WOOP stands for Wish Outcome Obstacles Plan. I learned about it in the science of well-being course I'm taking on Coursera. After trying it a couple of times, I am intrigued by the idea and intend to practice it every day this week.
WOOP is intended to be a simple, practical tool to help people reach goals. It combines two key parts: mental contrasting and implementation intentions.
Mental contrasting means envisioning the best possible outcome, and then envisioning the obstacles blocking that outcome. Implementation intentions are your specific plans to overcome specific obstacles when you encounter them.
You can actually feel something when you go through this brief process. The resulting plan just feels stronger, more robust than a less thoughtful plan would be. You feel empowered to take the challenge on.
This video from the YouTube channel Productivity Game nicely summarizes the idea. The same channel also has a Morning WOOP Challenge video, with a worksheet to make it easy to go through the WOOP process every day. There are also simple WOOP apps for iPhone and Android, which might be easier. I'll be going through this process every morning for the next five days, and I encourage you to try it too.
I'm going to try it for five days! Thanks for introducing it to me. At first the language makes it seem like it will be something complicated, but it's very approachable I see after watching the video.
Love this idea! It will be challenging for me as i usually visualize the opposite end of the outcome spectrum but i will give it a try!