Mental displacement

This technique has to do with what I said about imagination so if you haven't read that, read that first. The difference this time is that instead of imagining that we're playing the guitar while doing regular things, we'll imagine we're doing regular things while playing guitar. There are a few differences between the 2 techniques, and reasons why both are important.

Firstly, the aforementioned imagination technique is about dealing with the experience of playing guitar by imagining a situation where we are completely fluent with the guitar, we do this with our conscious mind. The mental displacement technique involves having a guitar in our hands and imagining that it's not in our hands, so in this case we're letting our subconscious mind deal with the experience of playing guitar. They're both important because we want to use our whole mind while playing, this is what the most skilled virtuosos of the world are doing when they play.

Secondly, while imagining that we're virtuosos or at least at a higher level than we are currently, we're creating a situation in our mind that hasn't happened yet. In the situation of imagining that we're not playing the guitar, we can think of anything we want and to do this we can draw on past memories, these can be powerful because we've been there and we know what it feels like which makes that situation easier to recreate mentally, which makes it easier to draw our conscious mind away from the guitar and leave our subconscious to do its work (because it is always working).

Another thing to keep in mind is that we all have our strengths and weaknesses, some people are better at daydreaming and imagination while some others are better at noticing their surroundings, taking things in and remembering them. By learning about yourself you can figure out which approach is more suited to you. If you take the MBTI test and get an S (sensing) then mental displacement is probably better for you, if you get an N (intuition) then you're probably more comfortable with imagination. Regardless, I think both should be worked on but with more emphasis on our strengths, because we want to be strong players.

So now what kind of situations do we want to imagine ourselves in? We want to imagine situations in which we feel the way we want to feel while playing guitar. Think about why you want to play guitar, what feeling are you looking for? Do you play to relax? feel excited? have fun? look cool? Whatever vibe you're looking for, mentally place yourself in a situation that produces (or produced) those feelings. Feelings are what resonate with our whole body and our whole mind, including (and often stemming from) the subconscious, we want our subconscious mind to associate positive feelings with guitar playing. Some of my personal favourite situations are:

- relaxing in a hot bath or in bed
- going for a walk on a sunny day
- playing video games
- snowboarding
- skydiving (I haven't skydived before but I find this one good because it's a situation of freefall where your muscles have nothing to do and can relax fully, but it's also exciting)
- having a cold beer (I do this one because while holding a beer up to my mouth with my left hand, my arm and hand are in a positions reminiscent of guitar playing, which can help get into it more.)
etc.

Remember to not put too much pressure on yourself and that it becomes easier and more effective the more you do it.