Insight | Picture the obstacles, not just the win: the visualization debate

The Short Version

Picturing the outcome you want is not useless, but on its own it is a weak engine for action. Dr. James Doty and Mel Robbins teach vivid visualization of the goal as part of a calm, repeated daily practice that points your attention toward opportunities [1][2]. Dr. Emily Balcetis, drawing on her NYU colleague Gabriele Oettingen's research, explains that vividly imagining how great life will be once you reach a goal feels like the goal is already satisfied, so the body relaxes instead of gearing up for effort [3]. Andrew Huberman goes further: picturing the big win helps you start but is "a pretty lousy and maybe even counterproductive way" to keep going, while routinely foreshadowing failure nearly doubles the chance of reaching a goal [4]. The practical answer from these sources is to picture the win once to define it, then spend most of your mental rehearsal on the steps, the obstacles and the cost of failing. That kind of visualization drives action; the other kind can quietly replace it.

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What They Said

James Doty: embed the intention, then let your attention do the hunting

Dr. James Doty, the Stanford neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who founded the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, told Mel Robbins that manifestation is not "woo-woo or the law of attraction [1]. He rejects the idea that positive energy attracts the Ferrari and that failure is your fault, which he traces back to the Hermetics and later prosperity gospels [1]. His definition is precise: the ability to take an intention and embed it into your subconscious in a manner such that it has the greatest likelihood to occur" [1].

His reasoning is about attention. We take in roughly six to ten million bits of sensory information per second but can consciously handle only 50 to 100, and those we can direct [1]. Repetition builds neural pathways ("what fires together, wires together"), so the method is to use as many senses as possible: write the intention by hand with a pencil, read it silently, read it aloud, then visualize it, over and over [1]. Once an intention is embedded, he says, three networks switch on. The salience network flags it as important, the attention network scans the environment for possibilities like a bloodhound, and the executive control network chases down the opportunities it finds [1]. He compares it to hearing your own name across a noisy party, and says the same attunement explains many apparent coincidences [1]. "There is no magic here," he says; it is basic neuroscience anyone can master [1]. Robbins quoted his book to him: "your brain can't tell the difference between what is real and vividly imagined," and Doty agreed [1].

It would be a mistake, though, to file Doty under just picture the Porsche. Several parts of his teaching push against pure outcome fantasy.

First, he insists visualization happens in a calm body and is aimed at needs, not wants. In his words: "For you to maximally visualize, that means you have to be relaxed. You have to have calm. You have to not look at what I want. And this is the difference for a lot of people because they have a vision of what they want, but not what they need" [1]. He knows the difference from experience. At 12 he wrote a list of ten wants: be a millionaire, own a mansion, a Porsche, a Rolex, and be a doctor so others would see him as okay [1]. He got all of it, including a villa in Florence and an island, and says he was never more miserable [1]. Then he lost $80 million in the dot-com crash and gave away $30 million in stock he could have kept, which is when, he says, everything changed [1].

Second, he says the practice starts small, like habits. He warns against New Year's resolution thinking: you give up soda before aiming to lose 100 pounds, or walk around the block before running a marathon [1].

Third, he explicitly ties outcomes to work and patience, not to the picture itself: "I've been trying to manifest for 10 or 15. years. And I firmly believe they will manifest, but you have to be patient. You have to do the work. You have to do the exercises" [1].

Fourth, he builds in detachment and realism: "things don't happen always exactly as we visualized. They may approximate it, but oftentimes they're not exactly" [1]. And: "I'm not attached to the outcome. And that is a critical thing" [1]. He adds that sometimes an intention doesn't manifest because "your subconscious may even know that it's not good for you" [1]. His summary of the odds is honest: will it happen? "Maybe, maybe not. And it's more likely that it will? Yes. Because you are training your mind using these techniques and putting yourself in a heart mode to make it happen" [1].

His daily routine shows how the visualization sits inside a wider practice. Each morning he breathes slowly (in through the nose for four to six seconds, hold for four to six, out slowly through the mouth, for a minute or two) to shift into the parasympathetic state, then reflects on the joy of being alive [1]. Each evening he ranks his goals by importance and time frame, takes the top three, writes them down, repeats them silently and aloud, and sees them happening, over and over [1]. He also asks people to deal with their negative self-talk, understand where their story came from, and accept their "shadow self," because "You're manifesting all the time": relationships, jobs and decisions often follow the narrative our baggage wrote [1].

Mel Robbins: picture the safe landing

Mel Robbins, the host of both of the first two sources, is the voice in this debate most clearly in favor of picturing the outcome you want. In an episode on dread, she describes extreme turbulence on a flight from Bali to JFK [2]. While her husband Chris sat calm and meditating, she spiraled into fear of death, missed weddings and grandchildren [2]. One of her tools for moments like this is to visualize the outcome you want: while bracing for turbulence, she visualized a safe landing, hugging her kids, and getting through the moment calmly [2]. She says this rewires the brain to expect possibility, not disaster, and applies the same idea to hard conversations, job interviews or presentations: visualize success, then breathe into that energy [2].

Her position rests on a specific view of what negative imagination does. She describes dread as bracing for what you think is coming: your nervous system prepares for the worst, your thoughts project the worst-case scenario, and you begin manifesting negativity with your focus and behavior [2]. She cites a Cornell study finding that 85% of what we worry about never happens, and that 78% of the remaining 15% is easier than expected [2]. Her advice is to "Ask better questions. What if this is easier than I think? What if it actually goes well?" [2] and to reframe "dread" as "uncertainty," because "Uncertainty creates possibility. Dread closes it." [2]

It matters where Robbins aims this tool. Her examples are mostly situations where the outcome is not in your hands (turbulence, a father's scan results) or moments of acute anxiety before a performance [2]. In the same episode she pairs it with action: box breathing, focusing on what you can control, asking Can I take action here? If not, can I let go?, and the 5-second rule to get up, move, act [2]. Her other point is that Dread is a signal, not a sentence [2]. So her positive visualization works mainly as a way to calm down and get moving, not as a replacement for doing the thing.

In the Doty conversation, Robbins also acts as translator, summing up the nervous system as "fear mode" and "heart mode" and endorsing his line that focusing on the feeling of success trains the brain to expect it [1]. Her own takeaway was that manifesting is less about the future than a daily present-moment reset, grounded in self-acceptance, compassion, gratitude and love [1].

Emily Balcetis: vision boards define the goal, then they can drain you

Dr. Emily Balcetis, a professor of psychology at NYU whose lab studies motivation and goal setting, gives the clearest explanation of why the popular version of visualization can backfire [3]. She starts from a fair view of vision boards, dream boards and lists. "And it's not bad to do that, right? For some people just even knowing what they want in life is a major accomplishment" [3]. Defining the goal can be really challenging, she says, and a board is a strategy that works for that [3].

The problem is what happens next. Research by her NYU colleague Gabriele Oettingen and her team found that vividly imagining how great life will be once the goal is reached does not help people achieve it [3]. Imagining success feels like a goal satisfied: blood pressure drops and the body relaxes, when the body would normally gear up in anticipation of effort, physical or mental [3]. The result is that people lack the physiological readiness to take the first step [3]. Huberman added a friend's theory that people who announce they will write a book get so much praise up front, with no risk of criticism, that they never write it [3].

Balcetis is careful not to overcorrect: "I'm not saying that people who enjoy a dream board creation should stop what they're doing. That's not the take home message here" [3]. Instead, "the process of goal setting shouldn't stop with articulating what the goal is" [3]. She lays out three parts. First, define the goal. Second, break it into concrete near-term steps; she says to "take it out of the abstract, take it out of this idyllic visual iconography and start thinking about the practical day to day," and plan what you can accomplish "in the next two weeks and the two weeks after" [3]. Third, and most overlooked, identified by Oettingen: "thinking about the obstacles that stand in your way of success. And that will actually help improve motivation in the long run" [3]. For each obstacle she recommends a plan B, C and D [3].

She admits that step sounds backwards: people assume that to have more motivation, thinking about "how hard it's going to be, all the ways that I'm going to fail" would be the last thing to do [3]. Her answer is about timing and stress. "If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink, that's not the time you want to start looking for life jackets," and "We're not going to do our best thinking when we're in crisis mode" [3]. When an obstacle hits, you are likely short on time, thin on resources and anxious [3].

Her favorite example is Michael Phelps in the 200 butterfly at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, chasing an eighth gold medal in one Games [3]. As soon as he dove in, his goggles started to leak, and they filled completely with water, leaving him swimming blind [3]. He didn't panic, she explains, "because he had foreshadowed that kind of possible failure. He had imagined that obstacle hitting him in advance and not even just imagined it, but practiced it" [3]. He and his coach routinely practiced with goggles not fully secured, and the coach would even rip them off and smash them; Phelps' backup plan was to count his strokes, and he won [3].

Balcetis also offers a different kind of visualization that does drive action: the narrowed "spotlight of attention [3]. Elite sprinters told her they focused as if a spotlight were shining on a single target, and runners who used this more often ran faster [3]. The instruction is simple: Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target [3]. In her lab, people wearing ankle weights equal to about 15% of body weight who used this narrowed focus were able to move 27% faster and said the exercise hurt 17% less, with identical weight and distance [3]. This is visualization of the next near step, not the distant reward, and she says: It works for everybody" [3].

Andrew Huberman: picture the win at the start, foreshadow failure the rest of the way

In a solo episode on goal setting that leans heavily on Balcetis' work, Huberman states the conclusion bluntly: picturing the big win, like a Super Bowl ring or eight Olympic gold medals, helps get goal pursuit started but is "a pretty lousy and maybe even counterproductive way" to maintain it [4]. He describes the studies: people told to imagine their big goal in rich detail, including how it will feel in their body, show a rise in systolic blood pressure and "a ramping up of the readiness and excitement for that goal. But that increase in blood pressure quickly wanes" [4]. Over time, he says, "that visual of the long-term goal becomes a poor thing to rely on in order to generate the actions that are required to reach that goal" [4].

His alternative still uses visualization: "it's not about visualizing success, it's about visualizing failure" [4]. The Balcetis lab and others found a near doubling in the probability of reaching goals when people routinely think about how things will go wrong if they do not take the needed actions [4]. He admits this runs against the usual advice, "fake it till you make it or it's a phrase that I absolutely hate, frankly, because it's not even clear what that means" [4], and against his own expectation: "I would have anticipated that imagining success is the way to go" [4].

His example is committing to run five miles, four to seven days a week, before 8 a.m. [4]. Instead of imagining how great you will look and feel, picture the negative health outcomes, the disappointment in yourself, and the morning when you wait until 7:30 and it is pouring rain [4]. His rule of thumb: If you're going to visualize in a positive way, do that at the very beginning of some goal pursuit. Maybe intermittently every once in a while... Most of the time, if you want to be effective, you should be focusing on avoiding failure and you should be really clear about what those failures would look like and feel like [4].

He guards against a misreading. Foreshadowing failure "is not the same thing as thinking about ourselves as failing" [4]. If you constantly think you are failing, "then indeed we are not going to turn out much dopamine" [4]. So he pairs it with self-reward: pick a schedule you can keep, ideally weekly, and when you are on track, tell yourself so. His own example is 150 to 200 minutes of zone 2 cardio a week; if he hits it, he checks a box and tells himself, "I'm on track" [4].

Like Balcetis, he also uses the narrowed-focus kind of vision as a tool for action: before goal-directed work, look at a single point, such as a dot on the wall, your screen or the horizon, for 30 to 60 seconds, then move into action [4].

Huberman on mental rehearsal: visualize the doing

A third Huberman episode, on mental training for learning skills, adds a kind of visualization neither the picture the win camp nor the picture the obstacles camp covers: rehearsing the action itself [5]. Hundreds of studies, going back to Francis Galton's 1880 paper, show mental imagery can speed up learning in music, mathematics, sports and dance [5]. Experiments by Roger Shepard and Stephen Kosslyn show imagined scenes unfold at the same speed and spatial scale as real ones [5]. A 2022 study reported "we found that mental practice enhanced both the speed and accuracy" of a finger-tapping sequence after just 50 imagined repetitions [5].

But his rules for doing it well look nothing like a dream board. Keep each visualization brief (about 15 to 20 seconds or less), simple and sparse, and repeat it many times with high accuracy [5]. Pair it with real practice of skills you can already perform at least some of the time [5]. Use first-person imagery, from the inside, which is significantly more effective than seeing yourself from across the room [5]. Label imagined practice the same way you label real practice [5]. And he warns you cannot simply lie to yourself and learn; the imagery has to accurately match reality [5]. Mental training, he says, is an augment, not a replacement [5].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Where they agree

All the sources agree that what you picture changes your brain and body, not just your mood. Doty describes salience and attention networks switching on [1]; Balcetis and Huberman measure changes in blood pressure and effort [3][4]; Huberman's mental-training studies show real gains in speed and accuracy [5].

They agree that defining what you want is a legitimate first step. Doty's evening ritual starts by ranking goals by importance and time frame [1]. Balcetis says a vision board can help people who struggle to know what they want [3]. Huberman says imagining the big win is useful "at the outset of a goal" [4].

They agree that visualization is not a substitute for work. Doty: "You have to do the work. You have to do the exercises" [1]. Robbins pairs her visualization with breathing and the 5-second rule to act [2]. Balcetis says goal setting "shouldn't stop with articulating what the goal is" [3]. Huberman calls mental training an augment, not a replacement [5].

They agree that starting small and concrete beats grand gestures. Doty warns against resolution thinking and starts with giving up soda before losing 100 pounds [1]. Balcetis wants a two-week plan, not only a ten-year vision [3]. Huberman recommends moderately hard goals, one to three major goals a year, and concrete action plans reviewed weekly [4].

Where they don't

The core disagreement is about what happens in your body when you vividly imagine success.

Doty and Robbins treat that calm, good feeling as the point. For Doty, you must be relaxed to visualize well, and the parasympathetic "heart mode" is where cognitive networks work best and manifestation is most likely [1]. For Robbins, picturing the safe landing pulls you out of panic [2].

Balcetis and Huberman treat that same calm as the problem, at least when it comes to getting things done. In Oettingen's research, as Balcetis tells it, imagining success lowers blood pressure and relaxes the body just when it should be gearing up, so people lack readiness to take the first step [3]. Huberman describes a short rise in systolic pressure that "quickly wanes" [4]. Either way, the picture of success doesn't carry you through the work.

Why does each side hold its view? Doty's case comes from his neuroscience of attention and from his own life: he wrote down his list at 12 and achieved every item [1]. His method also includes writing, speaking aloud and daily repetition, and it is framed as a way to direct attention toward opportunities, not as a way to feel the reward early [1]. Balcetis and Huberman's case comes from controlled experiments measuring blood pressure and goal attainment [3][4].

The second disagreement is about negative imagination. Robbins warns that dread, which projects the worst-case scenario, makes you brace and spiral and begin manifesting negativity [2]. Doty says each negative statement is like another brick in a prison you build for yourself [1]. Huberman says the opposite of a surface reading of that: routinely picturing how you'll fail is the better motivator, because "The brain and body are much better at moving away from fearful things than towards things we want" [4], and the amygdala "and some sense of anxiety or fear is actually built in to the circuits that generate goal seeking" [4].

This clash is smaller than it looks. Robbins' dread is picturing disasters you can't control and freezing [2]. Huberman's foreshadowing is picturing the specific cost of your own inaction so you act [4]. Balcetis' obstacle planning is picturing a specific problem and preparing plans B, C and D [3]. Huberman himself separates predicting failure from "thinking about ourselves as failing" [4]. Doty's warning is about harsh self-talk like "I'm never good enough," not about planning for a rainy morning [1].

There is one small difference in numbers. Balcetis describes her spotlight study with ankle weights equal to about 15% of body weight and says participants moved 27% faster [3]; Huberman, describing what appears to be the same line of work, says 15-pound ankle weights and 23% faster [4]. Both report 17% less perceived effort [3][4]. The direction of the finding is the same; the exact figure depends on which account you follow.

Why It Works

Why picturing the win can stall you

The mechanism Balcetis and Huberman give is physiological. Normally the body gears up in anticipation of effort, physical or mental [3]. Vividly imagining success feels like the goal has been satisfied, so blood pressure drops and the body relaxes [3]. Huberman describes a brief rise in systolic blood pressure when people richly imagine the big goal, which then fades, leaving the long-term picture "a poor thing to rely on" [4]. The social version is the same: announce the book, get the praise, and the drive to write it is gone [3].

Why picturing failure keeps you moving

Huberman grounds this in the anatomy of one goal circuit shared by every kind of goal: the amygdala, ventral striatum, lateral prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex, with dopamine as the common currency [4]. Much goal-directed behavior is about avoiding punishments such as embarrassment or financial ruin, so fear is part of the system, not a bug [4]. Bad experiences can rewire us through one-trial learning, while good experiences rarely do so as powerfully [4]. As he puts it, it only takes "one event, one time, to reorient or rewire our neural circuitry so that we have a bias toward moving away from that thing in the future" [4]. Foreshadowing failure uses that asymmetry deliberately [4].

Balcetis adds a practical reason: problem-solving is worse under stress. When the obstacle arrives you are short on time and anxious, so you want the plan already made [3]. Phelps could count strokes blind because he had practiced exactly that [3].

Why the right amount of challenge matters

Huberman reports that goals that are too easy don't engage enough of the autonomic nervous system, and impossible goals don't raise systolic blood pressure either, because they don't feel tangible [4]. Moderately hard goals produced a near-doubling of the systolic response and a doubling or more in the likelihood of ongoing pursuit [4]. Balcetis puts it simply: "We want to set a goal that will challenge us, but isn't impossible" [3]. A giant, glossy vision of the finished life may fall into the doesn't feel tangible category.

Why narrowed focus on the next target helps

Balcetis traces this to the goal gradient: in studies from the 1940s and 1950s, rats and mice ran faster and pulled harder as they neared a reward, and humans show the same pattern [3]. Narrowing attention onto a target makes it look closer, and that illusion of proximity makes people try harder and find effort less bad [3]. Randomized experiments show teaching the strategy causes better performance, not just that good runners happen to use it [3]. Huberman explains that focusing on a point raises systolic blood pressure and releases small amounts of adrenaline, placing the body in readiness, while wide, relaxed vision lowers it and reduces goal-directed drive [4].

Why Doty's version may still work

Doty's mechanism is attention, not reward. By making an intention salient through writing, speaking and repeated imagery, you prime your attention network to notice relevant opportunities, much as you hear your own name across a noisy room [1]. Balcetis offers a parallel from her own field: when people attend to a face in an overlaid face-and-house image, the fusiform face area activates, and when they switch to the house, it drops [3]. Where you choose to focus changes what the brain does [3]. So Doty's practice can make you notice more chances to act; the question the other sources raise is whether the feeling of success also takes away your drive to act on them.

Why rehearsing the action works

For skills, Huberman explains that imagined experience runs at real-world speed and scale [5], and that mental practice after 50 imagined repetitions increased net excitation between cerebellum and motor cortex in the 2022 study [5]. Learning needs focused attention, often with agitation, and sleep afterward [5]; he notes "the agitation and frustration is a reflection of the release of specific chemicals," norepinephrine and epinephrine, which signal that something needs to change [5]. Rehearsal also trains what not to do: combining mental and physical practice in a stop-signal task outperformed either alone, in some cases nearly doubling the improvement [5].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Outcome visualization fits the start. Picturing the win is useful for figuring out what you want and for an initial burst of excitement [3][4]. Huberman allows revisiting it "every once in a while" [4].

Outcome visualization fits moments you can't control. Robbins' safe-landing image was used during turbulence, a situation she could not change, to calm fear [2]. Where there is no action to take, calming yourself is the right goal, and the it drains your readiness problem matters less.

Doty's version applies to a whole practice, not a picture alone. His visualization comes with calm breathing, writing by hand, speaking aloud, ranking goals, attention to needs over wants, starting small and doing the work [1]. Taking only the see it happening step out of that routine is closer to the dream board Balcetis warns about [3].

Foreshadowing failure fits ongoing effort. It is the recommended default for the long middle of a goal, like a running habit or saving for retirement [4]. Balcetis notes the midpoint is where people struggle most with any kind of goal [3].

Foreshadowing failure has limits. It is not a license to ruminate or call yourself a failure; Huberman says constantly thinking you are failing lowers dopamine [4], and Doty warns that harsh self-talk builds a prison [1]. It should be specific (what would go wrong and what it would cost), paired with a plan and with self-reward for real progress [3][4].

Mental rehearsal fits skills you already can do sometimes. Huberman says it works best on skills you can perform correctly at least some of the time, and it adds to real practice rather than replacing it [5]. It is especially useful during injury, travel or layoffs [5].

Energy and mood change what you see. When people are fatigued, older, overweight or carrying heavy packs, "Distances look further and hills look steeper" [3], and in a double-blind study, people given sugar judged a finish line as closer: "if you have more energy, the world looks easier" [3]. People with depression or anxiety have their attention captured by negative things that confirm their outlook [3]. Balcetis says a short exercise of finding smiling faces helped people feel more capable, but "It doesn't cure depression" [3]. If low mood or anxiety is getting in the way of your goals, talk to a doctor or mental health professional rather than relying on visualization alone.

The evidence base differs. The strongest experimental support in these sources is for narrowed focus, obstacle planning, foreshadowing failure and mental rehearsal of skills [3][4][5]. Doty's case rests on his account of attention networks and his own life story [1]; Robbins' on her experience and the Cornell worry figures [2].

What To Do With It

1. Use a vision board or list only to define the goal. Picture the win once, clearly enough to know what you want, then move on to planning, as Balcetis and Huberman advise [3][4]. Check it against Doty's question: is this something you want, or something you need [1]?

2. Pick a moderately hard goal, and only a few. Choose something just beyond your current ability, not trivially easy and not impossible [3][4], and keep it to one to three major goals a year [4]. Start small, as Doty says, the way you'd walk around the block before a marathon [1].

3. Break it into a two-week plan. Write what you can accomplish in the next two weeks, and the two weeks after [3]. Make it about concrete actions, not feelings, and review it weekly [4].

4. List the obstacles and write plans B, C and D. For each thing that could go wrong, decide now what you will do, because in the moment you'll be short on time and anxious [3]. Where you can, practice the setback, the way Phelps trained with loose goggles [3].

5. Foreshadow the cost of not acting. Most of the time, picture what failure would look and feel like: the rainy 7:30 a.m. you skip the run, the health consequences, the disappointment [4]. Keep it about the cost of inaction, not about calling yourself a failure [4].

6. Reward yourself for being on track, on a schedule. Choose a checkpoint you can keep, ideally weekly; when you hit it, check a box and tell yourself, "I'm on track" [4].

7. Use a spotlight for the next step. During effort, focus on a near target, like a stop sign two blocks away, tune out everything around it, and when you reach it, pick the next one [3]. Before focused work, look at a single point for 30 to 60 seconds, then start [4].

8. Rehearse the doing, in short first-person bursts. For a skill you can already do sometimes, imagine it from the inside in epochs of about 15 seconds, for 50 to 75 repetitions, three to five times a week, alongside real practice, and sleep well that night [5].

9. Calm the body first, especially under fear. Doty's slow breathing (in four to six seconds, hold four to six, out slowly for a minute or two) or Robbins' box breathing (4-4-4-4) can move you out of panic [1][2]. If the situation is out of your hands, picturing the outcome you want, as Robbins did on the plane, is a fair way to steady yourself [2].

10. Hold the outcome loosely and keep doing the work. Follow Doty's lead: want it, do the work, and don't cling, since things often arrive only approximately as imagined and can take years [1]. And track your real progress, since memory is a poor judge of whether you're on pace; Balcetis found her own data contradicted her memory of how practice was going [3].

Sources

1. How to Manifest Anything You Want: Unlock the Unlimited Power of Your Mind · The Mel Robbins Podcast
2. How to Let Go of What You Can’t Control & Redirect Your Energy · The Mel Robbins Podcast
3. Dr. Emily Balcetis: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals · Huberman Lab
4. The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals · Huberman Lab
5. Science-Based Mental Training & Visualization for Improved Learning · Huberman Lab