Creative visualization is a term used by New Age, popular psychology, and self-help writers and teachers in two contexts.

Firstly, it is used by some to denote the practice of generating positive and pleasant visual mental imagery with intent to recover from physical sickness or disability and eliminate psychological pain. Secondly, it is used by others to signify the generation of autobiographical visual mental imagery, by which the participant envisions themselves in desired circumstances, commonly evoking prospective images that depict abundance of financial wealth, professional or vocational success and achievement, pervasive health, and persistent happiness.

The use of the phrase "creative visualization" to denote the practice of visualizing idealized autobiographical mental imagery indicative of physical, psychological, social, and financial goals has remained one of many self-realization or self-actualization pursuits characteristic of popular psychology and the New Age since the personal development writer Shakti Gawain published a book entitled Creative Visualization in 1978.

The first line of the book reads "Creative Visualization is the technique of creating what you want in your life". The following opening paragraphs define imagination as the "creative energy of the universe", and introduces the book as a means by which to use the so-defined imagination to "create what you truly want — love, fulfillment, enjoyment, satisfying relationships, rewarding work, self-expression, health, beauty, prosperity, inner peace, and harmony."

Gawain's book popularized a premise derived from the New Thought movement that began during the nineteenth century, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. The premise is that individuals have a mind containing mental content, including thoughts, images, memories, and predictions, which become manifested through the experience of living.

Gawain's book focuses primarily on making changes to visual mental imagery, and attributes to it the capacity for hindering or facilitating an individual's potential, citing vivid anecdotal stories drawn from her experience and that of others to support her thesis.

Subsequent to the popularity of the book, the practice of creative visualization, as described by Gawain, remained a staple and stable feature within the New Age movement, self-help media, and popular psychology of the 1980s, 1990s, and first decade of the 21st century.

The claim that thoughts and visual mental images are composed of a universal energy described by Gawain in 1978 as the "creative energy of the universe", which can be brought under volitional control by Creative Visualization was amplified and exaggerated twenty-eight years later by the writer and television producer, Rhonda Byrne.