Practically everyone has wishes and goals for their private and professional life. But how can we really achieve them?
“I want to lose weight.”
“I want to improve my relationship with my parents.”
“I want to convince my boss to promote me.”
Oftentimes, these good resolutions fail at the first hurdles. Those who don’t take the necessary time for their plans will lose sight of their goal in the stress of everyday life, or they won’t have enough willpower and energy to persevere and overcome their fears.
Many productivity experts and motivational coaches advise us to focus as intensely as possible on the desired goals, rather than waste energy on thinking about obstacles and potential problems. Visualizing the ideal future and positive affirmations are intended to help sustain motivation. But many people fail with these strategies.
That’s not because they don’t want to achieve these goals or they’re doing something wrong. On the contrary: their experience corresponds with findings of research in the psychology of motivation, which has meanwhile established that a positive focus is not sufficient.
A range of scientific studies have found that positive thinking and dreaming can even be counterproductive when it comes to achieving our goals. In various studies, positive thinking had a sedative effect on study participants. They appeared to gain enough positive feelings simply from their idea so that they no longer took action in real life to actually implement the changes necessary.
Conversely, those who become aware of what might hinder them from achieving their goal can paradoxically improve the likeliness that they’ll achieve it – provided they still consider it feasible. This technique is called mental contrasting and it plays a key role in the WOOP method.
Other studies have shown that people who define their goals and approach in writing have success more often than test subjects who only took a decision internally. Simply formulating a plan increases the probability of success by 50 percent. Plans following the if-then model worked particularly effectively.