View this email in your browser

Can you make dreams come true?

Hi Friend,

What a year! 2022 is done and dusted. Mine ended with a whimper rather than a bang but that’s a boring story so I won’t go into it.

New Year New You?

We perceive that January 1 offers us a clean slate. A new beginning. A time to reinvent ourselves. After the countdown on New Year’s Eve many of us begin to dream. What do we want our spaces to be like? How do we wish live in 2023? What do we envision for our future selves?

We search our back catalogue of home magazines (if we can find them) or scour Pinterest to find the spaces that inspire us and express our unique personalities. Some of us even created vision boards in order to “attract” good things into our lives.

So why do we always feel disappointed and right back where we started by mid January?

Because nothing changes if nothing changes.

Let’s dig into that.

Dreams are never enough

The area of behavioural change, motivation, and habit formation is, unfortunately, plagued by pseudo-science that innumerable coaches and self-help gurus offer via expensive courses and falsely claiming they can give you the simple tools you need to get everything you’ve ever dreamed of.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m far from against everyone striving to reach their highest potential.

What I am against is unqualified individuals using charisma and coercive techniques to take money from vulnerable people. They do this without any ethical oversight and without any evidence to support their claims.

Law of Attraction

One of the most common techniques promoted by these charlatans is manifesting and the law of attraction.

This type of advice can be dolled out on Social Media by anyone who APPEARS successful as evidence that it works. There’s a low barrier to entry for seekers because all you need to do is dream of your perfect life, think only positive thoughts, write down your aspirations and affirmations a certain number of times (numbers often come into it), create a vision board, or vibrate on the right frequency and that will be enough to give you your ideal future.

This is the - Dream it, wish it, and you will be able to effortlessly do it - concept.

It’s based on the idea that everything that has happened to you has come about because you thoughts created that reality.

This is problematic for so many reasons but the main one is that:
We know we can’t control our thoughts. We can’t un-think a thought. There’s no backspace.

Being told that all you need to do is think positive thoughts is extremely invalidating, demotivating, and potentially harmful for those of us with, for example, major depression who have negative thoughts popping up all the time on radio doom and gloom. Or those with OCD who overestimate the power of their intrusive negative thoughts.

“Thinking it makes it true” can be psychologically harmful.

So what does work according to the research?

Dr Gabriele Oettingen is a German research professor at NYU. She was a student of Martin Seligman - the positive psychology and learned helplessness theorist - in the 1980’s.
Seligman’s research indicated that:

“We are most optimistic when we assess reality as we’ve known it so far and logically conclude that the future will work out in a similar way to the past.”

Based on experience we have a “positive expectation of success”.

So basically, Seligman found that if you’re an athlete and you visualise yourself clocking a personal best in the 100m sprint before the race, you’re more likely to achieve your goal.

What Gabriele wanted to know was:

“if positive dreams that were disconnected from past experience would affect people’s willingness and ability to take action in their lives.”

She piggybacked on a 12 month weight-loss study and asked some participants to imagine successfully completing the program and others to imagine being in tempting situations. Oettingen was interested in whether the participants thought their dreams were positive or negative.

This is the gold people:

What she found was that positive fantasies, wishes, dreams that are detached from an assessment of past experience DID NOT translate into motivation to act towards a more energised or engaged life.

Those that imagined completing the program and being slim, gorgeous, and happy lost significantly LESS weight than those who imagined negative scenarios.

M I N D B L O W I N G right?

She published this paper in 1991 - the finding that dreaming about achieving a goal didn’t help that goal come to fruition - to crickets.

Colleagues told her to change her course towards something closer to established concepts. Researching dreams was far too risky.

Ye of little faith, ha?

Lucky for us she didn’t listen. She has conducted dozens of studies and found the same result in various populations.

But why?

What she’s found through her research is that the more positive people are when fantasising about their future goals the better they feel in the present.

Blood pressure lowers and they relax; it’s like the mind believes they’ve completed the goal just by imagining it.

It’s likely that’s exactly what happens.

The mind can’t distinguish between imaging a traumatic event and the actual event, right? That’s what flashbacks are and sufferers of PTSD report them feeling so real.

So, what to do?

When something is in your control the best way to approach your fantasies of –for example getting über organised or living like a minimalist– is to investigate the obstacles that might come up for you and create a plan to overcome them.

This is called mental contrasting in the literature but Garbriele Oettingen calls the process WOOP for Wish–Outcome–Obstacle–Plan.

First name a “Wish” that is challenging but feasible.

Second find the best “Outcome” and imagine this outcome

Third find your main “Obstacle” and imagine this obstacle in detail.

Finally, make an if-then “Plan” of how to overcome the obstacle.

2023

I wish for you to live the life you want. I’m here to make your life better. But, I’m also here to present you with the research that will make real change possible for you.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to break down:

Mental contrasting

And

Habit formation.

This is where the rubber hits the road. Stick around for more. Tell your friends to sign up. Begin taking tiny steps towards big changes in any area of your lives.

Until next week :)

Jan <3

If you want to share this with your peeps feel free.

(Note: If you enjoy this email, please consider forwarding it to someone who would get a lot out of it. If you were forwarded this email, you can sign up to receive it each Sunday afternoon. It’s free.)