After reading the first chapter of this book, Tim F., a close friend of one of the authors, decided he’d apply the concepts to the challenge of losing weight. He realized that for years he had been sporadically using one or two weight-loss tactics (borrowed from any fad that promised easy and rapid success), but he had never put together a thoughtful plan. He most certainly hadn’t used all six sources of influence—in combination. Tim also had never been able to lose weight and keep it off.
So this time Tim garnered advice from the strategy chapters that lie just ahead and applied an influence strategy to each of the six sources. For instance, to enhance his personal motivation, he worked hard to discover foods that were healthy—and that he also enjoyed eating. No more liver shakes and broccoli pudding. To improve his personal ability, he studied calorie counting. In his own words, “Without so much as consulting a chart, I can now tell you within ten calories how many I’ve eaten each day.
“I also attacked my social network,” Tim continued. “My life partner was constantly filling our fridge with fatty foods and our pantry with sweets. Ironically, she was doing it for me—she didn’t much care for those foods. So we talked and decided to surround ourselves with healthy food. I also asked her to celebrate with me each time I lost a pound. This helped keep me motivated.”
After improving his social motivation and ability, Tim turned his attention to his reward structure. At first he couldn’t think what to do to make eating a healthy diet more financially attractive, but then he read about the strategy of setting aside money for an organization he pretty much loathed, and then sending money to that very institution every time he failed to meet a monthly goal. Yikes!
“That got my attention,” Tim explained. “I couldn’t stand the thought of helping out a cause I despise.”
Finally, Tim made use of his physical environment. He hung up posters, tracked and posted his weight loss, had his computer send upbeat reminders to his cell phone, and moved snacks to the basement storage room—so they wouldn’t be so handy.
It was a great plan. But it didn’t work. Okay, actually Tim lost a few pounds. But within a month he gave up and put all the weight back on. Plus five pounds. “I know the Change Anything approach works,” he told us shortly after his setback. “It’s just me that’s the problem.”
Tim was back in the willpower trap.
As you might suspect, when it comes to changing long-standing habits, Tim isn’t alone in his struggle. When it comes to creating lasting change, failure is the rule, not the exception. Just take a look at the statistics:
Marriage counseling works for fewer than one in five couples who use it.1
A whopping 85 percent of us have had bosses who have tried—but failed—to get us to change in order to improve our performance.2
Ninety-eight percent of us fail at keeping resolutions to change our bad habits.3
Seventy percent of Americans who take out a home equity loan or other type of loan to pay off credit cards end up with the same (if not a higher) debt load within two years.4
Only one in twenty dieters with a history of obesity is able to lose weight and keep it off for one or more years.5
So, what is the solution to Tim’s problem? Where did he go wrong? Most people fail to reach their personal goals because they’re in the dark about what’s influencing their behavior. But Tim wasn’t blind and outnumbered. He put together what he thought was a decent plan. He looked at all six sources of influence and came up with a tactic or two for each. So why did he stumble like most everyone else?
To answer this, consider a recent and rather intriguing piece of research.6 A group of Stanford scholars examined the four most popular weight-loss programs in the United States to divine what works and what doesn’t. Here’s what they discovered:
All of the programs worked.
If people used them.
But people rarely used them.
That was Tim’s problem. He had a plan—one that he liked quite a lot—but it worked for only a while. It didn’t hold up to the test of time. So, what does it take to not only come up with a great change plan, but actually use it—forever?
Our Changers give us the answer. When you study people who not only succeed in changing but maintain their success for years, you’ll quickly discover two things:
They stumbled as much as they succeeded.
Their change plan was homegrown.
The Changers we studied discovered what worked for them through a scientific process of trial and error. They didn’t get it right the first time. In truth, when people are struggling with tenacious habits, few ever do. Instead, they took two steps forward and one step back—and sometimes the reverse. But they had a skillful way of learning from their setbacks so that their plan evolved in a deliberate direction. They snipped a little here and added a little there. They tried a new technique, observed, learned, and tried again. Day by day, week by week, they moved forward until one day their plan addressed all of their unique challenges—and they succeeded. Tailoring your personal change plan will require the same kind of purposeful experimentation.
So let’s see how this scientific trial-and-error tactic might work for you. Let’s say that, like Tim, you’re trying to lose weight. That means that if you’re going to succeed, you’ll need to burn more calories (move around more) than you consume (eat somewhat differently). These are the obvious behavior changes you’ll need to make.
Of course, a thousand people will offer advice about how to burn more and consume less. They’ll suggest diet books, gym memberships, coaching services, pills, iPhone apps, and rent-a-chefs. And this is exactly where the plan breaks down. The advice well-intended colleagues eagerly impart may have been good for someone, somewhere, sometime, but it’s unlikely to fit your peculiar needs. Researchers can tell you all about the science of weight loss (for example, a calorie is the energy it takes to heat one gram of pure water one degree centigrade at sea level), but nobody is ever going to be able to tell you what you personally need to do in order to master that bundle of nasty little calories glued to your belly.
What you need to succeed is not merely the science of weight loss; you need help from the social science of weight loss. That includes the study of you, living your unique life, in your particular environment, given your personal quirks.
Of course, nobody out there is studying you. Nobody else can study you. Researchers can give you generic hints that serve the broad population, but this type of advice serves only a small percentage of people a small percentage of the time. You’re going to have to become a social scientist, using yourself as the subject. It’s the only method that will withstand the test of time.
Talk to successful Changers you know, and you’ll hear the same advice embedded in their stories of success. They’ll tell you how in month one they discovered they had to stop going to lunch with the “Cholesterol Club” at work. In month four they realized that the jumbo box of Junior Mints in their drawer was more powerful than they were. In month eight they discovered that when they travel for business their plan falls apart. Bit by bit, they studied themselves like they were specimens under a microscope until they had a plan perfectly suited for the one subject they cared most about: themselves.
As troublesome as this recommendation may sound, what other choice do you have? Imagine how ludicrous it would be to expect career advice that helps a CFO who’s been passed over for the CEO slot to also serve the needs of a shipping clerk who routinely receives passable reviews but is given no increase in pay. How likely would it be for the relationship advice that aids a newlywed couple to address the challenges of a middle-aged couple on the brink of divorce because of one partner’s addictions?
Would you expect a diet that works for a sixty-year-old woman who struggles with depression and eats when she’s unhappy to also work for a thirty-year-old man who has added twenty pounds since he started a sedentary job? Of course not. Both need to burn more calories than they eat. That we understand. But how they accomplish such a feat requires very different change plans.
So, if you want to succeed, you’ll have to do what successful Changers do: You’ll have to give up the hope of simply being the subject of some smart person’s discovery. You’ll have to be both scientist and subject—in search of the most important social science discovery of all: how to change you.
Good change scientists don’t just thrash about trying every idea that makes the front cover of a popular magazine. Instead, they use a specialized form of scientific inquiry. Here’s a quick overview of how Changers ensure that they stumble forward rather than downward.
First, examine when and where you currently give in to urges. This was Tim’s first mistake. Rather than examining his unique challenges, he selected strategies that sounded new and interesting. Instead, he should have examined what we’ll call his crucial moments—the times or circumstances in which his choices are the most consequential.
Tim was like the fellow who searched for his lost car keys under the streetlight near his car, not because he figured he dropped them there, but because he could see better under the light. Tim had selected convenient and cool-sounding influence methods, not relevant ones.
Once you’ve identified your specific vulnerabilities, create a personal change plan (or hypothesis). This plan consists of what you’ll do to resist, remove, and even transform your urges during critical times.
Finally, implement the plan, observe the results, make changes in the plan (based on what worked and what didn’t—resulting in a new plan), and repeat as needed until you’ve succeeded.
Let’s see how this process works in practice, as demonstrated by A.J.W., one of our intrepid Changers. Now, let’s be clear. A.J. doesn’t consider herself a social scientist. She’s a thirty-one-year-old respiratory therapist, mom, and wife living in Austin, Texas. But she did begin taking an interest in examining her own behavior after a rather startling incident.
A.J. was a two-pack-a-day smoker. The executives at the hospital where she works as a respiratory therapist frown on employees who drop ash on the patients they’re resuscitating. So at key times throughout the day when A.J. could sneak a private moment and head out to the designated smoking area, she fumbled for a cigarette.
A.J. decided to quit smoking one day when she was called to help resuscitate a patient on the eighth floor of her hospital. At the time of the call she was on the first floor. Following hospital procedure, she bypassed the elevator (medical emergencies wait for no one) and hit the stairs. By the time she reached the third floor she was gasping for breath. When she arrived at the fourth she collapsed in a heap. Fortunately, other team members arrived on the eighth floor and saved the patient. But while A.J. sat burning with shame and gasping for breath on the concrete slab, she decided it was time to change.
As A.J. thought about her challenge, she quickly realized that not all of her life moments were created equal. Most of the time she was busy, on autopilot, and not tempted to smoke. Well, not that tempted. The moments when she was simply dying for a smoke were actually fairly infrequent.
This is true for all of us and all of our bad habits. Not all of our life moments are equally challenging. For instance, few kids struggling with pornography addiction are tempted to indulge when their grandparents are in the room. Go figure. We don’t lapse into lax work practices at the office when we know our work on a particular project is being used to evaluate whether we’re fit for a promotion. We don’t feel the urge to spend when we’re balancing our checking account.
You get the point. When it comes to personal change, you don’t have to be pushing yourself to the limit all the time. You need to focus on only a handful of moments when you’re most at risk. We call these special circumstances crucial moments. These are the moments of truth that would lead to the results you want—if you could get yourself to enact the right behaviors.
A good way to look for crucial moments is to look for the conditions that create the greatest temptation for you. For example, you’re tempted to ignore a customer request when it’s out of the ordinary. You become cold and aloof with your life partner when you’re under stress. You don’t climb on the treadmill when you come down with a slight sniffle.
As you search for your own crucial moments, consider whether they come at certain times, in certain places, around certain people, or when you’re in certain physical or emotional states. Different conditions affect different people differently. Only you can systematically search for the conditions of greatest importance to your change.
Once you’ve identified your crucial moments, your next task is to create the rules you’ll follow when temptation pays you a visit. Research shows that if you establish rules in advance of facing a challenge, you are far more likely to change your behavior when the crucial moment hits.7 Instead of facing each instance as a unique event calling for a new choice, you’ve already decided what you’ll do—and you’re far more likely to comply.
When it comes to personal change, you’ll want to set specific rules (not vague guidelines) that guide you to act in ways that eventually lead to what you want. That’s why we call these essential actions vital behaviors. A vital behavior is any high-leverage action that will lead to the result you want. Crucial moments tell you when you’re at risk. Vital behaviors tell you what to do.
To see how vital behaviors fit into a change plan, consider a rather fascinating study done by Peter Gollwitzer with twenty-one recovering heroin addicts who were desperately trying not only to stay clean but also to get jobs. Now, let’s be clear about the challenge the subjects were facing. For a longtime heroin addict, the first forty-eight hours of withdrawal lead to muscle pains, cramps, perspiration outbreaks, freezing sensations, and diarrhea.
So, how did Gollwitzer help addicts to withstand these horrible withdrawal symptoms and get jobs? The addicts were encouraged to create résumés as a step toward securing employment. Imagine that. Create a résumé while powerful urges scream in your head.
After receiving résumé-writing instruction, subjects were given seven hours to complete the task. Half of the subjects jumped right into the assignment. The other half did one simple thing before they began: They identified crucial moments they’d face in the next seven hours and the vital behaviors they would enact when the moments struck.
For example, “When I feel sick [crucial moment], I will go to the bathroom but then return immediately to the task [vital behavior].” The experimental subjects identified the physical state that could create a huge temptation for them and then planned the rule they’d follow to address it. The control subjects employed neither tactic.
The results from this groundbreaking study were remarkable. None of the first group of addicts succeeded at completing their résumés. But of those who prepared in advance for their crucial moments and vital behaviors, an astounding 80 percent succeeded.8
Now let’s return to A.J. and see how identifying crucial moments and creating vital behaviors helped her with her smoking addiction. She started by examining circumstances that triggered her to smoke. Throughout much of the day she was working with patients—no problem there. In the mornings she was busy getting ready for her day and rarely lit up. Even lunch was pretty safe because she hung out with nonsmokers.
As A.J. thought about the conditions under which she was most likely to relapse, she concluded that she had two crucial moments. The first was at home when she was talking on the phone. The second was when she was driving to and from work. Both of these were times when she would mindlessly smoke.
So A.J. took a guess at two tailored (made-just-for-A.J.) vital behaviors. For several months she avoided using the phone as much as possible. She began using e-mail and texting in order to curtail long stretches on her cell phone. Second, she changed her driving route. She suspected that taking a new and unfamiliar route might help her be more mindful and less reactive.
Notice the science in A.J.’s plan. She created a hypothesis. That is, she made a calculated guess about both her crucial moments and her vital behaviors. Then came the social science. Rather than following Tim’s example and simply grabbing the latest fad, she based her plan on her own unique circumstances.
Of course, A.J. didn’t pin all her hopes on her first plan. Instead, she conducted a full-on personal experiment. She identified her crucial moments, created and tried her vital behaviors, saw what worked and what didn’t, made adjustments, and repeated the process as needed.
So, let’s say you have concluded that in order to turn around a mediocre performance review, your crucial moment is at the end of high-visibility projects. You tend to give short shrift to formalities such as presentations, project reviews, and reports. You’ve always told yourself that you value substance over style. Now you realize that this philosophy has cost you. You need to demonstrate your substance by practicing a new vital behavior. You’re going to add two polishing steps to every critical document you prepare.
Your next problem is getting yourself to actually do that—no small task. It’s four thirty p.m. on a Friday and you’re exhausted. You’re about to push Send on a document that you just typed up in a rush. The old voice is saying, “Why should I have to spend two more hours just to perfume this?”
Now it’s time to move from thinking to doing.
Having identified your crucial moments and vital behaviors, you now have to develop a change plan to get yourself to recognize those moments and engage in those behaviors.
But how?
In “Escape the Willpower Trap” we answered this question. The only reasonable way to battle the wide world out there, which is so perfectly organized to keep you making the same mistakes, is to use all six sources of influence in combination. Here’s a sample of how this might work.
A.J. discovered that the reason she couldn’t quit smoking was that all six sources of influence were working against her. Over time, she recruited all of them to her side. Here’s how.
Personal Motivation. First of all, A.J. developed wise tactics to increase her motivation to stick with her vital behaviors. For example, in her crucial moments she would conjure images she was privy to as a respiratory therapist. She had watched patients literally suffocate to death due to symptoms of smoking-related diseases. When the smoking hunger settled on her, she was able to consider her default future (See the chapter “Source 1: Love What You Hate”) by recalling these incidents and the reactions of patients’ family members after their loss. Likewise, she found that posting inspiring quotes on her mirror to use as conscious pep talks when she was feeling weak helped her at key times. But she soon came to realize that motivation strategies like these weren’t enough. Her problem had not been just a lack of motivation. She had ability challenges as well.
Personal Ability. Ultimately A.J. realized that she needed to learn a great deal more about behavior modification. Her reading led her to focus on developing distraction strategies to increase her will skill (we cover this in the chapter “Source 2: Do What You Can’t”). Her challenge during crucial moments was that her hand wanted to do something with her mouth. That familiar motion was soothing to her. So she distracted herself with straws. When her hand involuntarily traveled toward her mouth, she grabbed a straw and placed that in her mouth instead of a cigarette. In fact, she’d even take a long drag on the straw, which she found to be a good breathing and relaxation tactic!
A.J. realized she also needed new skills to help her create new habits. She loved to read—so she scoured books to gather tips that would help her. She learned, for example, that she needed more skills in distinguishing her own emotions. She discovered that smoking was as much a psychological as a physiological addiction. Over time she began to pay more attention to signals of stress, and she deliberately practiced skills (more on this in the chapter “Source 2: Do What You Can’t”) to calm and focus herself—which made the compulsion to smoke much easier to handle.
Social Motivation and Ability. Next A.J. turned to her social network, where she transformed some accomplices (people who encouraged her to smoke) into friends (they now encouraged her to quit) by conducting a transformation conversation (which we discuss in the chapter “Sources 3 and 4: Turn Accomplices into Friends”).
Structural Motivation. Kicking the smoking habit had a built-in structural motivation. A.J. smoked two packs a day and her husband smoked one. Each pack cost $4.50. That added up to about $400 a month they were spending on cigarettes! A.J. explains, “The cost of smoking was a huge driver to quit. When we finally kicked the habit we experienced a real positive change in our financial way of life.”
Structural Ability. Finally, A.J. changed her physical environment. She altered the way she drove to work and tried to avoid other physical locations that triggered her thoughts of lighting up. Similarly, she removed all ashtrays from her home to jar her into remembrance of her decision to quit in case she started mindlessly looking for a cigarette.
These are just a sampling of some of the influence tactics A.J. employed as she studied herself and learned what she needed to do in order to stop smoking forever. They were a starting point for her—not the final destination. She had tried and failed to quit before. This time she committed herself to being a scientist and not just a subject. That meant that she would see setbacks as information, and she would use that information to improve her change plan rather than blaming herself when she experienced them.
Did A.J. correctly identify all of her crucial moments and vital behaviors—from day one? Did she nail the six sources she needed to get her to do her vital behaviors? No.
Just like the rest of us, A.J. had to learn what was working for her and what wasn’t and then make adjustments. For instance, she soon began to see unanticipated sources of influence that conspired against her. Unfortunately, one of them was her father. Every Saturday she and her husband would have supper with her dad—a legendary chain smoker himself. Being around him, in his house, and in this familiar smoking setting was overwhelmingly difficult for A.J.
But instead of smoking with her father and then feeling bad and quitting her change effort, she noted what happened in the company of her father and then used the information to her advantage. She updated her change plan. She started by minimizing her visits to her dad’s house, and then she tried her best to visit with him in safer settings. By revising her change plan, A.J. turned a bad day into good data.
It’s important to comprehend this adjusting process, because no matter how brilliant your initial change plan is, if you’re dealing with long-standing habits, your plan won’t work. Okay, it might work for a while, but sooner or later a crucial moment will hit and you’ll unceremoniously give in to the temptation. You’ll have a bad day.
This is the moment your real test begins. In the face of what feels like abject failure, you’ll become either depressed or curious. You’ll become depressed if you blame yourself, become discouraged, and fall into a total binge—only making matters worse and lowering your self-esteem. If you become curious, you’ll step back and examine the data, learn from what just happened, and then adjust the plan. So, there’s your choice. You can bump into a new barrier and become depressed and quit, or you can experience the very same setback, become curious, and turn a bad day into good data.
We’ve looked at smoking and weight loss, but how might these four scientific strategies help you solve a problem at work? Say you’re trying to get unstuck in your career. How might you develop, test, and alter a personal change plan to your benefit?
1. Identify Crucial Moments. You start by scanning your typical day on the job and realize that your biggest barrier to being viewed as a key player at work is that you’re constantly getting sidetracked with tasks that aren’t very important to the company’s success. Your primary assignment is essential to the organization’s success, but you also fill your time with tangential tasks that often keep you off target. So you ask yourself, “What are the crucial moments that keep me from focusing on my primary assignment?” You soon realize that your biggest challenge comes when a co-worker asks you to take on a new task and you worry about saying no. You don’t want to disappoint anyone. This is your crucial moment: Someone is asking you to take on a task and you feel obligated to say yes.
2. Create Vital Behaviors. Next you think about a possible tailor-made vital behavior. What actions will you need to take in this crucial moment? You talk to friends, study what others do who don’t seem to struggle with always saying yes, and conclude that your vital behavior is: Never make a commitment in the moment. Promise to consider the request and respond within twenty-four hours. This vital behavior will become the rule you’ll follow. You won’t decide upon it each time; you’ll merely implement it.
3. Engage All Six Sources of Influence. For example, get started by approaching the most obvious sources: Knowing that you’re bad at saying no, you decide to bolster your skills. You take an assertiveness class and read up on the topic. Plus you share your problem with your boss, who promises to support your efforts to stay focused on high-yield tasks. You now feel prepared.
4. Turn Bad Days into Good Data. For two weeks you stay on task. You do agree to an occasional side job, but only when it makes strategic sense and when you’ve got a slight lag in your own schedule. Then one day someone asks for help on a tangential task—and suggests that his boss would be pleased if you helped. In fact, he implies that you’ll be seen in a bad light if you don’t lend a hand. So you agree and then fall behind with your own critical work. At first you beat yourself up for caving in to a sidetracking request, but then you remember that the better response is to take corrective action. Next time, when an authority figure asks you to take an assignment, you’ll get more social support (social ability) for your vital behavior by routing that person through your own boss, who can then make the choice. You turn a bad day into good data, keep with your plan, make an occasional adjustment, and eventually improve your performance review.
So now we know what to tell our friend Tim, who’s trying to lose weight. The good news is that he realized that he needed to bring several influences to bear—in unison—when facing his weight-loss challenge. But he missed out on an important part of the scientific process. If he expects to succeed in the future, he also needs to create a plan that’s based on his idiosyncratic challenges, not on the latest fad or the recommendation of an enthusiastic friend. Then, as both scientist and subject, he needs to implement the plan, study the results, turn a bad day into good data, and continue doing so until every last challenge is met. That’s how problems that appear impossible transform into solutions that are inevitable.
While we’re exploring the science of personal change, let’s examine one of the most important scientific tools you own: a pencil (or the electronic equivalent, a keyboard).
How might these humble instruments play a significant role in your change effort? You might be surprised. Consider the following rather startling discovery. A team of researchers from New York University worked with students whose grades suffered because they procrastinated studying. They gave half of the procrastinators information on how to improve their study habits. The other half were given the same information—plus pencil and paper. They were told, “Decide now where and at what times you will study in the next week, and write it down.”
Those who recorded their plan studied more than twice as many hours as those who didn’t.9 Repeated studies show that simply writing down a plan increases your chance of success by more than 30 percent.10
So start now. Grab a piece of paper to record your off-the-top-of-your-head thoughts about your crucial moments. Then make your best guess about the vital behaviors that will serve you best in these moments.
Also, as you read the next five chapters, write down your plan for engaging all six sources of influence. Then learn what’s working and what isn’t, and make adjustments. If you keep a record of your evolving plan, you’ll make new mistakes rather than repeating the old ones. The goal here is not perfection, but progress. By actually recording your plans, you will increase your ability to follow through, enhance your motivation to change, and expand your capacity to learn and adjust along the way.