How The WOOP Approach Can Help You Reach Your Goals

Ever feel like a tumbleweed, mindlessly blowing through an open plain with no sense of direction? OK, that’s a bit of a dramatic metaphor, but you get the idea—you may have the drive and motivation to reach a certain goal or benchmark, but you feel you lack the agency to make it actually happen. You’re not alone.

Positive psychiatrist Samantha Boardman, M.D., author of Everyday Vitality, calls this feeling the “intention-action gap”; you have the right sense of determination, but you struggle with turning those dreams into a reality. “How do we close that [gap]?” she poses on the mindbodygreen podcast.

Considering her profession in positive psychiatry, her answer may surprise you: To actually achieve your goals, you actually shouldn’t just think positively. Boardman breaks down the theory below.