The One You Feed - Gabriele Oettingen

Episode Date: January 28, 2015

This week we talk to Gabriele Oettingen about rethinking positive thinking.Gabriele Oettingen is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. She is the author of more than a 100 articles and book chapters on thinking about the future and the control of cognition, emotion, and behavior. She received her Ph.D. from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, Germany.Her major contribution to the field is research on the perils of positive thinking and on Mental Contrasting, a self-regulation technique that is effective for mastering one’s everyday life and long-term development. Gabriele Oettingen’s work is published in social and personality psychology, developmental and educational psychology, in health and clinical psychology, in organizational and consumer psychology, as well as in neuropsychological and medical journals. Her findings contribute to the burgeoning literature on life style change and businesses and institutions have increasingly become interested in the application of her research.Her first trade book, RETHINKING POSITIVE THINKING: Inside the New Science of Motivation was published in October 2014. In This Interview Gabriele and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.How positive thinking can lead to worse results.How just fantasizing makes it less likely that those fantasies come true.What mental contrasting is.Using mental contrasting to increase your likelihood of success.How envisioning our obstacles can make us more likely to achieve the goals.What implementation intention is and how to use it in your life.The WOOP method- Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.Using WOOP to bring about success in our lives.How WOOP works on the unconscious mind.Eric gets WOOP'ed.Gabriele Oettingen LinksWoop Main SiteRethinking Positive Thinking BookGabrielle Oettingen Homepage  Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Dan HarrisTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You can use positive fantasies to kind of explore in your mind the possibilities of the future. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Gabrielle Ettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. Gabrielle's research focuses on how we think about the future and how this impacts our cognition, emotion, and behavior. Much of Gabrielle's research has been implemented into her fantastic website, whoopmylife.org. Gabrielle's first book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, was published in 2014. Here's the interview.

Hi, Gabrielle. Welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. I know you're in Germany, so it's pretty late there, so I appreciate you staying up late for us. Well, my pleasure. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who is talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do? Well, you know, my work is the work of a scientist. And what does a scientist do? He hopes to discover and he hopes to learn and he hopes to get involved in what's actually happening.

in what's actually happening. And, you know, the good side is that you get a lot of meaning out of discovering things you didn't know before, and you get a lot of meaning out of then taking these discoveries and telling other people and letting other people share. So I always had a lot of fun of just sort of learning more from the data and from all the surprises you get when you're a scientist. And lately I had a lot of joy sharing these discoveries and seeing how people benefit from it.

And that's the reason why I wrote the book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, because there's a message in there where I think people can benefit from and where I benefited a lot from people around me. And I saw my participants in the experiments benefiting from. So that's the kind of meaningful and trusting and pleasurable side of the wolf who is kind of trying to make meaning. Excellent.

Well, your book is called Rethinking Positive Thinking Inside the New Science and Motivation. I think I first came across your work certainly before I saw the book and I think it was perhaps Oliver Berkman was one of our very first guests and I think he referenced your research.

I think he did either in his book or in an article he wrote. So he was our second guest. So I had heard of you and your research a while ago. And when I saw that your book was out, I definitely wanted to have a chance to talk with you. And so you mentioned in your intro there that one of the things you like about your work is finding surprises. And I think that your research early on led you into a surprise. your research early on led you into a surprise.

I think you were, in the book you say that you were very interested in the way people think and their dreaming, and you thought that that sort of thing led to positive end results for them. And then when you started to do the research, you kind of came to a different conclusion. Can you share a little bit about what that research involved and what it led you to? Sure. about what that research involved and what it led you to? Sure. No, I was interested in hope. Very early on, I was interested in hope,

and I defined hope very differently from what people in psychology defined hope. I defined hope kind of according to Bloch, sort of saying, you know, you have these kind of according to Bloch, sort of saying, you know, you have these kind of positive spirits and the dreams, despite that the odds are really bad. And at that time, this was the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, hope and optimism was actually kind of blurred and was kind of sort of defined as one thing.

And I thought, ah, this is different. And in psychology, optimism was mostly defined as the likelihoods of whether certain events or behaviors happen in the future or not. So these were judgments people had about the likelihood that certain things will happen in the future. But I thought there might be another way of thinking about the future, which is daydreaming and kind of just sort of imagining the events and the behaviors of the future. And so I differentiate these two ways of thinking about the future. And at the beginning, I thought, you know, we know that optimism in terms of expectations,

since these expectations are based on past performance, that they predict high effort and success. So I thought probably these positive stage ratings will predict effort and success as well. But then I did a study, and what came out was that the more positively the participants, which were overweight women who were enrolled in a weight reduction program, the more positively they fantasized and daydreamed about the success in a weight reduction program, the more positively they fantasized and they dreamt about the success in the weight loss program, the fewer pounds they lost. So positive thinking suddenly led to low effort and low success. So they lost fewer pounds three months and one year and even two years later. And so I thought I might have made a mistake here.

Positive dreaming has kind of problematic consequences. But then we did more and more and more studies and we found the same pattern over and over again. So for example, the more positively university graduates fantasized about an easy transition into work life, the fewer dollars they earned two years later and the fewer job offers they got. Or the more positively students fantasized about getting involved with a person of the opposite sex they were kind of in love with, they had a crush on, the lower the likelihood that they actually got together with that person. And so on. Also in the health area, the more positively hip replacement surgery patients fantasized about an easier recovery, the less well they did as judged by the physical therapist

three weeks later. So it seems that these positive dreams and fantasies are pleasant at the moment, but over time they actually hurt the effort and they hurt the success to actually realize these positive fantasies. So they're good, if you want, for the pleasure, and they're relaxing. So we know, for example, that we induce these positive fantasies in daydreams and people relax. So the blood pressure goes down as compared to, for example, factual thoughts or questioning fantasies or negative fantasies or nothing. So these positive fantasies relax you. They're pleasant at the moment. But in the long run, they impede you from actually achieving these fantasies in real life.

Your statement is pretty clear in the book. You said, my research has confirmed that merely dreaming about the future makes people less likely to realize their dreams and wishes. That's exactly right. So, you know, I can use these positive fantasies to explore all the possibilities of the future or to just have pleasure when I'm sitting at the beach and there's nothing to do, actually.

But when it really comes to realizing and kind of attaining these wishes, then I better watch out. And I watch out that I also consider the obstacles in me that impede me of actually realizing these positive dreams and fantasies. And that's what we learned from our participants, because those who merely dreamt about the future, they actually were less likely to reach them. But those who also considered the obstacles and the hindrances and the temptations on the way to reaching these wishes, they did much better. So actually what we did is that we built a theory on what we learned from our participants in the early studies. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. No, really. Go to really, no, really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I want to just spend another brief minute on this fantasizing. And I think you do talk about in certain cases, fantasizing is it's useful for certain needs. It's useful for certain things, but it's not useful with anything that requires significant effort, energy, or commitment. So what are some of the good uses of these positive fantasies? Well, you can use these positive fantasies to kind of explore in your mind the possibilities of the future. So, for example, you have the fantasy of becoming a doctor or becoming a lawyer or something. So you can explore in your mind all the different tasks and all the different situations a doctor or a lawyer may encounter. So let's say you have throughout your generations, your family,

they produce doctors. You're from a family who's just traditionally a medical family. So it's clear you should go and become a doctor as well. So you imagine what it would should go and become a doctor as well so you imagine what it would be like to be to become a doctor as a young person and then um you think about how wonderful it would be to you know sit on the bed and sort of help the people to um recover and um to do the surgery or what have you just sort of how exciting it would be to help people and to be proficient in in your job or you might think about hmm it's nice to have you know

to be an accomplished doctor but actually I don't really like hospitals and the smells I don't like at all and you know I don't want to sit there in the nights all alone with all these patients and so you can explore these possibilities and suddenly you feel maybe that's not for me that's not something where I belong or which belongs to me so you you explore in your mind and you can explore the possibilities of the future and then see what belongs to you and where your wishes really are. So that's one way you can use these positive fantasies. Another way is if you need to wait and you are in a bad mood,

so just positively fantasize about something easygoing. And you might get a better mood, but don't expect that you then actually realize these positive fantasies. And then certainly positive fantasies are helpful if there is no way you can act. So if you have no possibilities to act, you're in a situation where you cannot actually achieve these wishes, nor can you disengage from these wishes. So then positive fantasies are helpful too. But if you have the possibility to actually achieve them, and if you are in a situation where you can act, then the sheer positive fantasizing impedes you from acting because you've failed already being there. You think you're ups. I'm already there. You mentally enjoy the positive future and forget that it's not there yet and that you need to overcome these

obstacles and temptations and the relinquishment to actually go all the way. And so you go in your book from this sort of initially thinking, okay, maybe these dreams or fantasies are, you know, the conventional wisdom is that these are helpful to get into your goals. And then you realize, well, maybe that's not the case. But you didn't really stop there. You went on to the next stage, which is where you sort of came up with something that you call mental contrasting, which is where you still use the desire or the fantasy, but then you also use this technique called mental contrasting as a way to push you forward towards those goals. Can you describe what mental contrasting is?

Yeah, exactly. This is what we learned from our participants. So mental contrasting is first designing in your mind the positive future. So you look at a wish which is actually very dear to you. So you find a wish which is actually something that is important to you, not just anything, but something where you feel, hmm, this is really my wish. And what you do then is you imagine the wish coming true and you imagine the best outcome. You define the best outcome and then you imagine the best outcome, you define the best outcome, and then you imagine the best outcome.

And after you mentally experience the best outcome, which is actually what we just talked about, the positive fantasies, once you imagine that and you mentally experience the positive future, then you switch gears and then you say, hmm, what holds me back from achieving this wish and experiencing that outcome? What is it in me that stops me from going that way and from trying to achieve the wish and experiencing that outcome?

What is my personal, my inner obstacle? And that's what mental contrasting is. So you design the future, something which you really want, and then you switch gears and say, what is the resistance? What is the obstacle in me that stands in the way? And once you do that, you define the obstacle, and you identify the obstacle, do that you define the obstacle and you identify the obstacle and then you imagine the obstacle and once you do that you understand whether you can overcome the obstacle

and actually achieve your wish or whether the obstacle is so formidable that you say no I don't want to do that I don't want to actually put all the effort in there. Either I don't want to do that, so it's not worth actually going all the way. But then you know that your energy and your resources are better for something else, or you can also adjust your wish. So what mental contrasting really is, it's the contrasting of the positive future with the obstacles in me that stands in the way. And once you do that, it's getting very clear whether you can overcome the obstacle and achieve the wish

and then you will really commit and go there and do the planning and all the relinquishment to actually achieve the wish. And if the obstacle is too big, either you don't want to because something else is more important, or you cannot, then you say, okay, forget it. This was too big of a fantasy. Let's go and postpone or delegate, do it at another time, or just let go from that fantasy. But then you can let go from the fantasies with a good conscience, and you can actually invest in something else. So it's a way to kind of clean up. You can clean up your desk with it, but you can also clean up your life by prioritizing what is really belonging to you and what you can do and what is not so important to you and what you actually cannot do.

about takes that deviation from the positive thinking because the positive thinking idea is, I think you're, you know, everything's kind of aligned on this. All right, let me think about what I want and let me fantasize about what I want. But the positive thinking thing is really about not imagining that anything could stand in your way and very much being like, well, I can have anything or I can do anything. And, and what I really like about the approach that you're bringing here is to, is, is that you are, um, you're being realistic about what's happening. And I think that's what I really like. And you talk about that. What's so helpful about this is that you are bringing together both the wish, then the reality in this mental contrasting and the studies that you did showed that this was a much more, that people were much more effective in reaching their goals when they brought those two things together, the dream and the fantasy, and then the reality or the obstacles that needed to be overcome. That's right. I mean, you can say, why are we motivated after mental contrasting? No, you can say, what is motivation? Motivation is energy, and you get the energy through mental contrasting because you see there is resistance,

so you need to have some energy to get over the resistance. Energy and direction. So the positive fantasies bring the direction, and the resistance, the obstacles that are in the way of reaching the positive fantasies, they give the energy. So that is what motivation really is all about. You get the energy to go in a certain direction, namely to achieve your wish.

And that's the reason why mental contrasting is really helpful in terms of sort of going, loving it, doing it, and really sort of reaching it then, and then leaving it so that you get your energy free. And you get freed of all these kind of lingering goals which are on your mind, and you never succeed to actually reach them, but you don't actually leave them either.

So this kind of feeling of being overwhelmed and being kind of burdened and this kind of feeling of upcoming burnout. kind of feeling of upcoming burnout. So you can actually help these feelings go away by using mental contrasting on a daily basis. And what we did then is to sort of complement the mental contrasting exercise with adding a plan, which is in the scientific literature called implementation intention, which has been discovered by Peter Goldritzer.

And what that does is then once I identify, imagine the obstacle, and I know now what to do in order to overcome the obstacle, I can actually add a plan which makes it even more effective to overcome that obstacle in the form if the obstacle occurs then I will perform the behavior to overcome the obstacle so for example if I'm let's say I have the wish to do really well at a talk or something and then the best outcome would be I would be so relieved and kind of more efficacious and then I imagine how wonderful it would be, how relieved I would feel if I had succeeded at that talk. Let's say my obstacle which I identify if I'm kind of honest to me and with a little bit of humor I could say okay I'm really anxious, I'm kind of honest to me and with a little bit of humor, I could say, okay, I'm really anxious.

I'm really anxious sort of, you know, giving this talk in front of that audience. And then I could say, okay, imagine the anxiety. And then what could I do to overcome that anxiety? Well, I could tell myself, well, this is really something which I did quite a few times. I succeeded to speak in front of our audience, so there is really no reason to be anxious. And then you can put a plan behind it, and you could say, now, if the feeling of anxiety creeps up, then I will tell myself, come on, you did it in the past really well, so this will work again. So it is a way of complementing the mental contrasting with adding on a plan.

And that is what we define as WHOOP. It's just an acronym for this four-step process. It's wish, outcome, and then you need to imagine the outcome. And then you identify the obstacle in you. You get rid of all the excuses. You say, now what is it in me that stands in the way? And you imagine that personal obstacle in you. And then you say, okay, if obstacle occurs, then I will perform the behavior to overcome that obstacle.

And, you know, I give a lot of kind of little exercises and also all the scientific literature of how mental contrasting and implementation intentions or WHOOPop works how it actually achieves the behavior change in the book but but these little exercises help you to understand how you can put your own wishes and your own outcomes and your own obstacles and your own plan into these four-step structure. Because what whoop really does, it gives the structure, but it doesn't give the content. The content needs to be filled in by the person.

So it kind of liberates the person to sort of be their own kind of coach and their own trainer and their own therapist. Because what whoop really does, it allows you to change your behavior. But the content needs to be filled in by you. Your own wishes belong into whoop. Right. So let's go back just a little bit there. So we talked about the mental obstacles, and then you added something to it that you picked up from another researcher. It was really this, what you just described as the

implementation intention, which is really, like you said, it's the plan of if then. So you're thinking about your obstacles, and if one of the obstacles is that every time I come home from work, I'm suddenly very hungry, and that's when I'm likely to overeat. every time I come home from work, I'm suddenly very hungry. And that's when I'm likely to overeat. So if I come home from work, and I feel really hungry, then I will do why thing. And one of the things that I thought was interesting in the book, when you talked about that, maybe you could share a little bit about this, was that you talk about the difference between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and that something about this implementation intention helps to reach the unconscious part of ourselves that often gets in our way. Can you talk about how that, what the mechanism is there? Sure. I mean, the whoop

exercise, whether it's the wish outcome obstacle, or whether it's the P, the plan, the whole exercise works via the non-conscious. So what we know is that when we do whoop wish outcome obstacle, even without the plan, what happens is that this kind of conscious imagery exercise produces changes in the cognition which are outside of our awareness and it produces changes in motivation which are outside of our awareness. So, for example, when we take a wish which is feasible, then we do the W-O-O exercise.

What happens is then that the future and the reality are connected. So the future and the obstacle are now connected. So that I cannot dream anymore without that the obstacle immediately appears in the mind. And not only that the future and the reality or the future and the obstacle are connected, now also the obstacle and the instrumental means to overcome the obstacles are connected. And in addition, the reality, the obstacle is now a real obstacle. So it's not, for example, a fun party is now no fun party anymore when it is kind of complemented to the wish of doing well on an exam.

on an exam, let's say on Tuesday, now the party is not a fun thing anymore, but it's an obstacle to doing well on the exam on Tuesday. So there are a lot of non-conscious changes which then predict the behavior change. So these non-conscious changes, they mediate the effects of that conscious imagery exercise, which is whoop, onto behavior change. So the imagery exercise works via the non-conscious onto behavior change. And that's also true for implementation intention. So if I say if obstacle, then I will, the connection between the obstacle, the reality, and the instrumental means to overcome the obstacle is even more strengthened than when I do only the W-O-O. So this plan is particularly important then

when the obstacle is very hard to overcome. And the nice thing is not only that cognition outside of awareness is changed as a result of the imagery exercise of whoop, it's also the motivation. So for example, my blood pressure goes up if I do whoop, and then the blood pressure changes that actually, the behavior changes later on. So it seems that it's a kind of practical exercise because I do the conscious imagery exercise. That sort of puts into gears all these non-conscious outside-of-awareness processes, and they then change my behavior.

So when you do whoop in the morning, for example, and you go through the day and you think about tons of other things, and then in the evening you think, hmm, I had a pretty good encounter today with my colleague, and actually I started my paper, and I had a really good dinner with my son or something. And then you think back and say, wasn't that what I whooped this morning? Wasn't that what my wish was for the day that I have a kind of easy encounter with my colleague

that I sort of, you know, start my paper and that I have a nice family dinner. And so the consequences of the whoop are such that you don't even need to think about it. But later on you think that the kind of, you know, the body did it for you. And that's fun because you feel, you know, you did this exercise and then if you did it without that, you were aware of know you did this exercise and then if you did it without that you were aware of what you did i'm jason alexander and i'm peterilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So WHOOP is Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Can you walk us through, maybe can we use, try and do an example of how this would work? So maybe you could walk me through one of my own? Oh, absolutely. All right. So let's pretend that I want to, uh, I want to learn to play the guitar solo to Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits. That's my wish. So how would we, what, what is the, what, cause you talk about mental imagery, which is something that I'm not typically, uh, something that I don't understand real well. So can you talk about where we would start with this, say, if this was a dream?

It's a small one, but a dream that I had. Well, so that's a dream. So that's your wish. Is that a wish which is actually dear to you? It's a real wish, yeah. It is. And it has real obstacles in my case, which is that I can't play guitar very well. And Mark Knopfler can play guitar better

than most people on the planet. So there's some real obstacles there too. But yes, it is a wish. Well, is it a wish which is very dear to you? And is it a wish which is feasible to you? I think it's feasible and it's kind of dear to me, yeah. Okay, great. So what would be the best outcome if you fulfilled yourself that wish?

I would finally stop feeling like Chris is always a better guitar player than me. No, I think it would be a real sense of personal satisfaction to play something that I didn't think necessarily I ever would or something that I thought was one of the most impressive pieces of music. Okay, so can you summarize for me this in two to three words? What would be the best outcome? I think feeling proud and accomplished. Very good. Okay, great. Now, if we did a real whoop now,

I would ask you to probably close your eyes and I would tell you, okay, I guide you through that, and then I would ask you to imagine this feeling of accomplishment. And you would really need to imagine that, how that feels. And you would probably close your eyes and just sort of go, like we talked about the positive fantasies and tantrums,

you would just sort of go on and just experience that in your mind. Do that for a sec. Okay. Okay? All right. Okay. And now I would ask you to wake up and open your eyes, and then I would ask you, actually, what holds you back from doing that?

And I would ask you, actually, what holds you back from doing that? What is it in you that stands in the way of fulfilling that wish and experiencing that accomplishment? What is it in you that stops you from doing that? Spending the concentrated amount of time to do it on a consistent basis and to stick with it when it feels hard. Okay. Can you summarize that for me in two to three words? Giving up in the face of frustration and lack of progress. Mm-hmm. So what is it, frustration or is it the giving up? What is it?

Two words, two, three words. What is it in you that stands in the way? What is your obstacle? If you dig a little deeper, what is it in you? Lack of persistence? Mm-hmm. It's lack of persistence, but why do you lack the persistence? This is getting a whole lot deeper than I anticipated. I know. All right.

Sure you don't want to do this, Chris. What is it in me? Boy, I don't know how to answer that. I think that if I think about this in the context of playing the guitar in the past, I tend to come across something that is challenging. And when I can't do it, after a couple easy tries, I just sort of move on to something else. Okay. So I don't know. What is that in me? You're the author and the researcher. No, I'm not the author and the researcher. And that's really important in whoop. I can't tell you, you need to find yourself.

But you kind of already sort of said it. i can't tell you from the outside i can't tell you um because you need to find that you know best and that's the idea of whoop you need to find your own obstacle and you can dig deeper and say now what is it in me and once you find that obstacle you're really relieved so try try once more and, what is it in me that holds me back? And if you dig a little deeper, what is it in you that holds you back from doing that and from feeling that accomplishment? What is it really? Well, I think it's kind of what I've identified, a tendency to give up and a lack of focus. So maybe it's, some of it seems like maybe not keeping the goal clearly enough in mind.

Okay, so it's a lack of focus. Why do you, it's like this giving up. So now you could say, now why do I have this lack of focus then? And you can explore that for yourself or you can stop short here and say, okay, it's a lack of focus. And then you can imagine the lack of focus. Let's say that would be your obstacle. But certainly when you're outside of of that podcast you can sort of

dig deeper on your on your own and say why is it that i have this lack of focus but let's say we stop short here and say you know i have this lack of focus and then you imagine how it feels to have this lack of focus. And you close your eyes again, and you can sort of really sort of, you know, just imagine to have this lack of focus, how that feels, this lack of focus. So I would say close your eyes and imagine that lack of focus again, okay? Okay. Okay, and then I would say I wake you up and now let's go on and i would ask you what can you do to overcome that lack of focus what would be an effective behavior you can

perform or an effective thought you could think in order to overcome that lack of focus? What could you do? I think I could commit to working on it a certain amount of time every day, regardless of how I'm progressing. Perfect. Okay. And now you can do this if-then statement. So when will be this lack of focus? When will that come again? And where will it appear again? Oh, I think it comes first thing in the morning when I wake up every day. No, in the context of your wish.

Yeah, yep. I think it will come when, I mean, I think it'll be, I think there'll be two places. One will be, uh, making the time to force myself to sit down and do it. And then the second will be to, um, when I get stuck to not move on to something different or start, you know, the tendency for me when I'm doing something like that is I can't figure out this one small passage, so instead I just start, you know,

playing some other thing that I know how to play that's easier. Right. So when will that happen? Tomorrow? Yes. When? Tomorrow night. Okay. Where? In my office at my house. Perfect. okay.

So now you can have an if-then statement. You say, if obstacle tomorrow night in my office, in my house, then I will, and now you put your behavior in, which you said. So make that if-then statement. If, and now repeat to yourself, your obstacle, when it occurs and where it occurs. So if tomorrow night in my office, learning to play the solo,

I get stuck and can't figure a part out, I will slow down and continue to play that same part over and over again for 10 minutes, regardless of whether I feel like I'm making progress. Very nice. Exactly. I mean, what you could have done is just sort of put in the obstacle the lack of focus once more, but it's fine like that. And now you would, if we did that, in reality,

now I would ask you, okay, repeat the if-then statement and say again, if, and now imagine the obstacle, and you would imagine exactly what you just said in its time and in its place, then I will, and now you imagine the behavior. So I would just go through that if-then statement, but do it sort of imagining it and seeing it in my head, me encountering the obstacle

and then doing the behavior that is the then part of it. Correct. And that's really it. And then what's the P part? So I've done the wish outcome. That was the P part. That was the P. That is the plan. All right then what's the P part? So I've done the wish outcome. That was the P part. That was the P. That is the plan.

All right. That was the P part. So now you have, we went through a whoop and now you can actually just say, okay, now I know how to do whoop and I do whoop kind of every day and you can do whoop for,

you know, a kind of big life wish or you can do whoop for a wish for the next four weeks, or you can do a whoop for next week or for the next day, or let's say for a meeting or for being interviewed for a podcast or whatever. You could say, now, what is my wish for the next 24 hours? What is my wish for tonight? What is my wish for that meeting? And then you'd go through this four-step process just like we went through that. And actually we did apps where you can, one for the kids and one for adults. And these apps are really nice because they force you to go through,

they give you all the instructions for the four-step process, but they force you to actually formulate your wish, your outcome, your obstacle, and your plan in a few words. So you can't wait it out. And so these are apps for your phone, for example? Yeah, you can download them on an iPhone or an Android. We'll definitely put links to those in the show notes. They will be found.

It's on the website, which is called whoopmylife.org. So it's W-O-O-P mylife.org. So it's W-O-O-P, mylife.org. I think that pretty much covers what I wanted to talk through. I think we are a little bit over time. That was good, though, I think, for everybody except me who had to do that on air. Thank you very much for going through with it. I think it's a big service because it needs a lot of courage to go through that process kind of on air. But it needs a little bit of courage even if you do it for yourself because you need to have a little bit of humor to sort of accept, you know, your obstacle.

No, no lack of humor here. But no, I think that I just was really impressed as I went through the book and I read that and came up with that because I think that there is, what I really got from it in this exercise was helpful, but how frequently I am extremely nons-specific in every one of those steps, you know, what the real wish is, what the outcome would be like, what the obstacles are, and what the plan are. It's all sort of half-formed in my mind a lot of the time. And so what I really liked was this was a methodology to walk through that. And I liked

the part about taking the time to stop and really visualize what it would look like, what it would feel like, etc. So I'm excited to give this stuff a try. Great. Well, have fun playing your piece. I'll play it on air for you here someday. Great. someday. Great. Thanks so much for staying up late. I know it's, you know, got to be nearly one in the morning or after there. So thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. And we'll be in touch again. Thank you so much for having me. All right. Take care. And have a good evening. You too. Bye-bye. Okay. Thanks. you can learn more about gabrielle eddington and this podcast at one you feed.net slash g o