Shifting Focus for Success: How to Change Your Perception and Get Closer to Your Goals

By Emily Balcetis

In Shifting Focus for Success, NYU psychology professor and Clearer, Closer, Better author Dr. Emily Balcetis dives into the latest research on our perception, and the ways in which it impacts our motivation, our health, and the pursuit of our goals, aiming to help you understand how focus can affect motivation and how you can use this information to your advantage in achieving your goals. In the course, Balcetis discusses tapping into a motivational mindset, the ways what we see affects our perception and ultimately our state of mind, how we can trick our brains into feeling more motivated, how to use narrowed focus for success, and more. She also shares exercises along the way to help you put what you’ve learned into practice immediately.

Balcetis’s course is written from the perspective of a world-class expert — it’s practical, compelling, and fresh. Self-help connoisseurs and mindset novices alike will find crucial insights in Shifting Focus for Success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribd Coach
• Release date: Dec 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094453989

Emily Balcetis

Dr. Emily Balcetis is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and the author of Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World. Her research focuses on how the motivations, emotions, needs, and goals of people affect how they interpret the world around them. To learn more about Dr. Balcetis and her work, check out Clearer, Closer, Better, or find her on Instagram @emilybalcetis.

Book preview

Shifting Focus for Success

SHIFTING FOCUS FOR SUCCESS

How to Change Your Perception and Get Closer to Your Goals

EMILY BALCETIS

SCRIBD COACH

Copyright © 2022 by Emily Balcetis

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781094453989

First e-book edition: December 2022

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

Scribd.com

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Introduction

What do you look at when you’re exercising? You might not have considered the question before. And you almost certainly haven’t created a training program that includes mental focus into your regimen.

But new research suggests that how we look can change what we see and what we believe is possible, and this can affect how we exercise, our health, and even how we approach our other goals in life.

As a social psychologist, my research focuses on how our perceptions can have major consequences, and some of my latest research has been focused on elite athletes. I wanted to know, Where do they get their exercise superpowers?

One group that I’ve studied is a running team in Brooklyn called Zenith Velocity. I wanted to understand what they focus on when they run. Does what they think about impact their success? Could we change the effectiveness of our exercise, and improve our fitness, just by changing our attention?

Well, one cold night in January, I decided to pose these questions to an elite team of runners at the Brooklyn YMCA armory building. The runners were at this historic building, and among them was the fastest man out of Nigeria; another was the third quickest person out of Trinidad who trained along Usain Lightning Bolt, who happens to be the fastest human alive.

The third athlete was a double Olympic bronze medalist and the first person from Tobago to win a medal at any Olympic Games. Tabling the fact that these athletes never worry about the imminence of swimsuit season, there are many facets of their experience that differ from mine.

One big difference is how they look at the space around them. I had the chance to talk to each of these elite runners about what they look at when they're running and asked how often they focus their eyes and their attention on a mark like the finish line or the end of a straightaway. I also asked how often they use a more expansive