Why Picturing Your Goals Can Work Against You
Vividly imagining the outcome you want is the most repeated advice in self-development, and the research points the other way. A look at what the evidence actually shows, and the repair that follows from it.
There is a particular deflation that can arrive after an intense session of imagining the life you want. The vision board is finished, or the journal entry, or the guided visualisation with the headphones on, and for a little while everything glowed. Then you stand up to make tea, and something has quietly gone out of the afternoon. The dishes are still there. The inbox is still there. If you are honest, you feel slightly less like doing anything about any of it than you did an hour ago.
People who notice that deflation usually assume it is a personal failing, a leak in their belief. It may not be a leak at all. In 2002 the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen published a series of studies with her colleague Doris Mayer that separated two things which are easy to confuse: not whether people expected to succeed, but how much they indulged in positive fantasy about succeeding, how vividly and often they enjoyed the outcome in imagination. Expectation, grounded in a person's actual record, tended to predict good things. Fantasy tended to predict the opposite. Across several domains, those who fantasised most vividly about the transformed future did worse on average. Graduates entering the job market applied for fewer jobs, received fewer offers and, two years on, earned less. Students did worse in an exam, and hip-replacement patients were rated as recovering less well two weeks after surgery. An earlier study by Oettingen and Thomas Wadden found a similar pattern among women in a year-long weight-loss programme.
That is close to the inverse of the standard advice. See it, feel it, enjoy it as already yours was associated in this research with getting less of it.
Why might that happen? Oettingen's later work offers a clue that fits the deflation. In laboratory studies, indulging in positive fantasy was followed by measurable drops in energization, the readiness the body brings to effort. One way to hold that finding, as an image rather than a proven mechanism, is that vivid fantasy pays a small advance on the outcome, and some part of the system treats the advance as partial payment received. A goal that has already been slightly enjoyed can press less urgently than one still entirely outstanding. One caution. This energization work comes substantially from Oettingen's own research programme and awaits wider independent replication. The broader fantasy findings are better established than the explanation for them.
Oettingen did not stop at the diagnosis. Her repair is to bring the fantasy into contact with reality rather than to abandon it. Imagine the outcome, and then, deliberately, in the same sitting, name the obstacle in yourself that stands between here and there, and decide what you will do when that obstacle appears. Wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. This procedure, which she calls mental contrasting, has improved goal commitment and follow-through in multiple studies, particularly when the goal is feasible and personally meaningful. It has also helped people let go of wishes that were never going to work, instead of carrying them for years. It is not a universal solvent, and it does not work equally for every goal or every person.
Four minutes will do. Take one current want, a real one, mid-sized. Write two sentences. First, what you want, concretely. Second, one internal obstacle within your influence, the part of you that most stands between here and there: impatience, an avoided phone call, evenings that dissolve, a fear of being seen trying. Naming an internal obstacle does not deny that external barriers exist. Some obstacles genuinely are in the world rather than in you. This exercise simply isolates one part of the situation you can act on.
Then stop, and resist the urge to spend ten minutes enjoying the outcome instead. Hold the want and the obstacle in the same view, once a day, and notice what happens to the quality of the wanting. It may become more concrete, less exciting, more demanding, or no longer worth pursuing. Any of those is information. A want that quietly dissolves when set beside its obstacle may be one you can put down. The wants that survive the contact are the ones worth building something around.
Prefer to go deeper?
This idea is worked through in full in Before You Want, alongside the rest of the cycle and a ninety-day practice.