Behavior Change IRL: Change the Game
Dennis Adsit
Coach for Extraordinary First 100 Days Transitions, Building High-Performing Teams, Nudging Cultures
This is the eighth installment in my series on Behavior Change in Real Life.
Here are the other links:
This series is exploring all the approaches to behavior change I have encountered and leveraged in fifty years of individual and organizational work.
The approaches in this Change the Game installment do not take your desired behavior change as a given.?
Change the Game
All the approaches so far have taken the behavior change you say you want as “a given.” The status quo is unacceptable and the new behavior or goal you want to create, or the person you are trying to become is obviously better and obviously what is needed.?
And the motivation for creating this “new you” is coming from a good place. Meaning the motivations are not coming out of some neurosis or obsession or other unconscious psychological material.
The approaches in this Change the Game installment do not take your desired behavior change as a given.? They seek to re-frame and re-vision how you look at where you are and what you need to do next, and to consider whether you might be better served by something altogether different than the objective you currently have in mind.
You could argue that getting really clear about where you are and what you should do belongs in the very first section…the Start Before You Start section.? I think that is right...that is where this belongs.
But in terms of organizing and presenting these 25 approaches to behavior change, I thought it would be better to just assume whatever behavioral direction you had chosen was right and talk about all the ways you could help bring it about up front and leave the approaches that seek to re-frame your objective until the end.? Register any complaints about that decision in the comments.
In this section:
Unfold the Process
Process-oriented Psychology (also known as Process Work) was developed by former Jungian psychologist Arnold Mindell.?
Process Work has one of, if not the most multi-faceted and unified models of the forces shaping individuals and their behavior.? It also teaches a coherent and consistent way to work with those forces, integrate them and choose optimal next directions for yourself.??
Because of Process Work’s depth, range of applications, and integrated approach, I am going to go into a little more detail and work through an example related to behavior change.
Here are some of the dimensions Process-oriented Psychology (aka Process Work) operates on:
Process Work proceeds in an integrated fashion on all those levels. What information and messages lie in these just-below-awareness experiences?? What do they say about who and what I am and what the best next direction is for me to continue to evolve in?
What immediately impressed me about Process Work was its breadth…how the same principles, frameworks, and in some cases, interventions apply whether you are working with an individual, two people in relationship, a small group or team, or a large group event, and even in scenes with highly polarized perspectives.
I admire Process Work's willingness to be iconoclastic and not just serve the often consensus-reality, “mainstream” direction of a client’s egoic identity that was honed by forces?they are often not aware of.
For individual work, the way Process Work can change the game is that it doesn’t take a client’s targeted behavior change as a given. Before it tries to help you get to this new place you say you aspire to, it will help you examine why you don’t like where you are and why you want to engage in new behaviors.? It wants to help you examine and understand your motivations and to ensure there is an inner congruence with the new direction.
Let’s work through an example.? Say you have always pursued artistic forms of expression and graduated from college with a Fine Arts degree.? You’re a few years out of college.? You like what you are doing, but you are under-employed and your finances are tight.? Your father never liked your degree choice and is pushing you to “make something of yourself.”? You come from a family of lawyers and a social stratum where lawyers are respected.? You think maybe it is time to "get serious" (as your Dad says) and you decide you are going to go to Law school.? You know it is going to be hard and are now looking for a coach to help you get your head right for the road ahead and for ongoing support to keep you in the best possible position to succeed.
A traditional coach or therapist might just accept the Law School direction and start working with you to do what you asked them to do:? help you get through Law school.?
They might pull out all the stops and support you with a host of the approaches I have recommended in this series: visualizations, short- and long-term goals, structuring your environment, leveraging social and non-social rewards, study buddies, working with cognitive distortions and inner critics, reshaping your identity (“I am the kind of person who doesn’t quit and sees things through.”), tapping into some “I’ll-show-him” resentment towards Dad, etc.
A Process Worker would likely take a different approach.? They would pay attention to any subtle signals you were sending that might suggest you are not fully congruent with the Law school direction.? They might notice for example changes in your physiognomy and energy when talking about your art and how you look down when talking about Law school.
They don’t just follow the lead of the primary, ego-driven process.? They are on the lookout for "minority" voices and what is trying to become so they can help get to a decision all the parts of you can support.? They might start inquiring about and bringing attention to body symptoms, dreams, conflicts with a partner, and inner parts with a different agenda.??
A process worker doesn’t care whether you go to Law School or continue to work as an artist.? They care about allowing all the voices to be heard and inner consensus or congruence about the direction.
One possible intervention might be setting up a role play conversation with your father to help you sort through which issues are authentically yours, including your projections, and which parts are Dad’s hopes, fears, and un-lived life that he is projecting onto you.?
The result might help you take an actual stand with your father about continuing to live an artistic life so you are following your joy.? Another result might be re-framing the “tight finances” are part of the price you have to pay in the short term for living that joy.?
Amplifying the other just-below-conscious signals and unfolding your process could also lead you to encountering a deeper vision for what you truly desire.? It might actually not be as an artist, but continuing to be creative in something more lucrative.? Or it might in fact be going to law school, but not with the goal of being a practicing lawyer. Law school would instead be a stepping-stone to politics, where you would still be creating but out in the world instead of in the studio.?
None of this is knowable in advance.? It comes from following the flickering signals provided by the body, dreams, symptoms, conflicts, obsessions, disturbances, and longings.?
It requires you trusting yourself and/or the Process Worker trusting and believing in Life and caring for and carrying what is trying to become until you can carry it yourself.
I love the Process Work approach.? I have taken dozens of their workshops, and I worked with the founder of the Deep Democracy Institute for over a decade.?
I admire Process Work's willingness to be iconoclastic and not just serve the often consensus-reality, “mainstream” direction of a client’s egoic identity that was honed by forces?they are often not aware of.
If you are thinking, “Come on, can someone just help me get through Law school?” Process Work might not be the best approach, as it could easily result in you deciding to upset the apple cart (from the primary process’ perspective!) and head in a different direction.??
But, if you are ready to deeply examine?your motivations and to choose a direction around which you feel fully congruent,?there is no more integrated and effective approach for that exploration than Process-oriented Psychology.
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The Eye of the Beholder
Unshaming , an approach to working with yourself and others, was created by David Bedrick, a former graduate school classmate and friend.? David is a Process Work Diplomat. So on the one hand, his approach leverages all the tools described in the previous section and is somewhat redundant.
But I decided to include his Unshaming in this list of real life behavior change approaches because I think it adds an important meta-skill to approaching change. It brings more conscious awareness to 1) the way you look at yourself, 2) the way your coach looks at you and 3) the way you both look at the challenging behavior that you say you want to change.??
The alternative to seeing through a distortion is seeing with compassionate eyes.?
In the Unshaming model, events happen in our lives, from the quotidian to episodes of real trauma.? And those events can create hurts or wounds of varying degrees.
If the person experiencing a hurt or a wound is ‘witnessed’ by the person themself or a parent, friend, aid worker, or therapist, then much less psychic residue and scar tissue will be left behind to affect a person in the future.?
The word ‘witness’ has a very specific meaning…it means being seen, believed, and responded to with compassion and protection.? The person has to do that for themselves, or they have to have someone else do that witnessing for them.
Because if the wounding is not witnessed, “shame” enters in the form of the person beginning to deny and gaslight what happened to them.?
An inner voice or critic (back to Parts Work ) emerges inside the person that denies their experience, makes them wrong in the moment, and perhaps even begins to create a sense there is something fundamentally wrong with them.?
In this paradigm, shame is more than a feeling.? Unaddressed, it can insidiously become the way we look at ourselves.
So here is an example: someone says something unpleasant to you and you say, “Ouch. That doesn’t feel good. What you are saying is not OK.? Please stop.”
Then in this Unshaming paradigm, you have ‘witnessed’ yourself: you believed in your experience and responded with protection. This event may still hurt, but shame is less likely to enter the person’s view of themselves and affect them going forward.
But in a second scenario, say the same thing is said and you don’t respond at all.? And when you tell someone else about how it hurt you, they tell you “you’re overreacting and you should get over yourself.”? In other words, they deny your experience.
No ‘witnessing’ occurred in this second scenario...by you or by the other person.? The result is likely to be that shame starts to build… you start to doubt yourself and deny that experience and other experiences you have.? You might start to believe you are in fact too sensitive or too selfish.
Worse, you or any coach or therapist you work with might act on this view that something is wrong and needs to be fixed or cured.? You start to put plans in place to change your behavior, to be tougher, less sensitive, and you embark on a behavior change journey like what we have been discussing in this series.?
I say it is “worse” because the need-for-change view is based on a distortion, a denial of what happened to you and your experience of it.? The resulting actions might be fixing something that may not even be broken.
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The alternative to seeing through a distortion is seeing with compassionate eyes.? Eyes that see that what happened to you in the past was wrong.? Eyes that see there is nothing wrong with you and that your reaction sprang out of who you are or were at the time.?
Un-shaming then occurs, in part, by changing how you behold yourself.? When you or another can approach situations that occurred to you with curiosity and love, it opens a space for your unique gifts and expressions to be revealed.?
A change of direction, if any is even needed, can emerge from that love vs from a distorted vision of someone who is broken and needs to be changed.
Back to the Law School example, the first step might be bearing witness to the wounding that occurred from a father who repeatedly derided your gifts and the creative call the artist in you was responding to.?
When that wounding is seen and some of the anger is burned off or integrated, you might start to embrace your gifts and true longing, and then an array of outcomes become possible.?
The next step (going to law school or back to the artist life or something in between) is then a function of whether it serves a deeper view of yourself that sees the gifts in how you are.
As with Process-oriented Psychology, if you just want help getting through Law school, Unshaming might not be the right path or support for you.
But if you want to make sure Law school is a step that allows your unique expression to flourish, or if you feel “against” yourself, trying to fix something that some part of you feels is broken, or if you would like to develop a more compassionate way of looking at yourself and others, it absolutely is the right kind of support.
Play Infinite Games??
Finite games are games that have a specific beginning and end, with clearly defined rules and a predetermined outcome. The goal in a finite game is to win or achieve a specific objective within the confines of those rules.?
Examples of finite games include chess, soccer, video games, and getting the CMO title. Once the outcome is finalized, you can start the same game over or go find a new game.
Infinite games, on the other hand, are games that have no fixed beginning or end. They are characterized by ongoing play and evolving rules. The objective in an infinite game is not to win, but to continue the game and keep it going.?
The pursuit of knowledge, artistic expression, or environmental sustainability are some rather lofty examples of infinite games.?
But infinite games can be more prosaic as well.? How do we continue to understand customer needs more deeply to enable us to deliver greater value year after year?? How can I evolve as a CFO and become the kind of leader who develops the talent around me and who supports others to go on to become great CFOs themselves???
These games don't have winners or losers in the traditional sense but involve continuous engagement and a focus on the process rather than a specific outcome.
Finite and infinite games share some characteristics, such as the presence of rules, participation of players, and strategic decision-making. However, there are significant differences between them.??
One difference is mindset.? Finite games often involve a competitive win-lose mindset, where players focus on defeating opponents. In contrast, infinite games typically require a more cooperative or collaborative mindset, emphasizing long-term engagement.?
Infinite games also embrace long-term thinking and continuous improvement vs. short-term gains, immediate victories, and mortgaging the future actions seen in finite games.
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown." ~Carl Jung
Eight years ago, I had a client who was “fused” to his view that the world was “unfair,” that he was being slighted and treated differently than everyone else, and that his greatness and contributions were not being acknowledged.? He was distraught about performance reviews that were not completely glowing.? He had conflicts and gripes with every manager he ever had.??And his role gave him access to the Cap Table , a document which, in his mind, was proof his gifts and talents were not fairly compensated.
No amount of examining his story….no amount of letting the thought just be the thought…no amount of seeing how the opposite of his story might be true…no amount of playing with his Victim persona…no amount of examining the rewards he got from holding this world view…no mini-experiments…nothing I suggested could loosen his grip on his belief that the he was being slighted.??
Years later we caught up, and it is clear he is no longer “at the effect of” an unjust world and in an existential struggle with the Fairness monster.??
When we can’t de-fuse ourselves from our world view on our own, Time, experience, and maturation often have a way of loosening our grip on the beliefs that hold us back.
But in this case, what changed his worldview was neither time, experience, maturation, nor another coach.? It was a change in scope.
His role had been expanded to responsibilities that included a business development component, which presented new challenges.? This was a chance to be more integral to the business.? Moreover, the straight-up vertical learning curve he was going through lessened his tendency to compare himself to other functional peers.?
He was expanding his purely functional identity and now playing something more like an infinite game…markets to adapt to, competitors to study, company valuation approaches to learn, continually refining the BD process, understanding the continually evolving customer needs, etc.
The way in which moving from finite to infinite games literally and figuratively “changes the game,” reminds me of a quote of Carl Jung’s that I have always loved:
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’ […] was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”? ~Carl Jung
If we’re playing a finite game with clear winners and losers, sometimes all we can see is one objective.? In the midst of that paradigm, we set behavior change goals for ourselves, goals that we are sure are the key to winning at this finite game and thus our future happiness.
But finding infinite games, even finding infinite games within the finite game, can cause us to see and value the behaviors and skills we need to cultivate differently.
Find Your Purpose?
In the last section on Access the Deeper Pools of Motivation, I discussed finding a way to connect the work you are doing or the change you are making to a purpose to help add to your motivation to change.??
But some don’t want to find a purpose.? They want to find their purpose.? They want a sense of their life purpose, their calling.? What am I here for?? Where do the world’s needs intersect with my skills and deepest joys?
Clients, if finding your purpose is your longing, find a coach who specializes in this work.? Coaches, if this is work you want to do, don’t dabble.? This is not?traditional coaching.
Questions like this are in the realm of Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss” from the Power of Myth series.??
?“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”? ~Joseph Campbell
Following your bliss isn't just doing what’s pleasant like some kind of amoeba moving towards warmth, light, and food.?
It is about finding that pursuit about which you are truly passionate and giving yourself fully to it. In doing so, your potential blossoms, and in some sense, you are of the greatest possible service to your community.
There are many career transition coaches out there.? But not as many are capable of exploring these almost existential questions beyond a few cursory exercises.? The reason they can’t take you there is that they have not walked that terrain for themselves.
But Jonathan Gustin and his team at Purpose Guides have walked that path for themselves.? They specialize in helping clients in transition who are searching for what their life’s calling is.? They have a comprehensive approach for helping seekers sort through the broken twigs, partial tracks, and inner whispers that are the clues to help you find what you are tracking.?
Setting out to find one’s life purpose is opening yourself up to play an unknown game with even more uncertain outcomes vs just setting goals to be better at the well-known game you are playing today.?
Clients, if finding your purpose is your longing, find a coach who specializes in this work.? Coaches, if this is work you want to do, don’t dabble.? This is not?traditional coaching.
Thus, this Change the Game section and the approaches herein have brought us full circle.? Because you are now back at the beginning of the change journey albeit with a new objective.?
Conclusion:? Change the Game
Any efforts towards changing the game will give you a different sense of yourself and likely will change the direction you want to go.?
Maybe following the unfolding process of your life through Process Work will surface a different direction to pursue or at least being more congruent walking the direction you want to set out on.?
The Unshaming approach might have you loving some aspect of yourself that you thought you wanted to change.? Instead of trying to deracinate it, you start looking for ways to lead with it.??
Maybe you found a way to break free of the win/lose, let-me-make-sure-I-get-mine approach and now want to play a game that never ends, that puts you on a path to continuously learn and play and grow.
Maybe you now have a better sense of your life’s calling and are beginning to think about how to build a support system around that, no matter how difficult that path might be.
Thus, this Change the Game section and the approaches herein have brought us full circle.? Because you are now back at the beginning of the change journey albeit with a new objective.?
Getting to the “New World” you are now find yourself envisioning will likely be important to you.?And it is likely to be a substantial change that will not be easy.?
How do you set yourself up to achieve this new vision?
The final installment...Behavior Change IRL: Conclusion ...of this series will offer some summary thoughts and next steps.
Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is the President of Adsum Insights and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond , a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get off to the best possible start in their new jobs.
We sell GREAT tools for engagement and collaboration, globally. Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine game and the Square Wheels images.
1 年I really like Dan Pink's frameworks on reinforcement. His explanations are quite solid. (I studied behavioral neurophysiology and played with pigeons and brain stimulation and schedules of reinforcement 45 years ago. Feedback on performance is more imoortant than reinforcement for humans, I think.