WOOP

Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan helps you turn a goal into action by getting honest about what's in the way and planning for it. It's a writing exercise with four steps: your Wish, the Outcome you want, the Obstacle inside you, and your Plan to handle it.

Pairing a vivid picture of the outcome with an honest look at the obstacle, then making an if-then plan, harnesses two well-studied techniques, mental contrasting and implementation intentions, that make follow-through far more likely. You may feel both motivated by the wish and clear-eyed about the obstacle, with a concrete sense of what to do. WOOP is based on decades of research by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen on what actually turns goals into action. She developed it as a practical, evidence-based method drawn from that research. If naming the obstacle feels discouraging or the plan seems too small, that's normal, even a simple if-then plan works, and the method sharpens with use.