If you’re like a lot of men, you’ve probably set some big goals for yourself this year. Lose twenty pounds. Start a side hustle. Finally read Aristotle.
When you set those goals for yourself, you likely felt good. Really good. Setting goals feels awesome. You imagine yourself looking lean in the mirror, seeing that first deposit hit your bank account, or riffing to your friends about Aristotle’s idea of phronesis. You’re riding a high of pure, unadulterated positive vibes.
But then, a week later, you’ve missed a week of workouts, haven’t even bought the URL for your side hustle website, and a brand new, uncracked copy of Nicomachean Ethics sits on your nightstand.
What happened?
Well, you were probably too stinking positive.
According to Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at NYU, pure positive visualization can actually backfire on you. When you fantasize about achieving a goal, your brain starts to think you’ve already accomplished it. Your raring-to-go drive dampens, and when obstacles on your path towards achieving the goal come your way, you wilt. You eat the QT taquito instead of sticking to your macros. You scroll YouTube Shorts instead of working on your business. You read The Daily Mail instead of Aristotle.
If you want to actually accomplish your goals this year, you need a dose of realism. You need to marry a portion of positive thinking with a dose of negative thinking.
A framework that Dr. Oettingen developed can help you do that.
It’s called WOOP.
The Power of Mental Contrasting
If you want to move the needle on your goals, you have to stop indulging in what Oettingen calls “free fantasies.” This is when you only think about positive outcomes and the good feelings you’ll experience when you accomplish your goal. As I mentioned above, her research has found that when we only think about the positive, our brains get tricked into thinking we’ve already arrived, and we lose our drive to actually do the brass tacks work to reach the goal.
To fix this, Oettingen pioneered a process called mental contrasting.
The idea is simple. You don’t just visualize yourself on the mountaintop with your fists up in the air, celebrating your success. You also need to visualize the jagged rocks and the steep cliffs you’ll have to climb to get there. You pepper your positive thinking with a vision of the obstacles that could potentially get in the way of achieving your aim.
This creates what psychologists call “mental tension.” By contrasting the future you want with a realistic picture of the landscape you’ll have to traverse to get there, your brain recognizes a gap that needs to be closed. It suddenly realizes, “Oh, I’m not there yet. I better do things to relieve this tension.” The tension is the fuel that mobilizes your energy and prepares you to act and get stuff done.
But identifying the obstacles on the path to your goal is only half the battle. You also need a plan on how you’re going to overcome those hurdles and barriers so you can keep plodding towards your desired outcome. To do that, Oettingen recommends creating an implementation intention. We’ve written about these “automated” actions before. An implementation intention is an “if-then” plan that links a specific situational cue to a predetermined goal-directed response.
Let’s say you decide one of the obstacles you’ll encounter in your goal to lose twenty pounds is “I’ll be tempted to snack on the donuts left every day in the office breakroom.” An implementation intention to overcome this obstacle would look something like: “If I see the donuts in the breakroom, I will immediately return to my desk and start working.”
By doing this, you’ve essentially automated your response to temptation. Instead of standing in front of the box of donuts, dithering about whether you’re going to eat them or not, and telling yourself you’ll “just have half,” you’ve outsourced the decision to a pre-programmed script.
WOOP There It Is: A 4-Step Framework for Achieving Your Goals
To help people put these two concepts — mental contrasting and implementation intentions — into practice, Oettingen developed a simple, four-step framework. It’s called WOOP, and it stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.
Let’s walk through it:
1. Wish
A “Wish” is something you want to accomplish that is challenging but actually feasible. It’s a goal. It could be something you want to do today, this month, or this year.
Let’s say your wish is to lose twenty pounds by June.
Write that down.
2. Outcome
Now, visualize the best possible result of fulfilling that wish. If you lose those twenty pounds, how will you feel being able to play with your kids without getting winded? Or how would you feel knowing that your glucose and cholesterol levels are in check? Or how would you feel being able to show up to a pool party with a bit more muscle definition? Let yourself feel those positive emotions for a moment.
3. Obstacle
Here is where we pivot from the typical self-help manifesting fluff and start getting real. Ask yourself: What are the things that would hold you back from accomplishing the goal? Is it your tendency to stock your pantry with lots of Chewy Chips Ahoy? Or your tendency to eat a high-calorie meal at lunch sourced entirely from the QT Kitchen? Or maybe you feel like you don’t have enough time to work out?
Identify the biggest potential obstacles. Write those down.
4. Plan
Once you’ve identified the obstacles, it’s time to create an if-then plan for them. In other words, an implementation intention.
The formula is simple: “If [obstacle] occurs, then I will [action to overcome obstacle].”
Let’s use the obstacle of not having enough time for a full workout. Here’s what an implementation intention to overcome that obstacle could look like:
Obstacle: Sometimes I don’t have time for a full workout.
Plan: If I don’t have time for a full workout, then I’ll take a brisk 15-minute ruck around the neighborhood before 8 PM. (Check out our article on other ideas for quick workouts when you’re crunched for time.)
How about your tendency to default to eating QT taquitos and a Big Q soda for lunch?
Obstacle: When pressed for time, I eat lunch at QuikTrip.
Plan: When I go to QT for lunch, I’ll get the cobb salad and a Diet Coke.
Harness the Power of Negative Thinking
This year, start visualizing negative outcomes with your goals. But then make a plan for how you’re going to prevent those negative outcomes from happening. The WOOP model reminds me a lot of the conversation I had with Kyle Austin Young about probability hacking. The key to reaching your goals, Kyle explained, lies in figuring out the things that will lower your odds of success and then plotting out ways to reduce the impact of those factors to tilt the odds in your favor.
Pick one goal you’ve been struggling with. Spend five minutes working it through the WOOP framework. Identify the snag that always trips you up, and write down your “if-then” script.
And then follow through on it!
