- The simple question is, can I use this finish line strategy to make the start line a goal and get my system more engaged or motivated? And is there any physiology, or physiological changes I should say, to reflect the idea that maybe just visually focusing on the start line would actually get me more excited as opposed to make me less excited to engage in effort. - Mm-hmm.
There's certainly vision science that's tied up in that very first stage of goal setting, like, identifying what that goal is in the first place and taking those first steps. A lot of people's go-to strategies that involve vision are our vision boards, or dream boards, or, you know, Post-it notes, right? They're creating some sort of visual representation of what it is that they want to accomplish.
Where is it that I want to be in five years, 10 days, 10 years? Whatever that timeline is that they're working under. The idea of vision boards, or dream boards, is that you like, you know, almost like a scrapbook collect visual icons that reflect where you want to be to motivate yourself.
It's a really common tactic that people use and it's not bad to do that, right? For some people, just even knowing what they want in life is a major accomplishment. Defining the goal can be really challenging for people.
And that's a strategy that works and involves our visual experience, right? It's not just people aren't saying like, why don't you just sit around and imagine what you want your life to be like in 10 years? The strategy that people are suggesting is like, no, cut out the pictures, put it on a board and stick it by your bathroom mirror so you see it every day, right?
- Or make a list. - [Emily Balcetis] Or make a list, yeah. - People are big on these lists.
I have a lot of friends are like, have you made your list? - [Emily Balcetis] Yeah. - Right?
The list of things that you insist on having in the context of fitness, relationship, job, et cetera, et cetera, this seems more and more common now. - Yeah, totally. And the idea like, write it down, right?
They're telling you, write it down, like, or create a visual manifestation of it. And so, yeah, that's effective for identifying what you want, but it may not actually be effective for helping you to meet the goal, to get the job done. So colleagues of mine at New York University have probed, well, why?
Why is that? Why is just, you know, thinking about what you want in your life and sort of putting yourself vicariously into those shoes imagining what my life will be like if I can accomplish everything on this list, why doesn't that work? Well, first of all, does it work?
The answer is, no. And why does it not work? Because what happens, these colleagues, Gabriele Oettingen and her research team have found, is that, you know, going through and dreaming about, or visualizing how great my life will be when I get X, Y and Z done, that is like a goal satisfied.
I have identified what it is that I want. I have experienced it, even if just in an imaginary way. I've had that positive experience of thinking about how great my life is going to be when I get this thing done.
And they start to sort of rest on their laurels. She's actually measured systolic blood pressure and heart rate. And they found that people who do that, who go through that experience of visualizing how great my life will be when I get X, Y and Z done, their systolic blood pressure, the bottom number on your blood pressure reading, decreases.
Okay, now I'm all about finding ways to relax, especially in New York, right? You're constantly living at a high level of stimulation. And so like, cool, great.
So maybe I should just like, think about how awesome my life will be when I get my bucket list done. But motivation scientists know that systolic blood pressure is actually an indicator of our body's readiness to get up and act, to do something. Now, that can be the going out for a walk, going out for a run, hitting the gym.
It can also be things like doing math problems, right? Even if it's something that's just mental, systolic blood pressure actually goes up in anticipation of your body or your mind needing to do something, taking the first steps on a goal. So then it helps us to understand of like, okay, if I've just created this dream board, this vision board, and put myself psychologically in that space of a goal satisfied, why is it bad that blood pressure goes down?
Because it means your body is chilling out. It's like, all right, cool. I just accomplished something pretty major, right?
I'd actually now don't have the physiological resources at the ready to take the first step right now to do something about that. So that was a pretty monumental finding for motivation scientists to understand that, like, creating these dream boards, these vision boards, or to-do list might actually backfire, because in and of itself is the creation of a goal and the satisfaction of the goal. And then people understandably give themselves some time to just enjoy that positive experience.
- So much for the secret. - [Emily Balcetis] Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- I guess now the secret folks will come after me with pitch forks, but. - I try to never say the name, right? - Oh, well, I'm not afraid to say the name.
I mean, I imagine that certain strategies might work for other people, but everything you're saying again is consistent with what we know about the physiology of dopamine circuits for motivation. I have a good friend who, perhaps in incidentally, perhaps not, is a cardiologist at a major university, said that one of the major errors that people make with book writing and completion is they will tell people they're going to write a book, and people will say, oh, you definitely should write a book, everyone's going to love your book. And they never end up writing it.
And his theory is that they get so much dopamine reward from that immediate feedback, with all the protection of never having the book criticized, - [Emily Balcetis] Yeah. - that they never write the book. I'm sure there are exceptions to this.
But I guess it raises the question, what's the better strategy? - Yeah, so I'm not saying that people who enjoy a dream board creation should stop what they're doing. That's not the take home message here.
- Nightmare board? [Emily laughs] - [Emily Balcetis] Oh, definitely not that, no. There's enough anxiety and fear in the world, we don't need to encourage more of it.
But the process of goal setting shouldn't stop with articulating what the goal is. So at that same point that we're trying to figure out, what do we want to do? What is my vision for the future?
In those planning sessions, we need to simultaneously think about a couple other things. One is, how are we going to get there? So take it out of the abstract, take it out of this idyllic visual iconography, and start thinking about the practical day-to-day.
We need to break it down into more manageable goals, not just my ten year plan for myself, but my two week plan. What can I accomplish in the next two weeks and the two weeks after that's going to set me on the right trajectory? That's probably not surprising to anybody who's been thinking about, how do I set goals better?
You know, plan big picture, think big picture abstractly, but then also break it down more concretely. That's probably not surprising, but it's an important aspect of the goal setting process. Then, again, Gabriele Oettingen in my department has identified a third, often overlooked, or underappreciated stage, that has to happen at that goal, in the goal setting process.
And that's thinking about the obstacles that stand in your way of success and that it will actually help improve motivation in the long-run. And sometimes people think that that like, is counterintuitive. You're saying like, if I want to increase my motivation, have more motivation than I need to think about how hard it's going to be, all the ways that I'm going to fail, how is that going to like, jazz me up?
How is that going to help me get through when I actually, you know, when things get hard? But it does, because it's like coming up with a plan B, a plan C, plan D in advance of actually experiencing that. If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink, that's not the time you want to start looking for life jackets.
You already want to know where one is so you can go to it right away. And it's the same thing with goal setting, is that you want to know, what am I working towards? How I'm going to get there?
And if I experience this obstacle, here's what I'm going to do about it. You may never experience that obstacle, but if you do, you're probably going to be shy on time, thin on resources, maybe experiencing an anxiety that hijacks your brain so you're not functioning at that optimal level of judgment and decision making. You want to already have like, the snap next step in place so you can just hop to it, right?
We are not going to do our best thinking when we're in crisis mode. But we don't have to if we have used, if we have already used our resources in advance to come up with that plan B or that plan C.
