The One You Feed - The Power of Visualization to Achieve Your Goals with Emily Balcetis

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

In this conversation, Emily Balcetis discusses how we can embrace the power of visualization to achieve your goals. Emily’s research-backed strategies provide a fresh perspective on how we can use our powerful lminds and eyes to create the life we desire. She shares insights on how our visual environment influences our behavior and offers practical tips for setting ourselves up for success. Key Takeaways: How to accurately track progress and use it for motivation The impact of visual focus on our perception of goal achievability When to narrow our focus and when to widen our perspective Practical ways to frame our environment for success The connection between what we see and the actions we take For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I really can't trust my brain to give me the right answer to how much progress have I made and is it worth the effort that I've invested. 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 really no really.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 on this episode is Emily Balchettis, an associate professor of psychology at New York University. She's the author of more than 70 scientific publications, and her work has been covered in Forbes, Newsweek, Time, National Public Radio, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and many others. She's also received numerous awards for her work. Today, Emily and Eric discuss her new book, Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World. Hi, Emily. Welcome to the show. Hi, great to be here.

We are going to talk about your book that's called Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. And she 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, bravery, and love. And there's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother,

which one wins? And the grandmother 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. I think, you know, that parable conveys the real power that we as people have to shape what our experience on an every day, every year, every life scale or timeframe that where we invest our energy is a lot driven by us. And then we can see the fruits of those labors. But as a psychologist, I also recognize that, you know, besides having choice about what we feed, about where we spend our time, besides having choice about what we feed, about where we spend our time, what we focus on, that our brain also has a default. And that is to prioritize or give more weight to the negative experiences, that those loom larger in our mind. Even if we don't feel like we're a ruminator or

have depressive ideologies, our brain sort of does. Our brain goes there and we hold on to those feelings. So as we're thinking about what we feed, we need to also be cognizant of the fact that it might take more effort or investment to feed the good and to cultivate and to nurture that wolf in our personality. And it might take more work. And it doesn't mean that it's unsuccessful or that there's something wrong with us. That's just the way our brains work. I love that framing of it. And it's sort of the idea of knowing the inclination of our brain. And not everybody's is the same.

But as you say, most people are going to have a negative inclination. But this applies to anything. Knowing the inclination, the direction we tend to go, does give us some sense of what way we need to correct for sort of more habitually. Exactly. I mean, if you are interested in talking about evolutionary pressures, you know, it's important for us to find food, find opportunity, find love, find safety. And those are pressing concerns, but some might argue that it's even more pressing that we keep ourselves safe. If we miss seeing the tiger that's coming at us back in caveman, cave lady days, you know, death was probably imminent. We might argue like evolutionarily speaking that our

attention to our focus on and our concern for things that might cause us harm or mistakes that we've made in the past so that we can avoid making them in the future to keep ourselves safe, that might be the basis for what we're calling this negativity dominance. That doesn't mean that we are depressed or that we have clinical symptoms. It might just sort of be a holdover from what requires more attention, but also that doesn't mean that that's a limitation or that that's just how it needs to be. It's just something we need to be aware of so that we can focus our efforts on cultivating and feeding the positive and light of what might have been these pressures that we've experienced in the past. Yeah. I love the way you say that. It is one of the things I like about the parable beyond its obvious implications of choice is it says

everybody has this in them, which I think normalizes sort of what you're saying. The fact like, yeah, of course, you've got some of these quote unquote negative tendencies, right? Yeah, they're there. Welcome to the human race, right? Exactly. So let's move in and talk about your book, which really talks about the way we see the world has a lot to do with how successfully we navigate it. And in the book, you frame this entire discussion up in a way that I as a musician love, which is about you learning to play the drums. So maybe first to share a little bit about why you wanted to learn to play the drum, share a little bit about that. And then I think it'll

help us as we put each of your four strategies into context, we can put them in context around that, at least as a starting point. Sure. You know, I think a lot of people can resonate with this at maybe some point in their life, they thought, you know what, I want to be a rock star. That looks like a really great life. And I went through that phase as well. I went through that phase when I was in my late teen years, I was playing in a band. It was a cover band. It was loads of fun. We had the opportunity to play with a group that was coming through that actually was quite successful. And we played this show for 15,000 people at this outdoor rock venue. And it was amazing. It was really exciting. But that at 18 years old was the peak of my rock star career. And it was all downhill after that, which is probably good. You know, I don't think my

stomach could have tolerated the drugs. And like, certainly my body wouldn't have put up with all of the late nights. So it's probably healthier that I peaked at 18. But I loved it. I have always been involved in music. That's all part of our family. That's part of my growing up. And in fact, that's what I went to study in college was to study music performance. So that has always been a love of mine. My career is as a basic experimental motivation scientist. I do behavioral research, trying to understand the reasons that people do what they do and think what they think and how can we help take advantage of opportunities to help them have and shape the kind of life that they want. So when I found myself at a point

in life where life was really changing for me, I had the opportunity to write this book the very same month that my first son was born. I just felt like here's all these incredible opportunities to try on something new, but I'm losing myself in this. Becoming a new mother really took away what I thought had been cool about me in the past, that people were coming to visit and saying, oh, let's meet this new baby. What's going on? And all I had to talk about was diapers and formula. What happened to me? I used to be interesting. I wanted to be a rock star. Where did that go? So I was conscientiously at that point in my life, trying to choose, carve out more time for myself and to bring back what I felt like was a really

important part of who I was. I needed that artistic side to come through. I needed some more time for myself. So I decided to become a drummer. I had played saxophone, flute, piano. So drums was still an instrument, but definitely a different skill set than I had tackled before. And so it was a challenge that I was excited to take on. Plus, being able to play drums is cool. Well, at least I think so. Yeah. And the world needs more drummers. It does not need more guitar players like me. There's plenty of us. There are needs more drummers. It does not need more guitar players like me. There's plenty of us. There are not enough drummers.

Well, you know, even if I had gotten there, they wouldn't, the world wouldn't have benefited from my drumming skills. Again, this is like a personal conquest that I wanted, you know? So that's what I took on. You know, my son is a month old. We live in a one bedroom apartment in New York City that's smaller than most people's garages. And that's when I thought like, you know what, we need to bring drums into this situation. That's what's going to help our life right now. So, you know, maybe an ill-placed goal, but one that I took on. And the book, as we're going to

talk about, is all about strategies that people can use to manage the obstacles that they face when they're trying to meet their goals. So I became well aware of what those challenges are when you're taking on a new goal, something that's personally important, but on top of an already busy full life with multiple responsibilities to manage. So the story really is about me trying to apply these tactics that behavioral science that I am conducting and that others are doing would say would work, should work, try this. And I tested it out myself as I was trying to take on this personal goal of becoming a one hit wonder, learning one song on drums well enough that I could play it publicly and not embarrass myself.

Yeah. You and I were talking before we started about how sort of different our pursuit of an instrument is like you were like, I'm going to play this one song and you got it exactly right. And I'm more of a, you know, good enough kind of guy, you know, the reason that is, is when I started, all I wanted to do was write songs. And in order to write a song, all I needed to do was learn enough of what was happening in this other song that I could then take it and incorporate. So it built this habit. And more recently, I've been trying to sort of do a little bit more of what you do, which is sort of push through to try and, you know, can I get it really right? turn towards your four strategies that you really outline in the book. Maybe we'll start by just listing what the four of them are, and then we'll walk through them each in more depth. Does that work? Yeah, sure. Number one, materializing, taking something that's abstract, maybe just in your mind and making it visual, concrete, and right in front of you. A second one

is narrowed frame. So narrowing our focus of attention, trying to keep out the distractions, avoiding what's in our peripheral vision. And in contrast to that, then there's the wide bracket. When do we need to assume a more expansive focus of attention? They seem like they might be in opposition to one another, but again, they're just like two tools in a toolbox. Yes, they might work in different ways, but you need a different tool for each aspect of the job. And... Framing. And number four.

Thank you. Sorry. I'm still stuck on my drumming. I'm pulling up my drumming story. Framing. Taking advantage of the fact that we can direct our eyes in one way or another and what we point our eyes at frames up a different element of our environment. And that is a really powerful tool as well because what we see predicts what we do. four tools. I also love how you sort of emphasize, you know, we've got studies that show these tools work and these tools are situational. They're going to depend on your situation. They're going to depend on who you are. Sometimes you might need one of them. Sometimes you might need another,

but you're sort of doing away with that oversimplicity of like, here's three simple hacks to crush your life, right? Like that's not what you've got here. Exactly. I mean, the metaphor of that toolbox is one that I do keep coming back to, you know, if you only had a toolbox full of hammers, I mean, that might be great if all you needed to do is pound in nails, but that's not what life is really like, right? The different challenges that we're up against and the opportunities that we have are different. And so we need different tools. The opportunities that we have are different. And so we need different tools.

Coupled with that, we are people. We are evolving as a species, but as a person ourselves, right? We're growing, we're changing. And what worked a year ago might not work today. It might not work during a different phase of life. And so we need that flexibility that a full toolkit can offer us. The opportunity to change out one instrument for another when the job and the needs change. Totally agree. So let's talk now about the materializing a goal. You say, understand how to materialize a goal, our steps or our efforts improves the way we track our

progress, which is a nice sentence that sort of summarizes everything you cover in that chapter. It's kind of in one sentence. That's pretty good. But let's talk about what are some of the things we want to do as we think about materializing a goal. This is particularly great this time of year because a lot of people are going to start thinking about, okay, 2022 is coming. How might I want to be different? And they're going to start to materialize a goal. So what are some things we need to know in that? And how did you do that with your drumming? Well, you know, this sort of comes back to the conversation that we opened with about the parable and how our brain is an amazing organ that we have at our disposal, but it also causes us problems. Our brain is faulty. It is powerful. It's more powerful than computers

certainly are now, but maybe ever will be. But yet there's these inherent biases in the way that our brain and our memories work that can do us a real disservice when we're trying to monitor our progress, for example. So if we were just to leave it to our own memory and look back on, let's say it's March and we set a new year's resolution in January, and we're trying to think, how far have I come? Am I making progress? Is the amount of effort that I've put in commensurate with the output that I'm getting, the change that I'm seeing? And so many people give up a month in, a month and a half in, and throw away their efforts that they have invested into a New Year's resolution or, I mean, January 1st or any time that we set a goal that's important. And oftentimes that's because it just feels like I've tried so hard and I'm getting nowhere. To which I ask, really? Have you really gotten nowhere? I know from my own personal experience, when I try to reflect on my drumming

or many other goals that I've taken on, I really can't trust my brain to give me the right answer to how much progress have I made and is it worth the effort that I've invested? Yeah. Our mood shapes that so much, right? The mood that we're in can shape our cognitive view of how we're doing. Exactly. What we're thinking and feeling right now shapes the information that's available in our brain. So when we're in a good mood, we tend to have happy memories pop to mind. And when we're in a bad mood, that's where that sort of feeling like we're in a rut or we're in this cycle that we can't get out of. That's part of where it comes from is because, you know, one negative experience begets or calls upon another negative memory that

we have. And again, we give more weight to those negative experiences that we've had in the past. So for me, when I was trying to learn to play drums, knowing that I gave myself a date that I was going to perform this concert publicly and that I was going to write about my experience in this book, and I promised myself I would do it accurately and not misrepresent what really happened, I felt a lot of pressure. And I'm not very coordinated. I got kicked out of my basketball team because I lost my footing and ran into somebody who was on my own team, pushed her out of bounds when she had the ball and we lost the game. I never got invited back to play another game after that.

So when I'm thinking about, can I actually play this song publicly? It just felt like every time I practiced, I wasn't making enough progress to be able to meet that goal. I was so nervous. I was so anxious about this personal conquest that I had set for myself that all I was really focusing on was what I wasn't getting, what wasn't coming together, the coordination problems that I was experiencing. And so then I realized, you know what? I've been talking about it.

I've been writing about materializing. I need to do that here. I got to stop relying on my memory to determine whether I'm making sufficient progress to hit my mark a couple months in the future. So I set up an app on my phone to ping me a couple times a day and ask, did you practice drums since last time I asked you? Mostly I told it no, but if I said yes, then it would say, how did you do? Talk about that experience. And I jot down a few little notes. I did that for a month and then I downloaded all

the data from my phone and thought about, well, what am I going to think? In a month, I haven't done very much at all. It's been a really busy time of the semester as an academic professor. My kids had a lot of stuff going on that I've had to manage. I don't feel like I've done anything this month. But when I actually looked at the data, I had a really different and more accurate understanding of the progress that I made. I actually practiced a lot more than I remembered practicing. The sessions tended to be fairly, you know, fairly mundane.

They weren't monumental moments and that's why they didn't stick in my mind. But when I was looking at the words that I used to describe those experiences at the beginning of the month, it was things like, I cried. I hated it. It was awful. By the end of the month, it was like a compliment. My husband, who actually is a drummer, gave me my first genuine, legitimate compliment. And my own feelings had resonated with that, you know, leading up to that. I feel I'm getting like a little bit better. My head doesn't feel like it's going to explode today.

But these are like, you know, small moments. They're not life changing. I'm not like concert ready yet. And that's why they didn't stick in my memory, which is why it's also important to write them down so that you can, you know, become a better personal accountant of your own effort, investment, and progress. Our minds aren't going to be able to do that for us. Yeah. I love that idea. I do behavioral coaching work with people. And that is such a big one is people will just be like, I'm not getting anywhere. And I'll be like, well, okay, let's actually look at the data. Let's, you know, let's look at your check-ins over the last few weeks. You know, let's see the progress you've made. Let's look at the tone, the way you're rating things. Out of curiosity, what app did you use to do that?

It's called the Reporter app. Okay. Yeah. I got that idea from this really cool collaboration that I came upon. These two women who didn't know each other at all before found one another at a conference for their field. They were like data scientists and I don't know their whole background, architects. I mean, they are a polymath, each of them, that they are like experts in so many areas. They found each other as total strangers met and decided in that moment that they met that they were going to commit to each other for 52 weeks. They were going to each week pick a goal

or pick something that they wanted to track, like what sort of animals do I experience in New York City on a day-to-day basis? Or how many times do I give or receive compliments? And they would just pick these sort of random themes and note every element, every time they came upon a compliment, gave or received one, every animal that they saw in their walks around the city. And then at the end of the week, they would create this amazing visual depiction. I mean, really like contemporary art. They would put it on the back of a postcard. One lived in New York, one lived in London, and they'd send the postcards to each other at the end of the week with this very beautiful, like vivid depiction of quantifying whatever data they had been collecting. Again, this sort of low level daily, everyday stuff that might not stick in your mind unless, and they used the reporter app, unless they were noting it within their phone and then downloading the data to look at all of their experiences over the week.

And their postcards are just beautiful. And in fact, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired them all, purchased their entire collection, and it's a part of their permanent exhibits now at the museum. So they were the ones who told me about the reporter app for how to keep track of daily experiences. That's awesome. Yeah, I loved that story in the book. It is such, such a great story. So we're talking about tracking our progress in this way, largely. Exactly. I mean, it's one of the most effective ways for getting an accurate insight into how far you've come and how far you have to go. Now, the next question then is like, well, what do we do with that information? So, all right, I learned a little bit more on drums than

I thought I had done before. And as a behavioral scientist, then I know that, well, we have choices as people. We have choices. What do we do with this data that we have now? And some really cool insights from behavioral scientists work is saying, you know, should you reflect back on that progress you've made, or should you look at sort of the void? Here's where I am now, and here's where I want to go. I have an accurate understanding of where I am, and I know what the goal is. So should we look to what's to come or should we look at what we've accomplished? Where are we going to find more motivation? And it's really interesting because again, there's no one right answer, right? It depends on the person, depends on that person's goal that they're, that they're thinking about. And what the research

says is that when somebody is really committed to a goal and maybe they have invested a lot in it already, this is something that is personally central to who they are, looking forward is actually more motivating. They didn't doubt that they were going to be committed. They don't need to convince themselves that this is something that is worth investing in. They want to close that gap separating where I am now and where it is that I want to be. But people who are new to a goal or maybe for whom, you know, the goal is more extrinsically motivated. It's something you have to do because a boss has said it or, you know, it's not like core to who you are as a person, then reflecting back on past accomplishments, progress to date, can be more motivating. Because in a sense, it's signaling, how much have you put

into this thing? Are you really going to give up now? Look at what you've already accomplished. It can give you a sense of self-efficacy, of feeling or data to prove you can do this. And then also, it's signaling that you must want to do this because look at what you've already done before. And it's hard for people to give up on anything that they have invested in. So, you know, that's a point where we can sort of self-reflect, think about, is this a goal I'm highly committed to, or is it less central to who I am? And use that as sort of a diagnostic tool to inform whether we should use that accounting experience, that materializing experience to look forward to the

future or look back on our past. I wanted to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf,

go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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?

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It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there any correlation in, if I'm looking back to the past for sort of affirmation that I'm doing better, which we might refer to as a positive reinforcement. And I may be stretching this, which is why I'm asking, versus looking towards the gap between where I am and the future, which is a little bit of a potentially negative reinforcer, or am I stretching making that connection between those things? Again, as people, we have opportunities to think about it in multiple ways. So some people probably do think about looking to the future as a negative, this unknown,

this like, you know, mounting to do list that separates where I am and where I want to be. But for other people, especially those that are most committed to this thing that they're pursuing, it's like having something hanging over your head. You want to see it come to a close. This is sort of an interesting personality test. I like movies that are really open-ended, like indie films where it's just sort of like the end of the day and you have no idea what happens to the people tomorrow, right? And there's so many possibilities. I love that. And my husband hates it. He needs the closure. He wants the story to get wrapped up. He wants that to be the end of the narrative and doesn't like those open-ended feelings. And of course, you

know, we can all resonate with both of those perspectives in different situations. But for a lot of people, looking forward to the future does give you that like pull, that impulse of like, oh, I want to close this gap. I don't like having this just hanging open, having it as an open thread. So, you know, I think again, there's opportunities to think about that either as a positive of like, okay, it's clear. Where am I going towards now? Where's the gap that I need to close. And for other people, it may not be seen that way. Yep. And in this section, you talk about that it's important to know how to materialize a goal and also how to create a plan. Yeah. So, you know, I think especially when it comes to New Year's resolutions or major

milestones in people's life, when they're thinking about, okay, what do I really want for myself? These moments where we reflect and then set a new grand, big intention. Those are exciting moments in our life. And oftentimes what we do is set an aspirational goal, a stretch goal, you know, this is where I want to be with my life. Like we're talking in like major, big, abstract kind of ways. And that's great to do. But sometimes that's where the goal setting stops is that people say, all right, world, this is what I'm going to make happen. This is what I want for myself. A lot of people at that moment will do things like create dream boards or vision boards for their personal life, for their professional life. It's, you know, this is like a technique of curating images or motifs and compiling them all into one visual frame.

For some people, like, you know, literally a cork board that they're putting these images that represent what they want for themselves in one same space. And then the advice is hang this in a place where you'll see it every day to remind you of what it is that you're working for. Again, a very popular technique that people use when they're setting goals. And that is wonderful because figuring out what you want in life can be a big step for a lot of people. Right. Right. So that is important. But at the same time, in those same sessions, when we're brainstorming about what it is that I want for myself in the future, we need to add on some other elements to materialize not just what we want to accomplish, but how we're going to accomplish it. So we need to add on some other elements to materialize not just what we want to accomplish, but how we're

going to accomplish it. So we need to add on some other steps. We need to dream big, like with those vision boards or those dream boards. But we also need to concretely plan for action. We need to think about what can we do today or this week? What behaviors can I engage in? What choices can I make that's going to advance my progress in this area? We need to translate that abstract idea into something concrete, manageable, actionable, visionable, right? So that we know which way to step first. Do I step left or do I step right? We need to do that. Another thing that we need to do is that we need to foreshadow the obstacles that we might experience along the way. And in fact, we will find more motivation and persistence if we do that. We need to think

about what are the challenges I'm going to face as I try to take on this goal and I take a step in this direction. And you might brainstorm a list of three or four possibilities of these things that might stymie or throw you off course or be the reason that you throw in the towel. And we need to figure out what can we do if we experience those obstacles. Now, again, it might seem like, all right, if I'm trying to like psych myself up, I'm really excited about this new thing I'm going to take on in my life. This new passion that I just discovered that I'm committing to, I'm really going to do better. I'm going to be more motivated and I'm going to increase the odds of making it if I think about all the ways that I'm going to fail, really, that's a reaction that I get a lot. And the answer is yes. And it's the same reason that when you get on an airplane

before the plane takes off, you know, the flight attendants are telling you what's going to happen with the oxygen masks and where can you find life jackets. And they do the same thing. If you, you know, get to go out on a boat for a boat ride, right. They tell you where you you find life jackets? And they do the same thing if you get to go out on a boat for a boat ride, right? They tell you where you can find the life jackets. Now, if you're just about to go off on this new adventure, like on a plane or on a boat or whatever, why do they kill your buzz by doing that? Because if that plane is going down or if that boat is sinking, that's not the time to try to figure out where the life jackets are. You need to already know so that you can instantly pick up on plan B or plan C or plan D, whatever you foreshadowed.

Because when we're in those moments of crisis or when we're facing challenges, we're thin on resources. We don't have as much time to try to think as creatively as possible and to figure out a solution when we're in the midst of a problem. And so that is why, you know, taking that abstract high level vision for ourselves, planning concretely and foreshadowing those obstacles. When people do those steps together, they increase the odds that they're actually going to make it to their goal. Yeah. An analogy to that in a slightly different domain is in recovery, right? Thinking about what might trigger me and what will I do when I get triggered? You know, what is the actual exact thing I will

do? It's something I do with clients a lot. It's like, because in that moment, like you said, we're low on resources, maybe time, but we've may very well be low on cognitive bandwidth. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect analogy in a domain that really matters to a lot of people. When you're feeling, you know, an urge, when you're feeling that temptation, right, we can get people in recovery can be fixated on that, right? And so that's not like you're so narrowly focused on just working through or avoiding succumbing to this temptation that, you know, starting a new friendship with a person and feeling confident enough to reach out and make a phone call and ask

for help, like, that's not going to happen. We don't have that bandwagon, like you're saying. Yep. You know, another great example of this, like, you know, the power of foreshadowing obstacles. I love this example of Michael Phelps, which I'm sure you remember from the book. But in 2008, right, he was taking the international stage for the first time by storm in the Beijing Olympics. He, you know, is an incredible swimmer. That's what we know him for. And he was on the brink of doing something that nobody has ever done in the history of the entire Olympic Games ever, which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad. At the time of this story, he had already won seven when he was diving into the pool for the

200 fly. That was like his jam, right? This is what he's known for. It's almost like he's a shoo-in to win this race and his eighth gold medal. All he needs to do is do four lengths of the pool, back and forth, back and forth, and the race is over. By the time he had done three and just had one length of the pool to return, his goggles had filled with water and he was swimming blind. If that happened to me, I would totally, I mean, it would never happen. I would never find myself in the Olympics or swimming without dying in a pool. But if it was me, I would have panicked. But he didn't because he had foreshadowed this obstacle.

Routinely in practice, he would rehearse having his goggles not be properly sealed and having them filled with water. Sometimes his coach would even rip them off his face and smash them on the ground just as he dove in, I guess for a dramatic effect. And he would have to practice swimming without goggles. So when it happened in the 2008 Olympics, he knew exactly what he was going to do, which is start counting his strokes because he knew exactly how many strokes it would take for him to get from one end of the pool to the other. He did that, calmly turned his attention to counting his strokes. He won that 200-meter fly, won his eighth gold medal, and then would

go on to win 15 more in his career. So I think that's a great example of what foreshadowing obstacles can do and what particular circumstances it's most essential. shadowing obstacles can do and in what particular circumstances it's most essential. That's a great story. Let's move on to narrowing our focus of attention. Why is this valuable and when might we want to do it? You know, narrowing our focus of attention, the idea that like, you know, we can imagine that there's a spotlight shining on just one thing at the expense of what's in our periphery. That's a powerful tool, especially when what we're focusing on might seem far off. So I've been doing research in this area for about 15 years now, and we are really focused on exercise, people's exercise goals that they have, walking more, running faster,

and trying to increase the number of steps that they've taken. And when you tell people like, oh, just set a farther goal, just try going a little bit farther today, see what happens, and then you can up it the next day and up at the next day. That can be really overwhelming for people because literally when they're looking at the track that they're going around or the street that they're going to walk down that now they're supposed to walk farther, that destination can look really far off. It looks farther to them. What we have found is that when they have that perceptual experience, when to them, they are seeing the world in more extreme ways than other people do, that stop sign, I can't make it there. I can't walk to that building that's too far away.

It affects their psychological experience, right? They stop believing that they can do it. They think the task is too challenging and they throw in the towel sooner. They think the task is too challenging and they throw in the towel sooner. So there is a direct connection between that visual experience and their motivational and psychological readiness to excel at that particular task. So we were trying to figure out, OK, if that visual experience is sort of the initiator of the problem, can we trick people? Can we trick their visual experiences into seeing the world in a way that is going to energize them, that is going to give them the belief that they can do this? And will that have consequences for how much they actually exercise? So we came up with these instructions that are very simple. They literally cost nothing. It's just about

changing what you do with your eyes. And like I said, we would tell people, just imagine that there's a spotlight shining on that stop sign up ahead or that building that you're hoping that you can walk to or the other end of the park that you've never quite made it to yet. Imagine a spotlight shining just on that location and focus your gaze there. Don't pay attention to the people on the sides or the buildings over on the right or the left. Just focus your attention, narrow your focus. What we found is that when they do that, it induces a visual illusion of proximity. When we have them estimate the distance, tell us how far away does that goal feel, they're saying it feels closer and they don't realize it. They don't realize that that narrowed focus has created this sort of perceptual trick for them. But when we look to see them, well,

what happens if we've induced this visual illusion by changing the way that people are looking, by not paying attention to the distractions on the side? What we found is that people across many, many studies, thousands of people that we have tested in lots of different contexts, they walk and run faster. They go out for walks more frequently. They take more steps in their day, and they say that it hurts less. The tasks are the same, right? We're not actually changing anything about what they're doing. We're changing their psychological experience.

Now, when it seems like it's not so far away, they feel empowered. They feel like they're ready to take on this challenge. And then the experience defies their expectations. It isn't as bad. I thought I could do it, and look, I did it. And it's sort of creating this positive reinforcement cycle, right? We've changed our visual experience, which changes our motivational state, which helps them perform better.

And when they do better than they thought that they could, they repeat that experience over time. So that's an example, I think, of the power of our eyes. Simple tweak early on, and all of that happens within the process of setting and reaching a goal. And you can see these big downstream consequences. And does that translate into something that, you know, the goal isn't like literally visible with my eyes? You know, what I loved about this section of the book is the phrase, which is our mental states have a much bigger

impact than our physical ones on our ability to get through things. And that really hit me. And I was like, yeah, the type of work that most of us, you know, as professionals do is not as physically demanding, right? So it is very much a mental game. You know, you say in that chapter, people who think that what they've done will take a lot out of them, feel more tired afterwards, even if, you know, that's not the case. So how does this translate into things that are not directly visual? How is that for a long question? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, because you're, I mean, there's a lot that this technique is relevant to, but one of them that, you know, comes to mind as a parallel is time.

You can't see time, but time is always a big determinant of what goals we set and whether we reach those goals. How we manage our time is really important. A lot of times when people set goals, some of those goals that matter most to us or that are most important are ones that are pretty far off in the future. You can take saving for retirement, right? When is retirement? For some people, it might be never, but for almost everybody, it's going to be pretty far off in the future. And all kinds of experts tell us like, well, we should start saving for retirement in our 20s. And if we do that, right, think of how much better off we'll be in our retirement years because of how

compound interest works. But nobody in their 20s is thinking about retirement. And when I work with my college students who are in their 20s with their first jobs and asking them, you know, have you thought about your 401B plan? They're like, I don't even know what that is. I mean, I really don't even know what that is either, but they certainly don't and they're not saving for it. They're not investing in it. And when you ask why, the number one most common answer is because it seems like that's so far off. I don't even know who's that person. Who's going to get that money? What does retired me look like? I have no idea who that is. And so that's what we're talking about is that oftentimes we'll reap the biggest benefits if we invest small today for a distant, far off future.

And because of that big separation of time, people find it challenging to connect what I'm doing today with that distant goal, that distant place that I'm trying to work towards. place that I'm trying to work towards. So a really amazing researcher at UCLA, Hal Hirschfeld, he's done work trying to say like, okay, can we connect that space? Can we shrink that temporal space, that psychological distance that separates me in my 20s, if we're thinking about retirement, and me in my 60s, who's actually going to get this money? In my lab, we did an analog of his research, which is we took pictures of people's faces, of 20-year-old's faces. We morphed them with Maya Angelou, Tom Brokaw, and created actual visual depictions of what retired you might look like. And we contracted that space. We made what seems so abstract and far off in the future relevant in the here and now. And what we saw is that people's interest in understanding

how retirement works and their commitment to investing some of their income now for retirement years increased substantially by contracting that space. So I'm not suggesting everyone needs to go out and buy computer morphing software and imagine every day what they're going to look like when they have more wrinkles and white hair than they do now. But finding ways to connect my current self with that future self can help make it easier to make the tougher choices today that will be essential for better outcomes later on. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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your podcasts let's move on to number three which will be the sort of opposite of the one we just talked about which is instead of narrowing our focus attention is having a wider bracket. Let's talk about why that's helpful. And then maybe tell us when one versus the other, we might want to think about. The wide bracket is in opposition to that narrowed focus, right? When is it important to take a step back, see the bigger picture, to be aware of the paths that are on the right versus on the left. That's what using that wide bracket is about. If we go back to that example of those data scientists who are tracking compliments and animals in the urban environments, they used a wide bracket to help maintain their commitment to something that I think a lot of people would have thrown in the towel on.

So literally when they talked about sending these postcards back and forth, I asked them, how did you do that? That's a lot. You're paying attention every single moment of every single day. And you're doing that for 52 weeks, seven days a week. That's incredible commitment that you had. And one of them said that the reason I was able to do that was because of this wider bracket that I was taking. I was seeing today's choices within this bigger context of what it is that I had committed to. To be a little bit more concrete, as it might apply to the rest of us who aren't just trying to track animals and compliments, sometimes we can get so narrowly focused on one course of action that it can be hard to let go when we might need to the most. Sometimes we need to change course.

This may not be the right career for us. This might not be the right person to commit course. This may not be the right career for us. This might not be the right person to commit to. This might not be the right goal that we're working to achieve, but it can be really hard to let go, especially if we've invested time and resources into this path that we've taken. And so we need to take a step back and realize that there might be more ways to accomplish what we really want if we try a different path. And it doesn't mean that we have failed. It doesn't mean that we made a mistake.

It means it's time to change course. You know, I think a great example is Vera Wang. We know her for her fashion empire that she's created, an incredible company. We know her most probably for her wedding dresses that she's made. But that's not where her career started. She was a figure skater, and she was on the national and international stage for figure skating. She hit a peak, though, that wasn't quite the top of where that profession could take you, but she sort of plateaued there, doggedly pursuing the next and final level of success,

but she never quite made it. And at one point, she just said, that's it. I've tried, and I'm done. Now, some might say, well but she never quite made it. And at one point she just said, that's it. I've tried and I'm done. Now some might say, well, she failed at figure skating. I didn't know she was a figure skater. I didn't know that was part of her history. And then she stopped trying to make it to literally the top of that industry. But for her, she doesn't see it that way. When she talks about that experience of moving from figure skating to fashion design, she said, all I did was take a step back, reflect on what is it that I really want,

and am I gonna get that? Am I gonna meet that passion through figure skating? The answer is no. But what is it that I want? For her, it was the art and the beauty of line, L-I-N-E. You literally cut lines into the ice as a figure skater and you cut lines into fabric. So she saw this as just a

natural connection, you know, just another instantiation of what it was that she was truly interested in art and lines and the fluidity of the lines and how the lines can move together. And of course, when she moved to fashion, she's incredibly successful. It's not a failure. It was just taking a step back, thinking more abstractly about what is it that I really want and being able to see multiple possibilities that you can't before if you just are focused on taking one step forward, one step forward, one step forward on the very same path. Let's take your drumming project, right? When in your drumming project did you know it's time to narrow my focus? And when did you know it's time to widen the bracket? Let's use that as an example to sort of talk about how do I know when to do each? I mean, I know it won't

apply universally, but yeah, I mean, for me, in setting the goal, I knew that I needed to be narrow and not so wide. And maybe for you, you had the opposite of experience in guitaring that, you know, guitaring and learning guitar, right? But your goal is to have an expansive repertoire. For me, it was to have a very singular one. And so, you know, I was learning the skills that are necessary in order to play this one song. But, you know, I can't say that after all of this time of having learned that song and the years of practicing that now it's been,

I only have one song. I didn't learn translatable skills because I was so narrowly focused, but it meant that I got what I wanted out of that experience. And so, you know, sometimes when we need that extra push in the case of the exercise work that we were doing to cross over that finish line, to get the extra boost of energy, that's when we need to take the distractions away. And when a narrowed focus can really be helpful, can contract that space, it can make us feel closer to the end game than perhaps we really are, but that can be motivating. And then we aren't going to be pulled in so many

different directions. Multitasking is a thing that plagues all of us. And for almost all of us, it does a disservice for our ability to get the best out of what we're putting in. So that's when we might want to use that narrowed focus is when we need an extra push of energy to cross over that finish line. And when we're feeling really scattered or like, you know, having that experience of I'm just not getting anything done and I can't cross over that finish line. The wide bracket, though, in contrast, is when we need options, when this is not working, I'm feeling, you know, like I'm on a treadmill and I'm working so hard and I'm not getting anywhere. And if you have accurately assessed your progress and that is the right conclusion to draw, that's when we need to sort of free ourselves from that fixation that we have on this one

course of action. And we need to take a step back and we need to think more abstractly at a higher level, going back to that vision board. If we've created some version of that to reflect on, okay, what is it that I really want and give ourselves the time and the space to think about all the different ways that we could get there. That's a great example. And I often see this with coaching clients is there are times we need to actually, like you're saying, sort of zoom back out and go, why did I start on this? What was important about this? And then connect the narrow view. Okay, I'm doing this thing. And sometimes reconnect that back to the broader thing, because I think there is a tendency you use a phrase somewhere in the book about we get caught in the middle. You know, we get caught in the middle. We're not seeing a ton of progress. We're not beginning, but we're not ending. We're kind of

in the middle. And sometimes I find it's like, well, why does this thing matter to me, which is the broader perspective? Exactly. And what we were talking about, what are the stages for effective goal setting, thinking abstractly, planning concretely, and foreshadowing obstacles? Those first two steps are that, are the connection that you're talking about, thinking abstractly, but in that same goal-setting session, thinking concretely, it can help wed those two together of like, okay, this is what I'm doing every day. This is what my day looks like. Why am I doing that? Oh, that's right. Because I have made that mental connection to the bigger purpose that this action is trying to serve. Yeah. I mean, it's similar every time when I sit down to meditate, the first thing I do is I just sort of remind myself like, why am I doing

this? Because it helps me sort of reconnect. I just am not going through the motions as much at that point because I've got a reason that it matters to me in that moment. There's this great example, this case study done of a Dutch telecom company that had set this new high-level goal for its organization and for all the employees, which was sustainability. They wanted to increase the amount of recycling that was happening and reduce the number of things showing up in the trash can that should have been recycled. So they brought in a special communications team. They did all kinds of messaging to tell their rather large organization, all the members of it, this is what we're doing, people.

The sustainability of matters. Start recycling. They gave everybody individual recycling cans, and they swapped out the janitorial staff for members of the research team who every night collected every single garbage can and recycling bin and counted the number of things that showed up in garbage that should have been recycled. And what did they find? Simply stating that high-level goal did not reduce the number of things showing up in the trash that should have been recycled. They suspected that. They thought with the behavioral scientists that they were working with that just setting this intention wasn't going to get the job done. So in a second way, for another cohort, they did the same thing, sent out this messaging, had the recycling bins right there.

But at the same time, in that same sort of first week of messaging, had each individual think about a concrete action that they could take that would align with that intention, that high-level abstract goal. What people came up with wasn't magic or rocket science. It was use a paper cup, I'll throw it in recycling. If I have some extra papers, I'll put them in the recycling rather than the trash. It's exactly what they wanted people to do. But importantly, they took that time. They had each individual employee think about, all right, this is the sustainability initiative and couple that, mentally pair it with the concrete action.

And what did they see? Well, at baseline, about 1,200 things were showing up in the trash can that should have been recycled, but that dropped to less than 200 within a week. And that stayed for two weeks, for a month, for two months' time that they were tracking what's showing up in the garbage. And that stayed at that really low level even when they made the actual action, the act of recycling, more challenging by taking away individual recycling cans and putting them into a communal space so that people had to get up from their desks and walk to the center of the office to recycle. So even despite that obstacle, having gone through that experience of pairing the high-level vision with the concrete action produced long-lasting behavioral change

that occurred even despite facing these added pressures and obstacles. The last one we'll talk about is the power of framing. So framing, the idea here is just based on the principle that what we see predicts what we do, right? So our eyes are incredibly powerful and our eyes, you know, of course, we can see them on our face, but they are directly connected to our brain and they're connected to parts of our brain that are responsible for producing the actions that we take, for moving our hands, for coordinating our feet. So you can literally see, neuroscientists can, the connection between our eyes and our movements, our choices, the behaviors that we make.

So we can take advantage of that as people. We don't have to be neuroscientists to appreciate and take advantage of that fact. of that as people. We don't have to be neuroscientists to appreciate and take advantage of that fact. But we can use that, our eyes as a superpower, to create a visual world that's going to instantly or automatically spark the kinds of choices that we want ourselves to make. So you can think about, you know, we've all lived through COVID times and people talk about the COVID-19, the 19 pounds that they gained by working at home. And of course, there's lots of reasons that that has happened. There's added stress. We're not going outside to exercise as much. But people are working at their dining room

table a lot, right? Where they're working is the same space that they associate with food and comfort, right? Or they take a quick break. And then before I was in the office to refill their water bottle or go chat with a colleague, but now it's to go visit the fridge. So we have set up our environments. We, the world has created these environments for us that are putting visual cues in our visual frame, in our frame that is automatically associated with a choice that maybe isn't ideal if we have found ourselves to be, you know, overeating relative to what we have done in the past. So we can acknowledge that, you know, that part of it is like, you know,

out of sight, out of mind. And we can, you know, change up the way that we craft our home environment or the way that we stock our pantry or our fridge. Those things that we have to keep in the house because our kids need those snacks and they're really tempting for us. Well, we can hide them from our kids and we can hide them from ourselves so that it's a little bit more challenging to see them or to reach them. And it's not that we don't know that they're there, but we don't automatically see them and then reach for them as our first go-to snack. The company, Google, did this.

They did this experiment with their own employees, right? They were noticing that, you know, one of the perks of Google is all this amazing food and the free snacks and the, at Facebook, you know, beer taps that are in the wall. You can bring your own growler and get more than a pint as you walk by to go to the bathroom, right? And all of these perks were literally increasing, well, decreasing

the health of their employees. So they made some changes. They made the unhealthy snacks, they put those into opaque containers, ones that they couldn't see. They put the unhealthy drinks, like the full sugar sodasas on lower shelves in the refrigerator or clouded the glass so that as people are walking by, they're not getting that visual cue. What's appearing in their frame is not something that is the unhealthy choice, right? They sort of tried to separate that link between what you see and what you do by making it a little bit harder to see these things. And what they noticed, according to those that stalked Google's pantries,

was that consumption of these unhealthy snacks decreased dramatically. So Google showed it with their own employees, and we can take advantage of that too and think about how it affects what we're eating at home or what we're doing. Maybe rather than leaving our slippers at the foot of our bed, we leave our running shoes or keep the yoga mat out so that what our feet touch first and what our eyes see first in the morning is the meditation mat or the yoga mat to cue that action rather than something else. Yeah. I'm always astounded by those sort of studies. And one way of looking at it is like, how much harder is it to open the opaque can right but as you say it's a sight thing and the clearest example of this in my life is the difference

between me playing the guitar when it's sitting there on a stand versus in a case the difference is seconds of effort literally seconds of effort to open a guitar case pull it out but i play it way more when it's just sitting there. Cause I, like you said, I see it. I bought this, uh, it's kind of behind me. It's one of those like balance boards that you kind of surf on. I love that thing when it's laid out on the ground, I'll do it pretty much every day. Cause I'll walk by it four or five times when it's sitting up in the corner, again, a foot away from where it is now, I could go days without doing it. I am just astounded by that every time. It's just amazing.

Yeah. I had the same experience learning drums that once I put it within my line of sight, we put it in a space that we walk by to get out the door. The number of times that I practiced increased because it's like, ah, waiting for my husband, waiting for my kid to get their shoes on. I can go down and play for the five or 10 minutes that's going to take before they come out the door because it's that visual automatic cue. When my son was born, we had this big bookshelf, sort of like a curio cabinet full of books. And every time he went to bed, we would make sure that the doors were open so that the first thing that he saw when he woke up was his shelf of books.

And we noticed that as soon as he was able to walk, what he would do in the morning, get up and go get a book. He can't read, of course, but it was cuing that choice and maybe bought us another extra minute or two of sleep before he came into our room. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Emily, thank you so much. I'm happy to have gotten through the four strategies. I loved the book. Again, it's called Clear, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World. We'll have links to your book in our show notes. We'll have links to how people can find you online so that they can check out everything you're doing. Thank you so much.

Thanks for this opportunity. It was a great conversation. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

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