The Power of Visualization to Achieve Your Goals with Emily Balcetis

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  02:23

Hi, Emily, welcome to the show.

Emily Balcetis  02:24

Hi, great to be here,

Eric Zimmer  02:26

we are going to talk about your book that’s called clearer, closer, better how successful people see the world. But before we do that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there is a grandmother who’s talking with her grandson. And she says In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. And there’s a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, he looks up at his grandmother, he says grandmother, which one wins, and the grandmother says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life. And in the work that you do.

Emily Balcetis  03:10

I think you know, that parable conveys the real power that we as people have to shape what our experience on an every day, every year, every life scale or timeframe that where we invest our energy is a lot driven by us. And then we can see the fruits of those labors. But as a psychologist, I also recognize that, you know, besides having choice about what we feed about, where we spend our time, what we focus on, that our brain also has a default, and that is to prioritize or give more weight to the negative experiences that those loomed larger in our mind, even if we don’t feel like we’re a ruminator or have depressive ideologies, our brain sort of does, our brain goes there. And we hold on to those feelings. So as we’re thinking about what we feed, we need to also be cognizant of the fact that it might take more effort or investment to feed the good and to cultivate and to nurture that wolf in our personality. And it might take more work. And it doesn’t mean that it’s unsuccessful, or that there’s something wrong with us. That’s just the way our brains work.

Eric Zimmer  04:19

I love that framing of it. And it’s sort of the idea of knowing the inclination of our brain and not everybody’s is the same, but as you say, most people are gonna have a negative inclination, but this applies to anything. Knowing the inclination, the direction we tend to go does give us some sense of what way we need to correct for sort of more habitually,

Emily Balcetis  04:43

exactly. I mean, if you are interested in talking about evolutionary pressures, you know, it’s important for us to find food, find opportunity, find love, find safety, and those are pressing concerns. But some might argue that it’s even more pressing that we keep ourselves safe. If we miss seeing the tiger that’s coming at us back in caveman cave lady days, you know, death was probably imminent, we might argue like, evolutionarily speaking that our attention to our focus on and our concern for things that might cause us harm or mistakes that we’ve made in the past so that we can avoid making them in the future to keep ourselves safe. That might be the basis for what we’re calling this negativity dominance. Yeah, that doesn’t mean that we are depressed or that we have clinical symptoms that might just sort of be a holdover from what requires more attention. But also, that doesn’t mean that that’s a limitation or that that’s just how it needs to be. It’s just something we need to be aware of, so that we can focus our efforts on cultivating and feeding the positive in light of what might have been these pressures that we’ve experienced in the past.

Eric Zimmer  05:46

Yeah, I love the way you say that is one of the things I like about the parable. Beyond its obvious implications of choice is it says everybody has this in them, which I think normalizes sort of what you’re saying the fact like, yeah, of course, you’ve got some of these, quote, unquote, negative tendencies, right? Yeah, they’re, they’re welcome to the human race. Right, exactly. So let’s move in and talk about your book, which really talks about the way we see the world has a lot to do with how successfully we navigate it. And in the book, you frame this entire discussion up in a way that I as a musician love, which is about you learning to play the drums. So maybe first, just share a little bit about why you wanted to learn to play the drum share a little bit about that. And then I think it’ll help us as we put each of your four strategies into context, we can put them in context around that, at least as a starting point,

Emily Balcetis  06:43

sir, you know, I think a lot of people can resonate with this, that maybe some point in their life, they thought, you know, what I want to be a rock star like that looks like a really great life. And I went through that phase as well, I went through that phase, when I was in my late teen years, I was playing in a band is a cover band, was loads of fun, we had the opportunity to play with a group that was coming through that actually was quite successful. And we played this show for 15,000 people at this outdoor, you know, rock venue. And it was amazing, it was really exciting. But that at 18 years old, was the peak of my rock star career. And it was all downhill after that, which is probably good. You know, I don’t think my stomach could have tolerated the drugs. And like, certainly, my body wouldn’t have put up with all of the late night. So it’s probably healthier that I peaked at 18. But I loved it, I have always been involved in music. That’s a part of our family. That’s part you know, my growing up. And in fact, that’s what I went to study in college was to study music performance. So that has always been a love of mine. My career is as a basic experimental motivation scientist, I do behavioral research, trying to understand the reasons that people do what they do and think what they think and how can we help take advantage of opportunities to help them have and shape the kind of life that they want. So when I found myself at a point in life, where life was really changing for me, I had the opportunity to write this book, the very same month that my first son was born. I just felt like, here’s all these incredible opportunities to try on something new. But I’m losing myself in this becoming a new mother, you know, really took away what I thought had been cool about me in the past, people were coming to visit and saying, oh, let’s meet this new baby, what’s going on? And all I had to talk about with like, yeah, diapers and formula and what happened to me, I used to be interesting. I wanted to be a rock star, where did that go? So I was conscientiously at that point in my life trying to choose carve out more time for myself. And to bring back what I felt like was a really important part of of who I was, I needed that artistic side to come through, I needed some more time for myself. So I decided to become a drummer. I had played saxophone, flute piano, so drums, the still an instrument, but definitely a different skill set than I had tackled before. And so it was a challenge that I was excited to take on plus, being able to play drums is cool. Well, at least I think so.

Eric Zimmer  09:13

And the world needs more drummers. It does not need more guitar players like me, there’s plenty of us there are not enough drummers.

Emily Balcetis  09:21

Well, you know, even if I had gotten there, they wouldn’t. The world wouldn’t have benefited from my drumming skills. Again, this is like a personal conquests that I wanted. Yeah, you know. So that’s what I took on, you know, my son is a month old. We live in a one bedroom apartment in New York City that’s smaller than most people’s garages. And that’s when I felt like you know what, we need to bring drums into this situation. That’s what’s gonna help our life right now. So, you know, maybe an ill placed goal, but one that I took on, and the bug, as we’re going to talk about is all about strategies that people can use to manage the obstacles that they face when they’re trying to meet their goals. So I became well aware of what those challenges are when you’re taking on a new goal, something that’s personally important, but on top of an already busy full life of with multiple responsibilities to manage. So the story really is about me trying to apply these tactics that behavioral science that I am conducting and that others are doing, would say would work should work. Try this. And I tested it out myself as I was trying to take on this, this personal goal of becoming a one hit wonder learning one song on drums well enough that I could play it publicly and not embarrass myself.

Eric Zimmer  10:34

Yeah, you and I were talking before we started about how sort of different our pursuit of an instrument is like, you were like, I’m gonna play this one song, and you got it exactly right. And I’m more of a, you know, good enough kind of guy. You know, the reason that is, is when I started, all I wanted to do was write songs. And in order to write a song, all I needed to do is learn enough of what was happening in this other song that I could then take it and incorporate so it built this habit. And more recently, I’ve been trying to sort of do a little bit more of what you do, which is sort of pushed through to try and you know, can I get it really right? Anyways, let’s now turn towards your four strategies that you really outline in the book. Maybe we’ll start by just listing what the four of them are, and then we’ll walk through them each in more depth. Does that work?

Emily Balcetis  11:24

Yeah, sure. Number one, materializing taking something that’s abstract, maybe just in your mind and making it visual, concrete and right in front of you. The second one is narrowed frame, so narrowing our focus of attention, trying to keep out the distractions, avoiding what’s in our peripheral vision. And in contrast to that, then there’s the wide bracket, when do we need to assume a more expansive focus of attention? They seem like they might be in opposition to one another. But again, they’re just like two tools in a toolbox. Yes, they might work in different ways, but you need a different tool for each aspect of the job, and

Eric Zimmer  12:04

framing.

Emily Balcetis  12:07

And number four, thank you. Sorry, I’m still stuck on like drumming, I’m pulling up my drumming style, framing, taking advantage of the fact that we can direct our eyes in one way or another. And what we point our eyes at, frames up a different element of our environment. And that is a really powerful tool as well, because what we see predicts what we do.

Eric Zimmer  12:29

One of the things I loved about the book, I love these four tools. I also love how you sort of emphasize, you know, we’ve got studies that show these tools work, and these tools are situational, they’re going to depend on your situation, they’re going to depend on who you are. Sometimes you might need one of them, sometimes you might need another. But you’re sort of doing away with that over simplicity of like, here’s three simple hacks to crush your life. Right? Like, that’s not what you’ve got here.

Emily Balcetis  12:57

Exactly. I mean, the metaphor of that toolbox is one that I do keep coming back to, you know, if you only had a toolbox full of hammers, that mean, that might be great if all you needed to do is pounding nails. But that’s not what life is really like, right? The different challenges that we are up against, and the opportunities that we have are different. And so we need different tools. Coupled with that we are people we are evolving as a species, but as a person ourselves, right, we’re growing, we’re changing and what worked a year ago might not work today, it might not work during a different phase of life. And so we need that flexibility that a full toolkit can offer us the opportunity to change out, you know, one instrument for another when the job and the needs change.

Eric Zimmer  13:38

Totally agree. So let’s talk now about the materializing a goal. You say understand how to materialize a goal, our steps or our efforts improves the way we track our progress, which is a nice sentence that sort of summarizes everything you cover in that chapter. It’s kind of in one sentence. That’s pretty good. But let’s talk about what are some of the things we want to do is we think about materializing a goal. This is particularly great this time of year, because a lot of people are going to start thinking about okay, 2022 is coming, how might I want to be different and they’re going to start to materialize a goal. So what are some things we need to know in that? And how did you do that with your drumming? Well, you know, this sort

Emily Balcetis  14:19

of comes back to the conversation that we opened with about the parable and how our brain is, is an amazing organ that we have at our disposal, but it also causes us problems. Our brain is faulty, it is powerful. It’s more powerful than computers certainly are now, but maybe ever will be. But yet there’s these inherent biases in the way that our brain and our memories work. That can do us a real disservice when we’re trying to monitor our progress, for example. So if we were just to leave it to our own memory and look back on, let’s say it’s March and we set a new year’s resolution in January we’re trying to think, how far have I come? Am I making progress like is the amount of effort that I’ve put in commensurate with output that I’m Getting the change that I’m seeing. And so many people give up a month in a month and a half in and throw away their efforts that they have invested into a New Year’s resolution or, I mean, January 1, or anytime that that’s important. And oftentimes, that’s because it just feels like I’ve tried so hard, and I’m getting nowhere. To which I ask, really, have you really got nowhere? I know, from my own personal experience, when I try to reflect on my drumming, or many other goals that I’ve taken on, I really can’t trust my brain to give me the right answer to how much progress have I made? And is it worth the effort that I’ve invested?

Eric Zimmer  15:38

Yep, our mood shapes that so much right, the mood that we’re in can shape our cognitive view of how we’re doing

Emily Balcetis  15:45

exactly what we’re thinking and feeling right now shapes the information that’s available in our brain. So when we’re in a good mood, we tend to have happy memories pop to mind. And when we’re in a bad mood, that’s where that sort of feeling like we’re in a rut we’re in this cycle that we can’t get out of, that’s part of where it comes from is because, you know, one negative experience begets or calls upon another negative memory that we have. And again, we give more weight to those negative experiences that we’ve had in the past. So for me when I was trying to learn to play drums, knowing that I gave myself a date that I was going to perform this concert publicly, and that I was going to write about my experience in this book. And I promised myself I would do it accurately and not misrepresent what really happened. I felt a lot of pressure. And I’m not very coordinated, I got kicked out of my basketball team because I lost my footing and ran into somebody who’s on my own team pushed out of bounds when she had the ball and we lost the game. I never got invited back to play another game after that. So when I’m thinking about, can I actually play this song publicly? It just felt like every time I practiced, I wasn’t making enough progress to be able to meet that goal. I was so nervous, I was so anxious about this personal conquest that I had set for myself, that all I was really focusing on was what I wasn’t getting, wasn’t coming together the coordination problems that I was experiencing. And so then I realized, you know what I’ve been talking about, I’ve been writing about materializing, I need to do that here. I got to stop relying on my memory to determine whether I’m making sufficient progress to hit my mark, a couple of months in the future. So I set up an app on my phone to ping me a couple times a day and ask, Did you practice drums since last time? I asked you, mostly I told it, no. But if I said yes. And it would say how did you do talk about that experience. And I jot down a few little notes. I did that for a month. And then I downloaded all the data from my phone and thought about well, what am I going to think and a month that I haven’t done very much at all. It’s been you know, really busy time of the semester, as an academic professor, my kids had a lot of stuff going on that I’ve had to manage. I don’t I don’t feel like I’ve done anything this month. But when I actually looked at the data, I had a really different and more accurate understanding of the progress that I made, actually practiced a lot more than I remembered practicing. The sessions, you know, tended to be like, fairly mundane, they weren’t monumental moments. And that’s why they didn’t stick in my mind. But when I was looking at the words that are used to describe those experiences, at the beginning of the month, it was things like I cried, I hated it. It was awful. By the end of the month, it was like a compliment. My husband who actually is a drummer, so gave me my first genuine legitimate compliment in my own feelings had resonated with that, you know, leading up to that I feel I’m getting like a little bit better. My head doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode today. But these are like, you know, small moments. They’re not life changing. I’m not like concert ready? Yeah. And that’s why they didn’t stick in my memory. Yep. Which is why it’s also important to write them down so that you can, you know, become a better personal accountant of your own effort, investment and progress. Our minds aren’t gonna be able to do that for us.

Eric Zimmer  18:44

Yeah, I love that idea. I do behavioral coaching work with people. And that is such a big one is people will just be like, I’m not getting anywhere. And I’ll be like, Well, okay, let’s actually look at the data. Let’s, you know, let’s look at your checkins. Over the last few weeks. Let’s see the progress you’ve made. Let’s look at the tone the way you’re writing things. Out of curiosity, what app did you use to do that?

Emily Balcetis  19:04

It’s called the reporter app. Okay. I got that idea from this really cool collaboration that I came upon these two women who didn’t know each other at all before, found one another at a conference for their field. They were like, data scientists, and I don’t know their whole background architects. I mean, they are a polymath and each of them that they are like experts in so many areas, they found each other as total strangers met, and decided in that moment that they met that they were going to commit to each other for 52 weeks. They were going to each week pick a goal that are pick something that they wanted to track, like, what sort of animals do I experience in New York City on a day to day basis? Or how many times do I give or receive compliments, and they would just pick these sort of random themes. And note every element every time they came upon a compliment, gave or received one every animal that they saw and their walks around the city. And then at the end of the week, they would create this amazing visual depiction. I mean, really like contemporary art, they will put it on the back of a postcard one lived in New York when lived in London, and they’d send the postcards to each other at the end of the week, with this very beautiful, like vivid depiction of quantifying whatever data they had been collecting, again, this sort of low level, daily, everyday stuff that might not stick in your mind, unless they use the reporter app, unless they were noting it within their phone, and then downloading the data to look at all of their experiences over the week. And their postcards are just beautiful. And in fact, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, acquired them all purchased their entire collection, and it’s a part of their permanent exhibits now at the museum. So they were the ones who told me about the reporter app for how to keep track of daily experiences. That’s

Eric Zimmer  20:53

awesome. Yeah, I love that story in the book, and it’s such such a great story. So we’re talking about tracking our progress in this way, largely,

Emily Balcetis  21:02

exactly. I mean, it’s one of the most effective ways for getting an accurate insight into how far you’ve come and how far you have to go. Now, the next question then is like, Well, what do we do with that information? So alright, I learned a little bit more on drums, and I thought I had done before. And as a behavioral scientist, then I know that well, we have choices. As people, we have choices, what do we do with this data that we have now? And some really cool insights from behavioral scientists work it saying, you know, should you reflect back on that progress you’ve made? Or should you look at sort of the void? Here’s where I am now. And here’s where I want to go, I have an accurate understanding of where I am. And I know what the goal is. So should we look to what’s to come? Or should we look at what we’ve accomplished? Where are we going to find more motivation? And it’s really interesting, because, again, there’s no one right answer, right? It depends on the person depends on that person’s goal that they’re, that they’re thinking about. And what the research says is that when somebody is really committed to a goal, and they’ve, you know, maybe they have invested a lot in it already, this is something that is, you know, personally central to who they are looking forward is actually more motivating, they didn’t doubt that they were going to be committed, you know, they don’t need to convince themselves that this is something that is worth investing in. They want to close that gap, separating where I am now and where it is that I want to be. But people who are new to a goal, or maybe for whom, you know, the goal is more extrinsically motivated, it’s something you have to do because a boss has said it, or you know, it’s not like core to who you are as a person, then reflecting back on past accomplishments, progress to date, can be more motivating. Because in a sense, it’s signaling, you know, how much have you put into this thing are you really going to give up now look at what you’ve already accomplished, it can give you a sense of self efficacy of feeling or data to prove you can do this. And then also, it’s signaling that you must want to do this because look at what you’ve already done before. And it’s hard for people to give up on anything that they have invested in. So you know, that’s that’s a point where we can sort of self reflect, think about, is this a goal I’m highly committed to? Or is it less central to who I am, and use that as sort of a diagnostic tool to inform whether we should use that accounting experience, that materializing experience to look forward to the future or look back on our past?

Eric Zimmer  24:00

Is there any correlation in if I’m looking back to the past for sort of affirmation that I’m doing better, which we might refer to as a positive reinforcement? And I may be stretching this, which is why I’m asking versus looking towards the gap between where I am and the future, which is a little bit of a potentially negative reinforcer, or am I stretching, making that connection between those things?

Emily Balcetis  24:27

Again, as people we have opportunities to think about it in multiple ways. So some people probably do think about looking to the future as a negative, this unknown, this, like, you know, mounting to do list that separates where I am and where I want to be. But for other people, especially those that are most committed to this thing that they’re pursuing. Yeah, it’s like having something hanging over your head. You want to see it come to a close. You know, this is sort of an interesting personality test. I like movies that are really open ended, like indie films where it’s just sort of like the end of the day, and you have no idea what happens to the people tomorrow, right? And there’s so many possibilities. I love that and my husband hates it, he needs the closure, he wants the story to get wrapped up. He wants that to be the end of the narrative and doesn’t like those open ended. Yeah. And of course, you know, we can all resonate with with both of those perspectives in different situations. But for a lot of people looking forward to the future does give you that, like, pull that impulse of like, oh, I want to close this gap. I don’t like having this just hanging open having an open thread. So you know, I think, again, there’s opportunities to think about that either as a positive, like, okay, it’s clear, where am I going towards now? Where’s the gap that I need to close? And for other people, it may not be seen that way?

Eric Zimmer  25:41

Yep. And in this section, you talk about that, it’s important to know how to materialize a goal, and also how to create a plan. Yeah. So

Emily Balcetis  25:52

you know, I think, especially when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, or major milestones in people’s life, when they’re thinking about, Okay, what do I really want for myself, these moments where we reflect and then set a new grand, big intention, those are exciting moments in our life. And oftentimes, what we do is set an aspirational goal, a stretch goal, you know, you know, this is where I want to be with my life, like we’re talking in like major, big, abstract kind of ways. And that’s great to do. But sometimes that’s where the goal setting stops, is that people say, alright, world, this is what I’m going to make happen. This is what I want for myself. A lot of people at that moment will do things like create dream boards, or vision boards for their personal life or their professional life. It’s, you know, this is like a technique of curating images or motifs and compiling them all into one visual frame. Some for some people, like, you know, literally a cork board that they’re putting these images that represent what they want for themselves in one same space. And then the advice is hang this in a place where you’ll see it every day to remind you of what it is that you’re working for, again, a very popular technique that people use when they’re setting goals. And that is wonderful. Because figuring out what you want in life can be a big step for a lot of people. Right? Right. So, so that is important. But at the same time, in the same sessions, when are brainstorming about what it is that I want for myself in the future, we need to add on some other elements to materialize that not just what we want to accomplish, but how we’re going to accomplish it. So we need to add on some other steps. We need to dream big like with those vision boards or those dream boards. But we also need to concretely plan for action, we need to think about what can we do today or this week? What behaviors can I engage in? What choices can I make that’s going to advance my progress in this area? We need to translate that abstract idea into something concrete, manageable, actionable, visible, right, so that we know which way to step first step laughters. Do I step right, we need to do that. Another thing that we need to do is that we need to foreshadow the obstacles that we might experience along the way. And in fact, we will find more motivation and persistence. If we do that. We need to think about what are the challenges I’m going to face as I try to take on this goal and I take a step in this direction. And you might brainstorm a list of three or four possibilities of these things that might stymie or throw you off course or be the reason that you throw in the towel. And we need to figure out what can we do if we experience those obstacles. Now again, it might seem like, alright, if I’m trying to like psych myself up, I’m really excited about this new thing I’m going to take on in my life, this new passion that I just discovered that I’m committing to, I’m really going to do better, I’m going to be more motivated, and I’m going to increase the odds of making it. If I think about all the ways that I’m going to fail. Really, that’s the reaction that I get a lot. And the answer is yes. And it’s the same reason that when you get on an airplane, before the plane takes off, you know, the flight attendants are telling you what’s going to happen with the oxygen masks and where can you find life jackets. And they do the same thing. If you you know, get to go out on a boat for a boat ride, right? They tell you where you can find the life jackets. Now, if you’re like, you know, you’re just about to go off on this new adventure, like on a plane or on a boat or whatever. Why do they kill your bugs by doing that. Because if that plane is going down, or if that boat is sinking, that’s not the time to try to figure out where the life jackets are, you need to already know so that you can instantly pick up on plan B or Plan C, your plan D, whatever you foreshadowed because when we’re in those moments of crisis, or when we’re facing challenges, within on resources, you don’t have as much time to try to like think as creatively as possible, and to figure out a solution when we’re in the midst of a problem. And so that is why, you know taking that abstract, high level vision for ourselves, planning concretely and foreshadowing those obstacles. When people do those steps together. They increase the odds that they’re actually gonna make it to their goal.

Eric Zimmer  30:01

Yeah. And analogy that in a slightly different domain is in recovery, right thinking about what might trigger me? And what will I do when I get triggered? You know, what is the actual exact thing? I will do? It’s something I do with with clients a lot is like, because in that moment, like you said, We’re low on resources may be time, but we’ve may very well be low on cognitive bandwidth.

Emily Balcetis  30:24

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy and a domain that really matters to a lot of people. When you’re feeling, you know, an urge when you’re feeling that temptation. Right, we can get people in and recovery can be fixated on that, right. And so that’s not like you’re, you’re so narrowly focused on just working through or avoiding succumbing to this temptation that, you know, starting a new friendship with person 10, feeling confident enough to get reached out and make a phone call and ask for help. Like, that’s not going to happen. You don’t have that badge, right. Like you’re saying, Yeah, you know, another great example of this, like, you know, the power of foreshadowing obstacles. I love this example of Michael Phelps, which I’m sure you remember from from the book, but in 2008, right, he was taking the international stage for the first time by storm and the Beijing Olympics. He you know, as an incredible swimmer, that’s what we know him for. And he was on the brink of doing something that nobody has ever done in the history of the entire Olympic games ever, which is when eight gold medals in a single Olympiad. At the time of this story, he had already won seven, when he was diving into the pool for the 200 Fly. That was like his jam, right? This is what he’s known for. It’s almost like he’s a shoo in to win this race and his eighth gold medal. All he needs to do is do four links of the pool back and forth, back and forth, and the race is over. By the time he had done three, and just had one link of the pool to return, his goggles had filled with water and who is swimming blind. If that happened to me, I would totally I mean, it would never happen. I would never find myself in the Olympics or swimming without dying in a pool. But if it was me, I would have panicked but he didn’t. Because he had foreshadowed this obstacle routinely in practice, he would rehearse having these goggles not be properly sealed and having them filled with water. Sometimes this coach would even rip them off his face and smash them on the ground just as he dove in, I guess, for a dramatic effect. And, and he would have to practice swimming without goggles. So when it happened in the 2008 Olympics, he knew exactly what he was going to do, which is start counting strokes, because he knew exactly how many strokes it would take from him, for him to get from one end of the pool to the other. He did that commonly turned his attention to counting his strokes, he won that 200 meter fly, won his eighth gold medal and then would go on to win 15 More in his career. Yeah. So I think that’s a great example of what foreshadowing obstacles can do and what particular circumstances it’s most essential.

Eric Zimmer  32:46

That’s a great story. Let’s move on to narrowing our focus of attention. Why is this valuable? And when might we want to do it, you know,

Emily Balcetis  32:55

narrowing our focus of attention, the idea that like, you know, we can imagine that there’s a spotlight shining on just one thing, at the expense of what’s in our periphery, that’s a powerful tool, especially when what we’re focusing on might seem far off. So I’ve been doing, you know, research in this area for about 15 years now. And we are really focused on exercise people’s exercise goals that they have walking more running faster in trying to increase the number of steps that they’ve taken. And when you tell people like oh, just you know, set a further goal, just just try going a little bit farther today, see what happens. And then you can up at the next day, and but the next day, that can be really overwhelming for people, because literally when they’re looking at the track that they’re going around or the street that they’re going to walk down that now they’re supposed to walk farther, that destination can look really far off, it looks farther to them. What we have found is that when they have that perceptual experience, when to them, they are seeing the world in more extreme ways. And other people do that stop sign, I can’t make it there. I can’t walk to that building that’s too far away. It affects their psychological experience, right, they stopped believing that they can do it, they think the task is too challenging, and they throw in the towel sooner. So there is a direct connection between that visual experience and their motivational and psychological readiness to excel at that particular task. So we were trying to figure out, okay, if that visual experience is sort of the, the initiator of the problem, can we trick people? Can we trick their visual experiences into seeing the world in a way that is going to energize them that is going to give them the belief that they can do this? And will that have consequences for how much they actually exercise? So we came up with, you know, these instructions that are very simple, they literally cost nothing. It’s just about changing what you do with your eyes. And like I said, we would tell people just imagine that there’s a spotlight shining on that stop sign up ahead or that building that you’re hoping that you can walk to or the other end of the park that you’ve never quite made it to yet imagine a spotlight shining just on that location and Focus your gaze there, don’t pay attention to the people on the side or the buildings over on the right or the left, just focus your attention, narrow your focus. What we found is that when they do that, it induces a visual illusion of proximity when we have them estimate the distance tell us how far away does that goal feel. They’re saying it feels closer, and they don’t realize it, they don’t realize that that narrowed, focus has created this sort of perceptual trick for them. But when we look to see them, well, what happens if we’ve induced this visual illusion by changing the way that people are looking by not paying attention to the distractions on the side, what we found is that people across many, many studies, 1000s of people that we’ve tested in lots of different contexts, they walk and run faster, they go out for walks more frequently, they take more steps in their day, and they say that it hurts less. The tasks are the same, right? We’re not actually changing anything about what they’re doing. We’re changing their psychological experience. Now, when it seems like it’s not so far away, they feel empowered. They feel like they’re ready to take on this challenge. And then the experience defies their expectations, it isn’t as bad I thought I could do it. And look, I did it. And it’s sort of creating this positive reinforcement cycle, right, we’ve changed a visual experience, we change, which changes our motivational state, which helps them perform better. And when they do better than they thought that they could they repeat that experience over time. So that’s an example I think of the power of our eyes, simple tweak early on, and all of that happens within the process of setting and reaching a goal. And you can see these big downstream consequences.

Eric Zimmer  36:39

And does that translate into something that, you know, the goal isn’t like literally visible with my eyes? Yeah, what I loved about this section of the book is the phrase, which is our mental states have a much bigger impact than our physical ones, on our ability to get through things. And that really hit me and I was like, yeah, the type of work that most of us, you know, as professionals do is not as physically demanding, right. So it is very much a mental game. You know, you say in that chapter, people who think that what they’ve done will take a lot out of them feel more tired afterwards, even if you know, that’s not the case. So how does this translate into things that are not directly visual? How’s that for a long question?

Emily Balcetis  37:25

Yeah. I mean, it’s a great question. Because you’re, I mean, there’s a lot that this technique is relevant to, but one of them that, you know, comes to mind as a parallel is time, you can’t see time. But time is always a big determinant of what goals we set. And whether we reach those goals. How we manage our time is really important. A lot of times when people set goals, some of those goals that matter most to us, or that are most important, are ones that are pretty far off in the future, you can take saving for retirement, right? What is retirement? For some people, it might be never, but you know, but for almost everybody, it’s going to be pretty far off in the future. And all kinds of experts tell us like, well, we should start saving for retirement in our 20s. We do that right? Think of how much better off will be in our retirement years because of how compound interest works. But nobody in their 20s is thinking about retirement. And when I work with my college students who are in their 20s with their first jobs and asking them, you know, have you thought about your 401 B plan? They’re like, I didn’t know that. I mean, I really don’t even know what that is either. But but they certainly don’t. And they’re not saving for it. They’re not investing in it. And when you ask why. The number one was common answers, because it seems like that’s so far off. I don’t even know like, Who’s that person who’s gonna get that money? Like, what is retired me look like? I have no idea who that is. Yeah. And so that’s what we’re talking about is that oftentimes, you know, we’ll reap the biggest benefits if we invest small today for a distant far off future. And because of that big separation of time, people have people find it challenging to connect what I’m doing today with that distant goal, that distant, you know, place that I’m trying to work towards. So a really amazing researcher at UCLA, Hal Hirschfeld, he’s, he’s done work trying to say like, Okay, can we connect that space? Can we shrink that temporal space, that psychological distance that separates me and my 20s? If we’re thinking about retirement, and me and my 60s who’s actually going to get this money in my lab, we did an analogue of his research, which is we took pictures of people’s faces of 20 year olds faces, we morphed them with, you know, Maya Angelou, Tom broke out and created like actual visual depictions of what retired you might look like. And we can track it that space, we made what seems so abstract and far off in the future relevant in the here and now. And what we saw is that people’s interest and understanding how retirement works and their commitment to investing some of their income now for retirement years increased substantially by contracting that space. So I’m not suggesting everyone needs to go out and buy I’m computer morphing software and like, look, you know, imagine everyday what they’re gonna look like when they have more wrinkles and white hair than they do now. But finding ways to connect my current self with that future self can help make it easier to make the tougher choices today, that will be essential for better outcomes later on.

Eric Zimmer  40:52

Let’s move on to number three, which will be the sort of opposite of the one we just talked about, which is instead of narrowing our focus attention is having a wider bracket. Let’s talk about why that’s helpful. And then maybe tell us when one versus the other, we might want to think about the wide bracket

Emily Balcetis  41:12

is in opposition to that narrowed focus, right? When is it important to take a step back, see the bigger picture to be aware of the paths that are on the right versus on the left? That’s what using that wide bracket is about. If we go back to that example of those data scientists who are tracking compliments and animals in the urban environments, in they used a wide bracket to help maintain their commitment to something that I think a lot of people would have thrown in the towel on. So So literally, when they talked about sending these postcards back and forth, I asked them, How did you how did you do that, that’s a lot. You’re paying attention every single moment of every single day. And you’re doing that for 52 weeks, seven days a week, like, that’s incredible commitment that you had. And, and one of them said that the reason I was able to do that was because of this wider bracket that I was taking, I was seeing today’s choices within this bigger context of what it is that I had committed to, to be a little bit more concrete as it might apply to the rest of us who aren’t just trying to track animals and complements. Sometimes we can get so narrowly focused on one course of action that can be hard to let go when we might need to the most. Some times we need to change course, this may not be the right career. For us, this might not be the right person to commit to, this might not be the right goal that we’re working to achieve. But it can be really hard to let go, especially if we’ve invested time and resources into this path that we’ve taken. And so we need to take a step back and realize that there might be more ways to accomplish what we really want. If we try a different path, and it doesn’t mean that we have failed, it doesn’t mean that we made a mistake, it means it’s time to change course. You know, I think a great example, is Vera Wang, we know her for her fashion empire that she’s created an incredible company. We know her most probably for her wedding dresses that she’s made. But that’s not where her career started. She was a figure skater, and she was on the national and international stage for figure skating. She hit a peak, though that wasn’t quite the top of where that profession could take you. But she sort of plateaued there, doggedly pursuing the next and final level of success. But she never quite made it. And at one point, she just said, That’s it. I’ve tried and I’m done. Now, some might say, well, she feel that figure skating, I didn’t know she was a figure skater. I didn’t know that was part of her history. And then she stopped trying to make it to literally the top of that industry. But for her she doesn’t see it that way. When she talks about that experience of moving from figure skating to fashion design. She said, All I did was take a step back, reflect on what is it that I really want? And am I going to get that am I going to meet that passion through figure skating? The answer is no. But what is it that I want? For her, it was the art in the beauty of line Li and he you literally cut lines into the ice as a figure skater and you cut lines into fabric. So she saw this is just a natural connection, you know, just another instantiation of what it was that she was truly interested in art and lines and the fluidity of the lions and how the lions can move together. And of course, when she moved to fashion, she’s incredibly successful. It’s not a failure. It was just taking a step back, thinking more abstractly about what is it that I really want and being able to see multiple possibilities that you can’t before if you just you’re focused on taking one step forward, one step forward, one step forward on this very same path.

Eric Zimmer  44:34

Let’s take your drumming project right. When in your drumming project. Did you know it’s time to narrow my focus? And when did you know it’s time to widen the bracket? Let’s use that as an example to sort of talk about how do I know when to do I mean, I know it won’t apply universally but

Emily Balcetis  44:50

yeah, I mean for me in setting the goal. I knew that I needed to be narrow and not so wide. And maybe for you you had the opposite of experience in guitar and you know guitar In learning guitar, right, your goal is to have an expansive repertoire. For me, it was to have a very singular one. And so, you know, I was learning the skills that are necessary in order to play this one song. But you know, I can’t say that after all this time of having learned that song in the years of practicing that now it’s been, I only have one song, I didn’t learn translatable skills, because I was so narrowly focused, but it meant that I got, I got what I wanted out of that experience. And so, you know, sometimes when we need that extra push, in the case of the exercise work that we were doing, to cross over that finish line to get the extra boost of energy, that’s when we need to take the distractions away. And when a narrowed focus can really be helpful, he can track that space, it can make us feel closer to the end game than perhaps we really are. But that can be motivating. And then we aren’t going to be pulled in so many different directions, multitasking is a thing that plagues all of us. And for almost all of us, it does a disservice for our ability to get the best out of what we’re putting in. So that’s when we might want to use that narrowed focus is when we need an extra push of energy to cross over that finish line. And when we’re feeling really scattered, or like, you know, having that experience of like, I’m just not getting anything done, and I can’t cross over that finish line. The wide bracket, though, in contrast, is when we need options, when this is not working, I’m feeling you know, like I’m on a treadmill, and I’m working so hard, and I’m not getting anywhere. And if you’ve accurately assessed your progress, and that is the right conclusion to draw. That’s when we need to sort of free ourselves from that fixation that we have on this one course of action. And we need to take a step back. And we need to think more abstractly at a higher level. Going back to that vision board, if we’ve created some version of that to reflect on okay, what is it that I really want, and give ourselves the time and the space to think about all the different ways that we could get there?

Eric Zimmer  46:57

That’s a great example. And I often see this with coaching clients is there are times we need to actually like you’re saying sort of zoom back out and go, Why did I start on this? What was important about this and then connect the narrow view, okay, I’m doing this thing, and sometimes reconnect that back to the broader thing, because I think there is a tendency, you use the phrase somewhere in the book about we get caught in the middle, and we get caught in the middle. We’re not seeing a ton of progress. We’re not beginning but we’re not ending we’re kind of in the middle. And sometimes I find you know, it’s like, well, why does this thing matter to me, which is the broader perspective.

Emily Balcetis  47:33

Exactly. And you know, what we were talking about, what are the stages for effective goal setting, thinking abstractly, planning concretely and foreshadowing obstacles? Those first two steps are that are the connection that you’re talking about thinking abstractly, but in that same goal setting session thinking concretely. Yeah, it can help when those two together, like okay, this is what I’m doing every day. This is what my day looks like, why am I doing that? Oh, that’s right. Because I have made that mental connection to the bigger purpose that this action is trying to serve.

Eric Zimmer  48:02

Yeah, I mean, it’s similar. Every time when I sit down to meditate, the first thing I do is I just sort of remind myself, like, why am I doing this, because it helps me sort of reconnect, I just am not going through the motions as much at that point, because I’ve got, I’ve got a reason that it matters to me in that moment.

Emily Balcetis  48:18

There’s this great example, this case study done of a Dutch telecom company that had set this new high level goal for its for its organization, and for all the employees, which was sustainability, they wanted to increase the amount of recycling that was happening and reduce the number of things showing up in the trash can that should have been recycled. So they brought in a special communications team, they did all kinds of messaging to tell the rather large organization, all the members of it, this is what we’re doing people the sustainability of matters start recycling, they gave everybody individual recycling cans, and they swapped out the janitorial staff for members of the research team, who every night I collected every single garbage can and recycling bin and counted the number of things that showed up in garbage that should have been recycled. And what did they find? simply stating that high level goal did not reduce the number of things showing up in the trash that should have been recycled. They suspected that they thought what the behavioral scientists that they were working with that just setting this intention wasn’t going to get the job done. So in a second way for another cohort, they did the same thing sent out this messaging had the recycling bins right there. But at the same time in that same sort of first week of messaging had each individual think about a concrete action that they could take that would align with that intention, that high level abstract goal, but people came up with wasn’t magic or rocket science. It was use a paper a couple throw it in recycling, if it have some extra papers, I’ll put them in the recycling rather than the trash. It’s exactly what they wanted people to do. But importantly, they took that time they had each individual employee think about Alright, this is the sustainability initiative and couple that mentally pair it with the concrete action. And what do they see? Well, that’s baseline, about 1200 things were showing up in the trash can that should have been recycled. But that dropped to less than 200 Within a week, and that stayed for two weeks for a month for two months time that they were tracking what’s showing up in the garbage. And that stayed at that really low level, even when they made the actual action, the act of recycling more challenging by taking away individual recycling cans, and putting them into a communal space. So people had to get up from their desks and walk to the center of the office to recycle. So even despite that obstacle, having gone through that experience of pairing, the high level vision with a concrete action produced long lasting behavioral change that occurred, even despite facing these added pressures and obstacles.

Eric Zimmer  50:45

The last one we’ll talk about is the power of framing. So framing

Emily Balcetis  50:48

the idea here is just based on the principle that what we see predicts what we do, right. So our eyes are incredibly powerful in our eyes, you know, of course, we can see them on our face, but they are directly connected to our brain. And they’re connected to parts of our brain that are responsible for producing the actions that we take from moving our hands record meeting our feet. So you know, you can literally see, neuroscientists can the connection between our eyes and our movements, our choices, that behaviors that we make, so we can take advantage of that, as people, we don’t have to be neuroscientists to appreciate and take advantage of that fact. But we can use it to we can use that our eyes as a superpower to create a visual world that’s going to instantly automatically spark the kinds of choices that we want ourselves to make. So you can think about, you know, we’ve all we’ve all lived through COVID times, and people talk about the COVID 19, the 19 pounds that they gained by working at home, and you know, principals, lots of reasons that that has happened, there’s added stress, we’re not going outside to exercise as much. But people are working through dining room table a lot, right? Yeah, where they’re working is the same space that they associate with food and comfort, right, or they take a quick break. And then before it was in the office to refill their water bottle, or go chat with a colleague, but now it’s to go visit the fridge. Yeah, so we have set up our environments, we, the world has created these environments for us, that are putting visual cues in our visual frame in our frame, that is automatically associated with a choice that, that maybe isn’t ideal, if we have found ourselves to be, you know, overeating relative to what we have done in the past. So we can acknowledge that, you know, that part of it is like, you know, out of sight, out of mind. And we can, you know, change up the way that that we craft our home environment, or the way that we stock our pantry or our fridge, there’s things that we have to keep in the house, because our kids need those snacks. And they’re really tempting for us, well, we can hide them from our kids. And we can hide them from ourselves so that it’s a little bit more challenging to see them or to reach them. And it’s not that we don’t know that they’re there, but they don’t, we don’t automatically see them and then reach for them as our first go to snack. The company, Google did this, they did this experiment with their own employees, right, they were noticing that, you know, one of the perks of Google is all this amazing food and the free snacks and the at Facebook, you know, beer taps that are in the wall, you can bring your own growler and get a more than a pint and as you walk by to, to go to the bathroom, right. And all of these perks were literally increasing, you know, while decreasing the health of their employees. So they made some changes, they made the unhealthy snacks, it puts those into opaque containers, ones that they couldn’t see, they put the unhealthy drinks like the full sugar sodas on lower shelves in the refrigerator, or clouded the glass so that as people are walking by, they’re not getting that visual cue, what’s appearing in their their frame is not something that is the unhealthy choice, right, they sort of tried to separate that link between what you see and what you do by making it a little bit harder to see these things. And what they noticed, according to those that stock to Google’s pantries was that consumption of these unhealthy snacks decreased dramatically. So Google showed it with their own employees. And we can take advantage of that too. And think about how it affects what we’re eating at home or what we’re doing. You know, maybe rather than leaving our slippers at the foot of our bed, we leave our running shoes or keep the yoga mat out so that what our feet and our touch first and what our eyes see first in the morning is the meditation matters a yoga mat to cue that action rather than, than something else.

Eric Zimmer  54:36

Yeah, I’m always astounded by those sort of studies. And you know, one way of looking at it is like, how much harder is it to open the opaque can right, but as you say, it’s a sight thing. And the clearest example of this in my life is the difference between me playing the guitar when it’s sitting there on a stand, versus in a case the difference is seconds of effort, literally seconds. of effort to open a guitar case pull it out. But I play it way more when it’s just sitting there because I see, like you said, I see it, I bought this. It’s kind of behind me, it’s one of those like balance boards that you kind of surf on. I love that thing. When it’s laid out on the ground, I’ll do it pretty much every day, because I’ll walk by it four or five times, when it’s sitting up in the corner. Again, a foot away from where it is now. I could go days without doing it. I’m just astounded by that every time. It’s just amazing. Yeah, I

Emily Balcetis  55:30

had the same experience learning drums that once I put it within my line of sight, we put it in the space that we walk by to get out the door, the number of times that I practiced increased, because it’s like, waiting for my husband waiting for my kid to get their shoes on. I can go down and play for the five or 10 minutes that’s going to take before they come out the door. Yeah, because it’s that visual automatic cue. And you know, my son was born we had this big bookshelf, sort of like a curio cabinet full of books. And every time he went to bed, we would make sure that the doors were open so that the first thing that he saw when he woke up was his shelf of books. And we noticed that, you know, as soon as he was able to walk what he would do in the morning, get up and go get a book he can’t read, of course, but it was cueing that choice, and maybe bought us another extra minute or two of sleep before he came into our room.

Eric Zimmer  56:14

Yep. Awesome. Well, Emily, thank you so much. I’m happy to have gotten through the four strategies. I loved the book. Again, it’s called Clear closer, better how successful people see the world. We’re have links to your book in our show notes with links to how people can find you online so that they can check out everything you’re doing. Thank you so much.

Emily Balcetis  56:32

Thanks for this opportunity. It was a great conversation.