Todd Suomela's Library tagged habit →  View Popular, Search in Google

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails. You immediately focus your attention on what you are doing, and you stop doing it. No rage, no blaming yourself, no negative emotions. You just stop, and you focus all the attention you can on the act of stopping. You move your arm down, focusing your attention on the act of movement, on the feeling of your arm going down, away from your mouth. That’s it. You can go back to whatever you were doing.

Five minutes later, you notice yourself biting your nails again. You calmly repeat the procedure again.

By doing this, you are training yourself to perform a new behavior – the “stop and put the hand down” behavior – which is itself triggered by the nail-biting behavior. As you go along, you will get better and better at noticing that you have started to bite your nails. You will also get better and better at stopping and putting your hand down. After a while, this will become semi-automatic; you’ll notice that your hand went to your mouth, a nail touched your tooth, and the hand went back down before you could do anything. Don’t stop training: focus your attention on the “stop and drop” part of the action.

After a while, the nail-biting simply goes away. Of course, the more complex and more ingrained a habit is, the more effort and time will be needed to break it. But for most people, even strong habits can be relatively quickly weakened, or redirected into less destructive behaviors.

The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?  

  Kotter has hit on a crucial insight. "Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings," he says. "This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."  

  Unfortunately, that kind of emotional persuasion isn't taught in business schools, and it doesn't come naturally to the technocrats who run things -- the engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, accountants, and managers who pride themselves on disciplined, analytical thinking. There's compelling science behind the psychology of change -- it draws on discoveries from emerging fields such as cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience -- but its insights and techniques often seem paradoxical or irrational.  

The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. "Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid." Lakoff says that's one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don't understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.  

  The frame that dominates our thinking about how work should be organized -- the military chain-of-command model -- is extremely hard to break. When new employees start at W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabrics, they often refuse to believe that the company doesn't have a hierarchy with job titles and bosses. It just doesn't fit their frame. They can't accept it. It usually takes at least several months for new hires to begin to understand Gore's reframed notion of the workplace, which relies on self-directed employees making their own choices about joining one another in egalitarian small teams.  

Hogwash!  People do change.  But there's a time lag before the changes show up in their lives, and in the meantime, they can also change back!

 

So if you want to change your life, you need to do three things:

 
• Focus on changing your actions, not your circumstances 
• Accept and plan for your weaknesses, instead of toughing it out 
• Periodically review your results to fine-tune or re-think your approach if needed