A shared universe › Blog › Wishing for something and setting out · Español
To move closer to a wish, it helps more to imagine it fulfilled and then, straight afterwards, think about what holds you back and what you will do when it appears, than simply to dream about it. That is what the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has studied, and it comes down to four simple steps. We have often been told that it is enough to visualise what we want. Oettingen has found something different.
Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University. In a 2002 study with Doris Mayer she followed, for weeks and in one case up to two years, people who were hoping for something important: graduates looking for work, students who had fallen for someone, undergraduates facing an exam and patients about to have a hip operation.
People who only fantasised about having already got what they wished for tended to make less effort and achieve it less often than the others. By contrast, those who had positive expectations, that is, who genuinely believed they were likely to succeed, made more effort and did better. The fantasy is so pleasant that the mind relaxes, as if it were already done.
What did work was imagining the wish fulfilled and, straight afterwards, thinking honestly about the obstacle in the way. Oettingen calls this mental contrasting. As her university page explains, that contrast leads people to commit to a wish when success seems likely and helps them let go of it when it does not.
That last part is a gift too. Letting go of a wish that is out of reach frees up strength for others that are within it, and saves you years of pushing at a door that is not going to open.
Oettingen combined it with another tool, plans of the “if this happens, then I will do that” kind, in a method known in English as WOOP:
The order matters: first the wish and the good it would bring, then the obstacle. And it helps for the plan to be very specific: not “I’ll try harder”, but “if at seven o’clock I feel like leaving it until tomorrow, I’ll go for a ten-minute walk and then sit down to write”.
In 2021 three researchers at Northeast Normal University in China brought together twenty-one studies with almost sixteen thousand participants on this method. They found that it helps people reach their goals, with a small to moderate effect, somewhat larger when it is learned with someone explaining it in person than when it is read on paper.
They also found signs that studies with good results are more likely to be published, so the real effect may be somewhat smaller. It is a useful, simple aid, not a formula that guarantees anything.
If you would like to imagine more calmly how you would like your life to be in a few years’ time, there is a similar exercise in imagining your best future.
There are wishes that are not in our hands: that someone gets better, that good news arrives. There, no plan will do, and what remains is to wait in company.
For those long waits, you may find it useful to read about patience, which can be learned too.
In A shared universe you can light a star with “What I hope for” and write your wish. Other people will leave you words of hope, and you can come back to tell how it went.
Writing it in a few lines is already a first step: it makes you say what you really want. If it comes true, you can say thank you and your star will turn golden.