For those of you who know me, goal setting is my jam. There’s nothing I love more than cracking the spine of a planner in January and spending a whole afternoon paddling around in all my wishes and dreams and aspirations. Setting a fresh crop for the year, and graphically recording it in a vision board.
From 2014 until 2021, I used Desire Map journals (see pic above) based on the premise of excavating your Core Desired Feelings - the way you want to feel, and making your goals through this emotion lens. It’s more female, less male. Goals with soul.
But their creator eventually couldn’t be arsed making planners anymore, so in 2022 I had to pivot to an off-the shelf option, a mi-GOALS planner. It wasn’t quite the same because I dropped the habit of reflecting on my Core Desired Feelings. But it was still very much focused on goals. I was prompted to roll around in my wish-list items at the beginning of the year, each month, each quarter and for that luscious end of year annual wallow.
Then in 2026 I chose a planner that caught my eye on Facebook. (Once a pleasant place to catch up with friends near and far, Facebook has now become my dealer for impulse buys. But that’s another entire blog.)
This new Curation journal confronted me by asking me to reflect on my fears in relation to my goals. Fears? Ewww. Move on, Debbie Downer, I thought, as I cut and pasted another image for my 2026 vision board.
And then, last week, in my medley of podcast listening I randomly clicked on an episode on the upbeat show Live Better Feel More (Rangan Chatterjee). The interviewee Nir Eyal cited research which indicated that people who do vision boards get all relaxed because they think they’ve achieved their goal already. They’ve imagined the sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations of achieving their dreams. And they relax. Also, when things don’t pan out, they blame themselves for not imagining hard enough.
I almost ran my car off the road during the episode. Once home, I couldn’t rest. Like a leaping lemur I bounced from the podcast to Eyal’s book Beyond Belief which I listened to in its entirety until found Gabrielle Oettingen’s WOOP website.
Let me save you all the hours this took. Oettingen is a New York psychologist, researcher and academic, and she discovered the importance of not just visualising your dreams, but thinking about the obstacles you will inevitably encounter, and making a plan to overcome these.
Mind. Blown.
It’s a relatively simple process. There’s even an app! Think of a wish, visualise it with all senses (yeah, yeah, I’ve been doing that like, FOREVER), but then I have to put a peg on my nose, think of all the obstacles and then emerge the other side of this reality check with a plan.
Here’s an example. I can express a wish to spend less than I earn over the next month. (Wish) I can draw up a nice vision board image with wads of cash in my savings account, symbolising how I will feel. (Outcome) BUT I also need to do the next two steps I’ve been missing all these years.
“When I see the next shiny thing on Facebook,’’ (Obstacle) ‘‘I’m going to throw my phone across the room and go for a walk around the block and have a long, hard talk to myself about consumerist culture.’’ (Plan).
So I’m going to get right onto re-doing all my vision board wishes with the WOOP method. Right after I impulsively order Gabrielle Oettingen’s book Re-thinking Positive Thinking...
