Give the GROW Model's Goal Stage Something With Weight

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise asks for two portraits and refuses abstractions in both. You write, in present tense and in sensory detail, a version of yourself some distance out — commonly a year, sometimes five or twenty — in which things have gone about as well as they realistically could. Then you write the version in which nothing changes and the current trajectory just runs. The discipline is the specificity: "healthier" is a category and does no work, while "still able to get up the hill behind the house with my daughter when I am sixty, without stopping twice" is an image you can check yourself against. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius introduced the term in 1986 — possible selves being the particular people you could become, hope to become, and fear becoming — and their claim was that these images function as the part of a self-concept that actually reaches forward into behaviour, rather than as pleasant or unpleasant daydreams. The exercise ends by setting both portraits against where you stand today and reading the distance in both directions, which is the part people skip and the part that does the work.

GROW Model

The GROW Model is a structure for a coaching conversation, developed in Britain in the 1980s by Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and John Whitmore, and made widely known by Whitmore's Coaching for Performance. The letters are the sequence, and the sequence is the method. Goal: what do you actually want, both from the next half hour and from the larger thing. Reality: what is true right now — facts rather than opinions, what you have already tried, what actually happened when you did. Options: everything you could do, generated widely and without evaluating any of them yet, because judging while generating kills the generating. Will, sometimes Way Forward: what you will do, by when, and often a check on how likely you honestly think it is on a scale of one to ten, followed by what would move that number up. The rule that holds the whole thing together is that the coach asks and does not advise. The answers have to be the person's own, because options someone hands you are options you can hand back.

What you get out of pairing them

The failure this pairing addresses is specific and anyone who has coached, or been coached, more than a few times has watched it happen. You ask the Goal question. The answer comes back smooth, complete and dead — "I want to be better at delegating," "I want to get on top of my health" — and it is dead because it is a sentence the person has said before, in this room and others, and nothing in them moved when they said it. The rest of the conversation is then conducted at that temperature. The Options are sensible. The commitment is agreed. Nothing happens between now and next session, and neither of you is surprised.

What a possible self supplies is material with a charge on it. The difference between "get on top of my health" and describing the specific morning at sixty when you cannot do the thing you have always done is not a difference of wording. One is a category; the other is a scene, and scenes produce reactions. Bring that into the Goal stage and the conversation starts from something the person has an actual response to, which changes what they are willing to put in the Options list — people generate cautious options for goals they do not feel and ambitious ones for goals they do.

The return trip is worth as much. The exercise on its own has a well-known ending: a vivid piece of writing, filed, revisited occasionally, never acted on — the difference between a vision board and a plan being that nobody ever asked the vision board what happens on Thursday. Running the gap through Reality, Options and Will is what forces the image to cash out into one thing you have committed to by a named day. Neither half is unusual. It is the specific combination of felt material and structural pressure that most people are missing one side of.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What GROW Model rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Self generated options increase commitment observational studies
  Options a person generates themselves produce more ownership and commitment than options handed to them.
• Structured reflection clarifies goals observational studies
  Walking through Goal and Reality in a fixed sequence clarifies what a person actually wants and where they currently stand.

Where they actually meet

The Possible Selves Exercise rests on the claim that a specific, felt image of who you could become — not a category like 'healthier' but a scene, like waking up at sixty still able to hike with your kids, or waking up isolated because you let every friendship lapse — motivates present action more than an abstract goal does, because the gap between the current self and that imagined self becomes something to close rather than something to merely intend. GROW rests on a claim about structure rather than content: walking a fixed sequence — what do you want (Goal), what's actually true right now (Reality), what could you do (Options), what will you actually do (Will) — clarifies a wish into a decision regardless of what the wish is. Put together, the possible self supplies the emotionally loaded material that GROW's Goal stage otherwise takes as a flat statement, and GROW supplies the path the possible self otherwise lacks: what was a vivid but static picture becomes a target you are working a specific plan toward.

The principle underneath both

Both practices work by refusing to let a wanted future float free of the present facts. That refusal is the entire mechanism, and both build it into their procedure rather than leaving it to the person's good intentions.

The possible-selves writing does it by construction: you cannot finish the exercise without holding the hoped-for portrait, the feared portrait, and where you actually stand today, all in view at once. The distance between them is not a byproduct — it is the output. GROW does it structurally by putting Reality immediately after Goal and refusing to skip it. A person who has just named what they want will nearly always try to jump straight to what to do about it, and the sequence does not let them. They have to say out loud what is actually happening now, in facts, including what they have already tried and how that went, before any option may be generated.

Held together, the shared move is this: name the wanted state precisely, name the current state honestly, and hold both at the same time without collapsing into either. Collapse toward the future and you get fantasy — enjoyable, motivating for about a day, and productive of nothing. Collapse toward the present and you get resignation, which is the same paralysis with worse feelings attached. This is not a discovery of either tradition. Gabriele Oettingen's research programme on what she calls mental contrasting — vividly imagining a wished-for outcome and then deliberately naming the present obstacle standing in the way — has repeatedly found that either half alone does little and the two together change behaviour, which is about as direct an empirical statement of this principle as exists.

What that makes the real goal

If holding both states at once is what does the work, then the aim, stated without reference to coaching or to writing exercises, is: keep the wanted future and the actual present in view together for long enough that a specific next action falls out of the distance between them.

The three words carrying the weight are together, specific and falls out. Together, because taken separately each state is inert — the future alone is a daydream, the present alone is a report. Specific, because a next action that could be described as "work on it" was never derived from anything and will not survive the week. And falls out, because the action is meant to be produced by the gap rather than chosen from a menu of reasonable-sounding activities; if you could have written the action down before doing the exercise, the exercise did not do anything.

Once the objective is put that way, it stops belonging to coaching. It is what a decent quarterly review is trying to do to a team, what an honest conversation about a relationship is trying to do to two people, and what a good doctor does in ten minutes with a set of test results and a question about what you actually want the next ten years to look like. The Possible Selves Exercise and GROW are two pieces of equipment for the same job, one strong at making the future vivid and one strong at making the present honest and the next step real.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Other practices chase the same target, and several carry evidence that neither of these two has on its own.

WOOP is the most directly relevant, and if you want the tested version of this pairing, it is this rather than either of the practices on this page. Oettingen's four steps are Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan: name what you want, picture the best outcome in detail, then deliberately name the internal obstacle most likely to stop you, and finish with an if-then plan attached to that obstacle. It has been through randomized studies in diet, exercise, academic performance and stress management, with modest but repeated effects. Its structure is unmistakably Goal plus Reality plus a commitment, run solo in about ten minutes.

The miracle question, from the solution-focused brief therapy developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, does the future half in conversation and does it more skilfully than most coaching does: suppose overnight the problem was gone, and you woke without knowing — what would be the first small thing you would notice, and who else would notice, and what would they see you doing. It is then immediately followed by scaling — where are you on nought to ten today, and what would put you one point higher — which is the same contrast move performed in a single sitting. Solution-focused approaches carry a reasonable outcome literature, more than coaching models generally do.

Locke and Latham's goal-setting research is the closest thing to a hard finding in this territory: across several hundred studies, specific and difficult goals produced better performance than "do your best," but only where people got feedback on where they actually stood. That last clause is the point. Specificity without a live read on the present does not deliver, which is an empirical argument for exactly the sequence GROW imposes. And Laura King's best-possible-selves writing — twenty minutes a day for four days on a future in which everything went as well as it could — is a tested version of the writing half, with a 2001 randomized study reporting improvements in mood and later in health measures, though it was never designed to produce action and does not.

A tradition that already does this

GROW's own lineage already contains the imagery half, which is easy to miss because the model as it is usually taught has almost nothing to say about it.

John Whitmore came to coaching through Timothy Gallwey's Inner Game work and taught the Inner Game in Britain before Coaching for Performance existed. Gallwey's method, laid out in The Inner Game of Tennis in 1974, is explicitly not instructional: rather than telling a player to change their grip, the coach has them hold a clear picture of the outcome they want and then observe, without judging, what is actually happening — where the ball hits the racket, what the body is doing. Picture the wanted state, then watch the present state without flinching from it, and let the correction emerge. That is the same two-step this page is describing, arrived at on a tennis court, and it is one of GROW's direct ancestors.

The other precedent is the solution-focused work at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, where from the late 1970s de Shazer and Berg were building the vivid-future description and the current-position scale into a single formal sequence in therapy — earlier than Coaching for Performance, in a different field, with no claim of influence in either direction. Two traditions independently landing on the same sequence is weak evidence that it is a real pattern rather than a house style. It is not evidence that adding a written possible-selves exercise to a GROW conversation works, which no one has tested.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to enhance the GROW Model

GROW's Goal stage typically starts with a fairly flat question — what do you want to achieve — and the answer that comes back is often something a person has said before without much charge behind it. Bringing a possible self into that stage changes the material: instead of 'I want to get healthier,' the coaching conversation opens with the hoped-for image (still hiking at sixty) and the feared one (a stroke at fifty-five that ends the option) sitting side by side, and the Goal that gets named afterward is pulled from that gap rather than stated in the abstract. The concrete move: before GROW's Goal question, spend five minutes writing one hoped-for and one feared future self in specific, sensory detail, then let the Goal stage name what would need to be true to move toward the first and away from the second.

Using the GROW Model to enhance the Possible Selves Exercise

A possible self, written and then set aside, tends to function like a vision board — vivid, occasionally revisited, rarely acted on — because the exercise itself stops at the image and doesn't ask what changes tomorrow. Running the gap between current and possible self through GROW's Reality, Options, and Will stages forces the image to cash out: what's actually true about where you stand relative to it, what specific moves are available, and which one you're committing to, tied to a cue-and-response pairing — an implementation intention, the pre-decided 'if this happens, I do that' link that lets a plan fire without relying on willpower in the moment. The concrete move: after writing the possible self, run its central gap through GROW's last three stages in one sitting, ending with one if-then commitment rather than leaving the exercise as a finished piece of writing.

You just wrote the version of yourself who let every friendship lapse

You've written the feared self — sixty, comfortable, and essentially alone because every friendship quietly died from lack of tending — and it lands harder than you expected. Left there, that image is just uncomfortable. Instead, name the Reality: which specific friendship has already gone quiet this year. Name an Option: reach out to one person this week, not 'reconnect with people' in general. Name the Will: text them by Friday. Then pair it with a cue — 'when I close my laptop tonight, I send the text' — so the feared self you just sat with turns into one message sent this week instead of a feeling you had and moved past.

When this is worth reaching for

You'll know the Goal stage needs help when it keeps coming back flat — the answer is the same well-formed sentence given last time, and neither of you feels anything when it's said. That's the diagnostic: the conversation doesn't need better questioning technique, it needs different material, and fifteen minutes of writing beforehand is the cheapest way to get some. It's also the right move when the stated goal is audibly somebody else's, a target inherited from a manager or a parent, or a career chosen at twenty-two and never revisited, and when there's a long horizon with no external deadline to supply pressure, or plenty of vision that stalls every time at Options because the vision has never been put next to the present honestly.

Where this does not apply

GROW's Reality and Options stages are built as a conversation, usually with a coach asking questions that a person wouldn't think to ask themselves, and running the model solo tends to lose some of that outside pressure-testing. The Possible Selves Exercise is introspective and can turn into rumination on the feared self without something to interrupt it. Where there's no second person or structured process to move the conversation forward, the vivid image and the four-stage structure can both stay stuck at the same point they'd get stuck at separately — a limit worth naming rather than papering over.

What the evidence does and does not support

The implementation intention that closes GROW's Will stage carries strong randomized-trial support on its own. The rest of what's listed here — concrete goals over vague ones, future-self continuity, self-generated options, structured reflection — sits at observational or mechanistic grades: plausible accounts with some supporting data, not controlled trials of the specific claim. No study has tested the Possible Selves Exercise combined with GROW against either used alone, and the account above of how they reinforce each other is a reading of the mechanisms, not a measured result.