice, with the strongest effects when the imagery is specific and embodied.
How to apply in a founder’s life: pitches, networking, and long-term goals.
How our minds play ‘tricks’
In one of the classic best sellers in psychology, Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz tells a bear story: if a hiker thinks he sees a bear, his adrenaline surges, and he starts to sprint for survival. Even if it’s a man in a bear suit, or a giant dog, the idea triggers his physiological response - even if it’s not an actual bear, he does not need to stop and decide whether he should run away from what he perceives as immediate danger.
In Maltz’s language, we don’t react to “reality”; we react to the mental image our cortex constructs of reality, and our body follows. The emotion of ‘fear’ came as a result of a constructed idea or belief. The idea, the belief, or the mental image was the causative agent, not the emotion or the event.
In a hypnotic experiment, where the subject was told he was at the North Pole, his body reacted as if he were cold, and he started shivering, developing goose bumps. In another study, when college students were asked to imagine that one of their hands was immersed in ice water, the thermometer readings in the ‘treated’ hand dropped.
Our nervous system cannot distinguish between an imagined experience and a real one. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that your forebrain received - even if it’s far from the true event.
Put differently, the brain and nervous system that react automatically to the environment are the same brain and nervous system that inform us about the environment.
Our nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true, so by practicing mental picturing, it offers us an opportunity to ‘practice’ new traits and attitudes.
The neuroscience evidence behind ‘mental pictures’
Mental practice was introduced as early as a classic 1994 meta-analysis by Driskell and colleagues, “Does mental practice enhance performance”? In 2020, a 24-year follow-up conducted by Toth and colleagues reached similar conclusions: imagery recruits overlapping brain machinery as perception and action:
Visual mental imagery engages early visual cortex: When you picture something in your mind with real detail - colors, edges, and shapes - your brain’s early visual areas (the same ones that process sight, often called V1/V2) are active.
Motor imagery engages premotor and related networks: When you rehearse a movement in your head - like a swing, a step, or a hand gesture, your brain’s movement-planning network (premotor cortex and SMA) is activated, as if you’re about to move.
A classic Research Quarterly study on the basketball free-throw task found that mental rehearsal improved performance and was nearly as effective as physical practice (Clark, 1960). The study recruited 144 boys, who were split into 3 groups. The first group practiced every day for 20 days, the second group had no practice, and the third group spent 20 minutes a day imagining they were throwing the ball into the hoop; when they missed, they would mentally correct the movement. On the final day of scoring, the 1st group improved by 24%, the 2nd group had no improvement, and the 3rd group improved by 23%!
Imagery is not a substitute for doing; it’s an amplifier of doing - especially when the representation is specific and embodied.
In Secrets of Closing the Sale, the writer taught his salesmen a technique: rehearse the conversation before it happens. Run imaginative, role-played scenarios - prospect asks a tough question, and practice your exact response. Sales teams using this mental run-through reported a 100- to 400-percent increase in sales gains.
A founder’s frame: imagery as a decision-and-execution tool
Think of mental pictures as ‘pre-experience’: you rehearse the cognitive steps, the body states, and the contingencies while the stakes are low. You’re not “manifesting” a term sheet; you’re training and pre-engaging a perception to recognize and enact the moves that make it more likely.
1) Pitches (investors, enterprise, or hiring)
Build a vivid, first-person visual environment in your head: room setup, your first sentence, slide timing, potential objections, and questions.
Rehearse correction: When you receive a rejection or make a mistake, observe and feel the micro-adjustment - what is your tone, pace, and body positioning?
This is priming both the narrative plan (prefrontal) and the embodied delivery (motor/visceral), which increases fluency and lowers threat arousal.
2) Networking
Pre-play 3 opening lines, 2 questions with curiosity, and 1 graceful exit.
Imagine the names, badges, and the warmth on your face, and your recovery line if your brain goes blank.
3) Long-horizon milestones
Construct a future scene where your product or service is widely adopted: at the celebration (with your audience, team, or loved ones), what did you say? How are you feeling? What can you see in front of you?
The mental picture protocol
What are the practical steps in practicing mental picturing? Maxwell Maltz noted:
Set aside 30 mins every day, find a comfortable position, relax, and close your eyes.
Imagine (your goals/ideal scenario/achievement) in pictures as vivid and as detailed as possible. You want your mental pictures to approximate actual experiences as much as possible. Pay attention to sights, sounds, and objects, and take a moment to look around at the physical environment you are in.
You do not need to immediately try to act in your ideal way tomorrow, your nervous system will take care of that in time - just see yourself act, feel, and ‘be’ as you want, and think ‘ I’m going to imagine myself acting this way now - for thirty minutes today’
Imagine your feelings, your emotions, as though you have already embodied that skill or achievement.
This exercise builds new ‘memories’ and stores data in your mid-brain and nervous system, which in turn creates a new image of self. And after consistent practice, you’d be surprised by how you’d ‘act differently’ without trying - because your present feeling and doing is automatic and spontaneous because of memories, whether real or imagined.
Start small, with 5-10 mins a day. The key is to practice every day, and you’ll slowly see how you are reconstructing a new automatic mechanism for yourself.
Key learnings
Picture → Practice → Perform: First-person, sensory-rich scenes engage visual and motor circuits, making execution smoother.
Specific beats vague: Rehearse exact openings, likely objections, and micro-corrections; pair each session with one real-world action.
Start small, stay daily: 5–10 minutes beats occasional marathons; consistency rewires the “automatic” you.
Directing your nervous system with mental images so it rehearses the future you intend - and then makes that future easier to execute. The question is not one of belief versus disbelief; it’s about mechanism.
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As always, please hit reply if something in here resonates with you.
Until next week,
Lavena
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