4 Simple Tools to Help Your Clients Achieve Their Goals

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How can we use our perceptual experiences to help us overcome some of the biggest challenges we face when working toward our most important goals? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward podcast. On today's show, we're going to learn about how our eyes work in conjunction with our brain and how we can use that knowledge to make the path to achieving our goals clearer to make success look closer and make the process to get there feel better. My guest today is Emily Belchades. Emily has a PhD from Cornell University, and she is a social psychologist and scientist at New York University. She's also the author of a great book called Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World. In our conversation today, Emily shares 4 specific tools that we can use, not just to achieve our goals, but tools that we can use to guide our clients in achieving their goals as well. With that, let's get started with Emily Belchetis. Well, I would love for you to start by setting some context here for the science behind how we perceive the world. I know that a lot of your research really is in that area. And then from there, we can talk about some of the tools that you've developed to help us improve our ability to set and achieve goals and to help guide others in doing the same?

Sure. So one of the things that I think is amazing about how our brain works is what it does with vision. Just a couple cool stats, not to nerd out on you too long, but more of our brain space is dedicated to vision than any of the other senses. More neurological cortical real estate is devoted to processing what we see compared to what we touch or what we taste or what we hear. So our brain thinks that there's something special about vision, and there is. Like, you can look up at the night sky and see the International Space Station that's 250 miles away. You can see a flickering candle if it's not foggy or smoggy over 30 miles away. You can see that small flicker of a candle. We can pick up on things that we only see for less than the snap of a finger. Our eyes and our brains can work together to register that input that comes in really quickly. We think that when we look at the world around us, we're seeing it exactly as it is. Maybe because we know our vision is so powerful, or it could be because we rarely get feedback or information that what we've seen or what we think we've seen actually isn't what's really there. So, you know, we don't know if there's something that has gone by on our peripheral vision that we haven't picked up on. We don't know if we've mistakenly identified somebody unless they tell us, but that rarely happens. So we come to form a sort of naive realism, if you will, that what we believe we see must be what's really out there. But if we question that, if we start to second-guess or play devil's advocate with that idea, then we open ourselves up to a whole host of other possibilities of other superpowers based on our visual experience that we might not have otherwise had available to us.

And so our eyes and our brain, the connection between those two, as I understand it, is a huge filtering mechanism. So We're taking in all of this data and information through our eyes, but then because of our brain, it's saying, well, so much of this stuff is extraneous. You don't need to worry about it. So you're not even going to register it in your consciousness. So tell me a little bit about how the filtering system works, because I think that also plays into like goal setting and what information do we need to view as important versus not important, and then how that impacts how we perform.

You're exactly right that there's filtering that happens. And one reason for that, as you've alluded to, is that hyperfocus we can use with our eyes to take in all of the details of something with great acuity and precision is really pretty small. We call that foveal view, your focus of attention, what you can see with great acuity is relatively small. So if you put both of your hands out at arm's length, the surface area of your two thumbnails is about all that you can take in with that level of clarity. Of course, there's more stuff that's coming into your eyes through your peripheral vision, but that all comes in in a more degraded way. It's blurrier. We can't pick up on color as well in our peripheral vision as we do with our foveal view. So the world offers our eyes and our brains a lot more than we can focus on at any particular moment. So we have to pick and choose. We decide, and sometimes we don't decide, but our brain decides for us, Where are we gonna direct that focus of attention? To the left, to the right, up or down? And what are we gonna allow to stay in our peripheral vision that we know isn't gonna come through as clearly and cleanly as what we're focusing on? So to make sense of all this information that's around us, we have to be selective in what we pay attention to and then filter the information that comes in. Part of that selective attention is the filtration process. Other ways that that filter is set up though is that it, we orient our attention to things that move. Right? Something moving in the periphery is going to grab our attention, and that might have been important for picking up on predators or knowing if somebody's coming up from behind you, maybe to scare you or pick your wallet or something like that. So there are things about the world that will capture our attention, but that means that we're not seeing some of what is there with that filtration. There's a really, like, classic and fun demonstration. Sometimes people call that the gorilla in the mist example. I didn't make this, but I as a psychologist might show a video to you. It's a still image first of players dressed in black and some players dressed in white, and everybody has basketballs and they're passing these basketballs really chaotically. You know, maybe there's 12 players and there's 6 or 8 basketballs that are being bounced all over, and your job is to count how many passes there are from one player in white to another player in white. So your job that I'm telling you is to ignore the people that are wearing the black shirts, pay attention to what's happening in the white shirts. And you can do that. It's challenging. That's the nature of this video and the way it was set up. But when you have focused your attention on those players in white, inevitably the vast majority of people fail to notice that right through the middle of that basketball game, there is somebody who's dressed in a gorilla suit, a dark black furry gorilla suit, who walks right through the middle of the game. He passes across your visual space and in fact, maybe even across your foveal view. But because you are so focused on lightness, whiteness, counting those passes from one white player to the what's next. You fail to notice something that is like crazy— a gorilla doesn't normally walk through a basketball game. And as a result, you don't see it even though your eyes will have landed upon it. And eye-tracking studies show us that even eyes can land on it, but because you're not attending to it, you don't see it. You don't have that conscious recognized experience of having seen it.

So essentially, we see what we choose to see and what we put our attention on is what the brain then starts filtering out all the other stuff that we haven't registered that, well, we want to see this, so that's what I'm looking for.

Right, exactly. And you can think of analogies maybe outside of this vision space where that would make sense, that if you're choosing to prioritize, you know, thinking about this task, then you have less room and space to think about this other one. Or if you're going down this course of action and you're just really doggedly following this path, then it can be hard to see another path ahead of you. When we're so fixated or focused on one opportunity, we may miss other opportunities like the gorilla that might be right before our very eyes.

There also, a few years ago, was this— what was it, a blue dress and a gray dress— where people would look at the dress and some people would see it one color and other people would see it a different color. How much of the way that we perceive things, the difference in how we perceive things between two people, how much of that is based on environmental— let's call it nature versus nurture— how much of it is just in your upbringing, your worldview is going to cause you to self-select to see things a certain way versus genetically you're really programmed to see it a certain way. Do we have any idea how much is that difference?

Well, that will be the perennial question in all of the study of people. So it's not for me to quantify that except to say that both are really important. That blue dress, gold dress example that, that you were talking about, that was a huge internet sensation, right? That went viral as you're talking about now. The science of that blue gold dress situation is that, yeah, we're all looking at the same picture, this dress that was photographed as somebody is trying to decide. I think they have a special event. What are they going to wear? They're standing in the dressing room or they're holding it up in the dressing room that has kind of poor lighting and taking a photograph with their phone. Now, because it's professionally staged and lit and composed, the quality of the photograph is not so great. And so our brain is filling in the gaps. It's trying to make sense of like, what is this lighting and Is it lighting that is coming from an outside source shining down, like from the top right down onto it, sort of down on the bottom left? Is it natural lighting or light bulb lighting? And depending on how your brain decides, is this being photographed inside or outside? What is the lighting source? It's changing its interpretation of the input it's getting. The same photons, the same little pixels of light and color are hitting all of our eyes, but it's how our brain pieces it together to try to make sense of this fairly degraded form of input, part of that filtration, filtering in some information, trying to input other information that our brain does automatically and super quickly, that contributes to that great divide of what's the color scheme of this dress that you and I saw in different ways. So where does that come from? Is it because our brains are born knowing that dressing room lighting in Macy's happens to have this kind of color palette to it? No, no, no. Our brains aren't born knowing that. But we have a lifetime of experience of building up that cognitive repertoire, that understanding of the way that light changes under different shadowing conditions or different forms of light. You know, a yellow light bulb versus a cool blue light bulb versus, you know, natural lighting all has different color schemes to it. And whether we are intentionally studying that or we're not, our brains pick up on that kind of information, and they are the best sort of artificial intelligence— except not artificial, real intelligence— but like AI systems that take what it's gotten and impart what it knows about how the world works to try to interpret what's come into that system.

So you've identified or developed 4 different tools to take this science that we're talking about here and apply it in real life. So let's go through those. I'm going to say what the 4 are, and then we can go through each one of them in turn. And feel free to take these in any order that makes the most sense to you. So the first one is narrow our focus of attention. The second one is wide bracket The third is materialize a goal, and then the fourth is framing. So let's go through those. And what would be a good first one to start with?

Framing might be a good one to start with, because really at the basis of everything I've said so far, when we're nerding out on this vision science, is the basic principle that what we see predicts what we do. You know, the idea here is that like a lot of times we're choosing what we want to do, but a lot of times We're not. So you can think about your commute home, whether you walk or you drive. Probably you're not thinking of every left and right-hand turn you need to take. You're probably not thinking about how many minutes you need to walk or drive before the next decision point is going to happen. Which way do you go? A lot of that becomes automated and automated based on what it is that you're seeing. You see this tree that happens to always be flowering in the springtime, and that sort of clues you in that you're about to turn the corner right. What we see helps shape our behavior. Behavior. And so we can take advantage of that. If what we see predicts what we do, why don't we be intentional about what we put inside of our visual space? And maybe we can nudge ourselves into making choices that we want to make that might be harder to make. Now, I think a great example of this, of showing the power both of not being intentional about what we see and then switching that up and what happens, came from Google. I visited, and I am impressed like everybody else about the snacks. There's snacks that are everywhere. What Google noticed though was that in bringing all these snacks, every, you know, sort of lobby space or communal hangout space would have a mini kitchen. What they were noticing is that their employees were getting unhealthy. Their employees were gaining weight. And they thought, oh, maybe it's because of all these snacks that we're putting around. And maybe we're doing a disservice. Yeah, we're helping keep our employees in their desks and in the office with these things that we're enticing them and holding them in here with. But we might be making them unhealthy as well. So What they did was try to change up what it is that people see. They weren't going to take away the snacks. That would be too drastic of a first measure. But instead, they made some of the more unhealthy snacks harder to see. They put the M&M candies in opaque containers. They put the sugary beverages like sodas on lower levels of the fridge and put water higher up, more at eye level. And so they didn't change what the pantries were stocked with. They just changed what people's eyes might fall upon first. What they might put into their visual frame, hence the framing up what you see and what they found. Well, they first noted what people were eating because they had the pantry attendants take note of how much of each snack they were replenishing at the end of each day. And they tallied it up and they found that when making these unhealthy snacks harder to see, a smaller volume of them were consumed by the Googlers in a week.. So they're not changing what's available, but they're just changing what it is that people can easily see. And that seemed to translate into behavioral change. So that's an example of how, you know, unintentionally trying to do a service for your employees of what snacks do you offer was unintentionally having an effect on their behavior. Because when we became intentional about putting healthier options within their line of sight, within their visual frame, the behaviors changed in a way that aligned with with what at least the employer's goal was, which was to create a healthier— literally a healthier work culture.

And now marketers know this as well. And so when they're trying to market a product, they're thinking to themselves, okay, our highest margin products, we want to put them, let's say, in the supermarket. We want to put them at eye level where it's easy for people to see, it's easy for people to grab, versus down on the lower shelf where they've really got to bend over and they got to grab this thing. So basically what I hear you saying what's easily in our view, we're most likely going to do or obviously see. But then we make it easy to do that as well. So that's really the framing. Is that essentially what we're talking about?

Exactly. And there have been other studies like you're talking about, too, where supermarkets in, you know, underserved neighborhoods switched up what was on those end caps. And when they put bottled water on those end caps, the sale of water rather than sodas increased, again, making it easier to see what are you going to pass by in the aisles? Are those end caps That's the reason for legislation about where cigarettes can be stocked and point of sale, you know, where the transactions happen, where people are spending a little bit more time in a bodega or in a supermarket. You're waiting to pay for the groceries that you picked up. Should cigarettes be in your line of sight right there? No. And so that's the reason for the legislation about where cigarettes can be stocked and stored is the result of that idea that what you see predicts what you, what you do.

Now, I use framing in exercising. So every night before I go to bed, I get out my workout clothes for the next day. I think about, okay, what's my workout tomorrow? What clothing do I need for that? Take it out of the bedroom, throw it on the living room floor, much to my wife's chagrin, so that when I get up in the morning, I cannot avoid seeing my workout clothes. So that's in my frame. So I guess I'm— maybe I'm intuitively using this framing idea as well.

Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, you can just think about what would be the difference if the the thing that you could slip on your feet first were slippers versus your trainers. But what kind of impact would that have on your psychology? Well, you're reminding yourself about your goal. Yeah, definitely. Exactly.

Okay, so that's framing. What's the second tool here?

Well, we can switch to that narrowed focus of attention transitioning into the exercise since you brought that up. I think your idea is a great one about using framing, putting your shoes there in front of you. Another reason that people have a hard time exercising and why it continues to be one of the top New Year's resolutions from year to year is that it's hard. It looks hard to get more steps in, to run farther, run faster. It looks challenging. And what our lab has found is, in fact, that is literally the case, that the visual experience for people changes as a function of things like their motivation or the state of their own body. We have found, along with many other labs, that people who, who weigh more, who experience chronic fatigue or chronic pain, when they look around the world, distances look farther to them, hills look steeper to them, inclines look taller to ascend than for people who weigh less or who don't have these chronic health concerns. I had the opportunity once to talk with Olympic athletes, some of the world's fastest runners, like the fastest guy out of Trinidad, gold medalists in sprinting competitions from the last Olympics. And I was asking them, like, what do you do as you look around the world? And I was completely wrong at what I thought they would say. I thought they would have like these superpowers of peripheral vision that they could somehow keep track of where they were and where the competition was at all times. But no, instead what they said is that they assume a narrowed focus of attention. They choose a target like the finish line or the end of the straightaway or some runner shorts up ahead of them and focus on that target. They narrow their focus of attention until they, they hit that mark and they pass it, and then they reset that goal. Now, I thought, okay, well, I get that. I understand that. I'm sure I can teach people this strategy that these world-class runners use. And what impact will it have? I've taught thousands of people this. And what we found was that it changed their experience of the environment. Narrowing their focus of attention induced an illusion of proximity. For people who had experienced some chronic health concerns, the distance that looked far before now looks shorter to them. That goal doesn't seem so far away. Narrowing their focus of attention is something you can teach people easily to do. Imagining a spotlight is shining just on a target up ahead. And you can do that, we can all do that. And what it does is make this world look not as challenging to navigate. And that has a host of consequences for our sort of psychological profile. We feel like an exercise isn't as hard. We believe in ourselves. We think we have the ability to make it to that goal. We're more motivated by all different kinds of metrics that you might use to assess motivation. And when that happens, what we found is that people can exercise more efficiently. When we tested them, we found that they moved 23% faster and said that it hurt 17% less. The distance was always the same. We didn't change anything about their actual experience, but subjectively they had a much easier time by following that visual strategy that the Olympians used, which induced an illusion of proximity, which changed their motivation, which improved their performance. And importantly, when we test this over time, this is a strategy that people can hold on to. We can teach them on one day they, they can, and they do on the other days, go off and use it on their own. And they go out for more walks, they take more steps, they move faster in each walk, and a bunch of other things that we have found as being a lasting impact of having practiced, even for a short instance, this narrowing their focus of attention.

I do a fair amount of exercising, and one of the types of exercise I do is bike riding. So I'm thinking of a particular hill that I ride on a regular basis. It's basically got 3 parts. First part, you go up and then it levels off, and then it goes up again and it levels off, and then it goes up again, and then you're at the top. I'm thinking to myself, I'm tricking myself here. So it's like, okay, I know the first part's not too bad, and at the top it levels off. So I'm going to have whatever, 30 seconds where I can catch my breath. Then the next up part's not that long, and then there's a sign at the top there. So I just keep my vision on that sign, and when I get there, it's like, no problem, I can make that. So I've got all these landmarks along the way that, like you say, I'm narrowing my focus just to get to that next landmark or get to that next flat spot on this hill. And so I'm breaking it down into these smaller components. And then next thing I know, I'm at the top of the hill. So I think that is definitely an effective strategy. So am I just tricking myself, so to speak, or is there something physiologically going on in terms of the signals that my vision, my perception, and my brain is telling me my physical body that you're not as tired as you think you are?

Well, I think it's effective for several reasons, and one you've alluded to already is that it's taking what might seem like a really big goal and breaking it down into sub-goals. And when you hit that sub-goal through these processes that I've talked about, because it induces that illusion of proximity and then creates a motivational profile that's effective for changing performance, that when we hit that sub-goal that we've set, then we get a little bit of a hedonic rush, right? We get, we get that maybe just tiny, but like sense of euphoria that can translate into helping us through the next sub-goal that we've set. So I think that is one mechanism that makes this tactic effective. Another one is if we pull from some psychophysiology research, research that couples the study of psychology and the body, another process could be that we've taken this goal that might otherwise seem in the realm of impossible, a very steep, multiply inclined hill that you're talking about, and puts it into the realm of like challenging but still doable. When that happens, we see that there is a change in the body's response. So some colleagues of mine at New York University have tested this by setting 3 different levels of goals. They've looked at what happens to the body when we set goals that are too easy, what happens when we set goals that are closer to that, like appraised as feeling impossible, where you think it's impossible for you, and one that's like a step back from that, moderately challenging, but I think I can do this. They measured, among other things, systolic blood pressure. So that's the top number on our blood pressure reading. And psychologically, what we know is that it indexes our body's preparation for action. Some of the first studies of systolic blood pressure looked at it within animals, and they found things like racehorses who are in the gates ready to have the gates open and to run around the track. Systolic blood pressure goes up for racehorses. Systolic blood pressure in particular. Now, they're not running now. They're confined behind their gates, but systolic blood pressure is going up in anticipation of running. That happens for human runners as well. And it happens for people even when what they're about to do requires just cognitive effort. You might be on the brink of doing math problems. You're going to sit there and focus on paper and writing and figuring out math problems. But systolic blood pressure goes up in anticipation of effort that you're going to need to get the job done. So back to this study of setting easy, moderately challenging, and impossible goals. What my colleagues found was that systolic blood pressure stayed relatively low when people set goals that were easy. It's as if their body knew, I don't really need to harness much here to get this job done. Systolic blood pressure also stayed low on those goals that were considered impossibly hard. It's as if their body was giving up before it even started because mentally we have decided I can't do this. And your body says, all right, if you don't think you can do it, then I'm not going to help you along the way. I'm not going to prepare for action. Systolic blood pressure stayed low. But in that, almost like the Goldilocks fable, that moderately challenging, not too hard, not too easy, but just right level of difficulty, that's when systolic blood pressure was at its highest. That people knew, like, I think I can do this, but I'm going to really need to muster some effort here. And the body responded to help produce that kind of effort that might be needed.

We often talk about this idea of a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal. I think it was popularized by Jim Collins. And it's this idea that we set this huge, huge target. It's like, oh man, there's just no way I can do that. But sometimes folks are able to accomplish something that they think is impossible. So how do you square that idea with the idea of setting a goal that is what you think is just beyond your grasp? But still you think there's a decent probability that if you work really hard, you can achieve it.

You know, it's all about the steps that you take to work towards that big goal. So, you know, some people use vision boards or dream boards, you know, or some process to figure out what is my BHAG? What, what is this long-term vision that I have for what success will look like for me? And going through that process should be applauded because for a lot of people, that's the challenge. What's my purpose? What's my passion? What am I working towards? I'm not even sure. So that's an important part of this goal setting process is knowing what is the end stage that I would like to accomplish. But people who are successful at meeting those end stages don't stop the process of goal setting there. Contrary to what some popular self-help books say, just putting that positive energy out into the world, like, this is what I want for my life and I am excited to go for it, doesn't translate into better outcomes in the long run. And in fact, it can backfire. Again, colleagues of mine at New York University found that if you stop the process of goal setting, it just articulating and thinking about what it is that you want in the future, that you sort of like mentally savor that desired outcome and chill out. Systolic blood pressure goes down. It actually drops after sort of fantasizing and daydreaming about what your BHAG might be. So how do people accomplish it then? They do. How do they do it? Because they often couple that big picture goal setting process with other aspects of goal setting that are really important when we're in the planning stages. Besides thinking about that high-level vision for the future, we need to concretely plan, set those micro goals or their sub-goals like you've talked about, and think about those concrete actions I can take today and this week and this month that are going to get me down the right path. But also we need to foreshadow failure. If we foreshadow failure, thinking about the ways that this plan, these actions might go awry or how we might get derailed on this goal, that actually can help motivate us. Now, that sounds, sounds like weird to some people to say, like, wait, it motivates me to, like, think about how my biggest dreams for my life are going to, like, fail. How could that be motivating? Because it's like coming up with a plan B or a plan C. It's taking some time to troubleshoot the obstacles in advance and thinking about how you'll move through them so that if you do face them, then you're not thrown off course. That's usually the time when we don't have the time or the resources or the opportunity to think creatively about how I'll move through a challenging space. But instead, if we already know what those backup plans could be, then we can instantly pivot in those moments of challenge and push through them. Those are some of the strategies that people use to translate that BHAG into success. And for some people, why they might struggle to accomplish that goal.

Let's use an example of a financial advisor. I was just on a conversation a half an hour before you and I started talking today. We were on a webinar and the advisor asked, I have a client who is in their mid-50s and they admittedly said, we have spent recklessly up to this point. We've not saved nearly enough for retirement. So the advisor was asking, what do I do for someone who admits we're reckless spenders? We don't have money for retirement. So on your research, how would you respond?

So, you know, I'm not going to have the magic cure here. I mean, you guys are the experts in this space, but you know, with my students, I, I was exploring this topic as well. So they were not 50, they were in their early 20s, And you might say like, you know, an exciting time from a financial advisory perspective to be working with people because they're at the moment now when they can be doing quote unquote the right thing, saving a small amount early on and how compound interest works. Of course, they're going to be better off in the long run. But when I asked, you know, 60 students that I was working with, all of whom had jobs, all of whom were on the brink of graduating from college, are you saving for retirement? It doesn't matter how much, even a small amount. Are you saving for retirement right now? They all said no. No, probably no surprise. They're all saving. None of them are saving for retirement now. And then I asked them, well, why? Why are you not? Do you understand? They don't really understand compound interest. People who are not financial advisors or bankers or in that world probably don't. But they understood the basic principle that they should be. But when I asked them, they said, because generally the most commonly offered response was because it seems so far away. Retirement just seems so far away. I've got time for that. But if they hold on to that mentality, then they end up becoming the 50-year-old who says, oh, I didn't start soon enough. I spent recklessly. I've lived my youth for too long, maybe. So because they said it just seems so far away, that really resonated with me with the exercise work. I started making some connections between the people that I was working with who were seeing a finish line as impossibly far away. And could we somehow bring that finish line in closer, make it feel closer to them? And would that change what they did? Could I take that sort of metaphor, that philosophy with these college students and change their perspective on saving for retirement? So I took this idea from Hal Hirschfeld, who's a professor at UCLA, and I took a photograph of my students and I morphed that photograph of what they look like right now with a famous, successful older person like Maya Angelou, Dan Rather, Betty White. And I sort of created this movie taking them from where they are right now to what their retired self might look like.— put a little bit more wrinkles on their face, give them some white hair. And then it showed them that picture and had them visualize, materialize what that future self might look like. The person who might get these retirement dollars that young me is being asked to set aside. Who is that person that's going to get this money that I'm giving up now? So they were— almost all of them were horrified. One man said, I think I look pretty good as an older person, but most of them were just like, like, like the breath was taken away from them and said, oh God, this looks awful. So that experience itself wasn't positive for most of them. But then they took some time to think about what is retirement, what could it look like? And it painted a more positive picture of that future self. But I think what's most important is that it connected that far-off future with the here and now. It made the choices that I make today and what the impact it could have on the future seem more relevant. Present and connected. It, it brought in, it created that sense of proximity that our runners experienced for them in a temporal sense. Time seemed contracted. And then when I asked them, what do you think about retirement? I mean, maybe it's a loaded question, but they know I'm not a financial advisor, but they all said like, okay, I get it. I think I'm going to really start considering what I can set aside for retirement now. I get the benefits of it and how it'll benefit me in the future. So I think, you know, for some people that's the struggle is that I have immediate concerns. I have bills that need to get paid right now, or I have desires. I really want this vacation or I really need this vacation. And to discount that, I think is problematic because those things are true. It's just that there is a waiting that's happening that is causing some of the problem here. It's like, well, yeah, but your future self is also going to want and need that vacation. And we need to set them up, set you up also to be able to have what you want in need in that future. So it's trying to shift that weighting so that the future self gets a little bit more weight than the current self and the current needs are being given. And one way to do that would be through that process of visualization. Now, I'm not talking about like, you know, hypnotizing people or anything like that. Nothing like super new agey and fringy, but it's just like make that future more concrete, as concrete as today's needs are. And you might see people having it, putting a different value on preparing for the future.

Based on the last word that you just said there, the values. So, the way I like to think of it is if someone is young and you're trying to get them to save for retirement, as you say, there's a tension here between I want to live in the moment, I want to spend right now versus, oh, 26 years from now, I can't even think where I'm going to go this weekend, you know? So, it's like we have to help them understand the value or what the values are, what is most important to them. So, if we can help increase increase their motivation or help them clarify what is most valuable to them. And if living well in my future is important to me, just like you did with Hal Hershfield, I think you mentioned his name, visualizing what I might look like in the future helps bring that into the present. So, I think that's important is increasing the motivation, increasing the value of my future self.

Another principle you can add too is how do you review a portfolio and financial goals? And, you know, One thing that we can consider is that you've got a couple options. You can look back to the past as you open this anecdote with saying there's a, you know, a 50-year-old who's saying, I've spent recklessly. What do I do? They're reflecting back on their past behavior, where they are relative to the goal that maybe they should have had back then and not seeing enough progress as they are nearing the end. So you can look backwards. You can also look forwards. Where do I stand right now and what is my goal? And which one of those is more effective? They're both effective, but they can be used in different times. And what science has told us, researchers out of the University of Chicago have found that looking back on past performance and past successes is useful for people who are less committed, for people that maybe aren't, aren't in it as much. This is a goal that is maybe more external rather than internally driven. Looking back on their past successes is almost a signal of like, well, you must be committed because look at what you've already done. Look how far you've come. That can be a source of motivation for people who aren't as committed when they're in that sort of middle stage of a goal in terms of time or progress. But for people who are more committed, who are internally driven, they're passionate about this, they're passionate about what they're working to achieve, reflecting forward, looking forward is more motivating. They may have never even second-guessed whether they could get this far, and now they find inspiration and motivation by closing that gap between between where they are and where they want to be. And that is a source of, of energy and motivation and commitment. Being aware that there are 2 ways that we can reflect on portfolio or any goal that we have. We can look back or we can look forward and sort of taking stock of how committed are we, how experienced are we within this domain, and where might we find more motivation. And even if we're just working with ourselves and trying to figure that out, you know, being aware that there are 2 possibilities and see which one works better for you could be useful.

Okay, so we've got framing, we've got narrow our focus, we've got two more.

What would be the next one? Widening our bracket, widen the scope of attention. That's another one, of course, in juxtaposition to narrowed focus of attention. And so that might seem like, wait a minute, she's just offering something that's completely contradictory. You told me to narrow my focus of attention, but now you're saying I should also widen it. Again, I like to think of these as tools, you know, tools in a toolbox. You couldn't build a house if all you had is a hammer, and you can't meet all your goals if you keep sticking with just one approach. So just realizing that we have different motivational tools for the job is just as important as if you were trying to build a house. And widening your scope of attention, widening your bracket, is important as well. An example that I really like is when I was digging into the backstory of Vera Wang. So, you know, an icon of fashion. She's created one of the most successful fashion houses in history, known for her wedding dresses and all else. And so you might think, like, you know, she must have been pretty focused for her whole life to achieve this level of captured within this discipline. But no, actually, she first started in figure skating. She was a figure skater as her first career, and she was pretty good at it. She was on, on the world stage as a figure skater, but we don't really know her for that, even though she was quite good. But she realized at some point, even though she was coming in, you know, second on the world stage constantly, that she's not going to hit it. She's not going to become the most iconic name in figure skating. And so she needed to take a step back. Some people might say she failed at figure skating, but she doesn't— she doesn't use those words in describing what her experience in that career was like, she said she took a step back and she was trying to figure out what is it that I'm passionate about? What is it that I'm trying to achieve in life? What do I like? She was fortunate enough to try to figure that out at the Sorbonne in Paris. I wish I could figure out my life at the Sorbonne at any stage, but that's where she was doing her reflections on what is it that she loves. And she realized it's the art of line. Of course, in figure skating, you're cutting lines into the ice and you are also in fashion. You're dealing with line and form and figure.. And so she took up as her second career fashion. Now, it's not an abrupt start and a restart in something completely new. She found continuity because for her it was just another way to express what it is that she'd always been studying. So that's an example, I think, of if she had been narrowly focused on being number one and not satisfied with number two, then, you know, she, she may not have ever accomplished what her dream was within figure skating. But she stopped. She looked for alternatives. Motives. She started, you know, really thinking about what is it that she loved, and she found another means. She found a different path forward that for her was not failing and then succeeding somewhere else, but just finding a new path forward.

I did an earlier Barron's show with John Hagel, and one of the things that he talked about was this idea of zoom out, zoom in. And in a business context, he was saying that we want to zoom out 10 or 20 years into the future, and we want to try and see what we think the trends are. What are the things that are still going relevant and important to our market 10 to 20 years from now. And then we want to zoom in over the next 6 to 12 months. What do we need to do? What are the steps we need to be taking today to keep us marching toward that 10 to 20-year zoom out that we've pictured here? So like you say, we have to know when is the right time to use the particular tool. In your case, the, the narrow focus and the wide bracket, they might seem contradictory. Contradictory, but they're just two tools to be used at different times and in conjunction with each other to support each other. So they're not really contradictory at all.

Exactly. And you can kind of prep yourself or help yourself thinking that 20 years out to the future, or like Vera Wang, trying to think what is it that we're working towards by doing something as simple as asking yourself why. Why right now am I talking to Steve? Oh, because I really like these engaging conversations. Why do you like these engaging conversations? Because I think something can be gained by, you know, you can go through this process of asking yourself why are you doing this? Well, why are you doing that? Well, then why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? And you put yourself into this wider mental frame that can help you think about 20 years from now, what do I want to be doing?

Comes down to motivation. It's like, why is this important to me?

And that is in contrast to another question you could ask yourself, which is how. If you want to put yourself in that, like, narrow, really local, like, troubleshooting mode, you just ask yourself how. How am I talking to Steve right now? I'm talking to him on my laptop. And how are you talking to him on your laptop? Well, I have it set up this way. How, how, how gets you thinking really concretely. And that mindset, it can be useful too when you need to stay in the weeds on something to move your way through a problem that you might be experiencing.

Yeah. And so as we think about the why and the how, so the why is really the motivation. So, and you mentioned why, why, why, you know, the old ask yourself why 5 times to really get to the core of why this is important to you and motivating. So I think one key is we have to understand what is motivating us. And then the second, we ask ourselves, okay, if this is what I want, then I have to ask, well, how do I know the how? And so there's different tools to help with the motivation, there's different tools to help with the how. And I think that's what you're talking about here. These are some tools that you've identified that help us, I think, both with the motivation and also with the how what do we do now once we have the motivation? Exactly.

Okay.

So we've got 3 now. What's the 4th tool that you talk about in your book?

And last is materializing. It's the idea of making concrete, making visual, making something you can see, and that will have a bigger impact than on the things that we just try to keep in our memory. So, you know, to me, I think a great example of this is just thinking about how do we schedule our day and how do we feel at the end of the day? Do we get done all the stuff that we need to get done? I never have that feeling. I never feel like I got everything done in the day that I hoped I would get done in the day. And so why is that? Well, one, I don't follow my own advice. That's part of it. Or I struggle to, like everybody else. But here's a tool that we have found that is effective, which is rather than leaving those things that you want to get done just in your mind as sort of a nagging mental to-do list, they need to take up visual space. So important meetings that you have go into your calendar. Calendar so that you don't forget them and so that you can plan the rest of your day around them. Doctor's appointments, important obligations that you have personally or professionally show up in your calendar. For some of those personal things that are personally important, they're no less important than our professional obligations. Oftentimes we don't put them in. Like, I need to take time, I need to meditate. Now, some people probably put that into their calendar, but not everybody does. And so at the end of the day, they haven't meditated and they still feel mentally frazzled. Now, why would an appointment with a boss be more important and you allow yourself to schedule your life around that appointment with a boss, but you don't give yourself that freedom to schedule other things around your own personal mental and physical health, putting that into your calendar the way that you do time with professional obligations? We studied this again with a group of, of students and I, and we tried this idea of using our calendar in different ways to see its impact. Impact. So we all thought about what's a goal that we have that's pretty important. We're not going to get it done today or this week, maybe not even this month, but it's something that we're really passionate about. What is that? It was different for everybody. And then on Sunday, we all woke up, wrote down what that goal is, and for one week, each of us woke up at the beginning of the day and thought, okay, what, what can I do today that's going to help make progress on this goal? At the end of the day, we reported on how much time we spent working on that And then at the end of the week, we summed up how many hours that we were able to spend on goal-related tasks. That's in comparison to another approach, which was waking up on Sunday, thinking about what that goal was, and on Sunday, making a list of many concrete things that needed to happen for me to make progress on this goal. And on Sunday, putting into our calendar chunks of time of when we were going to do that. And reporting at the end of every day, how much time did you spend on goal-related activities? What we found is that for 66% of people using Sunday to then schedule personal time, chunks of time that we're gonna allocate towards this goal was effective for actually spending, not just finding, but spending more time engaged in goal-related activities. And in fact, people found between 2 and 3 more hours each week that they were able to devote to goal-related activities. So they found more time, they spent more time, they got more done. Done by using their calendar in a different way in advance. When they looked at their life's obligations using a wider bracket, but materializing the way that they think about their commitments and when are they going to be able to get something done, they saw tangible improvements on how much progress they were able to make.

I am a huge fan of this idea of materializing, and I've been using this concept for decades. I mean, I go way back to high school, and I was a distance runner in high school and college. I tracked every workout in a logbook for years. Since then, I've got a spreadsheet where I track every workout every day. I have calculations. If I'm riding my bike, it calculates how many miles I've ridden year to date, compares to the previous year, the previous year, so on and so forth. And what I like about that is every day when I exercise, I go in there. And one of the things I do is when I exercise that day, I put a 1 in the box for that day. And, and it gives me this little hit of dopamine or whatever the chemical is that makes me feel good, and it keeps me motivated. So being able to visualize, to materialize that progress, helps reinforce that I want to keep doing this because I'm on a streak and this feels good, and I like looking back and seeing that progress. So if people listening to this do nothing else but start tracking your progress on things, I think that's going to be a huge win.

I like to call that being your own accountant, that, you know, our brains are set up in a way that we don't remember But it's not random, it's systematic. We remember good things more than we remember bad things. If we had it the other way around, then we often would— we could find ourselves depressed or not motivated to get anything done, right? So our brains are set up to prioritize positive experiences to keep us going more so than negative ones. But, but it's important for us to know both so that we can have an accurate sense of where we are at in the process of trying to meet a goal. You know, I've done something like that for myself too. I set a goal. It's, it's not long distance running, but it was learning to become a drummer. A rock drummer. There was a point in my life when I felt like that was really important to me, uh, and would be a challenge. And if I could accomplish it, then I would be really excited. But I felt like I was making no progress until I went through this experience of trying to become my own accountant. I had my phone, I downloaded an app called the Reporter app, and I had it set up to ping me, you know, 3 or 4 times a day and ask me, did you practice drums since the last time I asked you? Mostly I said no, but if I said yes, then it said like, well, how do you feel about about it. And I did that for a month and downloaded the data and then looked to see. And what I learned is that I actually had practiced more than I remembered because what was nagging me was the anxiety that led me to focus on how many days or how many times I didn't practice and not give myself enough credit for the days that I had. And I also couldn't see what was an actual pattern there. My memory was faulty and didn't let me realize that actually improvement is happening, but my anxiety was overriding my ability to see what It was small but still meaningful progress within that 1-month period of time. So that's important. Knowing where are we really and what is the trajectory that we're on is important for knowing how do we calibrate the next micro goal that we're going to set and do that accurately and produce the best outcomes for ourselves. We can only do that if we really know where we actually are standing right now. And we can't rely just on our memories to give us that accurate insight.

Yeah, and I like how you, you mentioned patterns as well. And so this idea of the perception, the visual, is like seeing the patterns. And if you're your own accountant, if you're tracking all these things and you're reviewing the data, you can start seeing the patterns in that, and that's going to help you make better decisions about how you're going to move forward and achieve what it is that you say that you want to achieve. And I go overboard too. You talk about the calendar, so I've got a digital calendar, so I schedule everything on my digital calendar. But then every morning, I look at my digital calendar. And I put it in a Word doc, and I write it out like, okay, at 8 o'clock, I'm doing this. At 1:30, I've got a podcast recording with Emily. And then after that, it gets edited, and so on and so forth. So I have a visual, but then I also have a physical representation of that. And I find that I get so much more done when I schedule even the littlest thing. I'll say, okay, at 2:15 to 2:30, I'm going to do X, from 2:30 to 3, I'm going to do Y. And it does two things. One is it forces me to do it at that time. But then second, I give myself a window to accomplish that and I don't get distracted and scroll through Twitter if I know I've only got 15 minutes to do this. So again, playing these little tricks with ourselves, at least it seems to be working okay for me.

Yeah, I think those are all great suggestions. That's an example of materializing. The other thing that I find helpful in doing both the digital calendar, which I do too, and then the analog is that it's another form of giving yourself feedback because, you know, often the way that digital calendars are set up is that, you know, the time sort of vanishes. What you've already done goes away. And so you can't really see all that you've accomplished. You just see what's next to come. You're sort of so focused on the future that it can create this sense of, you know, being on the rat race of just going, going, going. Here's the next thing. Here's the next thing. And so the other thing that I find beneficial about writing it down also is that it's a concrete visual manifestation of what I did accomplish. So at the end of the day, when I'm just left feeling like, oh my gosh, I didn't get enough done today, and I look at that Word document, I can see, no, actually I did get a lot more done than it feels like right now, and I need to just settle down and feel that success.

Yeah, and then literally I'll scratch through when I complete it, so I get that feeling of completion several times a day. All right, Emily, well, I know we need to be wrapping up here. So I've got one final question that I want to ask you. But before I do that, I'd love for you to tell me about your book. You've got a book called Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World. Tell me about that. And then for folks that want to keep in touch with you and stay up to date with all the research and great work that you're doing, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

Sure. The book talks about these strategies and goes into more depth and presents lots of interesting case studies of, of people who intentionally or who unintentionally use these strategies and how it plays out for their life. We tackle all different kinds of goals that they might have, those related to their personal life, to their health, relationships, financial stability, a lot of different domains, and just some of the most amazing people that I have met in my journey to understand how do people motivate themselves and how do they get the job done. And so the research that my team is doing filters into that book, but also you can learn more about it by following me on LinkedIn. I try to post as much content as I can up there for people to read more.

Excellent. All right. So final question. This comes from a previous guest who had no idea who I was going to ask this question to. So the question that they have is, what habit do you have now that you wish you would have started earlier?

Oh goodness. I don't multitask. I try to stay engaged in the moment. It helps me do a better job with what I'm doing. And I, um, probably even more importantly, I feel better. You get into that flow state, you get to make real connections with people, and I just feel like a more productive person and a better mom when I'm all of the above. It's just I enjoy my life a lot more when I'm not trying to be, to put on more than one hat at a time.

Excellent. All right, well, Emily, appreciate you taking some time to be on the show, and congratulations on the great book as well. Thanks Talking with Emily really drove home the point of the way that we perceive a goal has a critical impact on our ability to achieve that goal. And the 4 tools that she described— framing, narrow focus, wide brackets, and materialize a goal— are 4 practical ideas that each of us can utilize, and they don't cost any money. So if you have a client who is stuck and not moving forward on an important goal, try using one or more of these tools and you might be able to get your client over the finish line. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

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