Behavior Change IRL: Start Before You Start

This is the second installment in my series on Behavior Change in Real Life. Here is the link to Part 1: Behavior Change IRL: Introduction .

This series explores almost 25 different approaches to behavior change I have leveraged in fifty years of studying the topic. I am using the following taxonomy to group the approaches:

?I. Start Before You Start

?II. Focus on Both the Destination and the Journey

III. Align the External Environment So It’s Right…for You

IV. Reduce Any Drag from your Inner Environment?

?V. Access the Deeper Pools of Motivation

VI. Change the Game

I have a niche coaching service called The First 100 Days and Beyond .? One third of the 17 modules in that program are designed to help my clients start before they start. ?I make sure they walk in the door on Day 1 with confidence, a game plan, and having already started the trust-building process with key stakeholders. Day 1 should never be Day 1.

The same start-before-you-start approach can give all behavior change journeys a more solid start and momentum out of the gate. But starting-before-you-start is especially important for changes you know will be daunting.??

The thinking is that before you even begin zeroing in on the new behavior or goal you want to move towards and before you have even taken one step in the new direction, there are ways you can put yourself in a better position to be successful.

In this section:

• Above or Below the Line?
• ‘Go All the Way’ Role Play
• Shine a Light on Change Beliefs
• Don’t Be Na?ve
• Establish your “Kill Criteria”

I like to remind my clients, when contemplating change, you have to "choose your hard."??

Above or Below the Line

The Conscious Leadership Group (CLG) has popularized the notion of continuously noting your inner state with a simple assessment they call “Above or Below the Line?”??Their belief is that the way you hold yourself and approach any situation you are in is as, if not more, important than the “content” of the situation itself.

If you are Above the Line, you are open, in learning mode, taking responsibility, working for win-win, appreciating, etc.? In short, you’re in a kind of flow state, co-creating the world around you.??If you are Below the Line, you are blaming, trying to be right (and make others wrong), seeing others or life as against you, feeling entitled, etc.?In short, you are at the effect of the world around you.

According to CLG, most of us spend most of our time Below the Line.? And why not…the victim stance is a helluva lot easier than being responsible.

If you want to get to a better place in your life, the first step they advocate is to “take a breath of conscious acceptance” of where you are.??

The second step is to ask if you are really ready to make the needed changes. Not being ready is totally fine.? Sometimes we need to have a pity party for a while.? Sometimes we aren’t ready for the commitment that will be needed to see the changes through.? Either is important to acknowledge.

I like to remind my clients, when contemplating change, you have to "choose your hard."??

Do you want to suffer with the pain of where you are and the disappointing outcomes you are currently achieving in your life?? Or do you want to "choose the hard" of going through the challenges and accompanying frustration of trying to find the discipline to string together the behavior changes that will get you to a better place??

The acts of accepting where you are, seeing that you do have agency to decide, and then consciously making the choice to change, including all the difficulties that will come with making those changes, gets you “playing offense” and co-creating vs. having to “play defense” and being forced to react to life.?

Playing offense is way more fun and way more motivating...two useful companions in the game of behavior change.

‘Go-All-the-Way’ Role Play?

We are often anxious to just get moving towards the new thing, to find the “hack” that will lead to an improved you.

But there are real advantages that arise from better understanding what you are trying to move away from.? The ‘Go-All-the-Way’ role play allows for that deeper exploration.

The idea here is to study what you want to move away from.? Don’t try to avoid the behavioral hole you’re in. ?Instead, go even deeper into it, have fun with it, and see what you can learn. ?

The best example I have ever encountered of this was in the book Money is My Friend .? The author realized he had an unhealthy relationship with money, was all hung up about spending it, and he came to realize that at the root of his fear was a story he had that he would run out of money and end up being “helpless.” ?

He decided to go all the way into his deepest fear and try to become helpless: he did not get out of bed for three months except to bathe and use the toilet. ?He had people bring him meals. ?

When friends and creditors called, he said “I can’t talk to you/pay you, I’m helpless.”?

After three months of going fully into it, he realized helplessness really wasn’t as bad as he thought and that caused him to be less stingy and controlling about his spending. ?His fear of helplessness lost its power over him.?

Don’t try to avoid the behavioral hole you’re in. ?Instead, go even deeper into it, have fun with it, and see what you can learn. ?

Of course, few of us can lay in bed for three months enacting our fears.? Another, less extreme version of this is a Persona Party.?

At a Persona Party, you act out aspects of your personality that you believe are giving you difficulty or that you judge negatively and want to better understand:? maybe it’s your tendency to procrastinate or maybe it’s the imposter syndrome you believe you have…or perhaps you have gotten feedback you are too critical.?

For a bounded period of time, you just fully inhabit this part of yourself.??You stay in character, you speak like the persona, embody the persona, dress like the persona.? Doing this in a playful way, especially with other people who are putting their psychic characters on display, can make this exploration a lot of fun.

Both the Go-All-the-Way role play and Persona Parties have roots in a concept Carl Jung referred to as enantiodromia . When something is not resisted but felt all the way, it not only releases its grip, but according to Jung, it can sometimes turn into its opposite.??

Approaching the change process with more insight and equanimity can make you less hard on yourself and eliminate some of that negative, "what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-why-do-you-keep-acting-that-way, self-talk.?

Moreover, a deeper exploration of the current state might lead you to decide to not change in the way you originally thought, perhaps instead learning to leverage what was heretofore viewed as an annoying part of yourself in a more skillful way.

Shine a Light on Change Beliefs??

In the book Triggers: Creating Change that Lasts and Becoming the Person You Want to Be , Marshall Goldsmith talks about how your beliefs about change can make the process of change a lot easier or, of course, a lot harder.? He organized these potential belief barriers into three buckets:??

Beliefs about Self: For example, “My behavior is a function of the situation I am in, not who I am.” “These bad behaviors you want me to change got me to where I am.” “If I change, I won’t be authentic.” “Once I understand what I need to do, I will just change.” “I have will power and won’t give in.”

Beliefs about Others: For example, “I don’t need to change, they do.” “My team likes what I like.” “They will notice the changes I make right away.” “I don’t need them and can replace them.”

Beliefs about the Change Process: For example, “I won’t change unless s/he meets me halfway.”? “X in my environment needs to change before I will change.”? “I won’t be told what to do by anyone.”? “Once I fix these current problems, it will be smooth sailing” or said another way, “Fixing old problems won’t bring new ones.”

Here is a great example of what is different about behavior change in real life vs in the books on behavior change. Few people writing those best sellers think about the fact that how their readers frame the process of change itself is going to have an enormous impact on how the change goes.?

Try getting your beliefs about the change journey you are considering going on onto a piece of paper. This will allow you or those who are supporting your change see if your beliefs support the change or have a chance of tripping you up.

Few people writing those best sellers think about the fact that how their readers frame the process of change itself is going to have an enormous impact on how the change goes.?

Don’t Be Na?ve?

Just a word about a couple of Marshall Goldsmith’s examples, “Once I understand what I need to do, I will just change” and “I have will power and won’t give in.”

Please.? Naivety is so unbecoming.??

The wayside is littered with people, as, if not more, committed than you, who couldn’t make the changes they needed to in a timely, no-drama way.??

As Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.” ??

Avoid this naivete and start putting effort into what countermeasures you are going to implement when, not if, you fall off the wagon.

For example, begin by thinking ahead. Imagine you don’t succeed in making the change you want to make and speculate as to what will have derailed your efforts.? Then plan responses, contingencies, and options for additional support.

Behavior change IRL doesn’t assume failure.? But it makes damn sure you have a plan for it if you do.

Contingency planning is pervasive in all walks of life, but noticeably lacking in much of the popular literature on behavior change.

In the military they say, “most plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy,” and the plan for battle is supported with contingency plans.? In manufacturing, they have Failure Mode and Effects Analysis to anticipate what will go wrong and how they will respond.? Companies do Business Continuity Planning to rehearse responses to disasters and outages.

Behavior change IRL doesn’t assume failure.? But it makes damn sure you have a plan for it if you do.

Establish your “Kill Criteria”??

On the one hand, all the epic stories and modern movies seem to be written about people who persevered in the face of overwhelming difficulties, at tremendous personal cost and ultimately accomplished their objective, “against all odds.”? Our culture values this.? Highly.?

On the other hand, economists like to remind leaders about the sunk cost fallacy and to not “throw good money after bad.”?And we have behavioral economists who advise us to “be good Bayesians” and update our prior probability estimates when we acquire new information vs. sticking to the original estimates we had when we started out.

Keep fighting or change course? How does one decide?

The person that is a couple of years into pursuing an objective is not the same person who started the journey towards that objective.?

When we set a goal, we do so under the umbrella of uncertainty.? We assume the process will be enjoyable or at least bearable.? We assume the outcome will be rewarding.? We assume our future self will enjoy what we achieved.

But we don’t know.

For example, we set a goal to be a partner in a law or an accounting firm.? We start putting in the ridiculously long hours it takes, and we do it year after year.? We definitively know how great the financial and status outcomes will be because we have been told and we can see it.?

But suddenly the work doesn’t interest us anymore and doing it for 20 more years after making partner suddenly seems to be a fate worse than death.? We also can’t see a single partner who has a marriage or non-work life that is even the least bit interesting to us.

The question of whether to quit or not to quit on a goal can cause a real Texas Steal Cage Death Match inside your head.? Thoughts of quitting are not something popular books on behavior change are even willing to talk about, but those tunes are in heavy rotation on the behavior change IRL radio station!

On the one hand, we’re really good at convincing ourselves we should continue. We say things to ourselves like: “I’m not going to quit because once a quitter always a quitter,” “my mother was a partner, she expects that of me, and I can’t let her down,” “I am so close.”? On the other hand, ignoring new information that is not fleeting but persistent is likely a mistake.?

Convincing ourselves to continue and ignoring new information is why people die climbing mountains, or complete marathons with a leg they broke at mile eight , or stay in toxic relationships.

Making this choice even tougher is the fact that the journey itself might also be changing you.? The person that is a couple of years into pursuing an objective is not the same person who started the journey towards that objective.? What you valued at the start might no longer interest you because the journey or other life events in the interim have changed you.?

Annie Duke, in her book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away , offers a preemptive strategy for lessening the impact of this dilemma: kill criteria.

Because goals are fixed objects that don’t take into account new information we learn along the way, she says every goal needs an “unless.”? “I am going to train for a triathlon, unless my knee pain returns or unless I start missing the time away from my family.”

Ms Duke recommends you establish your kill criteria before you start because you can’t trust yourself to make good evaluations in a moment of doubt or pain.? Decide in advance what are the signposts that if encountered, would tell you that it’s time to change course?

The question of quitting is not something popular books on behavior change are even willing to talk about, but it's a regular feature IRL.

She says it is even more helpful if you combine kill criteria with a good “quitting coach.” That person could be a friend, your current coach, or a mentor. Find people who have your long-term best interests at heart and ask them to hold up a mirror to what you are doing, thinking, and saying and to point out any pretzel-logic and consequences they see.?

Finally, believe it or not, quitting can actually allow you to achieve your goals more quickly. This is counterintuitive because we think of quitting as stopping our progress. But we rarely think enough about opportunity costs, and we forget that quitting frees up resources to switch to a new activity that is more aligned.

Seen in this way, quitting can be re-visioned as an accelerant, not towards achieving a goal established at a point in time when we had less information, but towards helping us stay aligned with and moving towards our long-term goals as they inevitably evolve.?

Isn’t that what change efforts should really be solving for?

Conclusion: Start Before you Start??

Many behavioral change efforts never succeed.? Sometimes that is due to people “not getting their heads right” at the start.

Additionally, some change efforts, deemed “successful” by the standards of consensus reality, are actually cases of someone having successfully climbed a ladder they had "against the wrong wall.” ??

Both outcomes are avoidable.?

According to Sun Tzu in The Art of War , “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.”

If you use the Start Before You Start approaches outlined here you 1) improve your chances of making a conscious choice to change vs a reactive one, which improves your odds of sustaining effort, 2) frame the journey clearly and in a way that is less likely to eventually trip you up, 3) equip yourself with plans to adjust in the face of the inevitable setbacks, and 4) move with celerity and swagger knowing that you will know when and how to abandon the objective if it no longer serves.

Part 3 of this series, Behavior Change IRL: Focus on Both the Journey and the Destination , I focus on behavior change approaches that help you maintain that split focus between the destination and the journey along the way.

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.