what's the link between vision and motivation and how can we leverage that in order to better reach our goals? Totally. So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people that they struggle with the most. So we asked hundreds, thousands of people what their new year's resolutions are.

We looked to all the other polls that do the same kind of work. And regardless of where you look or who you ask or when you ask it, people's number one goal is something related to their health, right? To lose weight, to exercise more, to get out, get more steps for mental well-being, physical well-being.

And that's like the number one goal every January 1st. So if we were able to accomplish that goal, you'd think it would drop a little bit in the rankings. But it doesn't because it's really hard. So we thought, I wonder if there's a way for us to make some progress on that, on helping people to exercise better, more often, stick to it longer, and make some progress there.

We know diets don't work. And why don't diets work? For the same reason that that self-talk doesn't work, is that, you know, we go in it full bore, hardcore, and it requires a major commitment and effort to a lifestyle change. So again, we were looking for something that might be easier than that, that could produce big, big payoff, right?

That's the golden ticket. It's something that requires less effort for a bigger payoff. So one of the first things that I did was go over to Brooklyn to this old armory building. It used to be a military armory space. Yeah. I think I know that building. Yeah. It's a beautiful building now that houses a lot of businesses, right?

With plants on the walls? Yeah, there's businesses. There's a couple of armories all around the boroughs here, around New York City. And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA, right? So it's a family YMCA that's within a beautiful old red brick building that used to be a military establishment long, long ago.

And what's really cool is that one winter afternoon, somebody had invited me, a physical therapist said, "Hey, you should come out and check out what's happening here with your interest in exercise and trying to find new ways of helping people, new tactics that they can add to their tool belt.

I think you're going to find some interesting people that are working out there." So I showed up. I look around. There's families. There's new moms. There's kids that are – moms trying to get kids to burn off some winter energy that they have. There's people that look like they're just there for their – every couple of days going out for a run.

There's some people that look like they're training with a team. And that's who this physical therapist introduced me to, was the coach of this team. There's a bunch of people that were sitting down on the ground, and I would be hard-pressed to know who's the high school student that's in this group and then who, as it turns out, are some of the fastest runners in the world.

One of the people that was in the last Olympics before I showed up won the gold medal for the 400-meter, and from the looks of them – I mean, of course, their bodies are in better shape than mine, but there's nothing so – of course, they're not wearing their medals.

There's nothing pretentious about how they're walking around or anything like that that would lead me to know, like, "This person's amazing," and they probably have some insight that I don't have. So once I got introduced to them and knew who are these people that were part of this pretty elite training team that happened to work out at this family gym, I had the chance to talk with them about, "What strategies do you use?" Now, I am not an elite runner, and having recently had a baby, I'm not really a runner right now at all, but I thought when these people are running, I bet they are, like, hyper-aware of everything that's going on in their surroundings.

Where are they relative to the competition, what's happening in their peripheral vision, what's going on on the side, who's behind them, who's in front of them. They probably have this, like, master sense, this master visual plan at any point in time, and that's what probably makes them elite. So when I started asking them, "Is that the case?

Do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings, what's behind you, what's on the side?" They said, "No." Like, all of them said, "No." And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake. It doesn't work for me. So that was surprising. It totally went against my intuition about what they do that likely contributes to their success.

What they said instead was that they are hyper-focused. They assume this narrowed focus of attention, almost like a spotlight is shining on a target. Now, when they're running a short distance, that target might literally be the finish line, the line that they're trying to cross. If it's a longer distance, they set sub-goals, like, you know, the person, the shorts on the person up ahead that they're trying to beat.

Or they choose some sort of stable landmark, like a sign that they would pass by. And like a spotlight is shining just on that, or, like, they have blinders on the sides of their face. That's all they're paying attention to. It's a really narrowed scope of attention. And that was a strategy that all of these elite athletes said that they used.

And those that were better rather than slower were ones that used it more. And I thought, "Oh, that's something we can play with." Right? Like, they are elite and they are accomplished, but that visual strategy isn't necessarily something that you have to be in the perfect physical condition to be able to adopt.

And so I wonder, can that help the rest of us who aren't competing for an Olympic gold and who have no chance of ever getting one, but who want to exercise better, have a better time doing it, and maintain a commitment to that exercise goal that they might have that they might otherwise, you know, by February or March be giving up on if they had set it at the beginning of January?

So that's really where the work started was, you know, what you might call, like, focus groups or case studies of these incredible athletes. And then we did other studies looking at, you know, people who aren't Olympic athletes but who are competitive New York road runners. And how are they running in races?

And what we found is that those people who have better pace, faster pace, better time, they use that narrowed strategy more often than this more expansive or, you know, open scope of attention. And there seemed to be a correlation between that. Better performance among a wider swath of hundreds of runners who are doing it competitively but still, you know, could be like the person that you're sitting next to in the office or yourself, right?

And the more often that they did it, and the more consistently they had adopted that, that technique of the narrowed focus of attention, it seemed that they were doing better in their runs. So then we started thinking, like, okay, what about people who aren't competitive runners? What about, like, my mom?

Can she do that? Or me when I'm trying to get back on the bandwagon and exercise more? Is this a tactic we can teach people? The answer is yes. You can tell people about what these Olympic athletes are doing. You can tell them about what the New York road runners are doing.

And just using the same language that I just used with you, right? Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target. Choose something up ahead, the stop sign two blocks up that you can just see. And you know, imagine that you have blinders on so that you're not really paying attention to the people that are passing by or the buildings or the garbage cans or the trucks that are on the road.

You know, tune those out and focus in on that target until you hit it. And then choose another one. Right? Sort of recalibrate. Choose the next goal. And so we would test, like, can people do that? I mean, if you're listening right now, you probably are imagining that experience, too.

And the answer is yes. Like, I can imagine that. I know what those words mean. And I can do that. And our work found that, too, that people can do that. We have them say out loud, what is it that's captured your attention? And of course, sometimes something in the periphery, like movement, captures our gaze and we're pulled there for an instant, but then we can refocus up again and adopt that narrowed attention.

Now, one of the first studies that we did was teach that strategy and juxtapose or compare it against a group that we said, just look around naturally. You know, you might see that finish line up ahead and there's things on the periphery. Whatever your eyes want to do, whatever you think is going to work best, feel free to do that and tell us what you're looking at.

Then we gave them a finish line. We created sort of, you know, an exercise that's moderately challenging but possible. We put ankle weights on that accounted for about 15% of their body weight, told them to lift their knees up, sort of high stepping to a finish line. So this would be challenging for them to do, but we said, you know, it's an indicator of overall health and fitness.

Some of these people had narrowed their focus of attention and some were just looking more expansively or naturally. And what we found is that those people that we trained, just everyday normal people doing this moderately challenging exercise, they were able to move 27% faster. They could do the exercise more quickly and they said it hurt 17% less.

The exercise was exactly the same for all the people. We set the weight and we set the distance. It was in, you know, our lab space, so it was a constrained environment. Everybody was in the same sort of circumstance, but yet their experience was really different. We helped them to move faster, burn calories at a higher rate, exercise more efficiently.

The amount of time they put in is going to produce a better physical outcome and it also didn't hurt them. They're saying it doesn't hurt as much. So we were really excited about that because it meant that this strategy, we could use it on people who are not elite athletes.

It could be easily adopted, a quick training session, can teach people to look at the world in a different way. Again, this narrowed attention was different than whatever they do naturally, the comparison group. But it had a big outcome. It had a big difference on the way that they were engaged in the exercise.

It was like some of the first work that we did and then since then we've done dozens more studies to look at, well, what happens with that and what else can we do with playing around with this? Yeah, those are impressive differences as a consequence of narrowing visual attention.

A couple of questions about the actual practice of narrowing attention. Is there any indication of whether or not subjects are constantly updating their visual attention? So for instance, if let's say the goal line is in view, literally from the beginning, I could imagine just holding visual attention on the goal line.

But if it's an oval track or it's a trajectory along a trail or through a city, how often do you think they are updating their visual aperture and setting a visual goal? And I could imagine that there's some energetic expense to that, meaning you wouldn't want to do every crack on the sidewalk unless those cracks on the sidewalk were very far apart.

Because I think at some point that itself would be exhausting. So is there an optimal strategy or a semi-optimal strategy? Yeah, so those Olympic athletes that we started by interviewing, they tended to be sprinters. They were more often sprinters, short-distance sprinters. So when they said, yes, I narrow in more than I assume an expansive focus, that's because they're not going that far.

They have to do it as fast as humanly possible, but they're not going that far. And so we started asking that question too about, well, wouldn't that be tiring? And the answer is yes. So when we start to look at, well, people who aren't sprinters, who are accomplished but who are more long-distance runners, that's what we find that they do, is that they're using that narrowed attention strategy strategically.

And it increases in use. They use it more often as the race progresses. And they really start to do this major switch at about the halfway point of, say, a 10-kilometer run. So people who are seasoned runners, they really start making a switch with what they're looking at about halfway through.

And that's where they more often, more frequently, and are more intentionally adopting a narrowed focus of attention, when they're in the last couple miles of a run, when maybe their resources are starting to get more thin, maybe their motivation is starting to fade. That tipping point in the middle is with any kind of goal where people struggle the most.

And that's when they're doubling down on a strategy that they know to be effective. So at first, longer-distance runners are not using that narrowed strategy. They're looking more expansively, because I think that-- well, first of all, distraction is a thing. It's useful. Not necessarily that they're distracting themselves, because people are still trying to hold pace and jostle among probably a more concentrated group of runners.

But it is a strategy that they use and then wean off of as the race goes through. And it's particularly effective when we're looking for that last push, the last push to get over the finish line, when you might be literally neck and neck with somebody that you're trying to just beat out.

Or when you're most tired, but you know that last push, you don't want to drop off. And when you want to push through hard through that finish line, that's when people are using it at its peak level of intensity.