Keep Your Eye on the Prize

I watched a fascinating TED Talk last night titled Why Some People Find Exercise Harder Than Others presented by Emily Balcetis, a social psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. She discussed a series of experiments she conducted to find out what some of the obstacles are that keep some people from exercising. It may come as no surprise that people’s perceptions are key. People who don’t exercise generally perceive the effort involved as difficult, where as those who exercise regularly find it easy. What was most interesting though, was that she was able to create a shift in that perception, which resulted in people finding exercise easier than ever.

Anyone who has studied goal setting knows the importance of having a goal and making it your focus. What Dr. Balcetis demonstrated in her experiments is just how important that is. In one group of participants, she asked them to look at a finish line some distance away and estimate the distance by looking ONLY at the finish line. They were to exclude everything else from their field of vision. The other group looked at the finish line with no special instructions and looked at the goal and surrounding objects.

When asked to estimate the distance to the goal, those who looked only at the finish line estimated the distance to be shorter than those who did not limit their vision. This is a remarkable finding and certainly something we can all apply to all of our goals to make their achievement not only seem easier, but cause us to act on them and achieve them faster.

This is why not only having a vision statement is important, but reading it daily is vital. Having a vision book or board that you look at every day will bring you closer to your goal, faster. Every personal development speaker will tell you this, and Dr. Balcetis’s work proves it. So go ahead, pull out that vision statement and read it now and every day until it’s real. If you haven’t written one, now is the time. Everything will seem easier after that.