Discover how holding an image of something better can transform lives through purpose, resilience and reinvention.
Image: Supplied.
I have protocols. A 5am alarm. Meditation. Movement. Intentional silence before the world starts. I have read the literature, studied the frameworks, lived the practice. Rhonda Byrne. Napoleon Hill. Neville Goddard. John Demartini. This is not new to me.
So, I did not pick up this book to learn the basics. I picked it up because I wanted to be uncomfortable. Because discipline without challenge eventually becomes routine. And routine, however elegant, is not growth.
The Power of Visualisation: African Journeys of Purpose, Resilience and Reinvention delivered exactly that. Not by teaching me something new about the technique. By showing me the conditions under which it becomes a matter of survival rather than self-improvement. That is a different conversation entirely.
Two Women Who Earned the Right to Write This
Dr Shirley Zinn grew up on the Cape Flats during apartheid, went on to earn a doctorate from Harvard and held senior HR roles at Standard Bank, Nedbank, Woolworths Holdings and SARS. Dr Augusta Dorning became the first female hospital manager of South Africa's largest private hospital in its 120-year history and now drives healthcare improvement across the continent through Extraordinary Hospitals of Africa.
Neither of them wrote this from a comfortable distance. That matters more than any credential.
Why It Works and Why It Sometimes Doesn't
Neuroscience confirms what high performers have quietly known for decades. The brain does not fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. Mental rehearsal activates the same neural pathways as physical practice. Functional MRI studies show that mentally rehearsing an action engages the motor cortex, the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system simultaneously. The brain literally rehearses the outcome before the body has moved a single muscle.
This is why Oprah Winfrey says she became what she believed. Why Arnold Schwarzenegger walked into his first Mr Universe competition having already won it a hundred times in his mind. Why Serena Williams has spoken about using mental imagery as part of her match preparation. Why Eliud Kipchoge, the Kenyan marathon runner who broke the two-hour barrier, says athletics is not about the legs. It is about the heart and the mind. Why Jim Carrey wrote himself a cheque for ten million dollars before he had a single major role and dated it three years into the future. It arrived almost to the day.
These are not coincidences. They are neuroplasticity in action.
But here is what the research also shows and what most popular books on this subject quietly skip over. The technique is only as powerful as the self-belief beneath it. If you do not believe you deserve or can hold what you are imagining, the brain treats the image as fiction. You can pin photographs to a board every January and feel nothing shift.
This book gets to the root of that problem. It is not really about the practice as a technique. It is about what makes belief possible in the first place.
Not One Story, Many
The contributors in this collection do not all come from the same starting point. That is deliberate and it matters. Some visualised careers, boardrooms and qualifications. Others visualised safety, stability, and a meal on the table. Both acts are equally whole. Both require the same internal discipline: to hold an image of something better than what currently surrounds you and refuse to let it go.
The African context is not decoration. These are not people who visualised from comfort. They visualised against force. Against systems, against loss, against the particular weight of a continent that has never made aspiration easy. That changes the texture of the stories entirely and it is what separates this collection from its Western counterparts.
What You Can Do with This Book
Read it as research into the conditions that make belief possible, not just the mechanics of imagining. Ask yourself honestly whether you believe you deserve what you are working towards. Not as a soft question. As a diagnostic one.
Then read it again and notice which stories stop you. Those are probably the ones doing the most work.
Visualisation without self-belief is decoration. This book is about building the foundation that makes the whole thing real.
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