Motivational speakers and coaches often talk about the importance of “mindset” when it comes to achieving your goals. With the right “mindset,” you can achieve anything, blah, blah, blah.
And yes, the right mindset is important, but there’s much more to achieving your goals than getting in the right headspace.
One key area that is often overlooked in achieving your goals is the connection between what you see and what you do.
“By learning more about how our eyes work in conjunction with our brain, we can direct our perceptual experiences to help us see the world in ways that will help us overcome some of the biggest challenges we face when working toward our most important goals,” says social psychologist and scientist Emily Balcetis, Ph.D.
In my Barron’s Advisor podcast with Dr. Balcetis, we discussed four specific tools we can use to increase the odds of achieving our goals. And we can use these tools to solve another problem that advisors often face—clients who don’t follow through on your advice.
Four Tools
These four tools have one thing in common: they each harness the power of our eyes. By “looking differently,” we can “better our odds of succeeding at things that don’t seem related to vision at all,” says Dr. Balcetis.
1. Frame your situation. Research shows that what we see predicts what we do. Framing takes advantage of that by being intentional in what we put inside our visual frame or space. For example, to make it more likely that I will exercise, every night before I go to bed, I pull out my workout clothes for the next morning and, much to my wife’s chagrin, throw them on the family room floor. Why Because I can’t avoid seeing them when I wake up and it makes it that much easier to start my workout.
From a science standpoint, “There are neural connections in each of our brains—scientists refer to them as the dorsal pathway—that are designed to quickly translate our visual experience into movements other parts of our body can make,” says Dr Balcetis. “What this means is that what we take in through our eyes nearly instantly engages with a part of our brain that is responsible for how we move our arms, hands, and legs.” In other words, it’s almost as if we’re hardwired to do what we see.
So, the key to the first tool is to be very intentional in what you put into your visual frame.
2. Narrow the focus. Our eyes do a good job of filtering out “stuff” in our field of vision that is not material to the task at hand. What we can see with high acuity is called our foveal vision and it’s quite small. Everything else is blurrier and falls into our peripheral vision. We use our foveal vision for things like reading and driving. And we can leverage our foveal vision to achieve our goals.
I do a fair amount of bike riding. And in my area, there’s some decent hills. When I approach those hills, I don’t focus on the top of the hill. I focus on intermediate spots that I know I can get to. I narrow my focus to the next marker on the hill, which could be a sign, a tree, or even a sewer grate.
By narrowing my focus, I’m “misrepresenting reality” and inducing an “illusion of proximity.” In other words, by focusing on the next marker, I’m creating a sense that the top of the hill is actually nearer and more possible and that gives me the energy to keep going because the top of the hill “feels” almost here.
As Dr. Balcetis says, “The reason behind the effectiveness of this visual strategy lies inside our own minds. People who keep their eyes on the prize experience more effective workouts because the proximity they perceive directly changes their own confidence in themselves. When a goal looks closer rather than impossibly far away, our mindset inspires us to double down on the pursuit of challenge.”
3. Widen the focus. I just described narrowing the focus, now I’ll go in the opposite direction and suggest that there are times when widening your focus is a key to achieving your goals. When we widen our focus, we consider longer swaths of time and this helps us keep longer-term goals in perspective.
In effect, we need to keep two timeframes in mind almost concurrently. When we’re in “widen the focus” mode, we survey the big picture and nail down “what” we want to accomplish and by when. Without this bigger picture direction, we’d just flail about doing “in the moment” stuff that leads nowhere.
My past podcast guest, John Hagel, called this “zoom out, zoom in.” We zoom out 10 – 20 years and identify the big trends and opportunities that you can passionately drive toward, and then zoom in on a 6 – 12 month timeframe and pursue the 2 – 3 key initiatives that would have the greatest impact in accelerating your movement towards that longer-term opportunity that you’ve identified. In Dr. Balcetis’ nomenclature, that’s widen the focus, narrow the focus.
The key is to understand when to go narrow and when to go wide. For example, research has shown that more often than not, when working on a long-term goal or in a long race, it’s better to widen the focus in the beginning and then narrow the focus toward the end to induce the illusion of proximity. You could apply this widen/narrow sequence to helping your clients achieve their longer-term goals, as an example.
4. Materialize your plan. The concept of “materializing” is simply the idea of making the intangible, tangible. For example, let’s say you have a goal of buying a lake house within five years. To “materialize” that goal, you could do the following:
- Create a “vision board” with pictures of your ideal lake house.
- Write down (materialize) the steps that have to happen for you to be able to buy the lake house.
- Foreshadow failure and be ready when it happens. “When we allow ourselves to foreshadow failure, we can anticipate the obstacles we may experience along the way and preemptively create a plan for attacking those problems head-on,” says Dr. Balcetis. This is similar to what Navy test pilot James Licata told me on an earlier podcast. He said before every flight he asks himself, “What are the big items that are going to get me in trouble, and how do we mitigate that risk?” Astronaut Chris Hadfield says, “We’re trained to look on the dark side and to imagine the worst things that could possibly happen. In fact, in simulators, one of the most common questions we learn to ask ourselves is, ‘Okay, what’s the next thing that will kill me?’” By materializing what could go wrong and being ready for it, you increase the odds that a setback along the way doesn’t become a goal killer.
You can take “materialize your plan” even further by “becoming your own accountant.” In addition to the three steps above, you can track your progress along the way using the appropriate metrics, milestones, and key performance indicators. In this sense, I’ve been “my own accountant” for decades. I meticulously track my progress in a variety of areas (e.g., workouts, net worth statement) through spreadsheets (yes, old school!). I love updating the spreadsheets each day and getting that microdose of dopamine that keeps me going. Tracking my progress also helps me see patterns in my performance so I can make adjustments along the way.
Depending on your situation, you may need just one or some combination of the four tools. Whether through dumb luck or intuition, I’ve been using all four tools over the decades and can attest to their validity.
Try the tools on yourself first. Then add them to your toolkit as an advisor and when you see a client stumble while moving toward their goals, guide them through using these tools to help them get back on track.