1. Introduction and the Olympic Podium Effect
David Sage: Welcome to the Sage Solutions podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage, and I'm a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions.
A few years after the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, three psychologists sat down with the Olympics television footage. They spent their time watching the medalists' faces. Victoria Medvec, Scott Madey, and Thomas Gilovich had a series of viewers rate how happy each medalist looked, right after the event and again on the podium. On average, the bronze medalist looked happier than the silver medalists. Third place looked happier than second.
Now, that's pretty counterintuitive. Personally, I would much rather get the silver medal at the Olympics than the bronze. But in reality, that's not how people felt. The researchers traced it to what each athlete was comparing themselves to. Silver was thinking about the gold that they almost had. But bronze was thinking about how close they came to having no medal at all. They were both standing on the same podium, but each were running different what-ifs.
And that little what-if machine, the one running in your head right now, is also one of the best creative tools that you own. You just have to know which way to point it. Today, we're talking about counterfactual thinking. Now, I understand it's a clunky term, so don't let it scare you off. Counterfactual thinking just means counter to the facts, and it's anytime that your mind builds a version of events that didn't actually happen.
"If only I'd left 5 minutes earlier". "What if I'd taken that other job?". "At least nobody got hurt". Another term for this is thinking in hypotheticals. Everyone runs these little thought experiments, right? And most of the time we don't even notice.
But when left on autopilot, they tend to go one of two ways. They either drag you back into the same painful replay, or they hand you the information that you need to do better next time. What decides which way it goes is mostly in how we aim it. So by the end of this episode, you'll understand the two dials that control your what-if thinking and how to point it forward to come up with new ideas. And you'll have two practices you can start tonight.
But before we get into it, our goal with this podcast is to share free, helpful tools with you and anyone you know who is looking to improve their life. So take action: subscribe and share this podcast with them.
2. The Mechanics of Counterfactual Thinking
Let's start with where this comes from. In 1982, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described something they called the simulation heuristic. Translation: your mind runs quick simulations of how things could have gone, and the easier an alternative is to imagine, the more it shapes how you feel about what really happened. That's the silver medalist. For them, gold was right there, close enough to taste it, so the simulation runs itself.
The researcher who's since built the most on this is Neal Roese, a psychologist at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. With his colleague Kai Epstude, he laid out what they call the functional theory of counterfactual thinking. You can forget the name; the idea is that your mind mostly generates what-ifs to prepare you for next time.
Now, four features of how the machine works:
- Number one: It switches on by itself for most of us, most of the time, usually after a bad outcome or a near miss.
- Number two: It tends to grab onto things that felt controllable. Your own choice gets replayed a lot more than the weather or the other driver.
- Number three: It has a direction. Upward means imagining how things could have gone better; downward means imagining how things could have gone worse.
- Number four: It has structure, too. Hang onto that one, because it's where the creativity comes in.
Upward counterfactuals sting, but sometimes that's where the lesson lives. Downward ones feel better, and shades of gray here—they have their place, which we'll get to—they just don't tell you much about what to change. Roese tested this in work published in 1994, and he sorted these thoughts along exactly those two lines: direction and structure. People who generated upward what-ifs about a disappointing exam reported stronger intentions to do the thing that led to success. In another experiment using word puzzles, people who generated upward what-ifs improved more on the next round.
Now, these were lab studies, mostly with college students, so hold the details loosely because the real world isn't always so neat and tidy. But if the system is built to help, why does it so often feel like torture? Okay, torture is probably the wrong word—maybe a little intense—but it can feel pretty miserable.
The reason is because a useful what-if is a two-step move. Step one is imagining the better version. Step two is pulling out what you would do differently and carrying it forward. Most of us run step one on repeat and never get to step two. Let's say a presentation at work went badly. Step one is like, "Ugh, I should have practiced more". But step two would sound like, "Next time, I will practice out loud twice the night before so that I'm more prepared". Without step two, all you get is that sting, sometimes over and over and over.
Step one on a loop with no step two is what we call rumination. And to be honest, this one gets me too. I have a natural tendency towards being a chronic optimizer, and that cuts both ways. The same wiring that's great at spotting the better version of something is also really good at replaying what was suboptimal over and over and over.
We touched on part of this back in episode 71, "Dealing with Disappointment," where we talked about disappointment carrying information. An upward what-if is often where the information is hiding. Now, the standard advice here is: don't dwell on the past. But that asks you to switch off something your mind does automatically, and it throws away the most useful data that you've got. You're not going to out-willpower a reflex; that's just not how it works. So if you've lost an evening replaying a conversation, nothing is wrong with you. It's okay; you're human. That's just the system doing half of its job. The other half, step two, belongs to you, and nobody else can do it for you.
3. Directing the Mind: Structure and Perspective
So this brings us to the second dial. Direction mostly shapes how a what-if feels. Structure can nudge you towards creative thinking or towards analytical thinking. And for me, that's the most useful part of this whole topic. So let's ground this in something real.
Think about tasting a sauce. If you've spent real time in a kitchen, you'll know that a tasting spoon might just be the most important tool in your arsenal. You taste, you adjust, you taste again. Every what-if you run is a taste of a dish you already made. And when something's off, you can ask two very different kinds of questions:
- What if I'd added something—maybe a squeeze of lemon, more salt, or a little heat?
- What if I'd left something out, or put in less—maybe pulling back the garlic or leaving out the cream would have fixed it?
Psychologists call those additive and subtractive counterfactuals. That's the second dial: structure.
Now let's look at the science. In 2007, Keith Markman, Matthew Lindberg, Laura Kray, and Adam Galinsky published a paper in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They wanted to know whether the shape of your what-if changes the way you think afterward. So they nudged people toward additive thoughts ("If only I had done this") or subtractive ones ("If only I hadn't done this"). Then everybody got a problem to work on. Across the four studies, two things showed up:
- People in the additive mindset did better on creative generation tasks. Think brainstorming, where the goal is coming up with new possibilities.
- People in the subtractive mindset did better on analytical problem-solving. This is troubleshooting: figuring out how pieces relate and which one is the problem.
The explanation that they came up with is that adding widens your attention, so your mind goes out looking for ingredients. Subtracting tends to focus it, so your mind starts checking how the pieces fit together. You need both; they just do different jobs. You don't need to remember the labels. Adding brings something new into the mix; subtracting can make it less overwhelming. And you've got two settings to choose from:
- Upward and additive: "Could I have done better if I added to this?" That's your growth and idea setting, the one for creative ruts and planning the next attempt.
- Upward and subtractive: "What if I hadn't done that?" Let's call it your debugging setting, great for finding that one mistake that's getting in your way.
And then there's downward: the "at least I wasn't worse" setting. Remember the bronze medalist? "At least" thinking is what you want when the outcome was mostly outside of your control. And just to be clear, if it was in your control, reaching for "at least" every time can let you off the hook a little too early. "At least I didn't" or "at least I got this" can be a helpful perspective of reality for boosting your mood or looking at something more positively—a frame, if you will.
But the other fundamental that this lines up with is focusing on your locus of control. When something is outside of your locus of control, worrying or ruminating about what you could have done different isn't very helpful. In that case, it's better to focus on that "at least" downward framing. This is why I often say, stop worrying about what you can't control and focus on what you can—focus on your locus. When there's nothing left to fix, the downward dial lets you give yourself a break and some compassion. But when there is something to fix, upward and additive is where the new ideas line up.
To go back to the tasting spoon analogy, you can't taste your way to a better sauce without changing something. If you just keep taking bites, it's going to taste the same.
4. Forward Thinking, Actionable Exercises, and Closing
Now, almost everything that we've talked about so far when it comes to counterfactual thinking has pointed backward, at stuff that has already happened. And here's the really important part: you can aim the same machine at the present or even the future. Look at anything that already exists and ask: "What if this were different? What if I were different? What if this system were different? What if our future was different?"
These questions have a natural follow-up: "How could we make it different?" Remember how an upward what-if can easily turn into a next-time plan? There's a similar line of logic here aimed forward, and that move sits under a lot of creative thinking. By imagining how things could be different with counterfactual thinking, it opens up our imagination to think of new creative outcomes and even solutions. We can then follow it up with something like first principles by breaking a problem down to its fundamental truths and building back up, because there are often systems, things, and ideas that have built-in truths that don't have to be there. So by building it back up from scratch after doing some counterfactual thinking, we can come up with totally new, novel ideas.
There's a classic puzzle from a psychologist named Karl Duncker called the candle problem. You get a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and some matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so it burns without dripping wax on the table. Remember: a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and some matches. How would you do it? Now, there is an answer, and that answer is to dump out the tacks and pin the box to the wall as a little shelf. Most people get stuck because they only see the box as a container.
So let's bring it back to a real-world example. In 1943, Edwin Land was on vacation in Santa Fe with his three-year-old daughter. He took her picture, and she asked why she couldn't see it right away. Land went for a walk, and by his own account, within about an hour he'd worked out the basic idea that became the Polaroid camera. Warren Berger tells that story in his book, A More Beautiful Question, and frames Land's next thought as: "What if you could put a darkroom inside the camera?" From interviews with creative thinkers, Berger maps a pattern of three stages: Why, What if, and How. We can use this as a practitioner's map: the "what if" opens the options, and the "how" makes one of them real.
Everything around you that somebody built was once a thing that never was. We live in a world created by people's ideas. Now look, most of your what-ifs will go nowhere, and that's normal. You only need one good one, plus the willingness to ask how, to potentially change your life, someone else's life, or even in some cases, the world.
So how do we put all of this to work? I've got two practices for you, and you can start the first one tonight.
Practice 1: The Two-Step What-If
Use it after any setback, big or small. Within 24 hours of the setback, while it's still fresh, sit up, take a seat with something to write. Take however long it takes for you—let's say 5 minutes—and set a timer if you're worried about time.
- Step one: Write one upward additive what-if. Start with "If only I had..." and then finish the sentence.
- Step two: Turn it into a next-time plan: "Next time when this happens, I will do this". Make it specific enough that you know whether you did it or not.
It might sound something like this:
- "If only I'd asked a question before I started arguing my point".
- "Next time I disagree with someone in a meeting, I'll ask one clarifying question before I give my take".
That's it: two sentences. Then ask how much of this outcome was actually yours to control. If the honest answer is "not much," then add one line that starts with "At least..." and that can kind of be your recovery setting.
Now, the most likely way that this would go wrong is the replay coming back later. You're driving or lying awake, and the same scene starts rolling again. When that happens, ask yourself whether there's a new step two hiding in it. If there is, take note of it, or if you can, write it down. If there isn't, you can tell yourself: "I already pulled the lesson out of this," and think about the note that you wrote. The note is proof that the lesson is saved, which will help your brain move on.
Practice 2: The What-If, Then How
This is the forward-thinking one for creative problems and for anything you've always done the same way. This could be a stalled project, a business idea, a process at work, or even how your family handles parts or all of a holiday.
- Step one: Write down the thing and one honest why—why is it done this way?
- Step two: Set a timer for 5 to 10 minutes (10 being more ideal) and ask, "What if this were different?" in as many different ways as you can. Primarily lead with adding instead of subtracting. What if it also had a person, or a step, or a deadline, or a constraint? These counterfactual hypotheticals will be a combination of adding things, a couple subtractions, and switches or changes. Write down every answer with no judgment; weird ideas count.
- Step three: Circle the top one to three that feel like they actually have something to them.
- Step four: Take maybe 5 minutes and ask, "How could we make this real?" This is where the majority of the subtracting earns its rent: what would have to go or change for this to work?
Let's say you run a monthly game night, and the same four people keep showing up. Why does it always start at 7:00 with no food? Ten minutes of what-ifs might give you a potluck, a theme night, a teaching table for new players, or some other new creative idea. Some of those might be bad, but one or more could be great. Then you ask how: If it's the teaching table, who runs it? Which game? And what's the one text you send this week to make it happen?
Order matters here. My read of the Markman findings is that adding widens your options, and subtracting helps you evaluate them. Run subtraction first, and you'll prune ideas before they have a real chance to grow, which tends to stifle your creativity. The most likely way that this might fail is switching to subtraction—especially of the additive ideas—too early. You'll hear it as, "Oh, that won't work," or "That's dumb". Doesn't matter: write the idea down anyways. You can deal with that part later in the "how" round, because that's what that round is for.
Now, there are going to be plenty of times where you do this and, frankly, when you evaluate the ideas, there isn't something there. The current practice is the best, and that's okay too. But building this hypothetical thinking machine, this counterfactual thinking muscle, helps you get better at it in the myriad of ways that we've described for it to be useful. And none of this is going to rewire overnight. Life is like a muscle, so take action and build it. With enough reps, you'll likely start catching yourself mid-replay and reach for the right next step without much effort.
So as we wrap this podcast up, I want to circle back to that tasting spoon. Taking a taste only makes a difference when you learn something, or make a change, or an addition. Tonight, just pick something that you haven't really examined and start thinking about it in a counterfactual way, even if it's silly and ridiculous: What would it be like if gravity stopped existing? Just the fact that it makes your imagination start thinking about all of the implications of that change helps you think about things in a different way. Ask yourself, "What if this were different?" and follow up with "How?"
And remember: you are enough, and you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence, and resilience. Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions podcast. Your time is valuable, and I'm so glad you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more sage advice.
One last thing: the legal language. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching client relationship is formed. It is not intended as a substitute for the personalized advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.
