The lecture was really interesting, and I learned a lot about the psychology of imagining your goals. I never would've thought something like daydreaming about your wishes was so complex and affected your psyche! Thank you so much for your time!
- Gordon Tsang

Hi Guys - just heard about WOOP on Monday while listening to the 'Science of Well being' lectures from Yale on-line. Tuesday morning I lost my car key while out picking up rubbish in the long grass behind one of the local beaches - thankfully I had a spare at home. Last night I remembered WOOP and gave 5 minutes to WOOPing my lost key situation, which resulted in a plan - to hire a metal detector! (I would never have thought of this so quickly without using WOOP, I would have just spend the next days out searching for the key!) Anyway after 40 minutes the metal detector located my key.
To some one else the hiring of a metal detector might have been the clear answer, but not to me - thank you for this very simple approach that works!

Monica, School Chaplain, Ireland

WOOP is a powerful tool for effective decision making. It becomes second nature with continued use and the acronym sticks in my mind. I have found that WOOP is useful in projects when implementing new strategies. I work through each stage in the same order as WOOP to identify the wish, outcomes, obstacles and develop a plan. It is an efficient and motivating performance tool that I enjoy using and is applicable to a variety of situations in life. Highly recommended.

Angela Reedman-Polinski, Business Owner, Journalist & Marketing Consultant, Maleny, Australia

I found your work via The Science of Well Being with Dr Santos. I just realized that I've been woop-journaling for over 3 weeks. Every night I write down the struggles with my various projects I experienced that day and think of way to overcome the next day (or soon). I'm not sure how important it is, but I also allow myself to search things on my phone but only for a couple minutes if an idea strikes but I need more info (ex: maybe there is an existing product, or a diy youtube tutorial on making/cleaning/fixing/organizing X). This is to avoid it being a deep research session, though my plan might be that I need to do some deep research.
Sometimes a particular project is more of a struggle and I reflect on the benefits of finishing it as I write what the struggle is. As a result, this has been the easiest habit I've ever developed. I was telling my cousin about it, and he referred to it as "journaling", but I think the focus on obstacles makes it fundamentally different. I read an article where the author argued that writing is thinking, that the act of writing generates new ideas that were not in your head. I don't know if there is research to back this up, but I definitely think it is true.
Anyways, it only occurred to me today that basically I've been woop,oop,oop,oop..ooping and it has been incredibly helpful. Obviously I can't say for certain, but I intend to do this for the rest of my days. Last night I was up too late and wanted to relax a bit before bed and, instead of playing a videogame, I oop'd instead.
Again, thank you for your research and work.

Pat, Technical Artist, Seattle, USA

Thank you so much for your wonderful presentation at WMHC last month. I look forward to deepening my understanding and use of mental contrasting with my current caseload. It's been very helpful so far and my clients are remarking that it really helps them to focus on the goal-oriented tasks that are within their reach. It's been a great way to help my clients to identify their goals, have honest conversations about the barriers that might get in the way, and make significant progress toward their desired outcomes. I like to end a session with WOOP because I find that it's helpful to end with a sense of calm and control about the coming week. I help them to slow down and complete the app, and then we recap what it felt like. It's wonderful.

Jennifer Uhrlass (Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Modern MFT, New York City)

Hi Guys - just heard about WOOP on Monday while listening to the 'Science of Well being' lectures from Yale on-line. Tuesday morning I lost my car key while out picking up rubbish in the long grass behind one of the local beaches - thankfully I had a spare at home. Last night I remembered WOOP and gave 5 minutes to WOOPing my lost key situation, which resulted in a plan - to hire a metal detector! (I would never have thought of this so quickly without using WOOP, I would have just spend the next days out searching for the key!) Anyway after 40 minutes the metal detector located my key.
To some one else the hiring of a metal detector might have been the clear answer, but not to me - thank you for this very simple approach that works!

Monica, School Chaplain, Ireland

Thank you. This method is helping me achieve what has been daunting to me. I am a tecovering addict. I have created a mountain of unmanageability in my life. To attempt to organize, I write lists of to dos and tasks. Its almost three pages long! I have lists on my lists.
I have now been able to focus on the one important task for the day, and set the goal of completing it. The other tasks I still do as I can. My focus is on the big task. I believe the most useful part, for me, is the plan. WOO motivates me. The plan, the execution has always been problematic. I am able to follow through much better. Thank you!

Thank you for your work, your dedication and for widely disseminating the information. You have written concepts in a comprehensible form and managed to develop an easy tool to reinforce those principles. This is making a substantial difference in achieving behavior change!

Michelle Lee Guiney, Sustainability Consultant, New England, USA

Since I began using WOOP, my anxiety and depression levels have been the lowest ever, im getting better grades and my interpersonal relationships are improving as this method has helped me internalise my thoughts, desires and feelings and channel them in the correct desired/wished path.
I'm 18 years old and I'm living my life to its fullest potential thanks to WOOP and all the team behind it.

Andrés González Salido, Student, Mexico City, Mexico

Hi Guys - just heard about WOOP on Monday while listening to the 'Science of Well being' lectures from Yale on-line. Tuesday morning I lost my car key while out picking up rubbish in the long grass behind one of the local beaches - thankfully I had a spare at home. Last night I remembered WOOP and gave 5 minutes to WOOPing my lost key situation, which resulted in a plan - to hire a metal detector! (I would never have thought of this so quickly without using WOOP, I would have just spend the next days out searching for the key!) Anyway after 40 minutes the metal detector located my key.
To some one else the hiring of a metal detector might have been the clear answer, but not to me - thank you for this very simple approach that works!

Monica, School Chaplain, Ireland

I am the founding director of a nonprofit serving older adults  in crisis. I used the WOOP process before a phone call to a business owner to whom I had referred a number of clients. The clarity I had from doing the Woop Process (I literally replayed the segment you walked us through on Optimize) is why I was able to land my first event sponsor - ever!!

I also taught the WOOP process to my son this week. He’s 23 and leads a team at work. He had to reprimand someone and told me how it went. I walked him through the process and asked him if he thought WOOP would be helpful In the future to get his employee to come up with his own ideas for better behavior — especially when the same obstacles will inevitably show up again. He thought that was a fantastic tool for the situation.

I have big goals for my nonprofit to raise money to help seniors who are at risk for losing their housing due to covid.  This year we will raise money to help seniors at risk of eviction pay rent. Next year our goal is to raise enough money to purchase a few condos for seniors waiting for subsidized housing to open. After that, our goal is to raise enough money to build a building with wonderful, affordable apartments. I have already started using WOOP and one fundraiser has excitedly come on board to help. WOOP will be the tool that continually helps clarify the many steps needed to take to get there.

I am so grateful you came for the Luminary coaching season at Optimize!

Tracy Keibler, Founding Director, START Senior Solutions, Eden Prairie, Minnesota, USA

I’d love the opportunity to thank Gabriele for the creation and sharing of the WOOP tool. I am a life coach, helping people know peace in their darkest moments and biggest burdens (divorce, job transitions, new relationships, marriages, finances, etc.) and WOOP is the #1 tool that I use in my powerful life coaching sessions. I'm a big WOOPer and proud of it! I am so grateful that I am able to coach others in becoming WOOPers as well. Brian Johnson and the Optimize community brought this to me years ago and I am forever grateful. WOOP gave me my life. :) . With EXTRAORDINARY Love, Kimmy :)

Kimmy, Lifecoach

I had a great experience with my first WOOP. Really, it can show the direction towards the set goals. I love this practice and I am going to suggest this technique to my students. Thank you professor Gabriele Oettingen

Anjaneyulu Chandupatla, Assistant professor of marketing, Nizamabad, India

I am a big fan of your concept- WOOP which has helped me a lot in my life. My mom and I watched you first in The Science of Well-being Course and I went on to read your book later. Thank you so much for inventing this concept and putting it out there.

Shafkat Mahmud, Senior Manager, Corporate Advisory, IDLC Asset Management Limited, Dhaka, Bangladesh

I hate cooking! I always find excuses not to cook. But I have also noticed that my daughter doesn’t look healthy and energetic. So I always tell myself to cook more, instead of eating out or buying ready-made food. This afternoon, I came across WOOP via Laurie Santos’ COURSERA course. I immediately applied it. My wish then was to cook tonight. My best outcome would be she would become energetic ( not very ambitious goal!). My obstacle was sitting down and kept reading newspaper, and my plan was: IF I sit down on the couch, THEN I would immediately get up. I cooked dinner tonight! This was one easy goal and I find WOOP helpful. I will use it in other areas of my life.

WL Lee, Hong Kong, China

I have been using WOOP for 15 months and it has really helped me with two things:

1. It has helped me to understand what is important to me with so much more clarity. When taking the time to feel into the outcomes, I get a much deeper sense of what I am wanting to create and why I am wanting to create it.

2. Diving deep into the obstacles and what it is 'in me' that will hold me back, has helped me discover aspects of my character than I really love. And when an obstacle appears I have a tool or an 'implementation intention' ready and waiting for it. This makes the obstacle an 'expected friend', rather than something that is trying to throw me off track.

Hazel Boot, Exercise Scientist BPhEd (Exercise and Sports Science), New Zealand

I saw your lecture while taking the course the science of well-being by Laurie Santos. Thank you for doing and publishing your research! I found it extremely helpful both for my career and my interpersonal relationships.

Ronen Shapiro

I read about this a while back and copy-pasted some info in a file. This idea has been helpful in dealing with the mental blocks (fear of failure, mostly) that hold me back from finishing the novel I so dearly want to see published. I'm so glad to see there are free tools and I will use these actively with the aim of finishing the novel during this next month of lockdown!

Anonymous

I was a really shy, lazy and unproductive person. I had a lot of fears like public speaking or talking with girls of my age. I feared to put my self out of my comfort zone and do the things that I knew if I did will make me a better person. I was really frustrated and disappointed in my self. Then in 2018, I landed on this site Woopmylife.org. Here I learned about the WOOP technique by Dr. Oettingen. I decided to try it out for a change. After a few months of daily practicing this technique. I began to find progress. I was able to talk on stage (which was a frightening experience) and make some female friends. My social circle got bigger and I was no longer a shy person. Soon I applied this technique to other areas of my life. I had a desire to start my own website about books. I love reading books. Self-help books have helped me many times. But I wanted other people to experience these too. So I created a website called Readersvilla. Which I created after waiting for a year and a half. I now feel really happy and fulfilled. My aim is to spread awareness about reading books and learning from other successful people that will help us to become successful as well. I want to thank you Dr. Oettingen. Because of this technique, I was able to transform my life.

Lalit Thakre (Website owner of Readersvilla.com, India)

I read your book a couple of weeks ago and I have been experimenting over the last two weeks with very satisfying results. I've been eating much more fruit and drinking much less wine and I am wooping daily (I even have a WOOP for a daily WOOP practice). I have been soul searching for the last 5 years trying to find out why I consistently seem to underachieve despite my best intentions. I have been really frustrated and felt really stuck. I love your method because it is based on empirical research but also because it fits in with some Buddhist mindfulness teachings which remind us to love and accept every part of ourselves, good and bad. WOOP is a kind of self-love practice for me. On top of that, when I think back over my life, my successes fit into the WOOP model in the sense that on those occasions I didn't get carried away with big a dream - there was a sense of reality to how I set about those tasks.
So thank you - WOOP really makes sense to me intellectually, experientially and even spiritually. 

Alex Kemp

Thank you for sharing this wonderful strategy and for making it available to the world. I work for a mindfulness-based non-profit where I provide professional development for teachers around self-care and wellness. One of the things I have noticed in my work is that people truly do want to make changes in their habits and lifestyles but they do not have the right tools. I found WOOP and decided to try it with some of my teachers. They loved it!

Maura Salisbury (Program Manager, United States)

I’m Chinese and it was so lucky for me to learn of WOOP in my hard times. WOOP helped me to understand and face the reality, get out of the comfort zone and finally start a new job. I had stayed in my last company for about ten years. The company was losing competitiveness gradually with a new management team, and most of my colleagues were not focusing on their jobs. Therefore, I felt anxious about my career. However, I was afraid of leaving the company and making decisions. In my difficult time, I joined a psychological course, and read your book. I successfully applied WOOP to some of everyday work at first and then used it to change my sluggish condition, and it worked beyond my expectation.   

Teresa, Public relations department manager, China

I was lucky enough to see Dr. Oettingen speak at my conference last week (AASP) and was immediately intrigued and motivated to learn more. I downloaded the kit and hope that I can use it in my professional life as well as teach my students how to use it with their future exercise clients. Thank you so much for all of the great information.

Lindsey Greviskes, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Whitewat

"In this particular instance, I was struggling (with a recurring theme) that when something important but hard is overdue, I sometimes procrastinate up to and beyond deadlines to avoid the painful pressure. By imagining myself fixing the situation, and substituting doing something simple for something complex, I got started along the path of completion, and that alone caused me to become sufficiently engaged to get the difficult assignment started, and then momentum carried me through to completion. Such a relief! And it also led to an important insight about myself, that positive thinking alone has sometimes had the opposite effect on motivation.

I finished the book this weekend and now can truly appreciate the thorough research behind the WOOP method, with the full explanations given for why it carefully structured as it is. Wow, I had no idea how thoroughly the method has been tested and proven out over the years. Being immersed in a culture of "positive thinking Americans" :-), this is truly a great contribution for turning words and ideas into positive action. I never understood that positive thinking could often have the opposite effect and stymie action. Understanding at the very first step that it is important that the best wishes engender an expectation of future success is a great insight, and when they don't, understanding that those wishes may need to be modified.  How mental contrasting works, and how implementation intentions further increase motivation is excellent knowledge.  And having experienced it firsthand just validates what has been carefully researched. I look forward to applying WOOP more and more. It is truly a great contribution that I'm sure will withstand the test of time as people become more aware of it".

Tom Schroeder

"Rethinking Positive Thinking is a pleasure to read—clearly and compellingly argued, logically organized, and well-suited for all those seeking a way to help themselves without defaulting to the tired tropes often found in self-help books. WOOP offers actionable steps that are applicable to many situations, are easy to follow, and have been proven effective by decades of studies".

Xian Gu, Managing Editor, Routledge Psychology (Taylor & Francis Publishers)

"It’s great to learn of WOOP! I am a semi-retired pharmacist in Atlanta...looking for meaningful work projects and looking for ways to add to my current volunteer activity....Thanks for offering WOOP to me!"

Chip Robinson

I've been fairly successful off and on and overcome some extreme challenges, but I didn't realize that I had a method to my greatest achievements. Before I found WOOP, I committed to walking across the US to raise support for a charity, and figure this whole commitment thing out. I used the best personal development systems I know and got myself to commit to the walk. 500 days, five near death experiences and 4600 miles later, I finished. There was a lot I wanted to get myself to do on that walk, but for one reason or another couldn't. After I had finished, I had the exact same problem. There was something different between when I committed to my walk than when I tried to commit to rebuild my business, or even exercise regularly.

Like any highly analytical person, I dove into research. I stopped looking at the self-help and success gurus and started looking for the science. That's when I found your WOOP site. I read the studies on the site, used the app a bit, even remade the audio, so it works better for me personally, and integrated some NLP techniques that have helped me in the past with the WOOP session. Since using WOOP regularly, I've made massive strides in my professional and personal life. Moved to NYC, restructured my parent's business, gotten two new businesses started, started exercising regularly, found a new group of friends in New York, and lost 5 lbs. All of that in the last three weeks. I've got ways to go with everything still, but I'm confident I can do it all, now that I have a system.

Stephen Hnilica

I am excited to report that I have now been living with WOOP daily and building it into my personal and professional practice. The 40-year-old health related issue I have had has been ‘solved’ using WOOP, and I remain as excited by the process a year on as I was the day I ‘found’ it.

Congratulations as well on the book which I bought as soon as published and which I have personally recommended to many others! What still staggers me about the framework, even today is how ‘deceptively’ simple it is, and yet how it continues to work at such a deep level.

James Nelson, Counsellor

Thank you for adding WOOP in my personal and professional life

Kristina Bulik-Hocum, Life and Work Coaching

I have used many processes to help my clients define and achieve their goals. But WOOP has got to be the most memorable and quite frankly the most successful one I have used to far. My clients like it because they can remember it easily. I like it because it gently but firmly helps my clients to look internally at the obstacles they put in their way rather than finding all sorts of external obstacles to blame.

Briony Liber, Career development and leadership coach (Johannesburg, South Africa)

I use WOOP with second graders to improve self-control and with high school students who want to procrastinate less or be less anxious. I use it personally so I don't eat after 9 pm (my big obstacle to my weight loss). I have shared WOOP in many of my workshops in helping adults and children change, and the audience is always very intrigued by WOOP.

Dr. Caren Baruch-Feldman

WOOP is my preferred way to solve simple problems in my life and to beat anxiety. I first learned WOOP in 2013 to teach it to adolescents in school, but quickly adopted it as an effective way to achieve my goals in graduate school and elsewhere. So for three plus years I WOOP almost every day and find it greatly reduces my anxiety about my daily tasks and responsibilities. I even have FUN doing things I normally put off! I love that it involves free thoughts and imagination, and I can do it while I am on the bus or almost anywhere. Recently I taught it to my coworkers who said that it helped them get work projects done with ease. I use it for work, for school, for health, and for my relationships to get unstuck when I feel anxious about tasks or unsure of what to do next.

If you are interested in learning a simple way to get started on difficult tasks or just want to get to know yourself and your habits better, WOOP is it. If your experience is anything like mine, you will feel calmer, more present, and energized when you go about your day-to-day responsibilities and endeavors. Or you might just find that what you thought you wished for in the first place was not as important to you as you once thought. Either way, the self-knowledge I gain with WOOP means I am more engaged, less anxious, and feel better equipped to take on the normal challenges of life.

Tobias Leuthner, Graduate Student