Two weeks ago I wrote about a push-up challenge meant to help improve your mental and physical strength, and last week’s tip covered some extra push-up details to help you get the most out of the physical side of the challenge. Now that the novelty of it is wearing off and your motivation to continue is possibly waning, this week’s tip is meant to introduce you to a scientifically validated mental strategy that may help you successfully complete the challenge. As a bonus, the strategy can also be applied to almost any other area of life that calls for motivation or clarity.
When novelty wears, motivation wanes
If you’ve been playing along with 31 Simple, think back to a couple weeks ago when you started. If you haven’t been playing along, think back to another time when you began a fitness or nutrition challenge, work or study habit, financial or relationship practice, or other such objective.
Recall what thoughts and emotions were going through your mind.
Perhaps you were excited by the challenge or task ahead of you. Maybe you felt hopeful for certain results and confident that you’d be able to complete the challenge or task because of its simplicity or your determination. If you visualized yourself doing the work, you probably also felt a sense of motivation to get started.
In other words, you spent some time daydreaming about a particular outcome and thinking positively about your upcoming experience. While that may seem like a good way to start such an endeavor, real outcomes often won’t turn out quite as rosy as expected if our thinking stops there.
As Gabriele Oettingen explains in her book, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.
We’ve seen that the principle of “Dream it. Wish it. Do it.” does not hold true, and now we know why: in dreaming it, you undercut the energy you need to do it. You put yourself in a temporary state of bliss, calmness, and lethargy… More often than not [in those cases], we are the exact opposite of electrified… By fooling our brains into thinking we’re already successful, we lose motivation and energy to do what it takes to actually become successful.
In order to increase the probability of success, Oettingen (a psychology professor at NYU and the University of Hamburg) says that we do need to start with dreaming. But to maintain motivation, more consistently feel a “necessity to act”, and increase the probability of achieving our objectives, we then need to apply two other strategies she calls mental contrasting and setting implementation intentions.
Simply stated, mental contrasting is the practice of “grounding fantasies in reality” by confronting the obstacles that stand in the way of bringing our dreams to fruition and developing plans to overcome the obstacles when they arise. Setting implementation intentions means putting those plans into “if-then” statements that generally remove willpower from the equation and empower us to more easily take action when we encounter an obstacle.
If that sounds complicated and time-consuming, you’ll be happy to learn that Oettingen and her colleagues (somewhat accidentally) developed a super-simple way to remember the strategy and apply it quickly.
Increase energy and motivation by using WOOP
WOOP is an acronym that stands for: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.
Throughout over 20 years of research, Oettingen and her colleagues found that “WOOP enables people to pursue their wishes more wisely, producing more desirable short- and long-term results than more traditional treatments or no intervention at all. If you want a proven means of regulating your energies so that you move more effectively toward fulfilling your wishes, and if you want a method that is also safe, cheap, and easy to use, you should try WOOP.”
Here’s the overview and a simple way to apply it:
Wish: If you could wave a magic wand, what would you want? (This should be something that you expect to be challenging yet achievable. If you think it’s not actually achievable, science shows that you’re more likely to be demotivated by the remainder of this WOOP practice.)
Outcome: What is the benefit that you’ll experience when your wish becomes reality?
Obstacle: What challenges are you likely to face in pursuit of your desired outcome? (List the time and place you believe the challenges will arise.)
Plan: What will you do when you experience those obstacles?
Answer the first three items in just a few words, and spend a few minutes imagining each situation. (You can write or imagine more if you have the time.) Then put your plan into an “if-then” statement, repeat it once to yourself out loud, and you’re off to the races!
Here’s a simple example from an exercise-based WOOP intervention (in which the WOOP participants got far better results than the control group):
- Wish: jog in the evening
- Outcome: feel balanced
- Obstacle: tired when I get home
- Plan: If I come home tired at 7PM, then I will put on my running shoes and go outside.
Seems too simple to work, right? And yet, in most instances simple is exactly what works!
Putting it into practice
If you’ve been participating in 31 Simple, apply the WOOP process to help you stay consistent over the final couple of weeks.
Regardless of your participation in 31 Simple, give WOOP a try on any obstacle or wish of your choice this week, from work meetings to interactions with your friends and family to exercise and nutrition. You might be surprised by the results.
Last but not least, check out Oettingen’s book (linked above) or her WOOP website (which includes a phone app) for more details.