PNTV: Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabriele Oettingen (#253)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabrielle Odingen. Rethinking Positive Thinking Subtitle Inside the New Science of Motivation now you have a hard time seeing it, particularly if you're listening to the podcast. But this book is captured by a creative little image on the COVID Rose colored glasses with one lens that's broken, one that's fine, the other that's broken. Fascinating research into the power of bringing a little bit of reality or a lot of bit of reality and some quote, negativity to our dreaming. Positive thinking in order to catalyze much better results in our lives. So, philosopher's note, bunch of big ideas, five of them here. We'll jump straight in. Gabrielle Odingen is one of the world's leading researchers in the new science of motivation. She worked with Martin Seligman decades ago, has spent the last 20 years, basically her entire career, studying the science of dreaming and the science of wishes. And what she found out early in her career was, to her surprise, dreaming by itself. Positively fantasizing about an outcome you want to see in your life. She calls them wishes. If that's all you do, it actually reduces your motivation and reduces the likelihood that, that you're going to achieve the things you want to see in your life. Which runs counter to things like the Secret and other authors and self help who just talk about positivity as if positivity in and of itself is enough. Now, of course we know we need to take action, but she makes the distinction that if you want to take action, you need to make sure you do something else in the process of dreaming than what most people teach. Because her research has shown unequivocally that if all you do is positively fantasize, you're going to be less motivated and you're going to do less of what it takes to actually achieve your outcomes significantly so. Scientifically proven to be significantly so. So here's the deal. She brings people into her lab. This is a very, very short version of the deal, but she brings people into her lab and she actually measures their blood pressure, right? And she has them positively fantasize. And in a matter of minutes, when individuals just focus on the positive aspects of their outcomes, their blood pressure decreases. Now, I don't remember the precise measurements, but basically as if half as much as smoking a cigarette. Smoking a cigarette reduces your blood pressure quickly, right? Well, just fantasizing reduces it half as much as smoking a cigarette, which is fascinating. And she Says, now you can relax in a number of ways, right? You can get a massage, you can do some meditation, you can do a lot of things to relax. And as it turns out, you can close your eyes and imagine your ideal outcome and just fantasize. And that will relax you extraordinarily. Now, of course, we know we need to oscillate and make waves and take time to relax. But if you want to achieve your outcomes, you don't want to leave the. You're brainstorming at the wishing stage where you just imagine the positive stuff. Because what happens is not only did their blood pressure go down if they positively fantasized by itself, but their performance went down. They had less energy, less like reason to act, because they kind of tricked their brains into thinking that they had achieved what they wanted to achieve. So what she learned was, next big idea, you need to mentally contrast. She was looking at this research and she was actually disappointed and bummed because she wanted to show how dreaming can be an effective means to achieve the things you want to achieve in your life. Then her research showed that by itself, actually the opposite happened. So then she went to work and said, well, what can I do to create energy so that they're not left lethargic and too relaxed to take action, but they're left energized? And what she came up with was something called mental contrasting. So MC here equals mental contrasting. Huge idea. And this is where we get those rose colored glasses, one of which is clear, the other is broken, right? So you imagine your ideal outcome. That's still really important. Dreams are important, but you don't leave it at that. You then mentally contrast that with something that's going to get in the way of you achieving that outcome. You bring reality into the picture. You allow yourself to think of some negative things that might happen that would derail you from achieving your outcome. That's mentally contrasting. And what she found was when she had people do mental contrasting versus just the positive wishes, they totally outperformed them, with one caveat. If the individuals didn't think they could achieve the outcome they wanted, then they actually performed less well than the people who just fantasized. And she makes the really important point that that's actually really good, that their motivation goes down if they didn't think their goal was feasible. So when you imagine your positive future and then you imagine the obstacles, it's going to help you see if you should disengage from a goal. Now we get in trouble again if we just follow the kind of Self help rule of just imagine the castle in Spain or as she jokingly says, living on Neptune or being a billionaire in the next year. You can't imagine those unfeasible goals and expect to feel motivated. It's not how it works. So when you do the mental contrasting, if you realize, wow, that's just too much of a stretch, then you find a goal that's feasible, challenging but feasible, and then you contrast it with obstacles that might get in the way. That's really powerful stuff. The research is amazing on this. And then she continued working and she collaborated with her husband who came up with something which is equally powerful that we've talked about in our work on procrastination called implementation intentions. We've got mental contrasting and then we have implementation intentions. Now these are basically what you're going to do when certain things happen in the future. You want to keep this in mind. If this happens, then I will do this. We talked about it with procrastination where the idea was if I find myself distracted by the Internet, for example, then I will get to work immediately. If, then if there's an obstacle, then I will do this. Right? So we have mental contrasting and that implementation intention strategy stuff is shown to be extraordinarily powerful. The research on that is amazing. And there's a ton of research in this book, 20 years worth, if you like that kind of thing. I think you'll love it. So then she started talking about this in her work and she called it mcii, mci. And she's, you know, mental contrasting plus implementation intention. Then she realized, well, that doesn't really roll off the tongue. And they came up with this whoop. Capital W, capital O, capital O, capital P, whoop, which is short for wish plus outcome plus obstacle plus plan. And this is the whole point of the book is to get us to learn how to operationalize woop. In our lives. Wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. And again, the science behind this is really, really inspiring. We talk about it a little bit more in the note and of course she goes into depth on it. But here's the basic way to do it. And in the, in the note I have a bunch of different examples. Imagine something that you want to see, a wish that you have, right? What's something that you want to see in your life over the next? It could be day or week or three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, whatever. What's a wish that's both challenging and feasible? Think about that right now. What's a wish that you have that's both challenging and feasible. That's the W in whoop, right? So when we have our wish, then we move to the outcome. And the outcome is really kind of the number one benefit. Number one benefit. What's the number one benefit that you want to receive from that outcome? Right. So let's say that you want to exercise consistently. I'll do this because I'll use my example. So I've been using this through the day, right. In kind of big things, big goals that I have creatively and business wise and otherwise. Right. And then little things. My meditation this morning, I was having fun at the end, just kind of imagining my day. So for example, I had a wish of after my meditation, completing a note, worked on a note this morning. And I imagine that, well, that'd be cool. What would the outcome be? Well, the outcome of that would be that I'd set myself up for Monday. I'm recording this on a Friday. I'd set myself up for Monday so that I know that I can do one of these TV episodes in the MP3 and the micro classes and stuff like that. And I'm like, that'd feel great. That'd be awesome. To know that I'm ahead. Feels good, right? Wish, get the note done. Outcome, wow, that'd feel great. I'd be ahead, feel inspired, know I'm on track. Right. What would the obstacle be that would get in the way of me achieving that? That's our next one, right? I'll walk through mine, then we'll walk through your example. The obstacle for me that might get in the way is me doing something other than working on the note after I finished my meditation. I used to be tempted by the Internet. I'm no longer tempted by that. And I knew what I was going to do. So actually that was a pretty straightforward one for me of, okay, that's what I'm going to do. Then the plan. If. Then if I finish meditating, then what? Well, then technically I do five minutes of stretching and yoga. Right. Then I work on my note and I won't do anything until I'm done with it. Cool. I've got my whoop. I've got my wish, I've got my outcome, I've got my obstacle and I've got my plan. Now back to you. What's your wish? Challenging, feasible. What's your outcome? What's the benefit you're going to experience? And then think about the obstacle. What's the obstacle that's going to get in the way of you achieving that wish? And Experiencing the outcome. An important distinction here. The obstacle is within you, not in the world. We're not talking about your boss or your upbringing or anything else that is outside of your control. What within you is going to stand in the way of you attaining your wish? Pretty exciting juxtaposition, mental contrasting there. Then we look at it and say, okay, what's the plan? How am I going to deal with that challenge? Okay, that obstacle is going to come up. So then if this happens, then I will do this. If situation X, then behavior Y. If this happens, then I will do that. In the book, she does a great job. She's got these little cards, right, that have woop in it and you can actually just write it down, three to six words. You can capture these things. You don't need to write a long essay about it. Although she has a guided meditation or visualization kind of thing you can do and then a written one as well. But you can capture this in a very, very straightforward little piece of paper or card or whatever. But. But that's Whoop. Really, really powerful stuff. I hope I sold you on it. Try it out once, twice, again and again and again. Her intervention, work with people looking to achieve higher levels of health via exercise or nutrition or weight loss or whatever, is extraordinary when people actually walk through this whoop. That brings us to the final big idea. Two questions. She says, well, good luck on your journey. I hope that you try out Whoop. She says, and here are two questions I leave you with. One, what is your deepest wish? And two, what stands in the way of you achieving that? And again, too often, all we want to do is think about the positive. She says we need to rethink positive thinking by bringing in a little more reality, juxtaposing it, such that we can truly cultivate the motivation required to consistently perform over the long term to achieve our goals. So two questions. Whoop. Implementation intentions, which is the core of the P for plan, mental contrasting of the positive and the negative. And then the remember dreaming that, yeah, it's nice to feel that it feels good in the immediate term. There's no question about that. But it is disastrous for long term. She has more research on the effects of people who are depressed who just positively imagine it feels good immediately for them, but it actually makes them more depressed over the long run vis a vis the people who imagine their ideal outcome. Very important. Again, I'm not saying get rid of dreaming. That's not what Gabrielle says. But bring it back with reality. Energize yourself such that you feel a necessity to act and go out and do what you aspire to do. There you go. Hope you enjoyed. Highly recommend the book, particularly if you're into the scientific underpinnings of this new science of motivation. And I look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. 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