Going beyond imagination
When vision is strong, clear and believable enough, many of the world's best athletes don't even think much about the execution, they perform in a state of flow.
“Fictio quaerens veritatem": is a Latin phrase, coined by Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book The Art of Conjecture, that translates into “a fiction seeking truth”.
'fictio' - fiction, shaping, an invented or formed image
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'quaerens' - seeking
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'veritatem' = truth
What is means is that imagined mental images, or fictions...fantasies, dreams, visions...are the source of our motivated and sustained drive in applying our knowledge and resources to build what we desire.
- Fiction is what drives us to outperform. How we imagine the world could be and is of major importance to living a purposeful life.
- Practically applying our know-how, skills and resources appropriately over time,
- Creates the future...beyond imagination.
Spending time crafting fiction then is the most valuable use of time.
Athletes practice “fictio quaerens veritatem” and its called 'visualisation'.
Before committing to action, an athlete plays out, a perfect run-through of their pending performance, in their mind's eye.
It's been shown that at Olympic-level, there is very little difference physiologically between competitors; the edge between winners and losers, often comes down to how well an individual is able to perform “fictio quaerens veritatem”.
When vision is strong, clear and believable enough, many of the world's best athletes don't even think much about the execution, they perform in a state of flow.
Without a clear vision of the ideal future, our minds get trapped in reacting to the world in an endless present-state, rather than proactively working towards a long-term, future ideal that is worthwhile of effort.
“Watch your thoughts; they become your words; watch your words; they become your actions.” - Lao Tzu
The value and science of visualisation is a big part of performance coaching in sport; its time that sport's monopoly on it weakened.
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Jon Cherry