If you've ever performed a part in a play, you know the more you actually become the individual you are portraying, the more convincing you are to an audi- ence.
Internalizing this same role playing through visualization can often help you solve problems or overcome impasses in your life.
As an exercise, think of someone you know or have heard about (past or present) that would be most likely to solve a particular dilemma in your life.
Now visualize that person and step into his (her) shoes and fully associate yourself as being that somebody looking through their eyes.
Act out in your mind exactly what that person would do to master your problem, step by step.
Of course, you already know the answer to your problem, but by transferring yourself into the role of an acknowledged problem solver, you overcome the obstacle of not seeing it as yourself, but as someone else instead.
Once you feel how it feels to solve your problem through visualization, you also realize what it will take to solve that problem in the real world too.
Care must be taken with this exercise though, because every thought has an effect on the universe.
Actors and famous people are often thought about by so many individuals that their minds must be constantly inundated with conflicting images received from other minds -- both serene and perverse.
In fact, many people who have used this role playing technique have been utterly convinced that they were in actual mind synch with the person they were fantasizing.
Experiments have shown that students in art classes can develop rapidly into advanced, sophisticated artists under hypnosis, when they believed themselves to be some famous painter of the past.
Even in so doing they develop their own style and ability.
Through the technique of self-hypnotic time distortion (review "Exercise -- Learn Through Time Distortion"), you can even create lengthy sessions of instruction and practice within only minutes of real time.
Since a hypnotized person can impersonate someone fairly accurately, you can do it too, even without hypnosis.
This practice of assuming beneficial roles can make big changes in your life.
After studying successful men and women in various fields of endeavor, it has been found that there are fundamental behavioral traits that these people do over and over again to achieve their success.
Success leaves clues by way of certain mental and physical characteristics that anyone can duplicate.
If you do so, you'll produce the same successful results without going through the years of trial and error their originators did.
Any form of human excellence can be duplicated in this way.
Would you like to be more aggressive, wealthy, brainy, loving, etc.?
As an exercise, choose someone that can serve as your personal model of success.
Observe closely how they move, their posture, breathing pattern & muscle tension and the tonality and speed of their speech pattern.
Then, take action, and move in an enthusiastic way with an effective strategy toward replicating the characteristics of the person that you've observed as successful.
You can also create an internal visual image of this model person and step into it in a fully associated way and become that person you wish to emulate.
As an experiment, the next time that you're at a party, choose someone to watch and speak to.
As you are doing this, replicate their body language, posture, breathing and speech patterns, and see how favorable your rapport becomes with that person.
The quick rapport that you establish is because you are exactly like that person in so many identical ways.
This is just a small example of what can be done in a greater way when you replicate the characteristics of a successful person in any field of endeavor.