One of the most tossed around pieces of advice out there in the world of self improvement is the phrase “Act as if.”

Act as if your goal is already achieved. Act as if your goal is inevitably going to be achieved. Act as if you’re already the person you want to be.

At first glance, that advice seems kind of foolish. How can you act like something’s already happened when it hasn’t? Wouldn’t you just be making a fool out of yourself?

The first thing I want to clarify is that acting as if alone obviously doesn’t help you obtain any results.

It’s merely a tool and the reason why this tool is effective on some level is because it’s simply visualization in action. Visualization is powerful enough, but visualization in action helps take visualization itself to a higher level.

When you act as if, you’re putting yourself in the future state of where you want to be in and when you see how great it feels, that just serves to further fuel your desire to get there.

It also obviously helps strengthen your belief that the goal will be achieved because you’re physically doing it, not just running a mental tape of what you think it would be like in your mind. This actually helps with your mental visualization because you gather more details and feelings that you can use to “sharpen” your mental visualization that you never would’ve gotten had you not “acted as if”.

Some examples of “acting as if” that come to mind is the famous actor Jim Carrey making out a check to himself for ten million dollars one night during a walk up to the Hollywood Hills, that would soon later be realized by the date he had written on it and the famous film director Steven Spielberg, donning on a black suit and carrying a briefcase in his early years, strutting past the security guards at Universal Studios and setting up his own office in an empty bungalow so he could absorb the atmosphere of the directing world and learn immensely from it. When you do the things that are conducive to what you will be doing when the goal is achieved, you expose yourself to certain elements of it that help fuel your desire and belief.

Boxers will often climb into the exact ring they’re fighting in the next night, shadow box with an invisible opponent and raise their arms in victory at the end, basking in the glory of the victory they are experiencing in their own little world.

A high school student wanting to get into a certain university might benefit by visiting the campus and walking around it, acting like a current student by dropping in on certain classes and eating at different places on campus because all those details, experiences, and feelings from actually physically doing what you’ve been visualizing helps take your visualization to the next level. You have more “meat” to it so to speak so it makes it that much more "real" to you.

Acting as if starts putting you in a favorable cycle by introducing elements that help fuel your desire and belief and everything will start to build on itself and snowball into momentum in your favor.

It may seem foolish when you first try it, but it’s actually pretty fun when you get used to it. You feel like you’re time traveling and you’ll soon find yourself quickly closing the gap between the present and the future you want.

Start “acting as if” by doing some of the things you would be doing, given the fact that your goal is already achieved. It’s a tool that does have some merit to it so it doesn’t hurt to use it.