“If you can dream it, you can do it”

Walt Disney’s famous quote relates more to our competition prep than we might think. This month, Christian Schofield explores storyboards and visualisation

- Christian Schofield

Who would disagree with Walt Disney? He had a fantastic dream that led him to amass more Academy Awards (22 Oscars) than anyone else in the film industry. However, if we stop and think for a moment, we will probably accept that our dreams and decisions for the future don’t always work out as well as Walt Disney’s. Every day, we make decisions that require us to predict how we will behave in the future, but our predictions are not always accurate. In seeking to understand why this occurs, behavioural economists labelled the phenomenon ‘projection bias’. Projection bias becomes a problem when we make decisions based on our current emotional state and thinking, which is unlikely to align with a future emotional state or thinking.

This tricky concept is best described using an example with which we all will be familiar. If we go shopping when we are hungry, we are more likely to buy more food than we need and buy types of food we had not planned to buy: junk food. We incorrectly anticipate our future hunger preferences based on how we feel in the shop. We do this for all types of temptations and tend to overestimate our ability to resist them.

If we transfer this concept to shooting, we can probably think of some things that we plan to do, which never seem to get done. We plan to warm up, but end up eating a bacon sandwich with our mates. We plan to view the targets before we shoot, but somehow we end up rushing to start having done no preparation.