A scientifically proven method to overcome obstacles and make choices that lead us closer to our goals.

WITH A FOREWORD BY MARTINA NAVRATILOVA

What do weight gain, poor employee engagement, and climate change all have in common? All three are persistent problems for which solutions are known and readily available. Yet, on an individual and collective level, we continually make choices that lead us not closer to but further away from our stated objectives. Whether we choose the burger and fries over the salad, top-down management over collaboration, or leniency over rigor in combatting climate change, it all comes down to the same thing.

The Choice Point. The moment at which we each choose to take an action that we know will undermine our success, but we do it anyway.

The Choice Point explains how we experience thousands of thoughts every day: 80 percent are negative, while only 5 percent are new thoughts. We make most of our decisions within two seconds, using mental autopilot systems that we've built through years of experiences, and some of our thoughts (like quitting during a challenge) can compromise our goals.

But there's a strategy to change this: Functional Imagery Training (FIT).

FIT teaches us how to pick the thoughts that deserve our attention, and how to stop the other, negative thoughts from impacting our actions. Through FIT, we can pause decisions that would typically conflict with our goals, lengthen our Choice Point, and go from passenger to driver of our own minds.

Initially developed in 2005 by academics in the UK and Australia, with formal principles emerging through research in 2018, FIT blends motivational interviewing with imagery into a user-friendly model so we can learn, adapt, and adjust our behavior to go beyond what we think is possible.
About the Author: Joanna Grover, LCSW, is an executive coach with nineteen years of experience as a cognitive behavioral therapist specializing in anxiety. She first encountered FIT when it helped her recover from a horse-riding accident. After witnessing first-hand the effectiveness of this strategy in a client's weight loss journey, she felt even more committed to the work. She subsequently became the first person in the US to be certified in FIT. Since 2019, Jo has used FIT mainly in an individual context, where she's worked with top leaders at the US Department of Commerce, Olympic athletes, and C-suite executions at corporations such as Citi, IBM, and KPMG. She is a board certified coach and member of the International Coaching Federation and the Harvard Institute of Coaching. Joanna lives in Miami, FL.

Jonathan Rhodes, PhD, is a Chartered Psychologist (British Psychological Society) and a published researcher and lecturer specializing in cognitive psychology. After working with athletes at the 2012 Olympic Games, Jonathan decided to research strategies that change mindset, train individual and cultural resilience, and enhance performance. Ten years later, Jonathan concluded that imagery is the most effective route to achieving goals for individuals and teams. To get to this conclusion, Jonathan helped develop FIT by teaching individuals how to master their imagination, subsequently raising performance levels of athletes who went on to compete at the Olympic Games, in Premiership football and rugby, and with a multitude of athletes competing in other sports such as with Red Bull Cliff Divers, and America's Cup sailors. In 2019, Jonathan partnered with the British Army to develop the British Army Commando Resilience Training Program, which has increased recruits passing the All-Arms Commando Course by 44 percent. He lives in Plymouth, UK.