A Reality Check You Need to Cash

Be a dreamer and a doer. You cannot engage in wishful or positive thinking without also taking action to make your dreams and goals a reality. There are no magic wands to wave. There is no Wizard of Oz to grant your wishes.

Yes, you must be a dreamer to be successful, but you must also take action. It is the dreamers that take action who make a difference in this world.

The one big missing piece in the movie and book The Secret about the law of attraction was that once you have a dream that you visualize, you must also take action and the steps necessary to make your goal or desire a reality.

To illustrate our point, a psychology professor at New York University, Gabriele Oettingen, did numerous studies over several decades examining how positive thinking by itself does little to advance, much less achieve, your goals. In fact, merely thinking or dreaming about your future makes you less likely to achieve anything. In her words, “Just dreaming, detached from an awareness of reality, actually saps the energy we need to perform the hard work of meeting the challenges we face in real life.”

How does she propose that we remain positive yet stay motivated and prepare ourselves for the challenges ahead? First of all, our wishful thinking needs to be accompanied by a realistic assessment of the obstacles that could stand in our way. It’s a reality check process she calls “mental contrasting,” which she describes this way: “It instructs us to dream our dreams, but then visualize the personal barriers that prevent us from achieving them. My studies show that when we perform such mental contrasting, we actually gain energy to take action. And when we go farther and specify the actions we intend to take as obstacles arise, we energize ourselves even more.”

Not only does mental contrasting help keep us from getting overwhelmed by life, especially by the unexpected twists and turns of events and situations, but “the obstacles we think most impede us from realizing our deepest wishes can actually hasten their fulfillment.”

As evidence for her theory, Professor Oettingen cites a study involving college students whose brain responses were monitored as they engaged in either fantasizing about their desired goal or fantasizing and then engaging in mental contrasting to see the obstacles and how they could be overcome. Fantasy failed to activate the areas of the brain connected to memory and willful action, whereas mental contrasting lit up those areas.

This study demonstrated that positive fantasies don’t automatically translate into motivated behaviors. You must add strong determination and commitment to your own visual process of implementing your wishes by identifying likely obstacles and the behaviors you need to circumvent them.