How to Break "Triggered" Bad Habits

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Got a bad habit that's been befuddling, perplexing, baffling, or flummoxing you? Here's a counterintuitive way to erase and replace it.

At Sunday's Ultimate Frisbee scrimmage, our coaches had us focus on defense.?

That's useful for me; defense the weakest part of my game.?

I get faked out a lot.?

During the game, the opponents I was trying to cover got open, again and again. The coaches were repeating, with increasing volume and intensity, the same helpful advice:

"Keep your hips pointed toward your opponent."

It didn't help.?

My hips were all over the place, except for where they were supposed to be.?

My problem was, I was trying to unlearn a bad habit at full speed, in real time. All I could do was react to my opponent's moves. I had no time to notice, let alone control, my own wayward hips.

What I need are drills conducted at much slower speeds, focused on just that one element of defense. In order to change, I need to develop awareness of what I'm doing, along with "freeze-frame" moments in which I can adjust my footing and weight distribution.?

Communication Habits

In my work with executives and their teams, the habits that get in the way of meaningful progress aren't about hips (at least, they haven't been so far).

Most of them have to do with communication: interruption, dismissive tone of voice, aggressive body language, failure to ask for clarification, soliloquizing, bragging, deflecting, and so on.?

Unfortunately, the typical way leaders try to fix their employees bad communication habits is very much like the full-speed scrimmage that failed to reeducate my hips — tell them what they're doing wrong, tell them what to do instead, and then expect them to be able to pull these new skills out of a hat in fast-paced, high-stakes situations.?

The Know-It-All

A tech CEO once sent his top software engineer — let's call her Corrie because that's not her name — to me for coaching. Corrie was brilliant and indispensable — nobody knew more about the complex interrelations of software, systems, and programming protocols. She could glance at most problems and solve them instantly.?

The problem was, Corrie had no patience for anyone who might disagree with her who didn't have all the information she had. In the interest of efficiency, she would shut down discussion, tell people that they didn't know what they were talking about, and and reject their ideas out of hand.?

When I started working with Corrie, it quickly became apparent that she didn't want to be perceived as a dismissive know-it-all.?

Her ambitions including rising to a leadership role in the organization, which meant that she needed to make herself replaceable, which meant that she needed to develop her direct reports rather than make them feel incompetent.?

And she wasn't unaware of her reputation and her impact. She'd been told for years that this habit of shutting people down was hurting the organization.?

The problem wasn't knowledge. Corrie knew about the importance of asking questions, providing gentle and encouraging feedback, and including others in the search for solutions.?

It was just that in the heat of the moment, she wasn't doing any of those things. She was reacting reflexively.?

And Corrie's reflexes, like my defensive moves on the Ultimate Frisbee field, were dysfunctional.

Slowing It Down

Instead of just telling Corrie what to do the next time someone came up with a suggestion that wouldn't work because it wasn't backward compatible with legacy versions of the the node.js backend script (I mostly made that up — if it sounds right, it was a lucky guess), we slowed things down.

I asked Corrie to think back to a recent situation where she shut someone down at work. It was easy — it had happened the previous day.

And we looked at it like we were analyzing the film from last week's game. We slowed it way down. We rewound back to key moments and examined important freeze frames.?

And we tracked Corrie's internal behavior — thoughts, feelings, sensations, impulses — along with the outward behavior — actions and words.

Slowing it down did two hugely important things.

First, it "titrated" the memory so it was bearable. When we've "done something wrong," it can be hard to look back objectively because of shame or anger.?

Slowing it down and looking at the plain facts ("He said this, and then I said that") can help us gain distance and perspective, and not be tightly bound by the meaning we've given to the event ("I screwed up again"; "these idiots will never get it"; etc.)

Second, slowing down creates the space for imagining and role-playing different responses.?

Considered responses, rather than automatic reactions.?

Mastering Alternative Behaviors

By following what was happening in her mind and body as we "reviewed the tape" of that example of dismissive behavior, Corrie discovered a feeling of tension in her body that reliably preceded her curt words.?

And she further discovered that she could release that tension through a particular breathing pattern.

So she assigned herself the homework of purposely creating the tension (by thinking about someone's uninformed suggestion) and then dissipating it through breathing.?

This homework allowed her to practice and master a new and far more helpful strategy for dealing with that tension — one she could then deploy in meetings and conversations.?

Eliminating the Necessity of the Bad Habit

I wasn't completely open with you before. There are more than two ways that slowing down can help us break bad habits.

The third: getting in touch with how our inner experience drives our outer behavior can generate profound insights that can lead to profound transformation.

Managing tension is a great first step, but it's even better to eliminate the tension in the first place.?

The tension is a mind glitch.?

The only reason you feel physical tension is because your body is preparing you to deal with a potentially lethal threat. Which for most of our evolutionary history, could be summarized as "getting eaten alive by a predator."

What your body does when it senses a threat is very effective if the threat is a charging mountain lion.?

Your body prioritizes every process that strengthens your legs — rapid breathing, increased heart rate, cortisol dump into the bloodstream, rapid evacuation of bladder and bowels, and so on.?

I don't know about you, but none of those phenomena have ever helped me have a constructive and creative conversation, let alone manage conflict.

Which makes the stress response, in the words of my teacher Jon Connelly, "worse than useless."

That's why it's a glitch. You see Phil from Operations but your body responds like it's that velociraptor from Jurassic Park.?

When Corrie slowed down and brought awareness to that tension, in slow motion, with my support and guidance, she was able to tolerate it without needing to "do anything" about it.?

I invited her to tune in, to find out if that tension had anything to tell her.?

Eventually, through cascades of images, sensations, thoughts, memories, and feelings, she came to a realization: the tension was there because at some point, she had learned (without being aware of learning it) that not being acknowledged as the smartest person in the room was a threat to her survival.?

Once this insight popped, she saw through it instantly. Rather than helping her be safe, this need to put others down to maintain her own intellectual superiority was actually accomplishing the opposite — positioning her in opposition to her coworkers and undermining her career prospects.

Corrie's brain, when presented with both "truths" at the same time — that it's urgently necessary that everyone know that she's smarter than them, and that making everyone know she's smarter than them is hurting her — rapidly (like, within 30 seconds) rewrote her default programming.?

In meetings where her opinion was challenged, or where someone offered an idea that didn't seem like it would work, Corrie now reacted with curiosity: "What might they have seen that I haven't?"

Sometimes that new approach led to better ideas than her own.

But even when her ideas were still better — which was most of the time — her curiosity still paid dividends.

It allowed her a better understanding of how her direct reports were thinking. Which allowed her to develop their skills and support their growth, rather than shut them down and undermine their confidence.

Your Turn

Got a behavior that you'd like to shake, or shake up?

I invite you to practice mindfulness about it.?

Think of a recent situation where it showed up, and then slow it way down. Watch it in third person, like you're seeing it on a computer screen or security monitor.?

Then inhabit the scene and, beat by beat, tune in to your inner experience. What sensations, thoughts, memories, images, feelings, and impulses appear? Is there a sequence in which one leads to another?

Take your time.?

Notice what meanings bubble up for you. Get curious about how your "bad habit" is protecting you from something — something that your unconscious mind "knows" is much worse than whatever problems the habit itself is causing.?

And consider: is that "worse something" still a threat? Still sometime to go to all that trouble to avoid or prevent??

Don't take sides, but simply let your mind do its thing. You may discover that the bad habit now feels like it belonged to someone else. And that it's silly, laughable even, to think about doing it now.?

Important Note

If you're concerned about where an exercise like this might lead you, or if you're currently dealing with anxiety or depression, please don't do it on your own. Get support from a coach or therapist trained in experiential methodologies, or stick to the approach of mastering alternative behaviors that can compete with the one you don't like.

And feel free to reach out to me at askHowie.com if you'd like to explore this further.?