Page 93 - Hard Goals

84 HARD Goals

The people who imagined themselves looking through their own
eyes reported signifi cantly higher positive reactions than those
who viewed themselves through a third-person perspective.
Of course, this works in the other direction as well. Patients
with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) report less anxiety when
they recall traumatic events from the third-person perspective. Evi-
dently, the third-person perspective is useful for taking scary or
traumatic images and making them less scary or traumatic by suck-
ing out all of their emotional power. Of course, that is a double-
edged sword because in studies of depressed people, when they
recall autobiographical memories, there’s a lot more third-person
perspective going on than with people who’ve never been depressed.
This implies that depressed people are unknowingly using the
power of the third-person perspective in a bad way, because they’re
sucking all the joyful emotions out of their mental pictures.
When creating a mental picture of your goals, it’s important to
use a fi rst-person perspective. After all, this is your story, your goal,

and no one but you is qualified to animate it. If you’re looking at
your newly svelte body, do it as though you’re looking at yourself in
the mirror and not the way your spouse or partner or friends will
see you. If you’ve just unveiled your super-amazing new product,
make sure you see yourself standing at the podium looking at the
audience or looking at the device you hold in your own hands.
You’ll get a lot more mental bang for your visualization buck if
your animated goal is 100 percent from your point of view.

WRITE IT DOWN

Once you’ve got a picture of your goal clearly set in your mind,
it’s time to write it all down. You’ve no doubt heard for years