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Positive fantasies can feel motivating while actually reducing the effort you make.

Believing a goal is achievable is very different from imagining you've already achieved it.

Self-confidence helps you the most when it's paired with a realistic view of obstacles and difficulties.

With mental contrasting, you can connect a positive view of your future to the steps necessary to get there.

You have an important interview coming up, and you need to prepare. So you spend twenty minutes imagining yourself walking into the office looking great, impressing everyone you speak to, and immediately getting the job. The visualization is easy because you’ve already scripted it, too: To firm it up in your mind, you wrote out a detailed narrative of how much you impressed your interviewers. And this morning, just after you brushed your teeth, you looked yourself in the eye and declared, “I have everything I need to win, and my success is inevitable.” You repeated this fifteen times. As you drive to the interview, you’re feeling great — although a nagging voice in the corner of your awareness is asking you why you haven’t looked over your resume, even once.

But you mean to manifest success, no matter what, even if some people might call it delusional — delulu is the solulu, you once heard. So as you wait to be called in to the interview room, you browse a couple of TikToks about visualizing your financial future. You can imagine quite a bit of wealth. It’s a lot more fun doing that than explaining your departure from your last job, or the gap in your employment history — and less of a drag than doing research into the company you’re applying to. Of course it is; dwelling on potential problems could just drag you down, you think, as you stand up to meet your interviewer.

OK, end of scenario. I’ve painted with a pretty broad brush, so it’s easy to see that the “you” character above is leaving quite a lot on the table. In the example,........

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