How to Enhance Your Visual-Spatial Capabilities
When someone mentions visual-spatial skills, my mind races back to 14 years ago when I took a college entrance exam. The questions featured multiple shapes, which I needed to analyze and figure out how they would look if they were turned clockwise or anti-clockwise. At the time, I did not give it too much attention. I felt it was a pointless exercise. What good could come out of being good at those types of questions? However, visual-spatial skills are becoming increasingly important today.
Most of us think these skills are innate and that they are only gifted to those who are naturally intelligent. We tend to think you are either born with them or you are not. However, that is not true at all.
To develop a growth mindset, you need to start believing your abilities and skills are moldable. No matter how much or how little you may be “naturally gifted,” you can enhance your skills with time if you work on them.
Don’t become a victim of a fixed mindset. When you limit your mindset, you will start believing you are born with just a limited number of skills and that no matter what you do, you will not be able to add on to them.
To develop visual-spatial skills or any other skills for that matter, you need to have a growth mindset. Here are a couple of ways you can improve these skills.
Keep Your Body in Motion
A good way to enhance your visual-spatial skills is to become a moving object yourself. In other words, keep your body in motion.
This skill involves having the ability to visualize your body’s relationship to other objects. Hence, any kind of movement that needs this sort of bodily intelligence will aid in developing visual-spatial skills. Some of these exercises include martial arts and dance. When you practice these exercises, you make your brain work out which foot goes where after each step. This will naturally strengthen your visual-spatial abilities.
You can even improve these skills when you are going out for a walk. Pay attention to different objects you come across while you are walking. Observe what is in the background and foreground. Evaluate how far a tree may be from a lake in the distance. View the scenery as objects and try to determine their positions relative to other objects.
Take Up Painting as a Hobby
Visual arts is another good way to develop visual-spatial abilities. Painting any object requires creating a lot of depth. Getting into the habit of focusing on depth will no doubt enhance your visual-spatial skills.
When I used to take art classes in school, I didn’t put too much effort into the various activities that were conducted in class. So when I painted, all objects would be on the same plane and of the same size. However, when my art teachers painted, the depth of the objects relative to each other was picture-perfect. The hills would always be in the background. The trees and houses would always appear in front of the hills. Birds would appear to be flying across the painting in both the background and foreground.
There are few better ways to improve your visual-spatial skills than picking up a paintbrush and creating your paintings. It doesn’t matter if you don’t become the next Pablo Picasso. As long as you are painting, no matter how ugly your paintings turn out, you will get into the habit of visualizing objects and that is enough to improve your visual-spatial skills. If you want to up your painting game, there are plenty of painting tutorials available on YouTube.
Summing Up
The job environment is changing rapidly. Previously visual-spatial skills were required for just a handful of professions, like architecture and designing. However, now these skills are required across multiple professions like computing and programming. Even in many technology jobs, you are required to have the ability to mentally manipulate objects in a 3D space.
There are plenty of courses available online that will help you develop these skills. Before you set out to become visually spatially adept, you need to have a reliable internet connection. Get dependable internet speed only with Kinetic Windstream.