So in 2021, as my New Year's resolution, I set my mind on learning how to play the guitar.
It's been a dream of mine to be able to play an instrument for as long as I can remember.
So I bought one, I downloaded a popular guitar learning app and I even learned a couple
of songs with YouTube tutorials. The first few weeks were really exciting. I practiced
every day and even played some simple songs. But as you can probably guess, as the weeks went by
my motivation waned as I found myself swamped with work and life responsibilities. I wasn't
practicing every day anymore and I couldn't see the fast progress that I had at the beginning.
Even though I had it clear to myself that my goal was to learn to play the guitar,
I didn't know why, as soon as that initial excitement disappeared,
my objective seemed so far away. Without realizing it, I had set my goal all wrong.
So, happy New Year's. This time of year most of us are thinking about all the things that we want to
achieve. My guest today is psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen. She has more than 20 years
researching the science of motivation and she'll walk us through the strategy she created called
WOOP and why it is one of the most effective empirical methods to actually achieve your goals
and desires. We want to help you to go beyond the classroom, so every week here on RealLife English
we guide you on your learning journey with lessons that take you from feeling like a
lost and insecure English learner to being a confident and natural English speaker.
Does that sound like what you want for your English? Then join our community by hitting
that subscribe button and the bell down below. So, Gabriele, why is it that simply
imagining what you want to accomplish or even creating a plan is not always the best option?
That prior it helps you to avoid so much disappointment down the line because
I think... that tends to be the biggest... the biggest letdown, right? It is just that you...
you really think that this year is the year that you're going to get in shape, or that you're going
to learn French, or that you're going to become a better cook or something like that. But you're not
uh... maybe so realistic about the other demands you have in life, or the other priorities, so it
really helps you to prioritize to see "is this something that right now I can fit in with other
things that are really important to me or do I need to leave it for when I have a bit more time?"
So, now that you've seen just how powerful WOOP can be, you may be wondering
"how do I do it?" Well, before we dive into that, I want you to take
a moment to think about what your next English language learning goals would be.
Take notes and keep them near, we'll come back to that at the end of the video.
So in the beginning, Gabriele mentioned that the strategy she created WOOP stands for wish,
outcome, obstacle and plan. Let's see how each of these parts work.
So it's important to understand that really concretely what is it that's missing from you, so
it's interesting. I used to do an exercise with some of my students where... because in the
same thing you'll hear from a lot of learners uh..People learning English, they say "I want
to be able to speak English fluently." Because that's kind of something that they've been told
their whole life is "you need to speak English fluently." And so that tends to be the wish
that most people have, but when you dig deeper, it's generally because of something, you know,
it might be because they want to be able to get a better job, they might want to go live in the
United States or the UK or something like that, they might just want to be able to travel and,
you know, be able to interact with people without having uh... Cultural barriers, without having
language barriers um-- and so I used to do an exercise where I would have them ask themselves
"why" the question "why" at least five times. So really digging deeper into "okay you want to
be fluent in English, but let's get into what's the very specific reason" and people would get
to all sorts of different things, might be... I had one student who, you know, it is because
he wants to get a better job, but it's because he wants to provide a better life for his kids.
We had another student that wanted to be able to connect with other people and want to have friends
from all over the world, not just be limited to their local small town that they lived in.
So it's kind of interesting when you do that and you might see that what you want is not actually
what you really want deep down. One of the the things that's really interesting there too, I
think, is that oftentimes maybe you think you want a Ferrari or something like that. Which would be
for a lot of people very difficult to obtain. It's very expensive uh... but if you do that digger,
that deeper digging, then you might find out that actually you need something simpler,
it doesn't need to be something, you know, that grandiose to be able to fill that deeper need.
One of the really fascinating things there too, is that obstacle it doesn't necessarily need to
be something tangible like that uh... we talked earlier about diet plans, for example, that you're
going to see a piece of cake in your refrigerator and want to eat it, doesn't need to be just saying
that's actually like tangible, but it can also be something that is deeper inside of you,
that could be emotional reaction to something, that you can actually use this to in a sense
reprogram how you might react to something, or the emotion that you might feel in that moment.
I truly hope that you benefited from today's lesson, I can't wait to read all of your upcoming
plans. Take a moment to WOOP them and share them in the comments down below. Here's mine:
Now you can use the same model to write yours. Now don't just watch this video and do nothing,
I highly urge you to take just five to ten minutes and do it now.
If you need extra help Gabriele has all sorts of free resources like an app and her website with
tutorials and downloads. I've linked both down in the description below. After that,
why don't you take a look at this lesson Andrea made where she shares her favorite
free resources to learn English, I'm sure it can help you with your plans for 2022. Aww yeah!