Week 6 of the Coursera wellbeing course (described in the
previous post) was the second most impactful week for me. The nugget offered up that week was a
nuts-and-bolts strategy for getting to the place you want to be. It is a four-part technique called WOOP,
developed by Gabriele Oettingen, which stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacles,
and Plan.
The idea is that just wishing or envisioning some desired
future is insufficient to make it happen, because we don’t realistically
account for the various obstacles that might derail us, nor do we develop a
plan to overcome them.
Oettinger suggests finding five minutes of uninterrupted
quiet and calm to focus on the task, and ask yourself four questions:
What is my most important wish for today? Search for it, and try to boil it down to
three or four words.
What would be the best outcome? Again search for it, imagine it, and clarify
it with a handful of words.
What stops me? What is it within me that is the
obstacle? Search for the obstacles.
Imagine the habits, beliefs, and criticisms within me and try to experience
them.
What is an effective action or thought that will allow me to
overcome these obstacles? Make an
“if-then” plan. If I encounter this
obstacle, then I will take this action.
Oettinger emphasizes that WOOP takes mental effort, but that
eventually, the mechanisms will become automatic. She also says that one must let go of wishes
that are not feasible; presumably this process will indeed clarify which dreams
have some hope of coming true. The idea
is that motivation heightens energy and that pushing against the obstacles is
part of the process. She recommends
WOOP-ing on a daily basis and promises that it can provide much awareness and
clarity in life.
I enjoy goal setting and problem solving, so I
enthusiastically succumbed to dreaming. What
is my deepest wish? I am already blessed
with everything a human being could possibly want, except for one thing: a
partner to share my life with. So that
wish had to be top of the list. What is
the best outcome? Being in a committed
relationship with a man who is brilliant, curious, healthy, generous,
thoughtful, energetic, and kind. (OK –
that was way more than four words.) What
are the obstacles? Oy! Well, first there’s
the statistical problem of simply meeting someone that satisfies that Venn
intersection. Then there is the delicate process of getting to know someone intimately
and trying to navigate a life together. Also, underneath it all lies the
mishugas of my own psychology: could I actually let someone into my life? This wish seemed to fall into the category of
challenging to the point of hopeless, so I abandoned it (for the moment).
Instead, I decided to try something theoretically simpler. I had gained some weight during architecture
school, and I made a decision to shed those pounds. My wish is to lose weight. My desired outcome is to be twenty pounds
thinner by June. The obstacles to that
are clearly eating too much and maybe not eating the right things. I settled on a realistic eating plan: a
low-carb diet, but flexible enough to indulge myself in certain food groups I
wasn’t willing to give up, specifically tomatoes in any form, chocolate on long
hikes, a treat at my monthly book club meeting, and a glass of wine if I am out
to dinner with a friend. I’m about three weeks into it as of this writing. Come June, I'll let you know how it worked.
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