Change is hard. New Year's resolutions almost always fail. But at The Energy Project,
we have developed a way of making changes that has proved remarkably
powerful and enduring, both in my own life and for the corporate clients
to whom we teach it.
Our method is grounded in the recognition that human being are
creatures of habit. Fully 95 percent of our behaviors are habitual, or
occur in response to a strong external stimulus. Only 5 percent of our choices are consciously self-selected.
In 1911, the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead intuited what
researchers would confirm nearly a century later. "It is a profoundly
erroneous truism," he wrote, "that we should cultivate the habit of
thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is
the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important
operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Most of us wildly overvalue our will and discipline. Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation.
In order to make change that lasts, we must rely less on our
prefrontal cortex, and more on co-opting the primitive parts of our
brain in which habits are formed.
Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the
form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch,
and the more they recur automatically
What follows are our six key steps to making change that lasts:
1. Be Highly Precise and Specific .
Imagine a typical
New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for
failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in
advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on
each of them.
Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular work out Monday,
Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 30 minutes. If something beyond your
control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default
to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9 a.m.
Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.
2. Take on one new challenge at a time.
Over the
years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging
from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important
thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes and then
taking a break to spending 90 minutes talking with my wife about the
previous week on Saturday mornings.
In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus.
Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to
stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.
Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially.
3. Not too much, not too little.
The most obvious
mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we
bite off more than it turns out we can chew. Imagine that after doing
no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and
launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances
are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit
after a few sessions.
It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So
you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at
it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several
weeks, and your motivation fades.
The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone.
The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough
that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself
unwilling to stay at it.
4. What we resist persists.
Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip
cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of
time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we
enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of
self control.
The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming
emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your
full attention.
The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email,
the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times,
and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food
you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what
you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The
less you have to think about what to do, the more successful you're
likely to be.
5. Competing Commitments.
We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've
always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change."
Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is
invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen
"competing" commitment not to change.
Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think
about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're
currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If
you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example,
your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive
and available to those emailing you.
For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing
commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I
get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will
prompt?"
6. Keep the faith.
Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at
times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times
before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you
from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will
succeed, and probably without multiple failures.
