Re-examining Positive Thinking is about what you deeply desire, and how to accomplish it.
What is positive thinking?
Martin Seligman - the originator of the positive brain science development and the creator of Authentic Happiness - characterizes positive deduction as convictions or assumptions regarding the future that depend on past progress.
Seligman had performed a lot of studies that demonstrated an immediate relationship between positive expectations when the state of past success was present. That drove Oettingen to reason that there are two kinds of optimism- positive assumptions dependent on past encounters of achievement, and the desires.
Dreaming
There are situations where dreaming actually helps. The first situation is when the tasks are simple. The second situation is when you are waiting for some result that is out of your control. The third situation is allowing you to explore potential wishes without requiring you to make a commitment. You can also use dreaming to relax.
However, there are reasons that dreaming doesn’t always work. Your mind is fooled into believing that you've actually accomplished it, and thus leaving you with less drive to actually make it happen. Moreover, dreaming requires a certain level of energy and effort, it can drain the energy that could have been utilized in actually performing the task. It may also lock you into a dreaming loop.
Mental Contrasting
Oettingen began searching for a superior method to help individuals arrive at their objectives and dreams, and discovered it in what she calls Mental Contrasting. It's a genuinely straightforward interaction - just after you have the positive dream about anything you desire to accomplish, you promptly bounce into envisioning the difficulties and obstacles that you'll face in accomplishing it.
It gets your unconscious brain working on your obstacles. What you do by using this method is create a link between your goal and the obstacles. It also gets your brain thinking about the behaviour required to overcome the obstacles. This means that when you think of your goal, you'll also think of what you need to do in order to achieve them. It leads to a better job of processing negative feedback. When you expect there will be obstacles, you become more mentally prepared to face them.
Implementation Intentions
While Oettingen was doing her examination on mental differentiating, Peter Gollwitzer, was performing research on a similarly intriguing subject called implementation intentions. In it's most essential structure, an implementation intention is an arrangement enumerating how and when you mean to make a move - for this situation, how we intend to accomplish our objectives and beat our challenges.
WOOP: Putting It All Together
Energized by the discoveries in both mental differentiating and implementation intentions, Oettingen found that the blend of the two of them together was remarkable.
WOOP represents:
W = Wish
O = Outcome
O = Obstacle
P = Plan
Here's the way it works by and by, which is something you can do whenever you have a wish or an objective you need to achieve. To begin with, get a piece of paper and record your desire or objective in three to six words. Second, recognize what you accept the most ideal result of accomplishing that objective will be in three-six words. Third, let your creative juices lead the remainder of the activity by recording each hindrance you think you'll face on your approach to accomplishing that objective. Ultimately, for every one of the challenges, record one explicit move you can make for beating them.
WOOP is an incredible cycle you can use to accomplish your deepest desires.