Conventional wisdom—and countless self-help business books—tells us to visualize success if we want to succeed. So we dutifully imagine ourselves with fat bank accounts or framed diplomas, enjoying the good life. But it turns out that not only does visualization not help us achieve our goals—it might actually have the opposite effect.
Scientific Research
Researchers Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen wanted to find out if visualization helped people succeed, so they conducted a series of experiments. They discovered that when people visualize success, their bodies respond as if that success has actually happened. They become more relaxed, their heart rate slows down, and their blood pressure lowers.
Which is all great if you wanted to relax. But when you’re striving to succeed, you need a little bit of discomfort to push yourself.
Over the span of a week, one group of study participants was told to visualize attaining their goals while the other group was given no specific instructions. The visualizers achieved less than the other group. They also reported feeling less energetic and motivated.
Ultimately, Kappes and Oettingen determined that visualization is useful for calming yourself down—for example, if you feel anxious, imagining a safe and comfortable place can help. But when it comes to achieving difficult goals, visualizing success does more harm than good.
What Should You Do Instead?
So, if creating vision boards and meditating on success can easily backfire, should you give up visualization all together? Maybe not! It’s actually much more helpful to imagine challenges and even failures.
Critical visualization involves thinking about obstacles you might face or setbacks that would make it harder to achieve your goals.
Essentially, you work through potential problems and figure out ways to get past them. Instead of imagining yourself enjoying a Gatorade at the finish line, you’re going over the course in your head to make sure that you’ll win the race. When you think of visualization that way, it makes so much more sense to focus on challenges instead of rewards.
Critical Visualization Techniques
The key to making critical visualization work for you is to separate realistic possibilities from irrational fears. Is it likely that you’ll never sell a property and end up destitute? Don’t waste your energy on worst-case scenarios like that.
Instead, think about specific challenges you might face and how you’ll cope with them. For example, imagine that only one or two people show up at your next open house. How can you avoid that outcome? Work through the actions you might take—increasing your marketing efforts, targeting an overlooked demographic, or changing the time of the open house to make it easier for people to attend.
