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Have We Been Visualizing Our Goals All Wrong?
Research suggests that our fantasies about our idealized future may be sapping our motivation
When I first read Joseph Murphy’s 1963 book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, I was at a low point in my life.
At the time, I was 16 years old and trying to adjust to a new high school. Sitting alone in my bedroom, I was comforted by Murphy’s argument that I could change anything in my life simply by imagining the outcome I desired. In his words:
“The feeling of health produces health; the feeling of wealth produces wealth. How do you feel? Imagination is your most powerful faculty. Imagine what is lovely and of good report. You are what you imagine yourself to be. You avoid conflict between your conscious and subconscious in the sleepy state. Imagine the fulfillment of your desire over and over again prior to sleep.”
So that’s what I did. I imagined the fulfillment of my desires over and over again. But as I did, there was a nagging doubt in the back of my mind. A missing link. How could my imagination change events in the physical world? What could possibly be the mechanism of action? Maybe this was all just wishful thinking.
The doubt bothered me but not enough to dissuade my interest. I continued reading book after book by authors with similar claims, books replete with anecdotes of people who claimed visualization as one of the keys to their success.
It wasn’t until I became a graduate student in clinical psychology that I came across research suggesting I may have been on to something. According to a study out of New York University, visualizing a goal creates an emotion similar to having already accomplished it, which may de-motivate us to actually do the hard work. Other researchers found that repeating positive affirmations about oneself does not boost self-esteem and actually lowers it for people who had below-average self-esteem to begin with.
Still, I wanted to believe there was something powerful about visualizing goals, so throughout my graduate studies, I poured myself into the research, hoping to find reasonable evidence — or at least a good hypothesis — about how the imagination could create changes in our physical…
