🦉 10x curiosity — Issue #110 — When Positive Thinking Won’t Get You There…
Is the constant advice to think positive really all that useful?
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Achieving goals doesn’t come without hurdles, and the internet is full of advice on visualisation and mantra’s, positive thinking and manifesting your way to your goals. But is this useful? Turns out, maybe not so much.
Psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen looks at this question in her book “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” :
Positive thinking can make us feel better in the short term, but over the long term it saps our motivation, preventing us from achieving our wishes and goals, and leaving us feeling frustrated, stymied and stuck. If we really want to move ahead in our lives, engage with the world and feel energised, we need to go beyond positive thinking and connect as well with the obstacles that stand in our way. (Aeon)
Oettingen found through her work that more than just visualising success, you need to work through what can go wrong and importantly what you are going to do when inevitably it does. She calls this the WOOP process:
WOOP: The Scientifically Validated Exercise to Make Your Goals a Reality
Mental Contrasting + Implementation Intentions = WOOP!
The WOOP framework has four main parts:
- Wish
- Outcome
- Obstacles
- Plans
More from Mindful Ambition
Applying WOOP in your own life is a straightforward process. Simply follow these five steps:
1) Create a Wish
- What do you want to create in your life? Think of something that feels exciting, challenging, and feasible.
- Describe it in 3–6 words.
2) Envision the Outcome
- What’s the biggest benefit you could experience as a result of achieving this wish?
- Describe it in 3–6 words. (We want to get clear and specific here…hence the small number of words.)
3) Identify Obstacles
- What obstacle(s) might you create that would prevent you from making that wish a reality? (Focusing on the internal, or self-created obstacles first helps you focus on what’s in your control.)
- Identify as many as possible…Let your pen run wild.
- Prioritize the obstacles based on likelihood and significance.
4) Create “If…then” Plans
- What might you do to get around the most significant obstacles you identified?
- For each obstacle, make an “If…then” plan. (e.g. “If [obstacle occurs] then I will [plan 1].”)
- Pick the most effective path you could take for each identified obstacle.
5) Take Action
The WOOP concept is mirrored in another tool I find useful — Dan Sullivan’s Impact Filter. This tool prompts you to think through what you are trying to get out of a project or meeting or interaction and mentally work through both good and bad outcomes ahead of time. This in turn is a subset of the pre-mortem tool, developed by Gary Klein, which puts you in the frame of your future self looking back at a successful (or unsuccessful!) project and imagining everything that has happened to lead you to that point. Psychologists have found it is much easier to do this than than try and project forward all the issues that you might encounter.
The WOOP process has been also shown to be very useful for kids- see the excellent infographic below from Big Life Journal.
Hear about WOOP on NPR’s Hidden Brain
Let me know what you think? I’d love your feedback. If you haven’t already then sign up for a weekly dose just like this.
Links that made me think…
Britain passes one week without coal power for first time since 1882 | Business | The Guardian
www.theguardian.com
Landmark follows government pledge to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2025
No, diesel is not better for the environment than electric — Innovation Origins — innovationorigins.com
Rebuttal to Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn titled “Coal Engines, Wind Engines and Diesel Engines. What does the CO2 balance show?”
Why Accidents Like the Notre-Dame Fire Happen — The Atlantic — www.theatlantic.com
Our very attempts to stave off disaster make unpredictable outcomes more likely.
Why a Traffic Flow Suddenly Turns Into a Traffic Jam — Issue 71: Flow — Nautilus — nautil.us
Few experiences on the road are more perplexing than phantom traffic jams. Most of us have experienced one: The vehicle ahead of you…
