#154 Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals | The Knowledge Project

You can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target.

Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it.

Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery almost as if you have like blinders on, right?

So don't pay attention to those distractors.

And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line.

It was always exactly the same distance.

And they said it hurt 17% less.

We are capable of changing our eyes that can change our psychology, that can change our performance.

Why not embrace this and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity?

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My guest today is Dr. Emily Belchettis, PhD Professor of Psychology at New York University.

Dr. Belchettis specializes in how our perception of the world influences our persistence and motivation.

The perception gap is the difference between what we see and what is.

And understanding this gap not only explains why we sometimes have trouble getting started or finishing, but how we can use it to our advantage.

This episode is about achievement and getting better results.

It's about how our perception and where we focus changes not only our motivation to work toward our goals, but how hard we work and the pain or pleasure we experience as we work.

If the gap between where you are and where you wanna be is too large, getting started seems impossible.

If the gap between where you are and where you wanna be is too small, you'll eventually get bored.

And if it's just right, you become unstoppable.

For example, if you wanna write a book and you focus on the book being done, you're unlikely to start.

If your goal is to write a word, you'll eventually get bored because it doesn't challenge you enough.

We need to focus on the Goldilocks Zone, where it's just right for us.

And in this episode, you'll learn how to do that.

In the end, your achievement depends on where you focus.

It's time to listen and learn.

The Goldilocks Zone Our eyes are incredible tools for shaping the world.

However, they create a perception gap between what we see and what is.

In your book, you wrote, we think we see the world the way it actually is.

We think that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see our face the same way others do.

We believe that when we peer down the street in front of us, we know what will pass by on our journey.

We are certain that when we scan the food on our plate, we see what it is we'll be eating, but none of this is always true.

Instead, our visual experiences are often misrepresentations.

We form an imperfect impression and our eager mind fills in the gaps, putting in place the missing piece.

And this happens all the time without our awareness in big decisions and little decisions, the ones that matter and the ones that don't really.

Yet, we can take advantage of this if we know when and why it happens.

I think we should start with the relationship between perception and how we see the world.

Yeah, so I think there's something really special about vision for the reasons that you've just articulated, but in comparison to other sensations, other ways that we get information about the world, we don't get the kind of feedback about our visual experience, the way we do about all the other senses.

So, oftentimes we could be touching something really wonderful, like a new fabric, or trying to find the right kind of, the right outfit on the shelves, and it feels so soft.

And then we look at the label to find out, well, what is that?

And only sadly to discover it was polyester and not silk that we thought or something, right?

So we get that kind of tangible feedback that what we think we're feeling isn't quite what is really true.

You have a conversation with somebody and you've misunderstood what they said and they correct you in the moment.

Oh, that's not what I said.

And not just meant, but that's not what I said, right?

So you've gotten their words wrong, or something delicious that you're tasting or smelling at a restaurant and you're trying to figure out what the chef put in there and you know that you don't have the whole story.

But rarely do we have that experience with vision.

And that's what I think is one of the things that makes it really special, is that if we are seeing something the way that it is not really, or if we've missed seeing something, very rarely does the world correct that experience for us.

And that contributes to a sense of confidence that we're getting the whole picture, which builds a trust in visual experience that may not be so well founded.

We believe that we're seeing everything that's really out there because very rarely do we ever have that impression, that belief second guessed or corrected for us to learn otherwise.

Especially when you take that in contrast to all the other senses that we have.

So that's just one of the things that I think makes that visual experience unique and builds a unique sense of trust and miscalibration.

It's because we lack the opportunity for feedback and updating.

Are there other aspects to that?

So feedback being one of them, are there other things that come to mind?

Yeah, there's things about the way that the eyes are constructed that I think are also really interesting.

Again, it's always helpful to put it in contrast or in comparison.

So if we think about how our faces are structured, we have for the most part two eyes on the front of our face that point forward.

But think about a horse.

Think about any other animal that's an animal of prey that it is what is eaten.

Like horses, they have eyes on the sides of their head, like literally on the sides of their head.

And so as a result, their fields of view is like 270 degrees, three quarters of everything that's around them, they can pick up with their eyes.

Now, that's not true for us.

We have to move our heads around.

That's not true for owls.

We are so excited when we can see what an owl's neck is capable of doing because it really moves its head all around.

So when we look at the basic biology of our physical construction, we can see why don't we get the whole story?

Why aren't we getting the whole picture?

Because what our eyes are pointed at reflects a very narrow selection of what is in the world that we are situated in at any given moment.

Now, we know that, but are we really consciously aware of that at any given point in time?

Of course, we know it, we can know it, but are we thinking about it and taking that into consideration when we're trying to decide if we've got the whole picture or not?

And I would say like for the most part, no, that's not generally that important to us to be constantly reminding ourselves of the unknown, so things you don't even know that are happening all around you, are you thinking about those things?

No, you're thinking about the things that you do know more so than the things that you don't know, that you don't know.

Another thing about our physical construction is that, if you think about what can you take in with great clarity and precision, our foveal view, like what your eyes are doing, if you're reading text in a book, you're trying to read a passage and you know that to pick out those words and to take those letters and construct sentences that you're looking at a really,

you're focused on a very narrow subset of what's on the page.

Now you get that experience, we know that experience, that's why we consciously move our eyes from, at least in the United States, from top to bottom, left to right, because we know that we can't pick up on, we can't focus on everything, we don't take a snapshot of the page, we have to move that focused view around.

To put it in a perspective, essentially, if you take your two thumbs, put them side by side and hold them at arm's length, that surface area of your thumbnails is what you can take in with great precision and clarity.

And the rest is coming in fuzzy, it's coming in through our peripheral view.

We're missing details about, we can't detect sharp edges necessarily, sort of it sort of blends together, it's more foggy what's coming in.

We lose information that comes in through our peripheral vision, we can't really pick up on color very well of what's on the sides outside of that focused foveal view.

And so as a result, a lot of the information that narrowed selected amount of information that our eyes are even capable of taking in is coming in ambiguously in a degraded fashion, in a sense.

And all of that is stuff that like, yes, once we talk about it, you know that, but you're not thinking about that at any given point in time, and you're not correcting for it, you're not acknowledging that like, oh, most of what I think is true right now, I should put an asterisk next to it, I should take with a grain of salt because I recognize the biology of my physical

construction and the way that our eyes are set up at this moment is gonna leave me information deficient.

We don't think that way.

And as a result, it can often go overlooked and help to foster that perception reality gap.

The focus thing is super interesting because it's almost like we're filtering too at the same time, our eyes are taking in so much information that it's almost impossible to process everything.

And so we naturally have to narrow the focus in order to, I would assume process the information.

Exactly, cause it's not just what light lands on our retinas and then gets fed up through our optic nerve into our brain.

That's not what seeing is.

Seeing is taking that information, taking the light and the cells that respond to that light, but then making sense of it.

Seeing is making sense of that.

Information. And that's where our brains really come into play, that we are incredible, well, not AI, we are not artificial intelligence, we are true intelligence.

We are brain has created this great algorithm to help us do that really efficiently, to take these little bits of light and craft something meaningful out of it.

So it's not just zeros and ones, but it's the face of our husband.

It's the crawling of our child, right?

That's what we're seeing.

But we can only do that if we can put those little bits of information into context.

Our brain is taking what we already know to be true.

It's relying on memories that we have formed to help us very quickly piece together those little bits of information that we've gotten from the world around us to construct something meaningful, to put that information together to acknowledge, this is what I'm looking at right now.

It does that based in part on what it already thinks we're going to be seeing, what we already think we're going to be seeing, and then sort of tests the input against that visual hypothesis.

We prioritize what we see versus what we hear.

Why is that? What comes to mind when I say that is when, somebody is saying no, but shaking their head, yes.

And so we have this disconnect, but we tend to prioritize the action and not what we're hearing.

So it's something that we visually see instead of what we hear.

There isn't a definitive answer on that, but one source of insight on why do we do that, it could be related to the neurological real estate that's taken up by our visual experience.

There's far more of our cortex, the outer layer of our brain that responds to visual information than any other form of information.

So our brain thinks it's important.

More of our brain spaces is taken up to respond to visual input than auditory input or to tactile input.

And I think, and that just might reflect our sort of evolutionary origins as well, that we base a lot of what we see, what we're gonna think, what our next actions are gonna be based on what it is that we're seeing that has done us well to be able to prepare for something that might be dangerous by being able to see it before it's right upon us.

And how did you land on this idea of the perception gap?

To be perfectly honest, it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough.

And I thought I had discovered something totally amazing and mind blowing, but no, because all of science is developed in this sort of incremental way.

So it was to be completely transparent.

It was a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientists who've done great work before me.

So I had read a really important paper by somebody named John Barge, who's at Yale, a faculty member at Yale University.

And he had talked about the perception behavior link that we react, we can react very automatically instantly to what it is that we're seeing.

And we can sort of build up these habitual patterns of acting in a particular context in response to a particular person.

Or when we see something like chocolate cake, oh, I just wanna eat it right now.

All kinds of pairings can happen that when we see something we act in a certain way.

And he was talking about sort of the malleability of how those pairings come to be that not everybody sees the same thing and does the same action, not everybody sees a cigarette and wants to hold it or doesn't feel that craving, right?

Of why wanna smoke this?

Not everybody feels the way, but some people really do strongly.

The actions can vary with what it is paired against, the visual stimulus is paired against.

So he was saying like actions can be automatic, but interchangeable from one person to the next.

And I thought, well, what about visual experiences?

Maybe visual experiences also are malleable.

Maybe if we don't all act the same way in the same context, maybe we don't all see the same context.

Maybe we see things in different ways too.

20 years ago when I had what I thought was this great insight, it was me just not realizing that people have been studying this at this point for 70, 80 years.

That had been like theorized by psychological theorists for hundreds of years at this point.

So I started doing some studies and then grew much more aware of the literature that I was engaging with to realize that people have been asking this question for a really long time.

But now in the last 20 years ago, we were at a time in science where the technologies available to us are just much better and our understanding of how the brain works is much better.

And so we can develop more sophisticated, accurate theories about how is this possible?

How could I see something different than you, but you and I both don't know it?

Yeah, so like how is that even possible?

And so now we're at a time in our understanding of science to be able to answer those kinds of questions with more sophisticated technology to study them with more precision.

Like in our lab, we use eye tracking.

We have sensors that emit light that bounces off the back of our retina, kind of goes through our pupil, bounces off our retina and sends it back to the computer.

Computer can pick it up and sort of cross reference to know what you're seeing in the world out there or on the computer screen, if that's where I presented it.

I know exactly where your eye is looking.

I know for how long it's hanging out there, if it's fixated or if it's passing through that context.

And what's interesting is that in our lab, we can study that without people even knowing it.

So you don't have to wear anything on your head.

You don't have anything like that your chin has to sit on.

Like when you go to a doctor's office and you're looking at something and they're looking back at your pupil, people can just be looking at the world the way they naturally do.

And we can be monitoring what, where it is that they're looking to understand natural patterns of eye movement without disrupting what is natural.

And that's not a technology that 50, 70 years ago was available to people.

And that's really exciting.

The fact that we see the world in different ways because it creates an avenue where certain people see the world in a certain way and maybe something looks easier to them than it does to somebody else where we can hack this.

Talk to me a little bit about maybe the relationship between what we see and maybe what we accomplish or our motivation to do it.

Yeah, so that question that you're asking really is at the heart of one of our longstanding lines of research is one trying to understand, well, what are sources of problems as people are trying to get stuff done in this world?

The goals that they care most about as a motivation psychologist, which I am also, a lot of work has been done trying to understand, well, maybe people just really don't care.

Maybe they actually aren't as motivated on the things that they're working towards than they should be.

So let's increase motivation.

Yeah, that's part of it.

Maybe they are doing themselves a disservice.

They're talking to themselves in ways that aren't helpful.

Like, they're putting themselves down or they don't really believe in themselves enough to be able to get the job done where our own worst enemy when it comes to self-sabotaging kinds of language.

Yeah, that's part of it.

And we can change those things, but those changes don't help enough to push people in some cases literally over the finish line if we're talking about the context of exercise.

So we were taking that idea that I had said 20 years ago, I was so naive to think I had discovered and applied it to the context of exercise and tried to think, okay, maybe there's something about exercise that not everybody sees it the same way.

Of course, we don't all think about exercise the same way.

I like exercising. My husband hates it.

He's a very fit person, which is annoying that he can hate exercise and yet still be quite fit.

He burns his calories when he sleeps.

It's so weird and he's so lucky, but that's because it's not fun, right?

So like we all know those kinds of examples where we think about exercise in different ways, but maybe there is something about the visual experience when exercising that is helpful for some people and might be part of the problem for others who are struggling to do it at the level that they want.

So that's one of the questions that motivated a big line of work that we've been engaged in is trying to think, okay, when it comes to exercise, distance perception is something that really matters.

That we have to assess how much energy do I have, how much motivation do I have, and how far do I need to go and trying to regulate that, get those two in sync with one another.

So one of the first places that we started looking was, how do people perceive distance?

And is it related to something about their bodies or about their motivation?

We spent a long time looking through the literature to see how do people study distance perception, coming up with their own measures as well as using those from the past, to see not just what do people think about distance, but how are they really seeing distances?

And some of the things that we found, regardless of what measures we were using, was that people who weigh more, we indexed this by waist to hip ratio and by BMI, two metrics that the medical community uses to index people's weight status or to diagnose weight status.

And we found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or lower BMI.

Those distances literally look farther to people that for whom it might be harder to make it to that finish line, to navigate that space.

We also found that that's the case with motivation, that when people are more motivated to exercise or to make it to that finish line, that motivation can in a sense compensate for that effect of their body on their perception of distance.

So that even highly motivated people, people who are highly motivated, even if they have a higher waist to hip ratio, might see the distance in a way that suggests it's just as short as people who have a lower waist to hip ratio.

So motivation can change our visual experience and align people to experience a world that looks more like a person who'd have an easier time navigating it.

So those were like two initial findings, that sets of findings that suggested our visual experiences are not just reflective of the world that's out there, but instead it has to do with what is our body capable of doing and what is our brain capable of supplementing our own motivational states and physical states of our body are working together to shift what it

is that we're seeing in the world out there.

Now you couple that with like around this time, they had the opportunity to talk with some amazing athletes, some Olympic athletes, some of the world's fastest runners, like the fastest guy out of the Trinidad, someone else who's trained against Hussein lightning bolt.

Like these are amazing accomplished athletes.

And I was wondering like, well, what are they doing?

Like what's happening with their eyes as they are running?

And like I have no expectation that if I just interview them and then and adopt what they say that I'll be able to do what they have done, of course not, but I just wanted to get some insight from some really accomplished people.

Now my intuition going into these conversations was that they would say that they have like amazing powers of perception they could see in front of them on the sides behind them.

You know, I know that's not physically possible, but that's just what I thought would happen that they knew exactly where they were relative to their competition, that they could do something with their peripheral vision that maybe I couldn't do, but that's not at all.

I was totally wrong. They said they had this sort of hyper focus that for shorter runs, that they just focused on the finish line as if there was a spotlight shining just on that finish line and that they weren't paying any attention at all to their peripheral vision.

When it was longer runs, that they would choose a target up ahead and focus on that till they hit it and then they would choose another target.

And that seemed to resonate with other sort of memoirs that I was reading about accomplished athletes as well, like marathon runners would take that approach.

So then I thought, okay, visual experience does seem to be implicated in how they're moving their body at these amazing paces.

And what they're talking about is something that we can teach other people to do.

We're not gonna be able to take somebody who is really struggling to be in shape and turn them into a gold medalist.

That's not the point here.

That's not most people's goal, but can we improve their experience in some way?

By teaching them to do with their eyes what these Olympic athletes are doing.

The answer is yes. You can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target.

Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it.

Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery almost as if you have like blinders on, right?

So don't pay attention to those distractors.

People can do that. We have them talk to us about like, well, what is it that you're focused on?

What's catching your attention right now?

Those are easy instructions to understand and it's easy to make your eyes do it.

What's important though is that that's not what their eyes do naturally.

When they're walking or when they're running, people do take a sort of wider perspective.

They broaden their scope of attention relative to what these instructions are having them do.

And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line.

It was always exactly the same distance.

And we were using our stopwatches to see how fast did they move.

They moved 23% faster and they said it hurt 17% less.

So exactly the same actual experience, but subjectively it was easier and they performed better.

They increase the efficiency of this particular exercise.

Now, of course, that's not gonna make people, one bout of efficient exercises and going to change people's body composition or that one have the meat to a health goal.

They need to do this over time.

But what we also found is that if we taught them that strategy and tested its impact right here in front of us when we're watching and then tell them, now go out and exercise over the course of the next week.

And do you mind if we check out your fitness tracking app?

What we find is that people who have been trained in that narrowed focus of attention, go out for more walks.

They take more steps and they walk faster in each walk.

So we've improved the efficiency of their exercise even when we're not there to monitor what they're doing.

And even when their like compensation isn't contingent on what they're doing, it's just like, hey, if you could, go for some walks and go for some or some runs and then let us see how it's going for you using the strategy that we talked to you about.

Now, why does that happen?

I think that's pretty amazing that that does happen because it's not magic.

It's about changing people's psychology.

Yes, we're changing what their eyes are doing.

That's changing their visual experience of the landscape, but that then has psychological consequences.

People, when they see that, when they experience that finish line is closer or the stop sign that they've focused on or the building that they've always hoped that they could walk to that they're focused their attention on is closer, that changes their mindset.

Now it doesn't seem so hard because now it looks close.

It looks closer to me. They believe in themselves.

They have a sense of self-efficacy that is higher now.

The task doesn't seem so difficult.

They believe they have the resources to take on this challenge.

There's a host of cascading sort of psychological effects that comes from that misperception of proximity, that visual illusion of greater proximity, changes their psychology, that then is what translates into the improved performance.

So here really to understand like, how do we get people to exercise better?

One is that we want to induce that perception reality gap.

It's not something to be afraid of or to think as a deficiency.

It's an opportunity actually.

It's an opportunity for some sort of self-trickery, self-deception here that can work to our advantage.

Once we know we are capable of changing our eyes that can change our psychology, that can change our performance, why not embrace this perception reality gap and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity?

There's so many rabbit holes I want to explore with what you just said.

I think the first one is, there's multiple parts to a goal, right?

So with exercise, there's sort of like getting started.

There's well work in it, and then there's near the end, so the finish line.

And so does where you focus, change your motivation depending on what stage you're at in the process?

Yeah, so my lab hasn't done this work, but a great suggestion comes out of IELIT Fish Box research at the University of Chicago that again, if we realize that we have different places that we can look or that we can focus our attention, our cognitive attention or our visual attention, again, we can open ourselves up to more possibilities than we might use as a default.

So if we're thinking about a goal, oftentimes the tricky part is in the middle.

If we've set a goal, usually we've set the goal because we're excited to try something new.

That's often the case is that we are setting these goals and there's a moment of excitement about it.

Or we're getting towards the end and there's either the panic because we need to get this thing done or the excitement that we're almost done or the impending reward that we're looking forward to receiving.

So the beginning and the end have sort of unique motivational properties in and of themselves for where they're at, but it's the middle, where we've been working at it for a while, but there's still kind of a ways to go.

I don't know, how's my progress?

There's obstacles, there's competing goals.

The middle gets murky and that's oftentimes when we see drop off happening.

After people have given the first stab at it and then they have to reassess their commitment and try something else.

And that's where this strategy that I let Fishbawg has talked about can come in useful, which is being intentional about where you direct your attentional focus, intentional about attentional focus.

And what she has found is that people get a burst of motivation and performance increases, people engage in the goal relevant activity at that halfway point, if they look towards the finish line.

Look towards what separates where I'm at right now and where I wanna go, but especially for people who are committed to that goal.

So if you already know this is something that I want, this is something I'm passionate about.

This is, I've got a personal intrinsic interest in this.

People find motivation by looking at closing that gap between where I am and where I wanna be.

But for people who are less committed, maybe this is the first time they're trying out this goal or it was a goal that was given to them.

They haven't had buy-in at a personal level themselves.

Looking backwards, back is what is useful.

Focusing their attention on how far they've come.

This is where I am now. And that's where I started.

And they get a sense of, they get to pat themselves on the back in a sense.

Like, oh, I didn't even know that I cared about this.

I didn't even know I was capable of doing this, but look how far I've come.

And that's a source of energy or motivation for them.

So the takeaway here is that just recognize that there are options.

I say them now, they probably come as no surprise.

It's like a, yeah, I know that moment.

But being able to self-diagnose, what is this goal?

What is your personal commitment to this goal?

And if it feels low to you, then looking backwards, you might be motivating in that middle ground.

But if it is something that you've always wanted to do you're passionate about, you've already shown interest looking forward might be a source of motivation.

So is it backwards from I've accomplished this goal already and I'm visualizing it?

Or is it backwards from something else, some other milestone?

It's not about having accomplished it already.

It's when you're trying to track where are you at and where do you have to go?

It's sort of in these moments of accountability when you're taking stock of progress, where you have options.

So if you're already at the end of a goal, that's a different conversation about, well, do you need to reset the goal?

What kind of goal is this?

Is it a one and done experience?

Or is this something that requires sort of a habitual life change?

Fitness, health does, right?

You can meet your ideal weight.

You can get your A1C to where you want it to be.

But unless you sustain that for a very long time, you're gonna be back to square one pretty soon.

When you talk to athletes and they're setting these sort of sub goals that are closer, like I wanna make it to the next lamppost or I wanna, you know, where I'm focusing my attention.

Is there a frequency at which it becomes too frequent?

That's a great question.

Any answer is yes. When we've done extensive studies, like of thousands of people who are runners, at all levels of accomplishment, and we ask them about these strategies, you know, starting at the beginning of the race.

Let's take a 5K, at the beginning, when you're just coming out of the starting blocks, versus you're a kilometer in, you're halfway, you've got a kilometer left, you're nearing the finish line.

You know, when we break a race down like that and ask them, how frequently are you using narrow detention?

How frequently are you using more expansive, widened attention?

What you find is that for people who already can perform at that level, you know, to run a 5K, for most people, they have to train at least to some degree for that.

So these are people who are capable of running and who have chosen to run and report on their experience about running.

They use the narrowed attention a little bit more than the wide attention, but that gap grows tremendously over the course of the run.

So that by the time, you know, they're nearing the end, reaching the halfway point, you know, there's a kilometer left, they're nearing the end, they're really using narrowed attention quite a lot and really have dropped off on that wide attention.

And that sort of, you know, sort of polarizing, polarization of the use of these two strategies where narrowed is increasing and wide attention is decreasing, that is especially done by people who end up, who run faster.

We've collected their bib numbers and then looked up their performance statistics by whatever organization is responsible for recording official race times, that's publicly available information.

And what we found is that the people who actually run races faster and in other studies who report that their fastest race time or what they're currently running at is faster than those that have slower race times.

Those are the people that use this strategy of ramping up narrowed attention and ramping down wide attention to the greatest degree.

Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, so, you know, so yes, people who already can perform at this are using these two strategies pretty strategically that they recognize as you intuit a chain that like they can't use this all at the beginning, you know, max capacity because it would be tiring to engage in that kind of effort of like finding a target, focusing on it, fixating on it, setting another

one that would be really challenging to do and come at a cognitive and maybe even a physical mental cost.

But they do use that strategy and then sort of conserve its use to maximize it towards the end.

And that seems to be correlated with high performance.

It seems like the end is almost easier because our narrowed focus is actually the end goal at the end and then there's a hypothesis and maybe I'll let you explain it to everybody, but the goal gradient hypotheses and how that affects our motivation as we reach or become closer to our goal.

Yeah, so two parts there that it seems like, you know, one way to put your first part of your question of like when the finish line is present, like how could you not be focused on it?

You know, just if that was resonating with other people, yes, you would be focused on it, but you could also be focused on your competition unless you're, you know, five minutes ahead of the pack.

There's probably other people that are around you and how much are you paying attention to those people?

And just, you know, to remind you, like our Olympic athletes said they don't do that.

They are not really focused on, you know, where are other people relative to where they are when they're really trying to push themselves over the finish line.

So do keep in mind that there are options for most people that that finish line could capture attention, but so could the competition.

That's, you know, running neck and neck alongside you or the people that are cheering you on and that are holding signs with your name or, you know, hitting the cowbell off to the sides.

That's all possible forms of distraction that would widen your attention.

And these data are suggesting that that may not be the best thing to focus on.

Even if it's exciting to see, you know, your sister who's screaming for you over there, it might not be the best to really pay her a lot of attention towards that end.

Okay, so that was the first thing that I wanted to respond to.

And the second one was the goal gradient hypothesis.

Now you're getting deep in the weeds on some, you know, classic psychology, which is really great.

Those that don't know about this, you know, this was work that was started in the 30s and the 40s.

Oftentimes in those decades, people were using animal models where they would look at, well, how do mice respond?

How do rats respond? All different kinds of animals in addition to studying people.

But some of the best work on this goal gradient idea came from the study of mice and rats, looking to see, you know, when they're running a maze, what is their pace?

How fast are they trying to finish this maze?

And, you know, I say this just with a little grimace that oftentimes they motivate these animals by making them hungry, depriving them of food for a bit or of water so that their treat at the end is something that their bodies really want, more water or more food or a treat of some kind.

And the rats and mice will know that that's what they're gonna get when they get towards the end.

And I mentioned that just also to note that like, like marathon runners, they don't have a lot of resources to go off of, especially as they're getting towards the end of the race.

And yet what these scientists find is that the pace is faster towards the end once these rats and mice are getting nearer to the finish line than it was at the beginning.

Even when they have just expended some resources to try to make it through the maze, to engage in this maze, they have even less than the deprived state that they started with and they're doubling down.

They're moving faster through this to when they're in the last quarter of their maze compared to the first quarter of their maze.

And cute little studies where they've like, put restraining harnesses to measure how much pull is there.

So how hard are they pulling to try to cross that finish line to get the treat and they pull harder at the end than at the beginning.

And that's the idea of the goal gradient hypothesis that as we get close to meeting our goal, whether we are rats, mice or people, that we double down on how much we're investing to cross over that finish line.

So as part of the reason that the sub goals work then is that we're really just moving the finish line slightly farther than where we are.

So we're more motivated to accomplish it.

And then we're tricking ourselves in resetting once we reach that sub goal to the next goal.

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that are implicated here is that if we have a goal that seems impossible, if we can strew this is really far.

If you just looked at what 26.2 miles looks like to you, that might look really far, impossibly far.

And colleagues of mine at New York University have found that when we can strew goals at that level, when they feel at that level of impossibility, we give up before we've even gotten started.

That they've looked at systolic blood pressure as a physiological indicator of our psychological readiness to do something.

And they have found that systolic blood pressure goes down when people set goals that feel impossibly hard to accomplish.

It's as if their bodies are giving up before they've even gotten started.

And so what setting sub goals can do is sort of pull that appraisal of the difficulty of the goal into this almost like Goldilocks, just right.

And just that sweet spot of being just right, where I know I'm going to need to harness something here to get the job done.

But I'm not thinking about this as something that is totally beyond the realm of possibility for me.

So that's one part of how setting sub goals can help, is that it changes our cognitive thinking about the difficulty of this particular goal.

Two goals that would be kind of hard to do is going to be more motivating than one goal that seems impossible.

Because I'm not even going to try for it if my investment is if there's no chance that that investment would pay off.

And the other thing about that narrowed focus of attention that we've been talking about is that it can do that sort of perceptually, psychologically.

It could take that goal that maybe is immovable when you're not setting a sub goal, but bring it in, give the illusion of proximity that then might gear us up to take the next step or to find that energy that those rats and mice found when they thought that they were close to the finish line.

So it's almost like if we perceive the goal to be too hard, we won't even get started.

So OK, that's interesting.

How would you use this in terms of just goal setting for people?

Like how do you use this information to set better goals for yourself?

Yeah, so we can sort of liken this conversation to something that's a really commonly used tactic, vision boards.

People like vision boards, dream boards.

If those words don't resonate with you, it's the idea of collecting visual icons that reflect what would your ideal life look like in this space.

What does it look like to have met your health goals?

What will you look like?

What would life be like?

Or your professional goals?

What would it look like if your business reaches?

It's the goals that you've projected out for the next five years.

What's that going to look like?

The idea here is you collect all these visuals, sort of scrapbook them together into this combination, and then put that somewhere that will motivate you.

Maybe it's the backdrop or the desktop on your computer screen.

Maybe if you cut out images from magazines, you put it next to your mirror in the bathroom to remind yourself each day of where it is that you want to be.

What is it that you're working towards?

Now, a lot of times what people put into these vision boards or these dream boards reflects like, they're farthest out, most loftiest goals.

Like what would my perfect life look like?

That might be at that level of impossibility that we're talking about.

You might think that it's motivating.

You think it might help you have a vision for where you want to be.

But if those things reflect things that right now feel impossible, it might not actually be motivating.

It might be depressing.

The other thing is that it doesn't give you concretely the steps that you need to take in order to make it, to hit that big vision that you have for yourself.

And so it's not to say that vision boards or dream boards are not effective.

And even if the way that I've described it doesn't really resonate with you, some version of it, of thinking big picture, is really commonly used in personal life and professional life.

There's a side note. There was a study done by TD Bank of small business owners.

And the vast majority, over three quarters of people, say that they use vision boards or think that they would be effective for motivating their workforce and clearly communicating where they see their company going.

So even if you're not into scrapbooking and that you don't do that, probably some version of this big picture thinking you do integrate into your planning.

But what's important is that when we have these sessions where we are planning what does five years out look like?

What does our ideal life look like?

What's on our bucket list?

That we need to couple those brainstorming sessions with concrete action planning.

We need to be thinking about what can I do this week?

What can I do this month that's going to help me to advance progress in that area?

So that you can tie the big vision with the concrete actions so that you basically know, all right, am I going to go left or am I going to go right?

Which way do I even start?

How do I take the first steps here?

And third is that in, again, these brainstorming sessions, we need to start thinking about the obstacles that we might experience along the way.

Now, when I say that and say that, that actually will help us better reach our goals.

It's a form of motivation that can seem counterintuitive to some people.

When I start saying, yeah, dream big.

What do you want your life to look like?

What's perfection for you?

Or what is it that you're striving for?

And think about all the things that are going to stand in your way that are going to make it hard for you.

And then they're like, how would that motivate me?

It just makes it seem like I'm not excited anymore, but it's going to be really hard and maybe even impossible.

It could, if that's the way that you think about it.

But instead, I encourage everybody to think about it as coming up with a plan B or a plan C.

Because when we experience these obstacles, that's usually the time when we don't have the mental bandwidth to think about ways to push through them.

That we're short on time.

We don't have the resources or the support.

Something is taking up more of our mental space now.

This thing we're trying to troubleshoot our way out of.

And we're not able to figure out a solution when you're in the bunker, when you're in the sand pit, if this was a golf analogy.

It can be hard to see what the green looks like above you when you're down in that sand pit.

Instead, if you had had the opportunity to create a mental map of what that hole looked like, then you're going to have a better idea of which way should you try to hit it out of the bunker.

If you've already been thinking about, should this happen?

I will do this. If this happens, then I'll do this.

It's easier to pivot. You already know what the next steps will be.

And you don't have to then pause when you might not be able to pause to try to think about which way am I going to get out of this?

How do I get out of this? What do I do?

You've already done that hard work.

And so you can think about it as a safety net.

In advance of starting a goal, at the planning stages of a goal, you've already foreshadowed the ways that it could go wrong.

And you have your backup plan.

You have your safety net.

You're very well prepared to move forward.

And you're well supported because you've got plan B and plan C in the works.

Are there any examples that come to mind as you're saying that about how somebody has visualized something going wrong and already prepared for it and it helped them succeed?

Well, I think the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps, that this is something that he routinely has integrated into his training sessions, and this came out about how he trains a while back, actually, when he was in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

That was his first Olympics where he really hit the international stage hardcore.

At the time of this story that I'm about to tell you, he had won seven gold medals.

He needed one more gold medal to do something that Olympians had never done in the history of the Olympic Games, which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympia.

And all he had to do was the 200 fly.

That was his jam. That's what he's known for.

As he dove into the pool for this 200 meter fly, his goggles started to leak.

And by the time he had just one length of the pool left, they were completely filled with water, and he was essentially swimming blind.

If this had happened to me, I would have sunk to the bottom.

I mean, I wouldn't be in this situation anyway.

I can hardly swim at all.

My six-year-old son is much better at swimming than I am now after one summer of really trying.

But I would have panicked, and I think a lot of people might have that intuition too that, well, that's the end.

He got seven. That's great.

He's tied up. But he isn't going to have won the eighth.

But that was something that he had foreshadowed.

He and his coach had talked through the possibility that his goggles malfunctioned.

What are you going to do about it?

And so they had practiced that.

What's the plan B if your goggles fail you?

In fact, so the story goes that his coach would sometimes rip his goggles off his head just as he was about to dive in and smash them on the side of the pool.

I don't know why, for dramatic effect or something.

But he really can't be swimming with his goggles.

So what is he going to do?

Count his strokes. He had practiced that, counting his strokes.

He knew exactly how many strokes it takes for him to get from one end of the pool to the next.

He wasn't paying attention to the competition on the sides because he literally couldn't see them.

He just turned to his plan B.

He won that 200-meter fly.

He won his eighth gold medal, and he would go on to win 15 more in his career.

So an incredible athlete, of course.

But a message that I think can resonate with us all is that here is a compelling example of having planned for these obstacles.

And so when they crop up, he just instantly was able to turn to his backup plan and still make good on this very amazing goal that he had set.

One of the things I love about that story is that it would have been so easy to understand that excuse at the end.

Had it not turned into a gold medal, and he said, hey, I dove in, and my goggles filled with water, we'd all be like, oh, yeah, of course.

Yeah, and that's a testament also to how quickly he was able to pivot.

So it's not just coming up with that backup plan, but I think important in this story is that he had practiced it so that he could do that quick pivot, not even miss a beat, not even miss a breath.

But if there had been a moment of like, what do I do?

Plan B, then he would have been done for.

That kind of less than a second moment in time could have been enough to throw him off or to pull him back from first place.

But he was able to almost instantly pivot to that plan B because he had practiced it.

So in the course of trying to pursue our goal, we need to keep that in mind too.

That like, yeah, a month ago, a year ago, you could have gone through this mental activity, this exercise of planning big picture, pairing it with concrete actions, checking in on your progress, knowing whether to look forward or look backwards and planning for the obstacles.

But if that sort of loses saliency, if it no longer is at the ready and available to you, it's not going to be an effective backup plan.

The other point you said that I wanted to come back to is sort of breaking your goals down into the week and the month.

Is there an ideal sort of frequency or duration that we should be looking at?

Like, should we be looking at a, you know, a lot of people use to-do lists or whatever.

Should we be looking at these on a, what do I want to accomplish this week or today or this hour?

Like how frequently in practice should those be?

Yeah, I don't know that I have a prescription about that necessarily, about what to do, but instead what not to do.

I think that a lot of us, especially I, I am not immune to this, even though I know the science and I have tested myself on this science, it's still a challenge to implement that when things get really hairy, when there's a lot that you've got managing, we often start thinking myopically, just about, I got to get through the day, I got to get through the day.

You know, when's my next moment today to take a break, you know, to go to the bathroom even, or, you know, to try to troubleshoot what's next for me, or even if we know we're about to have a hectic day, we wake up and we just look at the day.

Now, that is problematic because the day just keeps going and the next day just keeps going.

And we need to take some time to plan strategically about how we're going to get the things done that we need to get done.

So within my team, we designed this experiment where we were testing the impact, how many, the impact of different ways about using our calendar, looking at the day, which is what we all tended to do when things got really stressful, planning our day versus planning a longer timeframe.

In this case, we tested a week.

And what we did was have people think about a goal that they were working towards, that was important for them.

Somebody in this team was, you know, working on producing her first film and she was nearing the end, but it wasn't gonna happen in a month.

There was still maybe about three or four months of work that's left.

Somebody else was trying to launch a new social organization.

And other people are trying to finish up a novel that they were writing on.

So big projects that were personally important.

The problem wasn't about investment.

It's not about motivation.

They all wanted to get it done, but it's about how do I find the time for these big projects that require daily or at least every couple of days persistence and effort, but I'm not gonna see the fruits of those labors for quite some time.

How do I manage that? So everybody thought about what their unique personal goal was.

For one week, we woke up, thought about today, what can I do today that's gonna make progress on this goal?

And when can I slide it into my calendar?

And then at the end of every day, reported on how much time did you spend working on this task or any part of it, whether it was even something different than you had planned, but how much time did you spend on this big goal for yourself?

And they did that for seven days.

In contrast to what I think is problematic, at least my problematic approach to managing my own calendar, was that we had people wake up on Sunday, they thought about this big goal that they have, they thought about all the concrete actions that they could take that would help them make progress on that bigger goal.

And then they planned out the next seven days.

They slotted in times into their calendar for when they might be able to work on a particular task or at least carve out time for even the unknown or unforeseeable actions that they might have to take.

And they slotted that into their calendar, even up to seven days out.

Same as before, at the end of every day, they reported on how much time did they spend working on that goal.

And what we found was that over the course of a week, when people had planned time in their calendar a week in advance, when they thought more big picture about time allocation, they found two and a half more hours to work on their goal.

In contrast to when people were thinking myopically about the day.

Now, it's not to say thinking about the day wasn't helpful and that slotting time into their calendar wasn't helpful.

That's not what I'm saying, but it was even more helpful to be able to plan and commit a week out to times in their calendar for when they're gonna hold that slot to be working on their goal.

And that worked for 66% of people to find more time.

That was an effective strategy for 66% of people.

Now, why would that be? I mean, it probably seems obvious now, but your calendar seven days out is much freer than your calendar today, right?

Because things come up that need instant attention and they fill up any free spots that you've had in your calendar.

The second thing is that we prioritize what we see.

And so if we have a block of time in our calendar seven days out that we've already scheduled something, even if it's just for ourselves, we work the rest of our life around it.

So seven days out, our calendar is much more open.

But if we can fill it with one or two blocks for those things that are like our nagging to-do list items or the things that we just think, like, OK, I'll get to that when I have a free moment.

You'll never have a free moment in your day if that's the way that we operate.

Our days end up usually being filled with much more than we had planned for or that we really can accommodate.

So if you had a meeting with your boss in the calendar, you wouldn't just forget that or scrap that or blow it off.

And we can use that same sort of philosophy when we're thinking about the things that matter to ourselves personally.

Scheduling time for ourselves further out in advance will make sure that we stick to that.

We can hold ourselves more accountable to actually spending the time.

If we plan for it further out, then we usually do.

Which also has an interesting byproduct that if things come to you and you're trying, somebody's like, oh, let's grab coffee.

And you would never say yes today, but two weeks from now when your calendar is free, you're like, no problem.

And then the day comes and you're like, oh, I have to do this coffee thing, right?

Yeah. And that comes down to different mindsets that we have also that when we become more psychologically distant, it can be in terms of time.

In this case, it's in terms of time, that further removed time.

We start thinking about what we want to do.

So most of us want to get coffee with this person.

When we're thinking more temporally, more locally, about what's today, yes, I love that person.

But today is so busy. I don't want to do it today because it's not feasible.

We start thinking about what's feasible when we're in a more psychologically close point in time or a moment of consideration.

And we're thinking about what's desirable when it's further removed from time.

So that's just another tactic we have to take that control of our brain is knowing that when we have a greater distance from something, we start thinking about, do I want to do this?

Is this related to something that would be of interest to me?

And in the here and now, it's about feasibility.

So that's often why we overcommit, is that there's probably a lot of things that we really want to do that feasibly when it comes down to thinking about what can I actually get done today isn't possible.

That's where a lot of the overcommitment comes from.

That's an excellent point.

I hadn't thought of it that way.

Is there a relationship between how we talk to ourselves and how we process information?

Or is the relationship stronger between how we process information and then how we talk to ourselves?

Can you give an example about your thinking of?

Well, if I think of myself as the type of person that likes to go to the gym or I go to the gym every day, and this is part of my identity, then I would assume that it becomes easier for me to go to the gym every day.

And obstacles would sort of like I wouldn't see them.

Whereas if I don't think of myself as somebody who goes to the gym every day, every obstacle becomes much larger so that we have a visual perception impact, also a self-talk impact.

And so is how I'm talking to myself, changing the information I'm getting from the world?

Or is the information that I'm seeing from the world changing how I talk to myself?

Or is it some sort of relationship between both of them?

That's really deep. I'm not sure that I have a convincing answer for that, especially as it relates to the visual experience.

But there is something called self-consistency theory that we want to hold consistent understandings of who we are.

It can lead to some counterintuitive findings, which is how this idea has been demonstrated and supported by other researchers, which is that sometimes counterintuitively we'd rather get negative feedback about ourselves than positive feedback.

We relish that if it's consistent with what we think is true about ourselves.

That getting something that maybe is even positive or at least neutral that isn't part of our self-schema can be challenging for people.

It can be a little bit weird for somebody to think you're good at something that you have forever thought that you're bad at.

You start to second-guess them.

Maybe they aren't a good assessor of people's abilities.

Are they really paying attention?

Do they really know who I am?

That's not who I am. So that idea of self-consistency is important for people, sometimes even at a detriment to getting a compliment that can make you feel better.

Also, as you were saying that, one of the other ways that I think it manifests itself is some people think they're not worthy of happiness or they're not worthy of love or something like that.

And that affects how they're seeing things.

Yeah, true. So that has jogged my thinking on some maybe more direct evidence to your first question about the visual experience part, that there has been research done by clinical psychologists.

I'm not a clinical psychologist in that I don't deal in therapeutic contexts and I don't diagnose people with mental health disorders.

But I'm aware of some research that does look at people who have depression and anxiety.

And they have found some visual orienting effects that people who have depression or anxiety or specific kind of phobias are quicker to notice and then at times can fixate on the things that are the source of that depression anxiety or the phobia.

Concretely, people who are spider phobics, if you show them photographs of different environments or spaces or rooms, they orient really quickly to where those spiders are.

They have this almost like a sixth sense for where are they that their eyes gravitate to that.

And then that fosters their belief or their phobia that these environments, these are dangerous spaces because they have the things that are really threatening to me.

I can see them. Like, what do you mean?

You can't see them. I see them.

And they are seeing them.

They're seeing them faster there and they're holding on to them more so than people who don't have that same kind of phobia.

So there is some work suggesting, supporting, what you're saying that maybe our negative states that we may not wish that we have are changing our visual experience and then that feed back, that understandably feeds back into reifying or supporting our belief that we live in a sad, dangerous world.

Why does some people sort of see the glass half full and some people see it as half empty?

That's such a big question, which way to tackle that.

Well, OK. So one perspective that people have resonated with is the idea of negativity dominance.

That things that are negative pack a bigger, hedonic punch, that we feel them more strongly than positive things that should be at the same magnitude.

Like, one compliment, one sentence, that's a compliment, should be just as powerful as one sentence, that's an insult.

But we can probably all think of one compliment we've recently received in one insult.

And we probably feel much more anger about that insult than we do good about that compliment.

That's the idea that the bad looms larger than the good.

Now, why would that be the case?

And people start speculating about that, that we needed to be attuned to the things that could cause us harm or the threats that are in environment to evolutionarily keep us alive.

Yeah, there's something to that.

But if we weren't paying attention to all the good things, like the food, the love, the warmth in our world, we'd also die.

So there's also that. But maybe it's about the severity that anything that could cause us harm could do us more harm more quickly than missing out on an opportunity that could provide warmth, or food, or growth, or something like that.

And so that's created this negativity dominance, where our brains are much more tuned in to things that are harmful, that could hurt us, or that are the insults, if you will, than the things that could do us good.

That's almost like a version of loss aversion, I'm thinking, as you're saying that, right, where we feel loss is much more than we feel gains.

And I'm sure this happened to you, too.

You're reading your book reviews, and there's thousands of positive ones, and then there's that one negative one.

Yeah, exactly, right? And you just wish that that person never got a copy of your book, for sure.

Yeah. So why do people see it as half full and half empty?

We probably all have a tendency to ruminate over the negative.

That's what I'm saying.

But then some people can put that into check.

They've noticed that about themselves, and they're actively working to maybe circumvent what might be a natural tendency for people to engage with the negative more strongly than the good.

It can also come from past experiences, too, because part of our thinking is based on our memories, like I was saying at the beginning of our conversation.

Memory informs perception, not only of what our eyes are doing, but our beliefs about the world.

Our memories inform that.

So if we've had a lot of unfortunate negative experiences, we come to expect them moving forward.

People have had a lot of positive experiences.

You come to expect that moving forward.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Again, our brain is a really sophisticated, sophisticated cognitive processing system.

It's based on the idea of, I've learned something.

I'm going to apply what I've learned.

If I've learned that this world is generally safe and happy and conducive to good things for me, then yes, you can extrapolate safely from that data that you have available.

But somebody who's grown up in an entirely different context, whose brain has learned a different set of parameters or contingencies about how things work, would have a different set of expectations and memories that would lead them to have a different belief system.

So those are a couple of high level explanations about why are some people a half full, half empty mentality.

What have you discovered about how we can shape our environment that impacts our behavior?

In terms of visual perception, and the thing that comes to mind as I'm saying this is, I think I read this a long time ago, like if you use a small plate when you're putting your food on, you put less food on.

And so we have this sort of, because your plate looks fuller, which is a visual sort of almost hack in how we're seeing the information, but it nudges us towards a more desired behavior.

So that hearkens back to a classic visual illusion, which is about context, if you have a circle that's surrounded by really tiny circles, or that same circle surrounded by very large circles, our experience of that center circle is going to change.

It either looks smaller, it looks bigger than it otherwise would in a different context.

So we can use that idea of contrast or of surrounds to try to change our experience of something.

On a more personal note, my mom is like living this experience right now, that she had a cancer scare, and she's had to have part of her stomach removed in order to deal with that.

So she has to eat small portions now.

And probably other people have had this experience too.

They've had this kind of surgery.

There's several reasons why one would have it.

But she has to eat less than what my seven month old daughter eats at each meal.

She's supposed to have five or six ounces of food.

My seven month old daughter has eight ounces of food.

So part of it is tricking yourself, especially at the beginning, tricking yourself into knowing this is enough.

This will be enough for me right now in my life.

And so she uses small plates.

She uses a little appetizer plates or a tea cup saucer for her full meal.

And then of course, eats very slowly and mindfully and makes sure that she's choosing the right kinds of food.

But she's using that perceptual trick to trick her brain into making what's a really radical life change, believing that this is going to be enough for me.

She feels like she's having a full meal by having induced that illusion that you're talking about.

Are there other sort of environmental illusions that come to mind where we can extrapolate from that too?

And think about maybe more general concept of visual sparks.

That going back to that, what started my interest in this, the perception behavior link, what you see predicts what you do.

We can be intentional and mindful about that, about crafting a visual environment that's going to spark the kinds of actions that we want to encourage in ourselves.

So you're trying to eat less unhealthy foods.

Don't bring them into the house, first of all.

Don't buy them at the grocery store.

But if you do, if they're in your house, because other people are enjoying them and eating them, or that's the challenge for you, don't make them as accessible, visually accessible.

Because there are, of course, moments when we're mindlessly eating.

We feel a 3 o'clock or 4 o'clock nudge.

We need a snack right now.

And we go to our pantry. And we're going to feel pulled by the things that we see.

In fact, Google did a really compelling demonstration of this experiment on their own Googlers, their own employees at Google, with all of the different locations that they have for snacks at their company.

And around every corner, there's a little cafe, or pantry, or a snack station.

And what they were noticing is that the accessibility of all these snacks was doing a disservice to their employees.

They were putting on weight.

Now, Google is known for their free food.

A lot of tech companies are as one of the perks.

So is it really feasible to say, oh, no, for the sake of your health, we were taking away all of the snack stations?

Probably not. Too drastic, too dramatic.

But what they did change was the visual layout of those snack stations.

And they put some of the less healthy options, like the M&Ns in opaque containers that you couldn't see through, not clear glass, but frosted glass.

They put the unhealthy drinks at the bottom of the cooler rather than at eye level at the top.

And then they had the people who restocked the pantries each week report on what was being consumed.

And so pre-test, post-test, what they found was that just by changing what it is that people could see easily, they changed consumption patterns.

People ate less of the unhealthier stuff, even though it was still there, simply because it was out of sight.

It was harder to see. And this was also replicated at Massachusetts General Hospital in their cafeteria that was there.

They played around with where do products get placed, at eye level, on lower shelves, near the checkout point at the cash register.

And they also used some sort of visual coding strategies.

They put green price tags on healthier options, red price tags on things that people should consume that were the least nutritious and yellow labels on things that people should approach with caution.

And so that coupling of being mindful about healthier things at eye level and this color-coded scheme for reminding people of what's good and what's not so good to eat drastically changed employees' consumptions at the cafeteria too.

That healthy eating went up and unhealthy eating went down.

So you can take those examples and think about, well, what does that mean for my own life?

How do I stock my fridge?

What do I put in my pantry?

But beyond just eating, we can think about, too, what do we do in our bedroom?

Where do we put things in our bedroom?

Do you have your slippers at the edge of your bed, or do you have your running shoes at the edge of your bed?

Do you have your workout clothes right on the top of your dresser?

Or have you left your pajamas from the night before?

You're robe the night before.

Are you visually queuing yourself to get up and exercise?

Or are you visually queuing yourself to relax in the morning?

We can also think about outside of the fitness context of how can we hold ourselves accountable?

We probably have had this done to us as children.

We might be doing it to our own children now, but using stars to visually reward doing chores.

I had that. Chore chart for the week.

I could put a star on every time that I weeded the garden, cleaned the bathroom, or whatever, and kept it on the fridge to try to encourage me to meet whatever the goal was.

Probably getting quarters to go play ski ball at the arcade.

That was what was motivating for me.

But we can do that to ourselves as adults also.

And that's helpful in a couple of ways.

Getting that visual feedback about our progress can be useful.

It can help us be better accountants of our own progress.

Because, again, some of us may be more oriented to thinking about our failures or about the obstacles and not give ourselves enough credit for our successes.

And as a result, be pretty bad personal accountants, thinking we haven't made as much progress as we actually have if we were keeping data on ourselves through a star chart or something like that chore chart that maybe you've seen with children.

So when we do that, then we can be more accurate about assessing our own progress on whatever goal it is that we're interested in.

Again, because there's a lot of power in what we see, if we start thinking about ways to more intentionally engage our eyes with our surroundings, we can nudge ourselves in pretty incredible ways.

One of the things that a lot of people do is set new year's resolutions.

Why do we break them? What can we do to keep them?

I mean, we all have the best intentions, but then something happens.

And it doesn't work out the way that we thought it would.

Well, there's no simple answer.

And a lot of what we talked about already, I think, is part of the problem, that we're using the wrong strategies to motivate ourselves.

We try talking to ourselves in encouraging ways.

We try to constantly remind ourselves of the importance of the goal.

And those are really effortful.

They are a goal in of themselves to find the ways to best motivate yourself.

To be the person who's always going to be the cheerleader for yourself every day, that takes a lot of work in and of itself, which is why I find value in trying to think about how can we set up habits, taking advantage of this perception, behavior, automatic link that we have, so that we don't have to do that work of reminding ourselves.

If we can form a new habit to leave our running shoes at this part of our closet that's nearer to the door that we open all the time rather than this part of the closet that we hardly ever look into and that's really quite dark, we don't need to remind ourselves that we need to go out for more steps, so we need to take another walk.

Our environment can do that for us.

So we can make it easier.

That's part of the reason why people break New Year's resolutions.

And in fact, the vast majority of people break New Year's resolutions by Valentine's Day.

We give up pretty quickly into the year because of these things that we've talked about, is that we've made it really difficult for us to sustain that motivation.

We set goals at a level that's impossible.

New Year's resolutions often start with, I'm going to lose 40 pounds before swim suit season.

And is that really reasonable?

When have you ever lost 40 pounds before?

Maybe we've set a goal that's impossible.

And so you work on it for the first six weeks, which is a really long time to stay committed to something.

And you've seen a drop in weight of like three pounds.

And you're so disappointed.

I spent all this time. I put in six weeks worth of effort, and I haven't seen these kinds of changes that I would like.

So then you throw in the towel because it just seems like it's too challenging.

Now, the problem may have been that we set a goal that was really too hard.

You still lost three pounds.

That's great. Maybe we don't understand enough about how our body works.

And it's requiring more than just walking more or eating differently.

But we're going to have to change the way that our body and all of our circuitry is working together.

We might need to give ourselves some goals, rather than saying by June, I'm going to lose 40 pounds.

You say by the first six weeks, I want to go down, not up.

And that I will consider to be a success.

And then you set the next goal after you've seen.

Yeah, you've gone down by three pounds.

So we need to be thinking about those sub-goals intentionally as well and creatively about what would constitute success at this sort of micro moment within the length of the goal that we're working on.

And also, that three-step planning that we've already talked about, set that big goal.

Sure, if you decide that really 40 pounds in six months is reasonable for you, it's not the realm of impossible, but it's a moderately challenging and still feasible way to set a goal.

Great. Think concretely about what you can do each week that's going to help make progress.

How will you hold yourself accountable?

What's a motivating strategy for accountability for you?

Oftentimes, it's social support for people.

That's a great motivator.

So how can you keep that social support network up?

How can you be a better accountant for yourself as well, knowing that we have faulty memories?

And what about obstacles?

What obstacles might you expect?

And what can you do about it?

January for some people is lighter.

As things start to ramp up again, but by February, full bore.

Kids, soccer schedules are in full effect.

Your work schedule is now like all the goals are hard for.

You've got your own personal family responsibilities.

And so once time becomes thinner, what are you going to do if you can't hit the gym every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon?

What's the backup plan?

If you miss a moment, if you miss one of your pre-slotted, pre-committed times in your calendar that you had set a week in advance, what's the backup for that?

Do you have a backup time scheduled in your calendar that you've already worked the rest of your schedule around?

So those are some things that we can do to help us move past that Valentine's Day point of destruction that a lot of people experience.

It's like, can you handle the first obstacle that comes your way and get past it?

Because if you can do that once, then you can do it again and again, and it becomes reinforcing.

Is there a way to move away from goals that are lose 20 pounds and actually focus the goal on the process?

We know how to lose weight.

We understand this intuitively.

And then we have this goal, and then we feel bad about ourselves until we accomplish this goal in one way or another.

Is there a way to get out of that feeling and actually create more progress and better, more sustainable progress by just being like, you know what, my goal is to eat healthy today?

My goal is to go to the gym today.

Yes, for sure. That would be a different way to set a goal rather than thinking about in six months time, what do I want to accomplish?

It's about setting it today.

What do I want to accomplish today?

Another thing that I could think that's relevant to that question is about the mindset that we bring to when we experience obstacles or challenges or setbacks or not hitting our mark, whatever time frame we've used as that mark, that check-in point, is that oftentimes we think about it as failure.

We use that word failure a lot.

I'm a failure. I failed at this.

And that's sometimes why people also stop working on the goal, is that they feel like they failed and they avoid that.

They don't want to feel like a failure.

They don't want that label put on them.

That can be really challenging.

And I think the problem is because we think about it as failure.

We think of it as diagnostic about something about us or our ability to meet this goal and that it seems really like a black and white label that gets permanently tattooed onto ourselves.

That's how we tend to think about failure.

In contrast, you can think about it as a learning opportunity.

Anytime you fail at something, it means that something didn't work out.

And so maybe rather than thinking about that as a failure, those are the moments where we need to start introspecting that this is a debriefing moment.

OK, what did work? What didn't work?

What did I learn about this?

Maybe it's about the level of difficulty with the goal itself.

Maybe it's about how I used my calendar.

Maybe it's about the social support I did or I didn't have.

Maybe it's about how I checked in with my own progress over the course of time.

That rather than thinking about these moments of failure, where you didn't hit the goal in whatever specified time, at whatever level you set it at, we don't decide to put those labels on ourselves.

Instead, we're like, you know what?

I am happy about this because this is where the world is telling me it's time to check in, that I need to change something.

I got to switch it up. I got to try something else out.

And let's see. Let's see what else I can do because this something about this, one of these pieces of a puzzle didn't come together quite right.

So let's for the next three weeks, let's try something else.

Here's an opportunity for creative self-exploration.

And don't use that language of failure for ourselves because what are you supposed to do with that?

Just feel like crap. But that's not helpful.

It's not helpful to just feel that way.

And instead, I think people would be a little bit more excited if we tried to rid ourselves of using that word and instead considered a diagnostic moment for evaluation.

That's a great point. I want to switch gears and ask you a couple questions for me or personal questions before we wrap up if that's OK.

What do you need to remind yourself when you're stressed?

Oh, be patient. I think my biggest source of stress just comes from trying to juggle too many things at one time that I have a six-year-old and a seven-month-old.

And I'm a director of an international research lab with 40, 50 people that I'm responsible for.

And I'm a wife, and I'm a daughter, and I'm a sister.

We all have all of these identities that are really important to us.

And they are often in conflict with each other.

And so that's the source of my stress.

It's like, I don't doubt my ability to be a really good mom.

And I don't doubt my ability to be a really good scientist or communicator or daughter, whatever.

I know that I can do a really good job at all of these things.

That's not the source of my stress.

But knowing that it's hard to figure out how to do them all at one time, well, do a couple of them at one time.

And I just have to be patient with myself.

Multitasking doesn't work for me.

I have to remind myself of that, that I'm not a good scientist and mom to a seven-month-old at the same time.

Those are incompatible.

She doesn't understand what I'm saying.

So I can't explain multiple regressions and statistics to her to work on the thing I need to work on and also be a good mom.

So these things don't work together sometimes.

And so it's about being patient and compartmentalizing and then just trying to carve out enough time to, in the course of a day or in the course of a week, put on each of these hats and make progress and being patient with that.

What words do you use when you talk to yourself about those competing priorities?

And I don't want to plant any in your head.

That's what I'm not saying any.

How do you think about them?

I just try to remind myself of the positivity of it, that I like playing Legos.

You like playing Legos.

Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data.

Right now, you think that you need to be jumping back onto this work call that you know is going on, but you've committed yourself to playing Legos right now to stay in the moment.

Enjoy the Legos, because in a year from now, your six-year-old might not like Legos anymore.

And he might not play. He might not like.

Well, he probably will like Legos.

But he may not like playing with you anymore.

So stay present. Stay in this moment and enjoy this moment, because you know you can't do two things at once.

So enjoy the one that you are doing.

What did you used to spend time on that you now see as unhelpful or a waste of time?

Trying to get everybody to like me.

I think that's probably, it feels a little like, I can't believe I just said that to you and to the audience who's listening.

But I think we can all relate to that.

So I think being honest about that is something that probably a lot of people can resonate with.

That people just have different personalities and different styles and different value systems.

And having one doesn't mean the other is right or wrong.

But they may not be compatible.

And so that may mean that we don't get along.

And that's OK. So the effort doesn't need to be spent trying to have us be friends, but instead to be productive if it's a relationship that you have to maintain.

Even if you wouldn't choose to maintain it.

I can relate to that. Final question that we ask almost everybody.

What does success mean to you?

Being happy. And it sounds so cliche, Corny, but just being happy.

Appreciating what I have, not striving for something that isn't possible for my life.

Just yesterday, my husband, we were talking about skiing for some reason.

And I would love to ski. I think he was mentioning a friend that is a very humble friend.

And he didn't realize that every couple months he gets to this friend, gets to jet off with his sister to go ski the Italian Alps, followed by the French Alps before he comes back to work.

He was like, oh, I want that life.

I want that life. And that will never be my life.

And he's like, why won't that ever be your life?

Because I'm too afraid of tearing my ACL like I did before.

So I was kind of annoyed at myself for feeling like, oh, I want that life that I know I'm not going to pursue.

So just appreciating what I have.

And the wonderful life that we've created for ourselves and all the opportunities that I get.

And probably avoiding the social comparison, because that's the source of the unhappiness a lot of times, is looking at somebody else's life and wanting it, even if you don't really want it or you can't have it.

And that leads to a failure to appreciate all the good that is available in our own situations.

And that's why we're here.

And we're here to help you.

[The Perception Gap: How Focusing Your Attention Can Master Your Motivation and Performance]-[#154 Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals]

📋 Summary

The Power of the Perception Gap

The Biology of Narrowed Focus

Strategic Goal Setting and the Goldilocks Zone

Planning for Obstacles and Environmental Design

Long-term Planning and Self-Compassion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript