Mastering Your Process Visualizations & How to Do It

There's a moment before Michael Phelps ever touches the water where the race is already won. Long before he steps onto the blocks, he's swum it hundreds of times, stroke by stroke, in his mind.

That's not a metaphor. It's a documented part of his training, and it points to something most people underestimate: visualization isn't a nice-to-have mental trick. It's a trainable skill, and it might be the most underused tool today, whether the performance is a swim race, a boardroom pitch, a speech, or a moment of intimacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EdbGHKsEg

What the Best in the World Do

Phelps' coach, Bob Bowman, built visualization directly into his training regimen. Each night, Phelps would relax his body from head to toe, then mentally rehearse his races. Bowman described it simply: "Once you put yourself in a relaxed state, it's like watching a movie." But Phelps wasn't just watching a highlight reel of himself winning. He rehearsed the race from multiple angles, sometimes from the pool deck, sometimes from inside his own body, feeling the cold water and the burn in his shoulders.

He also visualized things going wrong: a goggle filling with water, a bad start, a rival surging ahead, so that when adversity actually showed up, his mind had already been there. By the time he reached a World Championship or Olympic final, Bowman said, "he's swum that race hundreds of times in his mind."

Synchronized swimming takes this even further, and it's one of the clearest examples of what visualization actually looks like in practice. Elite synchro teams spend up to half of their training time entirely out of the pool. On land, without a drop of water, they run through full routines, shuffling their legs and feet to simulate the motion, working through arm and body positioning with none of the water's resistance to hide behind.

Alongside those physical run-throughs, they layer in pure mental rehearsal: finding a calm space, closing their eyes, and running the routine internally, gradually adding sensory detail, the music, the smell of chlorine, the temperature of the water, until the internal rehearsal feels almost as real as the actual performance.

Why This Actually Works

This isn't wishful thinking dressed up as sports psychology. When you vividly imagine performing a physical action, your brain activates significantly overlapping regions, including the motor cortex, to the ones it uses when you actually perform that action. Your brain doesn't fully distinguish between a well rehearsed mental simulation and the real movement. That's the mechanism behind why mental rehearsal can build real skill: you're laying down and reinforcing neural patterns before you ever put your body through the motion, which means your body has less new territory to figure out when the moment actually arrives.

This is also why visualization isn't limited to sports. A 2009 study on public speaking found that visualization measurably reduced speech anxiety and improved actual performance in speakers who used it consistently. The mechanism is the same one the athletes were using. Rehearsing the walk to the podium, the sound of your own voice landing clearly, the moments where you'll pause and let a point land, means your nervous system has already been there. It's not new when you arrive.

The same logic extends into business. Walking through a hard negotiation, a high stakes pitch, or a difficult conversation with a client in vivid mental detail before you're in the room does the same work that Phelps' pre-race rehearsal did for him. You're not just building confidence, you're pre-loading the actual neural patterns you'll need to draw on when the pressure is real.

How to Practice It

The athletes above all rehearsed from more than one angle, and that's really the key to making visualization work. Phelps watched his races from poolside and from inside his own body. The same layered approach can be broken into three distinct passes, each one giving you something the others can't.

Part One: Become the Fly on the Wall

Start outside yourself entirely. Picture the room from a distance, up in a corner, watching the whole scene unfold. Notice the setting first: the size of the space, the lighting, where people are sitting, how the room is arranged. Then find the audience. Who's there? How are they positioned, are they close together or spread out, leaning in or settled back? And then find yourself in the scene, as if you were a fly on the wall. How do you carry yourself from that distance? What does your posture say before you've said a word?

This pass isn't really about performance yet. It's about removing the unknown. A huge amount of pre-performance anxiety comes from walking into a space your mind hasn't been to before. By the time you actually arrive, you've already been in that room. It's familiar territory instead of blank space.

Part Two: Step Into the Audience

Now leave the wall and become one of the people watching. This is the perspective almost nobody rehearses, and it's usually the most valuable one. What are they feeling as they watch you? Where's their attention? Find the specific moment where something you say or do lands, the line that makes someone pause and think, the beat that gets a smile, the point that earns applause.

This pass shifts the entire exercise. Up until now you've been picturing yourself. Here, you're picturing your effect on someone else. That's a different kind of preparation, because it forces you to identify what actually matters in the room: not just getting through your material, but the specific moments built to connect.

Part Three: Return to Your Own Body

Now come back inside yourself and rehearse it from the inside out. What do you feel? Find the specific emotion, calm, grounded, alive, and let it settle in before you move forward. Notice your posture, tall and open rather than closed off. Notice your hands, moving with intention instead of fidgeting or hiding.

Then rehearse the sound of yourself. You enunciate clearly. Your tone moves deliberately between high and low, loud and quiet, instead of sitting flat in one register the whole time. And you use the pause, the moment where you stop, let the silence sit, and feel the room lean in a little closer to hear what comes next.

By the time you've run all three passes, the moment isn't unfamiliar anymore. You've seen the room, you've felt your impact on the people in it, and you've felt what it's like in your own body to deliver it well. That's the same layered rehearsal Phelps used watching his race from the deck and from inside the water at once, just applied to a stage instead of a pool.

Join Our Community

To learn more about breathwork, check out our online courses. If you really want to dive in and become certified, join ourself-paced our group online Instructor Training and learn our 3-part framework on how to guide others out of dysfunctional breathing patterns and into better self-control and emotional knowledge.

Want to really get out there? Join us in the Indian Himalayas on our breath expedition next July 2027!

---

Kevin Connelly

Kevin is an author, researcher, and breath expert who's led thousands of wellness enthusiasts through breathwork experiences around the world. He is one of the leaders in breathwork-related research and conducts studies on the effects of breath on the heart and brain. Kevin delivers breathwork and cold exposure trainings for retreats, corporate events, and businesses worldwide.