The Secret and other Ineffective techniques

The secret and other ineffective techniques

On Thursday night I was the keynote speaker in the annual Unity Awards in Sarasota, Florida a very nice town in the west side of Florida. I was very happy to see a community get together as one team and recognize the power of diversity.

There was the large company award which was won by Tropicana Products, a subsidiary of Pepsi, for hiring so many minorities, the entrepreneur award, won by a distinguished Colombian woman named Rosalia Holmund who started her career in New York cleaning houses and now owns a big restaurant.

The medical award was given to Dr. James McCloud, an African American who took it upon himself to open a clinic to treat the needy, for that segment of society that have nothing and no money to afford healthcare.

The small business award was given to a law firm named Czaia and Gallagher formed by two lawyers who are believers in treating people well and helping everyone solve their legal problems fast and without hassle.

Esperanza Gamboa, a Cuban American won the Education Award for her work in educating a diverse community making sure that no one is left out of educational opportunities.

After my keynote, I was invited to participate in a television program which will air in April by the editor of the prestigious Sarasota Hispanic newspaper 7 dias.

It was a very interesting interview and one of the things he gave importance to was my million dollar card, saying that people could visualize that they would get a million dollars and make it a reality.

He asked me point blank if this type of visualizing really works. And I had to tell him that according to the latest research, it actually doesn’t.

Throughout the past fifty years, a large number of books, audio books and seminars, most recently a book called “The Secret” have promised to help people look beyond the perils of immediate gratification and achieve their long term objectives. From visualizing to self affirmation, from being extremely focused to simply “going with the flow” in the end, you will make lots of money and be happy.

There is one small hitch. Several recent studies suggest that many of these exercises plain and simple, don’t work.

You might close your eyes, you imagine the new you, thinking how great you would look in that red bikini, sitting in a lovely beach in Isla Verde or in Anguilla. This type of exercise has been promoted by the very lucrative self help industry for years, with claims that it can help people stop smoking, lose excess pounds, find your ideal partner or become a very successful salesperson. .

Unfortunately, recently published research reported by Rick Viseman, suggests that although such exercises might make you feel rather good in the short term, the technique is at best ineffective.

For example, he reports that in a University of California study a group of students were asked to spend a few moments each day visualizing themselves getting a good grade on a midterm exam that would take place a few days later. They were told to form a clear image in their mind’s “eye” and imagine how great it would feel to make a good grade. The study also involved a control group of students who did nothing special and weren’t asked to imagine anything. The psychologists asked the students in both groups to write down the number of hours that they studied each day and monitored their final grades. Even though the daydreaming exercise lasted only a few minutes, it had a marked impact on the student’s behavior, causing them to study less and make lower grades on the exam. It is obvious that the experiment may have made them feel better about themselves, but it didn’t help them reach their objectives.

In another exercise conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, a group of obese women took part in a weight reduction program. During the experiment, the women were asked to imagine how they might behave in various food related scenarios, such as going to a friend’s house and being tempted with a delicious pizza. Each of their responses was classified on a scale ranging from highly positive (something like saying” I would be a good person and I would stay away from the dessert”)to highly negative (“Hey I would go for it, eating my own and somebody else’s too”).

Get this, after the women were monitored for a year, the results revealed that those with more positive fantasies had lost, on average, twenty six pounds less than those with negative fantasies.

The same effect applies to career success. The experimenters asked their senior students to write down how often they fantasized about getting their perfect job after graduating from college. A two year follow up revealed that the students who had reported frequently fantasizing about success had submitted fewer job applications, received a lower number of job offers, and commanded significantly smaller salaries than their classmates.

Why, you may ask, should it be so bad to imagine yourself achieving your goals? Psychologists and Sociologists have theorized that those who fantasize about how wonderful life could be are not very well prepared for the defeats that often occur along the jagged road to success, or maybe they enjoy delighting in escapism and so become reluctant to invest the effort, often a really big effort, to achieve their goals. Either way, the message from the research is crystal clear: fantasizing about your perfect world may make you feel better, but it is highly unlikely to help you convert your dreams into reality.

What should you do then?

Well, research has also shown that some techniques do help create lasting and genuine changes in people’s lives. From losing weight, to stop smoking, getting a good job, finding the love of your life, there are very effective techniques that can provide meaningful help.

It all comes down to understanding your strengths and weaknesses, having clear expectations, drawing a realistic plan, acting on it without procrastinating and persisting until you achieve your goal.

I would love to see a study of people who have read the book The Secret and see if by simply thinking that you can attract what you want, it actually materialized and you are better off now after you read it than before. I highly doubt it.