For many years I've working with partners or experts to enhance our body focused retreat programmes with support for the mind. In June we've rolled out our new Future Perfect workshop which will be held during our Champneys and Marbella Club retreats - we've just run the first session and is was incredibly popular! 

The workshop is based on something called Psycho Cybernetics. Psycho refers to the mind and cybernetics refers to the feedback mechanism we all have in our brains.

In evolutionary terms we have an inbuilt automatic goal achieving success mechanism hard-wired into our brains geared to helping us survive. Unfortunately what happens for the majority of us is that we trigger or reinforce the wrong  ‘goals’ by continually overlaying thoughts to do with our past into our present or our futures. For example, it’s easier to overlay the now with what’s familiar…even if it’s a negative or detrimental thought…. “I’m inadequate, not clever, not sporty, not pretty etc.” It’s familiar and for our primitive brain the known is safer and less scary than the unknown….even if our conscious brain understands that we are choosing a negative.

The research into this originally began with a cosmetic surgeon called Dr Maxwell Maltz who noticed that patients after surgery continued to suffer from low self-esteem and an inaccurate self-image, the emotional scars of the past were affecting their now.

The experiments were geared towards exploring how to activate the positive automatic success mechanism and what they found out essentially was that in order to do that you needed to repeatedly and vividly visualise.

Our brains are primarily wired for visual output, specifically imagery.

70% of all your sensory receptors are in your eyes.

50% of your brain is involved in visual processing.

We can process a visual scene in less than 1/10 of a second.

Today our brains suffer from information overload….we receive 5 x more information daily than we did 30 years ago, so it is a relief for our brains to relax and take in a lovely visual image.

Practicing mental imagery impacts the motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory parts of the brain. In effect by visualising you are priming, training and steering yourself actively towards your future as opposed to being passively carried by old beliefs.

I like the image of the difference between a raft floating down a river at the mercy or whimsy of what it encounters vs the same raft outfitted with a rudder and a sail. Your choices are greater with the latter option without taking away the ‘just drift along’ option when you want it.

So why do we include a Future Perfect Workshop?

Most of us have really busy lives as well as very busy brains and apart from anything else it is just much easier having the space facilitated to clarify and sift out habitual ‘past’ messages that might be running our systems. It’s fun, more creative and useful to be inspired by other people’s journeys and processes.

Psychologists generally agree that developmentally a child’s belief system with regards to the kind of person they identify as, their worth in life, what they believe the world is like, even when they are going to die, are all embedded by the age of 7. There are some developmental windows for tweaking during the adolescent years, but essentially our unconscious has for most of us, been left without new data or ‘updates’ for a long time.

A workshop is an opportunity to update and install exciting new programming that you have chosen.

Clients leave having a beautiful laminated vision board creation - what a lovely way to support our valued guests!