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Why You Need To Forecast Your Feelings To Achieve Big Goals
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Affective forecasting
It refers to how we predict our future emotions and how certain life events will affect them.
We’re generally pretty bad at it—and that impacts our productivity, our goal setting, and our overall happiness
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We're bad at predicting our feelings
The main barriers to accurate affective forecasting:
- Impact Bias: Your tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of future emotions.
- Projection Bias: However you feel in the present, you tend to project that onto the future.
- Focalism: When picturing an event in the future, you tend to focus only on that event, to the exclusion of everything else that may happen.
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“Our ability to look into the future and think about what will make us most happy is the way that we get to a present that pleases us.”
Daniel Gilbert
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Seeing your goals differently
Affective forecasting is forcing you to view your goals through the lens of what you really want, what will make you happy, and how achieving those goals will make you feel.
It’s a practice that helps you confront peer pressure, other people’s expectations and learned behaviors.
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3 ways to set rewarding goals
- Understand the things that stand between your present self and your future self. That includes those natural biases, but it also includes situations and events you just can’t predict.
- Use mindfulness to get in touch with your emotions, to recognize and understand them, without being consumed by them.
- Consider outside forces and their effects.
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Measuring Happiness
Measuring happiness, which is a highly subjective emotion, is akin to getting your eye tested through the various lenses for your correct eye prescription number.
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The Paradoxical Game Of Happiness
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- Happiness and unhappiness both promote creativity, though of a different quality.
- Employees who have challenging but not impossible goals appear to be happy and productive, with high engagement levels and a sense of purpose.
- Contented employees which are too much into their comfort zones aren’t as creative as those who are a bit uncomfortable and have healthy levels of stress.
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Mistakes in predicting our future feelings
We are not very good at guessing how we'll feel in the future. In predicting how we will feel in the future, we commonly use the past experience as a guide.
But our br...
Overestimating our future emotions
We overestimate the strength of our emotions in the future.
Studies show that people overestimated their happiness at winning and their disappointment at losing because they forgot all the other things that would happen in a day that would influence their mood.
Feelings are not long-lasting
A lottery winner, for instance, won't spend every day celebrating their win. Nor will someone with a disabling accident spend all their time in shock.
When imagining either situation, we like to think that the feelings will be long-lasting. We forget that we will adapt and that the feeling will eventually wear off.