Stop visualizing your success

Visualizing your success on its own can backfire. Research by NYU psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, including a 2011 study with Heather Barry Kappes, found that daydreaming about an ideal future can drain the energy you need to pursue it. A better approach is to picture the goal, then the obstacle in your way, then make a plan for it.Close your eyes. Picture it. Your dream business, fully booked. The waitlist. The beautiful office. The vacation where you don't check email because everything runs without you.

Feels good, right? That's the problem.

For decades, we've been told that visualizing success is how you get it. Vision boards. Manifesting. "See it, believe it, achieve it." It's everywhere in business coaching, and it sounds so reasonable. There's a psychologist who has spent over twenty years testing that idea, and what she found is uncomfortable.

Daydreaming about your success can actually drain the energy you need to achieve it.

The research that surprised even the researcher

Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University, set out to study positive thinking expecting to confirm that it helps. Over and over, her results said something else.

She drew a sharp line between two things we usually lump together:

• Positive expectations: believing, based on your track record, that you can succeed. These help.

• Positive fantasies: vividly imagining the dream outcome, with everything going perfectly. These often hurt.

In one set of four experiments published in 2011, Oettingen and Heather Barry Kappes had people either daydream positively about a desired future or think about it in other ways. Then they measured energy, both by asking people how energized they felt and by measuring their systolic blood pressure, which rises when your body gears up for effort.

The positive daydreamers had less energy. Lower blood pressure. Less of the physical get-up-and-go you need to work toward something. In another study, vocational students who had more positive fantasies about their future ended up with more absences and lower final grades.

So why do fantasies backfire?

Oettingen's explanation is simple, and once you hear it you can't unhear it. When you vividly picture the goal already achieved, your brain gets a taste of the reward. It's a bit like having already arrived. And a brain that feels like it's already arrived doesn't see much reason to gear up for the hard climb.

The fantasy relaxes you. It feels good. But relaxed is the opposite of what you need when there's work to do. If you read my post on announcing your goals, this might sound familiar. It's the same trap in a different outfit: getting the feeling of success before doing any of the work.

The fix: WOOP

Oettingen didn't stop at "fantasies are bad." She developed a tool that keeps the dream but adds the missing piece. She calls the method mental contrasting, and the practical version has a memorable name: WOOP.

W: Wish. What do you want? Something challenging but realistic. "Book five new clients this quarter."

O: Outcome. What's the best result? Picture it for a moment. Yes, you still get to dream a little. "Steady income, and I can finally stop taking on the work I hate."

O: Obstacle. Here's the step we always skip. What inside you is most likely to get in the way? Not the economy. You. "I avoid sales conversations because I hate feeling pushy."

P: Plan. Make an if-then plan for that obstacle. "If I feel the urge to put off a sales follow-up, then I'll send it within five minutes, before I can talk myself out of it."

The magic is in putting the dream and the obstacle side by side. The dream gives you a reason to act. The obstacle tells you exactly where the fight is going to be. And the plan means you've already decided what to do when you get there.

Oettingen's research suggests mental contrasting energizes people when their goal is realistic, which is exactly the kind of goal you want your energy going toward.

What this looks like in real life

A client of mine came to me with a gorgeous vision board: a new studio, a team of three, a six-figure launch. She looked at it every morning, and she still felt like she was barely moving.

We did a WOOP together. Wish: launch her group program by spring. Outcome: more impact, less one-on-one burnout. Obstacle: she freezes every time she has to talk about price. Plan: if she starts to freeze on a call, she reads her pricing from a card she keeps by her laptop, word for word.

The vision board didn't change anything. The obstacle and the plan did. She booked her first three group spots within the month.

Keep dreaming. Just don't stop there.

I'm not telling you to stop wanting big things. Your dreams are what get you out of bed. I'm telling you that the dream alone isn't fuel. It's more like dessert. Great after the meal. A problem if it's the only thing you eat.

So the next time you catch yourself daydreaming about the finished business, don't stop at the good part. Ask the harder question: What's the thing in me that's most likely to get in the way?

That question is where the energy is.

If you want help turning your big vision into a plan that accounts for real obstacles (including you), that's exactly what coaching is for.

Studies to link: Kappes & Oettingen (2011) · WOOP is freely available at woopmylife.org