Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Emotionalized Mental Rehearsal
Daily, vividly rehearse the desired outcome using all the senses plus strong emotion, so the brain treats the future self as familiar and primes matching behaviour.
Assaraf’s emotionalized rehearsal: Daily, calmly rehearse your goal and your future self in first-person, using all five senses and strong, real emotion — feel it as already yours. Repeat to build the pattern, rehearse the process not just the prize, and then act. Visualization without action, in his words, is wasting your time.
What it is
This is John Assaraf’s daily visualization practice: not idle picturing, but multi-sensory mental rehearsal charged with real emotion, in which you repeatedly experience the desired outcome — and the future self who has it — until the brain treats it as familiar and “primes” matching behaviour.
Assaraf’s distinctive emphasis is emotion and full sensory detail: “really vivid visualizations include all of your senses plus your very real emotions,” and you should “believe and fully feel as if it’s yours — that it couldn’t be any other way.” He frames it as neural priming — building “new neural patterns” that become “automatic habits and subconscious expectations.” This differs from the generic mental-rehearsal and future-self entries in its insistence on daily emotional intensity as the active ingredient and its neuroplasticity framing.
The Method
Assaraf’s practice, faithfully:
- Choose the goal / future self clearly — the specific outcome and the version of you who lives it.
- Rehearse it daily, in a calm state (he often pairs it with a breath reset first).
- Use all five senses — sight, sound, taste, touch, smell — to make the scene vivid and first-person.
- Add strong, real emotion — feel the satisfaction, gratitude, pride or relief of already having it. The emotion, not the picture alone, is what he says makes it “stick.”
- Repeat and reinforce — through repetition the pattern becomes an “automatic habit and subconscious expectation.”
- Take action — Assaraf is explicit that visualization without action is “wasting your time”; rehearsal is to prepare and prime, then you act. (Sourcing note: faithful to Assaraf’s Innercise, The Answer, and NeuroGym “Power of Visualization” materials; quoted phrases are his.)
Source & Lineage
The practice sits in the long visualization lineage — New Thought “mental picturing,” Silva Method mental rehearsal, and sports-psychology motor imagery — re-expressed by Assaraf in neuroplasticity language. He developed it across The Answer (with Murray Smith, 2008) and the Innercise system at NeuroGym.
Common refinements
Flat, emotionless picturing. Without real feeling, Assaraf says it doesn’t work; engage emotion and senses fully.
- Outcome-only fantasy. Rehearse the process and the future self acting, not just the end reward.
- Rehearsal as a substitute for doing. Treat it as priming, then act.
- Inconsistency. It is a daily rep, not a one-off; the benefit compounds with repetition.