How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

MENTAL CONTRASTING
An excellent way to reinforce your positive intentions, strangely enough, is to
make sure you spend a little time on the negatives. By this, I mean thinking
honestly about what’s likely to get in the way of achieving your goals, so you
can address those obstacles head-on. It’s a technique that’s called “mental
contrasting,” because you’re comparing your ideal outcome with the pesky
reality of day-to-day life. (Perhaps some of you have been itching for this, after
all that Pollyanna positivity.)
It’s reminiscent of a phenomenon that Jim Collins termed the “Stockdale
Paradox” in his business book 
Good to Great
. The paradox takes its name from a
two-sided coping strategy adopted by U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Stockdale,
who survived eight terrible years as a Vietnamese prisoner of war while many
around him lost hope and perished. Stockdale observed that it wasn’t just the
pessimists who had lacked the psychological strength to endure; it was the blind
optimists, too, because of the continual disappointment they experienced when
their positive assertions (e.g., “We’ll be out by Christmas”) failed to materialize.
Stockdale described it like this: “You must never confuse faith that you will
prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to
confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
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Today’s psychologists have confirmed that this type of realistic idealism is
just the ticket for ensuring we turn our intentions into actions. We’re not facing
challenges as awful as staying alive as a POW, thank goodness, but every day
we face hurdles such as uncooperative technology or unexpected last-minute
requests from colleagues. Gabriele Oettingen and Peter Gollwitzer, experts on
the psychology of motivation at New York University, discovered that people
are far more likely to achieve their goals if they think hard about both the
outcome
they want and the 
obstacles
they’re facing, and plan for both. Their
twenty years of research have found this to be true across multiple spheres of
life, including professional endeavors, academic test scores, and even romantic
relationships.
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 They found that mental contrasting works especially well with the
kind of goals I described in the last chapter—those that are broadly achievable
and framed positively—since they’re the sort of goals that naturally help you
feel good about what you’re trying to do. That means you won’t be daunted by
the small reality check that mental contrasting provides.
To benefit from mental contrasting as you’re making your own plans for the
day, ask yourself:
What’s most likely to get in the way of you succeeding in meeting your goals
for today?
What’s your “when-then” contingency plan to prevent that obstacle from
getting in the way?
In the last chapter, I talked about the way that the “when-then” technique had
finally helped me achieve a cherished goal: to go for a morning walk before
starting work. But I bulletproofed that morning walk even further when I
acknowledged that bad weather (“Ugh, it’s raining, maybe I won’t go”) and the
temptations of a hot shower (“I’ll just have a quick shower…oops, too late to go
now”) were serious potential obstacles to taking that walk. So I added a couple
of when-then plans to deal with each one:
“
When
I’m tempted to shower, 
then
I will tell myself to just throw on
yesterday’s clothes, remind myself that I’m not going to meet anyone I know,
and tell myself that I’ll have an extra-long shower as a reward after the walk.”
“
When
it’s raining, 
then
I’ll wear my waterproof jacket and peaked hat, which
I’ll keep by the front door for easy access.”

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A little of this kind of contingency planning will go a long way toward
guaranteeing your success, too.