What’s holding you back from achieving your biggest goals? Why might your positive thinking actually be working against you instead of helping you?
Gabriele Oettingen’s Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation challenges the common belief that visualizing success is enough to reach your goals. Her research shows that positive fantasies often backfire, and she offers a practical alternative.
Continue reading for an overview of this book that will give you a fresh perspective.
Overview of Rethinking Positive Thinking
We all daydream about the future and fantasize about the day when we’ll have achieved all of our most important goals. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen’s Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (2014) challenges the conventional wisdom that thinking positively and visualizing yourself reaching your goals is enough to motivate you to make your dreams a reality.
Oettingen found in her research that positive thinking can actually be counterproductive and make it harder for you to stay motivated to work toward your goals. She explains that to avoid falling into the trap of positive fantasies, you need to balance your dreams with an awareness of present reality and the obstacles standing in your way. Recognizing the barriers you face can re-energize you by connecting your desired future to the real work needed to get there. With this balanced perspective, your positive visions become a motivating force rather than a relaxing indulgence.
Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. She has spent decades researching how people think about the future and how those thoughts affect our behavior and motivation. Her work on the limitations of positive thinking and the development of more effective goal-setting techniques has influenced fields ranging from education and mental health to organizational psychology.
In this overview of the book Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, we’ll explore Oettingen’s argument that positive thinking isn’t enough to get us to our goals. We’ll look at how she and other researchers define positive thinking, how positive thinking seems to have a negative effect on our motivation, and what she recommends doing instead of positive thinking: a technique psychologists call mental contrasting.
What Is Positive Thinking?
Oettingen explains that positive thinking means dwelling on mental images and daydreams of our desired future. These fantasies—whether about publishing a novel, landing a dream job, or finding true love—give us a momentary taste of what achieving our goals might feel like. While this kind of daydreaming can provide temporary comfort, especially during stressful times, Oettingen argues that it can actually work against us and undermine our motivation to make our dreams a reality.
Why Do Positive Fantasies Undermine Motivation?
Oettingen explains that positive fantasies give you a mental reward by allowing you to experience your desired future in your mind. But, according to her research, this creates a false sense of accomplishment: Your brain responds to your fantasies as if you’ve already achieved your goal in real life. As a result, your motivation decreases, with measurable physiological effects such as a reduction in blood pressure (which is typically associated with a more relaxed state), and you become less energized to pursue the goal in reality.
Oettingen explains that positive fantasies also detach you from the present and disengage you from the obstacles standing between the reality you have and the reality you want. She notes that, if you fail to mentally connect your dreams to the work required to achieve them, you don’t prepare yourself to take action. Instead, indulging in positive fantasies may even make us less equipped to handle difficult tasks that require sustained effort: The pleasant mental escape puts us in a state of mind where we lack the drive and determination we need to push through challenges. When we’re in this mindset and run into obstacles, we’re more likely to give up or look for shortcuts rather than doing the necessary hard work.
Many of us get stuck in this cycle of dreaming about what we want without making any real progress toward our goals. Over time, this pattern of fantasizing without action leads to frustration and keeps us from reaching our potential. However, the solution isn’t to suppress these thoughts entirely. These forward-looking thoughts and daydreams serve a purpose: They help you identify what you truly want and keep you alert to opportunities. You just need to do something else—in addition to thinking positively about the future—to motivate yourself to do the hard work of achieving your goals. We’ll discuss this next.
What Should We Do Instead of Positive Thinking?
Oettingen explains that, to effectively pursue our most important goals and wishes, we need strategies beyond positive fantasies alone. She recommends learning to use a strategy called mental contrasting. We’ll take a closer look at what mental contrasting is, why it works, and how you can put it into practice to work toward your goals.
What Is Mental Contrasting?
Mental contrasting means you still think about achieving your wish, but you don’t stop there. Instead, writes Oettingen, you purposefully imagine the obstacles that stand in between you—in your current reality—and your dream. By making a conscious connection between your present reality and your dream, you can gain clarity on what needs to be done and start to feel motivated. This energizes you to start working to overcome the obstacles you’ve identified and to begin taking productive steps toward achieving your goals.
Oettingen explains that, in its most basic form, mental contrasting is a two-step process:
- First, envision your desired future in detail. Allow yourself to experience the positive feelings associated with attaining your wish.
- Then, reflect on your current reality. Thoughtfully identify the key obstacle (or obstacles) preventing you from realizing your desired future.
Why Does Mental Contrasting Work?
Oettingen explains that, by juxtaposing the future you want with the obstacles in the present, you can use mental contrasting to create tension, engage both your conscious and non-conscious minds, and fuel your motivation. At the conscious level, mental contrasting helps you clearly see what stands between you and your goal. It changes how you think about setbacks: Instead of seeing them as permanent roadblocks, you start viewing them as challenges you can overcome. This builds your confidence that you can achieve what you set out to do.
Your non-conscious mind—the part of your brain that processes information and influences behavior without your awareness—is also at work during mental contrasting, according to Oettingen. Your brain automatically starts connecting your goal, the obstacles, and the actions you need to take to succeed. She explains that as you practice mental contrasting, you become better at spotting both problems and opportunities, and you react to them more quickly. Interestingly, your brain even adjusts how it views obstacles based on whether your goal is realistic: If the goal is achievable, obstacles appear more threatening (motivating you to overcome them), but if the goal isn’t realistic, those same obstacles appear less daunting (helping you let go of the unrealistic goal and redirect your energy elsewhere).
Crucially, Oettingen explains that mental contrasting works best when you focus on internal barriers—the thoughts, emotions, or habits that hold you back—rather than external circumstances. For example, if you’re training for a marathon, the real obstacles might not be your busy schedule or your lack of access to running trails (which are external circumstances), but rather your tendency to procrastinate, your fear of physical discomfort, or your habit of making excuses (internal barriers). By identifying these deeper, personal obstacles, you can better understand what’s really standing in your way and develop more effective strategies to overcome them.
Continuing the marathon example, through mental contrasting, you might recognize that while you blame your busy schedule, your real obstacle is anxiety about not being “athletic enough” to train with other runners. This awareness, rather than discouraging you, can help you plan practical solutions like starting with solo runs or joining a beginners’ running group. Meanwhile, your non-conscious mind starts automatically noticing opportunities to build up your confidence: You might find yourself naturally taking the stairs to prove to yourself you can handle physical challenges, or becoming more aware of how negative self-talk (“I’m not a real runner”) affects your motivation to train.
Mental contrasting also helps you recognize when a goal might not be the right fit for you right now. For instance, if your dream is to qualify for the Boston Marathon, mental contrasting might reveal that your real barrier isn’t just the training schedule—it’s that you’re not willing to prioritize intensive training over family time. Rather than letting you stay stuck in an endless cycle of dreaming and failing, this honest self-assessment can help you redirect your energy toward a more personally meaningful goal—like running shorter races that let you maintain work-life balance, or finding other ways to stay fit that better align with your values.
Once you’ve determined that a goal is right for you, mental contrasting can help you overcome the fears and anxieties that might hold you back. Let’s say you’re afraid of training in public places, which is keeping you from pursuing your running goals. By first envisioning the positive outcome of confidently running in the park, and then acknowledging your social anxiety, mental contrasting can help you approach and confront that fear constructively.
The process will also help you determine whether your fear is justified: If there are legitimate safety concerns about running in certain areas, you’ll recognize that you need to take precautions or find alternative routes. However, if the fear is primarily about feeling judged by others, mental contrasting will help you take steps to overcome it.
Oettingen explains that mental contrasting is most effective for strong, irrational fears that prevent you from taking action. A moderate level of anxiety can actually be beneficial—like the nervous energy that helps you prepare for a race—so mental contrasting is best used when fear is truly holding you back. For example, if your social anxiety about running in public is preventing you from training altogether, mental contrasting can help you develop a plan to start small, perhaps by running during off-hours or finding a supportive running group for beginners.
How Can You Use Mental Contrasting in Real Life?
Oettingen recommends using mental contrasting as part of a practical four-step technique called “WOOP” (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan). While mental contrasting makes up the first three steps (WOO), adding the planning component makes the technique even more powerful. Here’s how it works:
- Wish: Identify a meaningful, feasible goal you want to achieve within a specific timeframe. Oettingen explains that this wish should be something that’s meaningful and important to you, whether it’s a major life goal or a more mundane wish.
- Outcome: Vividly imagine your best possible result if you achieve this goal. Oettingen explains that this step helps you to clearly define what you truly wish to achieve. By visualizing the result you desire, you can set a clear goal for yourself.
- Obstacle: Identify the main internal barrier holding you back—such as specific thoughts, emotions, or habits. Oettingen explains that this step requires you to think about what’s in your way, often internal limitations like your fears or insecurities that impede your progress toward the specific goal you’ve set for yourself.
- Plan: Create an “if-then” strategy so that you can decide in advance how you’re going to handle the obstacle when you encounter it (for example, “If I feel unmotivated to exercise, then I will put on my running shoes and go for just five minutes”).
Putting WOOP Into Practice
Let’s look at how WOOP works in different situations. Take someone who wants to improve their public speaking skills:
- Wish: To feel confident presenting at work meetings
- Outcome: Imagining themselves delivering clear, engaging presentations while feeling relaxed and in control
- Obstacle: Identifying that anxiety about being judged leads them to speak too quickly and lose their train of thought
- Plan: “If I start feeling anxious during a presentation, then I will pause, take a deep breath, and speak at half my usual pace.”
Oettingen explains that WOOP works particularly well for handling stressful situations because it helps you prepare for challenges before they arise. For instance, if you’re facing a difficult conversation with a colleague:
- Wish: To have a productive discussion without becoming defensive
- Outcome: Picturing a respectful exchange where both parties feel heard
- Obstacle: Recognizing your tendency to interrupt when you disagree
- Plan: “If I feel the urge to interrupt, then I will write down my thought instead of speaking immediately.”
To get the most benefit from WOOP, Oettingen recommends making it part of your routine: Set aside a few minutes daily or weekly to apply the technique to your current goals and wishes. Over time, you’ll develop the habit of balancing dreaming with reality—turning your positive visions into concrete actions rather than just pleasant fantasies.
