Page 92 - Hard Goals

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can always remake and refi ne your board when the vision of
your goal becomes clearer. For right now, you’re just trying to
get at the pulse of it all—the basic colors, shapes, sizes, and
emotions.

WHOSE PERSPECTIVE?

I really want you to give those visual skills a workout—again,
not to develop your artistic talent, but rather to sear the picture
of your goal into your memory. The artists out there will notice
that I didn’t mention perspective. That’s because perspective
deserves a special mention. Imagine you’ve just created a highly
detailed picture of yourself having achieved your weight-loss
goals (nice body, by the way). Now the question becomes, how
do you see yourself? Are you looking at the picture of yourself
from outside of yourself (like a spouse, friend, or even stranger
looking at you)? Or are you looking through your own eyes (like
you’re looking at yourself in the mirror)? Seems like a semantic
difference, doesn’t it? Turns out the difference is way bigger
than you’d think.
Some Oxford University researchers gave subjects 100 dif-
ferent positive messages (like “It’s Saturday morning—the start
of the weekend . . .”) and asked them to do a little visualization
exercise, imagining themselves in a particular situation. The
subjects were divided up, and two of the groups were assigned
to imagine themselves either from a fi rst-person perspective
(looking through their own eyes) or a third-person perspective
(looking at themselves as though through someone else’s eyes).