Visualize Reaching Your Goal

Quick Win

Think of a goal you’d like to accomplish — master a tennis serve, learn a language — and picture yourself taking the steps to make it happen.

Try This Today

• Sit in a chair, get comfortable and close your eyes.
• Picture yourself putting the work in to accomplish your goal. Make the images as vivid as you can. Focus on the sights, sounds and details.
• If doubts creep in, reframe your thoughts with a positive lens. Replace “I won’t be able to get this done” with “I can do this!” Do the exercise for about five minutes and repeat it daily, if possible.

Why

Visualizing the steps needed to reach a goal may help you succeed. A landmark study published in 1998 in American Psychologist about mental simulation — envisioning where you want to go — suggested that rehearsing the steps needed to reach the goal is more productive than simply imagining the final outcome. For the study, researchers divided university students into three groups before an exam: One group was told to visualize where and when they would study to earn an A and to hold those pictures in their minds, another group only pictured their ideal outcomes (an A), and the third group simply tracked how many hours they studied. The process-visualization group ended up studying more and earning higher grades.