Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg and the author of more than a hundred articles and book chapters on the effects of future thought on cognition, emotion, and behavior. She lives in New York City and in Hamburg, Germany.

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Author’s Note

Throughout the book, I draw from the scientific articles and book chapters my colleagues and I have published over the past twenty years. In describing our experiments, our findings, and their implications, I have cited the articles used in the writing of this book so that readers can consult the original texts if they wish. I am deeply cognizant of the rich intellectual contributions of my coauthors, my fellow travelers in the rethinking of positive thinking.

Preface

What is your dearest wish? What dreams do you have for the future? What do you want to be or do? Imagine your dream coming true. How wonderful it would be. How fulfilling.

What holds you back from realizing your wish? What is it in you that stops you from really going for it?

Rethinking Positive Thinking is a book about wishes and how to fulfill them. It draws on twenty years of research in the science of motivation. And it presents a single, surprising idea: the obstacles that we think most impede us from realizing our deepest wishes can actually hasten their fulfillment.

Approached by someone who wants to achieve a specific dream, many of us offer simple advice: think positive! Don’t dwell on the obstacles, since that will only bring you down; be optimistic, focus on what you want to achieve; imagine a happy future in which you’re active and engaged; visualize how much snazzier you’ll look when you’ve lost that twenty pounds, how much happier you’ll feel when you’ve snagged that promotion, how much more attractive your partner will find you when you’ve quit drinking, how much more successful you’ll be when you’ve started that new business. Channel positive energy and before you know it, all your wishes and goals will come true.

Yet dreamers are not often doers. My research has confirmed that merely dreaming about the future makes people less likely to realize their dreams and wishes (as does dwelling on the obstacles in their path). There are multiple reasons why dreaming detached from an awareness of reality doesn’t cut it. The pleasurable act of dreaming seems to let us fulfill our wishes in our minds, sapping our energy to perform the hard work of meeting the challenges in real life.

Another way to visualize our future exists, a more complex approach that emerges out of work I’ve done in the scientific study of human motivation. I call this method “mental contrasting,” and it instructs us to dream our dreams but then visualize the personal barriers or impediments that prevent us from achieving these dreams. Perhaps we fear that by bringing our dreams directly up against reality, we’ll quash our aspirations—that we’ll wind up even more lethargic, unmotivated, and stuck. But that’s not what happens. When we perform mental contrasting, we gain energy to take action. And when we go on to specify the actions we intend to take as obstacles arise, we energize ourselves even further.

In my studies, people who have applied mental contrasting have become significantly more motivated to quit cigarettes, lose weight, get better grades, sustain healthier relationships, negotiate more effectively in business situations—you name it. Simply put, by adding a bit of realism to people’s positive imaginings of the future, mental contrasting enables them to become dreamers and doers.

Rethinking Positive Thinking presents scientific research suggesting that starry-eyed dreaming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The book then examines and documents the power of a deceptively simple task: juxtaposing our dreams with the obstacles that prevent their attainment. I delve into why such mental contrasting works, particularly on the level of our subconscious minds, and introduce the specific planning process that renders it even more effective. In the book’s last two chapters, I apply the method of mental contrasting to three areas of personal change—becoming healthier, nurturing better relationships, and performing better at school and work—and I offer advice on how to get started with this method in your own life. In particular, I present a four-step procedure based on mental contrasting called WOOP—Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan—that is easy to learn, easy to apply to short- and long-term wishes, and that is scientifically shown to help you become more energized and directed.

I’ve written Rethinking Positive Thinking for individuals who are stuck and don’t know what to do about it. It’s also for people whose lives are just fine but who might wonder if they could be better. It’s for people who have a particular challenge in front of them that they’ve tried and failed to handle in the past or that they just don’t know how to approach. Ultimately, though, I’ve written it for all of us. We all need help motivating ourselves so that we can stay on track and move ahead.

Why is this? Well, traditional societies have more mechanisms in place—rituals, habits, rules, laws, norms—that circumscribe individual autonomy and assign people roles and responsibilities. The same is true in repressive societies such as North Korea or the former East Germany. When we lack freedom of action, our own choices do not matter so much because external forces push and pull us to act or prevent us from doing so. The challenge people face in these societies primarily involves keeping up their morale and persevering.

Modern Western societies are different, confronting us with what some call the “curse of freedom.” The pull and push of tradition and external authority seems to have subsided. Many of us experience more freedom than ever, but we are now required to act on our own—to find it in us to stay motivated, energized, engaged, and connected. Nobody is guiding us, day after day, to do what it takes to stay healthy, to pursue a fulfilling career, or to build a family. Nobody is standing over us giving meaning to our lives. It’s all on our shoulders. We need to keep ourselves on track—and we need to restore our ability to take constructive action when we get painfully stuck.

Indulging in fantasies about the future doesn’t help. Though enjoyable in the short term, fantasies only deplete our efforts and lead us to stumble over and over again. We wind up mired in indecision, on the verge of apathy, prone to an impulsive lurching from action to action, pushed beyond our capabilities, seething with frustration, and falling into an unhappiness we don’t understand. But by experiencing our dreams in our minds and also grounding ourselves in the realities we are bound to encounter, we can charge ourselves up to tackle life head-on—to connect with what is most real and abiding in our lives.

Whether you are unhappy and struggling with serious problems, or just want to discover, explore, and optimize hidden possibilities and opportunities, this book will deepen your ideas about human motivation and help you boldly chart a path ahead. Like so many participants in my studies, you’ll come away more motivated than ever to connect with others, engage with the world around you, and take action. All from a single, counterintuitive question: What holds you back from realizing your dreams?

Chapter One

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Dreaming, Not Doing

One of my friends, a man in his early forties whom I’ll call Ben, remembers having an intense but rather corny crush on a fellow student when he attended college during the late 1980s. He had seen this woman on several occasions while dining with his friends at a cafeteria on campus. As Ben would...