The Shift in Focus That Can Turn a Wish Into a Triumph

Have you ever watched the downhill skiers in the Winter Olympics before a race? They visualize the run, moving and swaying as though they’re on the course. They all do this now, because visualization is a powerful, effective strategy for better performance.

So they aren’t picturing themselves with the gold medal and the national anthem playing. They’re crouched in a downhill tuck, imagining how they’ll negotiate the challenges of the run. They practice the specific skills that will get them to that gold medal.

There is a lot of talk these days about having a compelling future vision. You have to picture yourself on the winner’s block, or with that book published, or in that wonderful relationship. You imagine a future that you can step into. Pop psychology literature is chock-full of advice telling people to view their goals as already accomplished.

But the literature on this is wrong.

When we imagine having already achieved our goals, part of what happens is we feel like we’ve already achieved our goals. And because we feel the reward of the accomplishment already, our motivation to do the inevitable hard work required fades.

Achieving dreams is not easy. It takes time and considerable effort.

Imagine you have a big goal that means a lot to you. You’re willing to work very hard for it. Let’s imagine for fun that it’s a mountain you want to summit. You’ve trained, you’ve prepared, and you’ve struggled physically and mentally to make it to the top.

Hooray! You’ve done it!

Now, how would you feel if – having felt this amazing achievement – you suddenly discover you’ve only just started the climb, and you still have a very long way to go?

I think most of us would feel disheartened, disappointed and let down. We also would have a hard time mustering up the same intense desire and focus we initially had. We may still get there, but it would be more of a hard slog – not an invigorating triumph.

This is exactly what we do to ourselves psychologically when we spend time just imagining what it will be like when we’ve already reached our goals. It saps our energy and undermines our motivation.

But it is relaxing and comforting in the moment, which is why we do it… and why all those pop psychology authors advise it.

When Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg, and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking, first discovered this, she was disappointed. She had hoped that dreaming about success could help those who were struggling to meet their goals. Finding that it did the opposite made it hard for her to continue studying such fantasies.

Then she asked an interesting question: “I wondered if there was anything I could do to the process of dreaming to turn things around and make dreams more helpful for achieving wishes. In particular, since positive fantasies tended to relax people, was there a way that I could use dreaming to wake them up, get them into gear and motivate them to succeed?”

What she found was if she asked people to dream of their success, and then confronted them right away with the obstacles, that would get them energized and ready to dive into the task.

She calls this “Mental Contrasting,” and it can give us huge leverage when it comes to achieving our dreams.

But only if what we dream of is attainable in reality.

Let’s say we’re on that mountain. We’ve trained and prepared. We actually have the skills and knowledge to summit the mountain. Seeing ourselves at the top for a moment and then identifying all the challenges between will get us fired up and ready to climb.

On the other hand, if we don’t actually have the skills and knowledge to climb that mountain, seeing the reality of the challenges will sap our energy and make it very hard to get going. That’s a good thing. We don’t want to find ourselves facing a mountain we can’t climb! That would be not only disheartening, but also extremely dangerous.

In other words, if we want to achieve our dreams, reality has to be our friend.

Have the dream. Identify what you actually need to overcome to reach that dream, for real.

If summiting that mountain has enough meaning to you, and you could do it with a lot of training and preparation, then mental contrasting can help you to get to work. If you don’t have the ability – no matter how much work you do – then it’s important to let it go and make room for other things you can actually do.

Here are some of the things Oettingen discovered in her earlier research:

• Women who fantasized about losing weight lost less weight than women who didn’t.

• Women who fantasized about getting a great job out of college got fewer job offers and put out fewer applications.

• People with hip replacements, after two weeks of only positive fantasies, had a harder and longer recovery than those who had a realistic sense of what they were in for.

• Students did less well on exams when they dwelt on just the positive.

• Students who fantasized about a happy future felt less depressed in the moment, but more depressed over time, as they were discouraged by the actual challenges.

When we think about a positive future, our blood pressure goes down and we feel less energized. We feel lower levels of motivation, and we don’t have the energy or desire to overcome the real challenges.

We want to start with the dream. We need the inspiration of a meaningful vision to draw us toward action. But then we need to shift our focus and go right to what the challenges are and what needs to be done.

Imagine the future, and imagine the obstacles. Doing so connects the future with the obstacles and helps us overcome challenges. This sets up an automatic process of sorting out what we can and cannot do and provides the energy we need to focus on actually reaching our goals.

Those Olympic skiers know exactly why they’re there. They want to achieve their absolute best performance and, hopefully, earn a place in history. But their focus is not on the gold medal; their focus is on what they have to do to get there. That simple shift of focus can make the difference between a wish and a triumph.

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