Visualize 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, 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 around you.
• If doubts creep in, reframe your thoughts with positive ones. Replace “I won’t be able to get this done” with “I can do this!”

Why

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