Kate Purmal

Here’s a quote from a book written in 1910 by Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich. It’s available for free on Google Books.

“There is nothing wrong with wanting to get rich. The desire for riches is really a desire for a richer, fuller, and more abundant life; and that desire is praise worthy.”

Wattles was one of the first to practice and write about creative visualization. This technique, frequently used by athletes to enhance performance, is a practice of seeking to affect the outer world by changing one’s thoughts and expectations.

You may be familiar with one of the most well-known studies on creative visualization in sports in which Russian scientists compared four groups of Olympic athletes:

Group 1 received 100% physical training;
Group 2 received 75% physical training with 25% mental training;
Group 3 received 50% physical training with 50% mental training;
Group 4 received 25% physical training with 75% mental training.

The fourth group demonstrated the best performance results, indicating that certain types of mental training, such as evoking mental images of successful performance, act as a prelude to muscular impulses. It has since become widely accepted in neuroscience and sports psychology that mental training causes the body to respond favorably to achieve consciously desired outcomes.

As you look forward to 2013, take a page out of sports psychology – envision your best year ever. Let your imagination create a vision of success in as much glorious detail as possible, then visualize it over and over again with all of your senses (what do you see? what do you feel? what do you hear? what does it smell like?).

Don’t forget to imagine the after party! What’s your reward when you’ve achieved financial success and abundance? A trip to Paris? Sailing in the Caribbean? Sales executives have long known that sales incentives significantly boost sales revenue.  Create your own sales incentive – then imagine the experience in glorious detail.

One of my clients imagines her trip to Paris at the end of 2013 when she’s launched her new business and hit her financial goals. She is in a boat floating on the Seine near the Eiffel tower. She is wearing an evening gown, and her husband a tuxedo. They are sipping champagne and toasting a year of unprecedented success as they watch the lights on the Eiffel tower change colors.

LinkedIn has launched a virtual holiday party blog post featuring 50 of the smartest and most accomplished people in business blogging on the Big Ideas of 2013. Great fodder to spark your visionary thinking as you plan for the new year.  

With a sleep-deprivation at an all-time high for Americans, 46% of whom report work-related stress keeping them up at night, I love Arianna Huffington’s call to eradicate stress in 2013.

In HBR Blog article, Ten Ways to Get People to Change, Morten Hansen compiles research on the topic of how you get leaders, employees, customers and even yourself to change. It’s a great article.

The three ways that stand out for me:

1. Focus on one change at a time. Sequence to change more than one behavior
2. Paint a vivid picture. Use images, stories, metaphors and objects to paint an ugly “before” picture of where things stand now, and a glorious, compelling vision of the “after” picture.
3. Tweak the situation. Hansen uses the example of how Google changed where things are located in the physical flow of their cafeteria to get people to choose healthier foods.

This third one intrigues me. How does tweaking the situation work? A book Hansen cited in his blog article is Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The Amazon description perfectly captured my daily struggle to stick with my exercise and nutritional program: “Psychologist have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems – the rational mind and the emotional mind – that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie.”

Yesterday my emotional mind was clearly running the show when I reached for that delicious Haagen Daaz bar.

I’m only on the second chapter, and I’m hooked. The book starts with a study: a research team gave moviegoers two sizes of free popcorn – both way too much to eat – one medium sized and one large. They carefully engineered the popcorn to taste wretched, “one moviegoer later compared it to styrofoam packing material.” Yet the moviegoers ate it anyway. The study was designed to determine whether someone with a larger inexhaustible supply would eat more than someone with a smaller inexhaustible supply.

The result: Those with large buckets of wretched popcorn ate 52% more than those with medium sized buckets – the equivalent of 173 more calories, 21 extra hand-dips of wretchedness. The ran the studies again, in different cities with different movies and the results were the same. People eat more when you give them a bigger container.

If you want people to eat less popcorn, change the situation, not the behavior. The easy way is to shrink the bucket – the hard way is to figure out how to motivate people to adopt healthier snacking behaviors.

How many of our most challenging changes are situation problems and not behavior problems? What if you could change the situation (eat off a smaller plate) to make it possible for you to get the outcome you want with less effort and discipline?

Well, I’m hooked. Off to read more about how I can unite the rational and emotional minds to stay clear of the Hagen Daaz.