WOOP, WOOP vs. Procrastination
- Ida
- Mar 23, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 5
If you need a simple strategy to help you move from wishful thinking to goal achieving 👇
What is WOOP?
Apart from having a cool name, WOOP is a scientifically proven method that helps us achieve goals. It’s based on 20+ years of research on neuroscience and theories about motivation by psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen. It stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.
How does it work?
WOOP takes you through the highs and lows and makes you come up with a plan. Research indicates that positive thinking alone isn’t enough. Why? It's because as our brain goes through the process, it can’t necessarily distinguish if the outcome happened. For this reason, Oettingen complemented positive thinking with mental contrasting. This means that apart from visualising positive outcomes, we should think about the internal obstacles which obstruct us from reaching our results. In other words, we need to let our inner critic have a say.
The final and crucial step (after being dreamy & critical) is to create a plan with actions to overcome those inner obstacles. This mental strategy is called implementation intentions and it’s there to help us set a plan.
Here are two examples to help me illustrate that:
Example of WOOP I Making content for ...(eg. Playground)
Wish: I wish to publish 3 useful blog posts per week
Outcome: I feel pride as readers make use of the articles and sign up for the Playground
Obstacle: Self-doubt
Plan: If I start to self-doubt, I will remind myself how the topics which I am writing about helped me.
Another example of WOOP I A 40-day yoga practice
Wish: Do 40-day yoga challenge
Outcome: I will feel energised & balanced
Obstacle: What if I feel lazy or don’t have the time
Plan: I will see the yoga practice as a reward and schedule it right before or right after work.
Benefits of WOOP
I enjoy WOOP because of its simplicity and how widely it can be applied. When it comes to other people, research shows that it helps with:
Improved social behaviours – people find new solutions, become more tolerant etc.
Becoming healthier – it helps with exercise goals, better mental health, eating better.
Improved academic performance – improved time management and grades.
WOOP instructs us to dream, but also to imagine what internal obstacles prevent us from achieving our dreams. If you want to try it out now, here is a link to the official WOOP website. Also, if you found this article useful, please consider sharing 🤗.
P.S. We use WOOP and other research-based strategies to help with goal-reaching during the 3 months of the anti-procrastination programe.
If you need a support system and guidance to stay on track with goals and stop procrastinating, contact us now. How does it work? Learn more here or book your free consultation call.
WOOP is a great method, and like all others, it only works when you use it. Many people are not structured in the way they do things, and abiding by a method can be challenging in itself - someone should invent a method for that! :)
Joke aside, I found WOOP to be useful (when I remember to use it) to better specify my goals and put them in a more realistic context (the OO part). What I often get stuck with is the P - I usually find it difficult to come up with a P that is strong, a P that will make sense and keep me going every single time I run into an obstacle.
Maybe Ps…