59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (10 page)

A different story emerged when we examined the data from the people using the techniques that have an odd number in the questionnaire. Each of these five tools significantly increased the likelihood that people would successfully achieve their aims. Let’s look at each in turn.

First, the successful participants in our study had a plan. Author Zig Ziglar once famously remarked that people don’t tend to wander around and then suddenly find themselves at the top of Mount Everest. Likewise, those moving aimlessly through life are unlikely to end up suddenly starting a new business or losing a significant amount of weight. Successful participants broke their overall goal into a series of sub-goals and thereby created a step-by-step process that helped remove the fear and hesitation often associated with trying
to achieve a major life change. These plans were especially powerful when the sub-goals were concrete, measurable, and time-based. Whereas successful and unsuccessful participants might have stated that their aim was to find a new job, it was the successful people who quickly went on to describe how they intended to rewrite their résumé in week one and then apply for one new job every two weeks for the next six months. Similarly, although many people said that they aimed to enjoy life more, it was the successful ones who explained how they intended to spend two evenings each week with friends and visit one new country each year.

Second, successful participants were far more likely than others to tell their friends, family, and colleagues about their goals. It seems that although keeping your promises to yourself helps ease the fear of failure, it also makes it too easy to avoid changing your life and to drift back to old habits and routines. This is in keeping with several key findings from the psychology literature illustrating that people are more likely to stick to their views and promises if they go public. In one classic experiment, students were asked to estimate the length of some lines that had been drawn on a pad and either make a public commitment to their judgments (by writing them on a slip of paper, signing the paper, and handing it to the experimenter) or keep the estimates to themselves.
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When the participants were informed that their estimates might be wrong, those who had made a public commitment were far more likely to stand by their opinion than those who had not told anyone. Other work suggests that the greater the public declaration, the more motivated people are to achieve their goals.
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Telling others about your aims also helps you achieve them, in part because friends and family often provide much-needed support when the going gets tough. In fact, some research suggests that having friends at your side makes life
seem easier. In a series of studies carried out by Simone Schnall from the University of Plymouth, people were taken to the bottom of a hill and asked to estimate how steep it was and therefore how difficult it would be to climb.
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When they were accompanied by a friend, their estimates were about 15 percent lower than when they were on their own, and even just thinking about a friend when looking at the hill made it seem far more surmountable.

Third, those who ended up making and maintaining permanent changes in their lives frequently tended to remind themselves of the benefits associated with achieving their goals. It wasn’t a case of imagining their perfect selves but rather of having an objective checklist of how life would be better once they achieved their aim. In contrast, unsuccessful participants tended to focus on how failure to change would result in having to endure the negative aspects of their current situation. For example, when asked to list the benefits of getting a new job, successful participants might reflect on finding more fulfilling and better-paid employment, whereas their unsuccessful counterparts might focus on a failure leaving them trapped and unhappy. When looking at weight loss, successful participants might remark on how good they will look and feel when they drop a dress size, whereas unsuccessful participants might talk about how not losing weight will mean continued unhappiness about their appearance. While the former technique encourages participants to look forward to a more positive future, the latter demotivates by fixating on unsatisfactory events and experiences.

Fourth, there was the issue of reward. As part of their planning, successful participants ensured that each of their sub-goals had a reward attached to it. Often it was something small, and it never conflicted with the major goal itself (no going on a binge of chocolate bars to celebrate a week of
healthy eating), but nevertheless it gave them something to look forward to and provided a sense of achievement.

Finally, successful participants also tended to make their plans, progress, benefits, and rewards as concrete as possible by expressing them in writing. Many people kept a handwritten journal, some used a computer, and a few even covered their fridge or bulletin board with graphs or pictures. Either way, the act of writing, typing, or drawing significantly boosted their chances of success.

IN 59 SECONDS

To achieve your aims and ambitions, there are four key techniques that will help you succeed: having the right kind of plan, telling your friends and family, focusing on the benefits, and rewarding yourself each step of the way. To help you incorporate these techniques into your life, I have created a unique motivational journal that can be used when you are attempting any form of change.

1. What is your overall goal?

My overall goal is to …

2. Creating a step-by-step plan

Break your overall goal into a maximum of five smaller steps. Each step should be associated with a goal that is concrete, measurable, realistic, and time-based. Think about how you will achieve each step and the reward that you will give yourself when you do. The rewards can be anything you like, perhaps ice cream, new shoes or clothes, the latest high-tech gadget, a book, dinner out, or a massage. For each of the five sub-goals, complete the following statements in writing.

STEP 1

My first sub-goal is to…

I believe that I can achieve this goal because …

To achieve this sub-goal, I will …

This will be achieved by the following date:

My reward for achieving this will be …

STEP 2

My second sub-goal is to …

I believe that I can achieve this goal because …

To achieve this sub-goal, I will …

This will be achieved by the following date:

My reward for achieving this will be …

STEP 3

My third sub-goal is to …

I believe that I can achieve this goal because …

To achieve this sub-goal, I will …

This will be achieved by the following date:

My reward for achieving this will be …

STEP 4

My fourth sub-goal is to …

I believe that I can achieve this goal because …

To achieve this sub-goal, I will …

This will be achieved by the following date:

My reward for achieving this will be …

STEP 5

My fifth sub-goal is to …

I believe that I can achieve this goal because …

To achieve this sub-goal, I will …

This will be achieved by the following date:

My reward for achieving this will be …

3. What are the benefits of achieving your overall goal?

List three important benefits, focusing on how much better life will be for you and those around you. Focus on enjoying the benefits associated with your desired future rather than escaping the negative aspects of your current situation.

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4. Going public

Whom are you going to tell about your goal and sub-goals? Perhaps your friends, family, or colleagues. Could you describe it on a blog or display it somewhere prominent in your house or at the office?

   
PROCRASTINATION AND THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT

Research suggests that about 20 percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators.
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Presumably this figure underestimates the scale of the problem, given that it can be based only on people who completed the questionnaires on time. Regardless of the actual figure, it is obvious that procrastination can be a major problem, causing people to fail to pay bills on time, not complete projects by deadlines, and make inadequate preparation for important exams and interviews. Procrastination is a surprisingly complex phenomenon that can stem from a variety of causes, including fear of failure, perfectionism, low levels of self-control, a tendency to see projects as a whole rather than breaking them into smaller parts, being prone to boredom, the feeling that life is too short to worry about seemingly unimportant tasks, and an inability to accurately estimate how long it takes to do things.

However, the good news is that the problem can be overcome using a technique first uncovered during an informal observation of waiters.

According to research lore, in the 1920s a young Russian psychology graduate named Bluma Zeigarnik found herself in a Viennese café, taking tea with her supervisor. Being students of human nature, they were watching how the waiters and customers behaved, and they happened to notice a curious phenomenon. When a customer asked for the check, the waiters could easily remember the food that had been ordered. However, if the customer paid the check and then queried it a few moments later, the waiters had to struggle to remember anything about the order. It seemed that the act of paying for the meal brought a sense of closure as far as the waiters were concerned, and erased the order from their memories.

Zeigarnik was curious, and she returned to the laboratory to test an idea. She asked people to do a number of simple tasks (such as stacking wooden blocks or placing toys in a box), but sometimes she stopped the participants before they had finished the assigned task. At the end of the experiment, the participants were told to describe all of the tasks. As with her observations of waiters, Zeigarnik found that the unfinished tasks stuck in people’s minds and so were far easier to remember.
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According to Zeigarnik, starting any activity causes your mind to experience a kind of psychic anxiety. Once the activity is completed, your mind breathes an unconscious sigh of relief, and all is forgotten. However, if you are somehow thwarted from completing the activity, your anxious mind quietly nags away until you finish what you started.

What has this got to do with procrastination? Procrastinators frequently put off starting certain activities because they are overwhelmed by the size of the job in front of them. However, if they can be persuaded, or can persuade themselves, to work on the activity for “just a few minutes,” they often feel an urge to see it through to completion. Research shows that the “just a few minutes” rule is a highly effective way of beating procrastination and could help people finish the most arduous of tasks.
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It is also a perfect application of Zeigarnik’s work—those few minutes of initial activity create an anxious brain that refuses to rest until the job is finished.

Zeigarnik’s work on the psychology of unfinished activity is just one example of her fascinating research. On another occasion she attempted to restore movement to patients paralyzed by hysteria by having a stooge dressed in a military uniform suddenly enter the room and order the patient to stand. Unfortunately, the results of that study have been lost in the mists of time, although one recent Russian biographer noted that it is no longer possible to repeat the study, as it is impossible to find anyone in Russia who holds the required reverent attitude toward either the military or political figures.
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DOUBLETHINK

At the beginning of this chapter I described how research conducted by psychologists Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor showed that asking students to visualize themselves doing well on an important exam caused them to study less and make lower grades. In fact, I described only one part of their fascinating study. While one group of participants was busy seeing themselves as A students, another group was asked to spend a few moments each day imagining the
process
of revision by visualizing when, where, and how they intended to study. A third group of students acted as a control, doing no exercises at all. Compared to the control group and to the group who were visualizing themselves as A students, the students who imagined themselves going through the process of studying spent significantly more time revising and eventually earned higher exam grades. According to the researchers, visualizing the process of study proved especially effective at reducing exam-related anxiety and helped students better plan and manage their workload. Subsequent research has shown that the same effect occurs in several different areas, with, for example, tennis players and golfers benefiting far more from imagining themselves training than winning.
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Additional work, conducted by Lisa Libby from Ohio State University and her colleagues, suggests that the type of
“behavioral commitments” involved in such visualization exercises can be made even more effective by seeing yourself as others see you.
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In this study, conducted one day before the 2004 American presidential election, more than a hundred voters were asked to imagine themselves going to the polling booth the following day. One group was told to carry out the visualization exercise from a first-person perspective (seeing the world through their own eyes), while another group was instructed to carry out the same task from a third-person perspective (seeing themselves as someone else would see them). Remarkably, 90 percent of those who imagined themselves from a third-person perspective went on to vote, compared with just more than 70 percent of those who employed first-person visualization. Although the explanation for the effect is uncertain, it could be that adopting a third-person perspective requires more mental effort than a first-person one and so results in more significant behavioral changes.