Positive thinking is not all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to retirement planning 4

Retirement Stats, Studies, and Stuff

By Mariella Vigneux, MBA, ACC
Certified Professional Coach

I’ve come to understand that it can take about five years of thinking before people finally say sayonara to work and walk out the door into retirement. A lot of dreaming, processing, and scheming goes on before a retirement date is set and, even then, people often postpone the date, or return to work after trying out retirement.

The trick is to use mental contrasting

When I read the New York Times article The Problem With Positive Thinking it made me wonder if we could condense pre-retirement decision-making and have people happily retired sooner.  The article, by Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg, demonstrates that ‘mental contrasting’ is more effective than either positive thinking or thinking that focuses only on challenges and obstacles.

In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we asked two groups of college students to write about what lay in store for the coming week. One group was asked to imagine that the week would be great. The other group was just asked to write down any thoughts about the week that came to mind. The students who had positively fantasized reported feeling less energized than those in the control group. As we later documented, they also went on to accomplish less during that week.

Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.

Some critics of positive thinking have advised people to discard all happy talk and “get real” by dwelling on the challenges or obstacles. But this is too extreme a correction. Studies have shown that this strategy doesn’t work any better than entertaining positive fantasies.

What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with “realism.” Here’s how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.

This simple process, which my colleagues and I call “mental contrasting,” has produced powerful results in laboratory experiments. When participants have performed mental contrasting with reasonable, potentially attainable wishes, they have come away more energized and achieved better results compared with participants who either positively fantasized or dwelt on the obstacles.

Bridging the gap

This idea of combining positive thinking with realism is similar to the coaching model I use, which has us envision an ideal retirement, examine our current reality, and then build a bridge, through action plans and accountability, which will allow us to travel from the current reality to the desired future.

Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have seen a high level of success in studies using mental contrasting:

In a recent study on healthy eating and exercise, we divided participants into two groups. Members of one group engaged in mental contrasting and then performed a planning exercise designed to help them overcome whatever obstacles stood in their way. Four months later, members of this group were working out twice as long each week as the control group and eating considerably more vegetables. In other studies, we found that people who engaged in mental contrasting recovered from chronic back pain better, behaved more constructively in relationships, got better grades in school and even managed stress better in the workplace.

So although positive thinking, in the form of dreaming and mind wandering, is useful in planning for retirement, it needs to be tempered by a look at the obstacles that must be surmounted.  Problem solving keeps us from wandering away from the task of real retirement planning.  We need the two: fantasizing and problem solving; dreaming and scheming.

When fantasizing about never having to work again, we can look at the things that scare us – like not knowing if we’ll have enough money to support ourselves until the end of life; not knowing what we’ll do with all that time; not knowing how we’ll let go of the status of our position or the close colleagues we’ve worked with.  Mental contrasting research shows that if we can balance those two, we’ll be much more successful at making the changes we want, and having those changes stick.

Self-coaching questions

What does your ideal retirement look like?  (Describe it in all its delicious detail.)

What are the biggest obstacles you face in getting to that ideal state?

What steps can you take, right now, to get you from your current reality to your desired future?

What will support you in moving forward?

How will you hold yourself accountable for taking these steps?