Positive thinking can hold you back.

"You have to visualize the hardships and obstacles too." -Dr. Gabriele Oettingen

• 
  
• Why positive fantasies can stop us from realizing our goals.
  
• How to visualize in a way that increases your rate of real-life success.
  
• When, if ever, is it okay to engage in happy daydreams?
  
• The difference between mental contrasting and the law of attraction.
  
• What is the one question to ask yourself during your daydream?
  
• And so much more...
  

Visualization and the law of attraction have been touted as the way to make your dreams come true. But does it actually work? Can you just positively think your way to success? Not exactly according to our guest for today's show, Dr. Gabriele Oettingen.

Dr. Gabriele explains how we should be rethinking positive thinking in a way that actually helps us and she explains a simple system to do so. All of that and more on this bonus episode of The Art of Charm.

Dr. Gabriele Oettingen is a trained psychologist who teaches at NYU and the University of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. She worked with the founder of positive psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman and has been fascinated by this work. She has long been a researcher and experimenter in the field of positive thinking and positive psychology.

In fact, she's published a book about it called Rethinking Positive Thinking and on today's episode she explains why we need to take a critical look at our own positive thinking habits and implement her WOOP system to help us achieve better results.

Before we get into what WOOP is it's important to understand why we need her system. Research, including her own, has shown that when people positively visualize having achieved their outcome they are LESS likely to actually achieve it in real life. Now why would that be? Dr. Gabriele says it's because they aren't taking into account the challenges and hardships that must be endured to achieve that end goal.

So if you're going to daydream and positively think about losing 20 pounds or being in the relationship of your dreams, you need to also think about the challenges you may face along the way.

And her four-part WOOP system spells out exactly how to do this:

1. W - Wish.
Determine your wish. Decide what you want to go after and make it personal, make it a wish that is very dear to your heart and is a wish all of your own (not someone else's).

2. O - Outcome.
Think about your outcome. Ask yourself what's the best possible outcome you can see when your wish comes true? And how would you feel if you achieved this?

3. O - Obstacle.
Identify the obstacle within you that gets in your way, there will be something or even multiple somethings so come up with them and be aware of them. Doing so will give you the energy and the impetus to persevere when the going gets tough.

4. P - Plan.
And finally create a plan based on your dream and the obstacles that may get in your way to achieving that dream. It looks like this: If (fill in obstacle) then I will (fill in plan).

Dr. Gabriele also explains what mental contrasting is and why it's so important to reaching our desired outcomes, and how we can catch ourselves if we find we're only daydreaming. Special thanks to Dr. Gabriele for being with us, and thanks to all of you for listening in. We'll see you next time on The Art of Charm.

If you enjoyed this session of The Art of Charm Podcast, let Dr. Gabriele know by clicking on the link below and sending her a quick shout out on Facebook:

Click here to thank Dr. Gabriele on Facebook!

WOOP web site
WOOP on Facebook
Rethinking Positive Thinking, by Dr. Gabriele Oettingen
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