Picturing Success Is Strong Preparation For It

Mentally practice the thoughts, feelings and actions necessary for good performance and you will greatly speed up achievement - a valuable tool to accelerate learning. How can it be done? In a general over-all way you may picture yourself quietly and without strain listening to the incoming signals and easily recognizing them as the printed or spoken letters and words they represent, and as sending well-formed characters without hurry or strain. Picture yourself doing it, and doing it well, like an expert. It helps to have a real model in mind. Watch or imagine a skilled performer (a telegrapher if you can find one) at work. He isn't in any hurry. He isn't flustered or concerned, he just does it and enjoys it. Repeat and rehearse this picture often in your mind.

 

There are at least two ways to use this tool. One is to sit back and relax and deliberately form the picture. To get started, set up a general over-all picture first. As you continue practicing the mental picture of how you want to do, add details, making it more and more realistic until you have a solid lifelike picture in mind. See yourself doing it, how you will do it step by step. The more vividly you can mentally see, hear, and feel it as you rehearse the picture, the better the results will be, how doing it right looks, and how it feels. This is not mere wishful thinking, it is building up a working pattern to become realized in time as you continue actual receiving and sending practice. This kind of mental picturing can have much the same effect as real practice. It creates memories, models of the behavior as you want it to be - but it is, of course, no substitute for real practice –actually doing it.

 

Another way is now and then to "see" brief "snapshots" of yourself receiving and sending while you are doing other things (such as driving, walking, working, etc.), not making any particular effort to fill in details.

 

You may want to try it right after you have learned the sounds of the first group of letters. Sit quietly in a chair, close your eyes, relax, and imagine you are hearing each letter sound (just as you heard it), taking them one at a time, and immediately recognizing it or writing it down with a pencil. Make the picture as realistic and vivid as you can, even to imagining the "feeling" the pencil writing on the paper. Feel a sense of satisfaction of doing it right. Three to five minutes practice this way at any one time is probably enough. You can then repeat this kind of mental practice with each new group of characters as you learn them, and it will greatly strengthen the habit you are trying to build.

 

When you know the whole alphabet and have a clear mental picture of how each character should sound, you can mentally practice visualizing short printed words and then imagine "hearing" them spelled out in code. Feel it in your mind as if it were actual - a mental "sending" practice.

 

Mental picturing practice may be extended to prepare you to minimize distractions, such as static, interfering signals, noisy people in the vicinity milling around, being watched closely, etc. Prepare for these by picturing yourself calmly receiving and sending while extraneous noises - talking, shouting, crashes - are all around you Think of what a war-front operator would have to contend with! It may also be used to help learn to copy on a "mill" (typewriter or keyboard), and other aspects you may need to meet.

 

All this is preparatory and supportive of real practice, not a substitute for actual practice by doing. The goal we seek is for the use of the code to be as natural and easy as talking, reading, and writing. These mental images take some real effort and practice. Don't expect instant results, give it time to grow.

Chapter 3

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