You’ve probably heard me bang on about the GPS method before as a way to help you achieve your goals – it’s something I talk about in LifeOS and mention fairly regularly in these emails AND talked about in a recent video on the channel.
But today, I wanted to zoom in on one specific part of the planning component that I reckon doesn’t get enough attention, and I’ve found myself using it a lot recently for my goals this quarter.
Just as a quick reminder so we’re all on the same page: the goal in GPS is your destination – where you’re trying to get to. The plan is your roadmap and the system is the daily habits that’ll get you there.
But the thing about planning I’ve realised over the years is that most of us spend loads of time figuring out what we want to do, but basically zero time thinking about why it might not work.
It’s a bit strange if you think about it because let’s say you’re planning a road trip with your mates. You’d probably check the weather, think about where you might run into traffic, maybe figure out where you’d stop if the car broke down, stuff like that.
But when it comes to our goals, we sort of assume that everything will go perfectly and then act totally surprised when it doesn’t.
So this is where something I like to call the Crystal Ball Method comes in (and before you roll your eyes, no this isn’t about actual crystal balls or anything like that 😅).
This approach is actually based on research from a psychologist called Gabriele Oettingen and the whole idea is that you imagine you’ve got a crystal ball, you look into the future where you didn’t achieve your goal or follow through with your plan, and you ask yourself: what are the top 3 reasons why it didn’t work?
Not in a pessimistic “I’m going to fail anyway” kinda way. It’s more like doing a pre-mortem on your plan before you’ve even started and being realistic about your own patterns and life constraints.
The fancy psychology term for this is mental contrasting – you’re deliberately visualising the obstacles you’re likely to face so you can actually do something about them in advance.
And this is exactly what I did with my goal to reduce visceral fat by 50%. I sat down and thought “okay, knowing myself and looking at past attempts at this sort of thing, what are the top 3 reasons this might not work?”
For me, the answers were pretty obvious:
Reason #1: I blow past my calorie target of 2,200 because I’m not paying attention to what I’m eating or I convince myself “it’s just one meal” (which then becomes every meal).
Reason #2: I don’t hit my protein target of 150g (and don’t train at the gym regularly enough) so I end up losing muscle along with the fat, which defeats the whole point.
Reason #3: I don’t get my 10,000 steps a day, which means I end up in a caloric surplus rather than a deficit.
Now what makes this approach actually useful (rather than just a depressing exercise in predicting failure) is what you do next: you come up with a plan to address each of those obstacles before they become problems.
So for my 3 obstacles, the solution to both blowing past my calorie target and not eating enough protein is to track everything using MyFitnessPal. Yep, I’ve abandoned it multiple times before but when I actually use it, it definitely works 😅
And then the solution to not hitting 10,000 steps each day is to make sure I’m getting on my walking treadmill in my office during Zoom calls or whenever I’m reviewing YouTube scripts or coming up with new content for the Lifestyle Business Academy.
The really interesting thing about Gabriele Oettingen’s research is that this whole mental contrasting thing actually makes people feel more energised and motivated to achieve their goals, not less, which sort of makes sense if you think about it.
Instead of having this vague anxiety about “what if it doesn’t work”, you’ve got specific problems with specific solutions already planned out in advance. And having used this tool myself a lot over the years, I can definitely say that even just spending a few minutes on this exercise makes a huge difference.
If you want to learn more about the GPS method, then this is all covered in way more detail in the final module of LifeOS. You can check it out by clicking the link here and remember if you use the code SPARK100 before 31st January, you can get the programme for just $197 👀
But even if you don’t decide to join the course, hopefully this mental contrasting exercise is a useful little framework to try out with whatever you’re working on at the moment.