#576 Set yourself up to fail, so you're more likely to succeed

Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast, and you are listening to another one of our weekly squiggly shortcuts. We've been doing these episodes for a while now, and we did them because we know it is hard to fit listening and learning into your week. So we've tried to make it really quick and easy for you to do. So these episodes are always really short, and today's topic is about I don't know whether it's gonna sound negative, but I hope it's gonna be positive. The topic is about how to set yourself up to fail so that you are more likely to succeed. And I am borrowing some research and a tool that we put in our second book. You coach you. And the tool that we talk about here is called mental contrasting. It actually comes from some research on New from New York University, which says that the people that are most resilient, the people that are most likely to succeed, Are the people who are not only able to hold the opportunity, so the thing that they really want to achieve, but they are also able to hold the obstacle. So they can see where it's might go wrong or what might get in the way.

And what I see when I talk to people about their career. is that they often have a goal for their growth. So maybe that is a role that they want to do, or maybe that is a skill that they want to develop, or maybe maybe it's getting promoted. Like lots of people have got different goals for their growth. And they hold on to that goal that they that thing that they want to succeed in. But what they don't do is consider all the things that might go wrong or that might not happen or that might get in their way.

And based on this research, if we are only thinking about the opportunity, so we're being sort of permanently optimistic about what we want to happen. And we are not also considering some of the things that might get in the way, then we are actually less likely to achieve that thing that we're looking for. So In the squiggly shortcut, I want to just talk through a bit of a process that you can go through so that you can have that goal that you want to go after, you can have that squiggly success in mind, but you can set yourself up to be more likely to achieve it by thinking about what's going to get in the way.

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