By now it should be abundantly clear that when it comes to changing ourselves, it’s best to use strategies from each of the six sources of influence—especially those that are currently working against us. If we don’t, we’re going to be outnumbered and out of luck. So to help facilitate this tactic, we’ll jump right into Source 1, personal motivation, and see what it has to offer a fledgling Changer.
When it comes to changing ourselves, here’s the biggest challenge: The things we should do are often boring, uncomfortable, or even painful. Ergo, we don’t want to do them. Well, that’s not completely accurate. We do want to do them—in the abstract, just not in real life. We want to do them in the future, just not in the present.
For instance, when psychologist Daniel Read asked subjects to make out a shopping list, he found that if they were shopping for what they’d eat right now, 74 percent picked tempting chocolate over healthy fruit. No big surprise there. But if he asked them to pick what they would eat a week from now, 70 percent chose the fruit.1 Someday we want to do the right thing.
Taking our cue from Read’s subjects, we too have plans for changing—tomorrow. We’re going to get up early, eat healthy fruit while shunning chocolate, exercise vigorously, study abstruse but important journal articles that will enhance our careers, and stop losing our temper. That’s right, tomorrow we’re going to be a force to be reckoned with.
None of this tomorrow talk would be necessary if we could find a way to enjoy doing the right thing today. We’re good at doing what we enjoy. If only we enjoyed doing what is good for us, we wouldn’t have to resist our short-term impulses (never easy); nor would we have to remove those impulses altogether (sometimes impossible). If we could only convert our dislikes into likes, we’d be unstoppable.
But is it even possible to love what you hate?
To see how people find a way to love what most people would most certainly hate, let’s visit a sprawling garden located across Guanabara Bay from the city of Rio de Janeiro. There we find Valter dos Santos talking excitedly about the work he and his colleagues do every day. As you listen to Valter discuss his job, you can’t help noticing that he sounds more like a public relations executive than an hourly employee.
He starts out, “I have been a picker here for twenty-six years. I am proud to be a picker.”
Valter goes on to enthuse about living at the center of the green movement, where he and his co-workers do some of the most important work imaginable.
Then Valter carefully puts on a pair of tattered gloves, scurries over to a mammoth garbage dump, and picks through some of the foulest-smelling trash in the world. Valter is a catadore—or picker. He, along with two thousand other catadores, extracts recyclable material at Gramacho Garden—one of the world’s largest dumps. Despite working conditions that would choke a maggot, Valter and his colleagues take great pride, even pleasure, in their work.2
Valter and his co-workers have found a way to take satisfaction from a task that would disgust most human beings. But how? More to the point, since resolving our own bad habits often calls for us to do something we find noxious, tedious, or stressful, what if we could react to it as the catadores do?
It turns out that we can. Consider one of our Changers, Louie C. After a decade of suffering from a crippling shopping addiction, Louie eventually overcame his burning desire to buy every new gadget in sight. This was no mean feat considering the fact that at home, at work, and at play, Louie was surfing the Net for deals. At one point he logged more than a quarter of a million dollars in debt and went through bankruptcy; at his lowest point, he sold his mother’s car to raise money to buy a moose head for his den.
How did Louie turn his life around? When the police showed up at Louie’s doorstep (at his mother’s request) and the judge gave him the choice of prison or counseling, Louie decided that it was time to change. Like the rest of the Changers, Louie’s turnaround called for a variety of strategies, but one came from a surprising source. Louie learned to take pleasure from what he once loathed. Here’s how he described the turnaround.
“I didn’t think it could ever happen,” Louie explained. “It makes me cringe now to think of how I used to lose control of my spending. And the strangest thing is, I now get a bit of a rush out of seeing my net worth grow. I feel like a different person. Now when I’m tempted to make an impulse purchase, I take pleasure in knowing that I’m no longer selling out my future in order to buy the gadget of the moment.”
As you listen closely to Louie, you’ll note that one of the secrets to enjoying an activity that isn’t yet hardwired into the pleasure center lies in our ability to see, feel, and believe in the future it will bring us. It’s possible to diminish the immediate pleasure of a bad habit by connecting it to the pain it will eventually cause us. Similarly, by contemplating the pleasure a good habit will eventually yield, we can make the habit itself more enjoyable. The good news is that when we do take the effort to consider the long-term effects of our actions, we can overcome our hardwired short-term bias. Thinking differently actually rewires the brain.3
Unfortunately, for most of us it’s hard to get that rewiring started in the first place because it’s so enormously difficult to keep our future in mind in light of the fact that our present is always so real, compelling, and in our face. That’s why human beings are so notoriously myopic. We know how the delicious chocolate will taste right now, but we fail to feel any of the effects our chocolate choice will yield in the future. In the heat of an argument with our life partner, we know how wonderful it feels to take a cheap shot, but our future—the way it could feel if we swallow our pride and apologize—is typically out of mind and therefore offers no motivation in the moment.
At work, when the boss asks us if an insane decision he has just presented to the team makes sense, we know what it will feel like to disagree with him in public (we’ve taken more than our fair share of ugly stares and put-downs), so we aren’t exactly thinking about what it will feel like to live with the stupid decision later on.
In short, when faced with the choice of enjoying now or paying later, we often think only about the now. This means that when deciding if we want to serve our short-term interests, we must take steps to see, feel, and believe in the future we’ll face if we continue to satisfy our urges. Here are five tactics for turning our future into an ally for change.
Every eight seconds a baby boomer in America turns sixty-five, and more than half of them will be armed during their retirement with little more than their social security stipend and thinning hair. A majority of forty-five-year-old Americans have less than fifty thousand dollars saved for retirement.4 Many of them are dooming their golden years to a period of financial struggle because they’ve refused to contemplate what will actually happen to them when they stop receiving a paycheck. They haven’t merely lived in denial; they’ve lived in carefully crafted ignorance.
If you’re facing a similar fate because you’re having a hard time motivating yourself to make short-term sacrifices, there is a cure. Visit your default future—today. Your default future is the life you’ll live if you continue behaving as you currently are. It’s the life that’s hurtling toward you—but you aren’t motivated by it because you aren’t currently in it.
With a little imagination you can pull that unpleasant future forward and wire it into your current decision making. One powerful way to do this is to take a field trip to your future. An actual experience like this can profoundly reshape your feelings about your choices when the pep talks and guilt trips you’ve tried in the past have had no effect.
For instance, when it comes to your finances, think back to a visit you recently may have made to an acquaintance who is currently living on nothing more than social security and is suffering as a result. That could be you. Or calculate what you will have to live on after retirement if you continue your current spending and saving patterns—and then try to live on that much for a month. Visit your future self: Taste your future meal, lounge in your future furniture, and sit in your future car. The experience just may change your life.
Our inability to see our future is particularly troubling when certain aspects aren’t guaranteed to happen—but will have cataclysmic consequences if they do. Under these circumstances, it can be even more important to personally examine what might happen to you—on a bad day.
Consider Jacob L., another one of our Changers. During his early twenties he was seriously addicted to Internet pornography, often spending most of his free time and much of his disposable income on the habit.
“I figured no harm could come from it,” Jacob explained, “until one day at work I was jolted to my senses when I spotted a co-worker and friend (who was also a big pornography fan) being escorted out of the building in handcuffs. It turns out he had taken secret photos of his next-door neighbor’s daughter in various states of undress and loaded them onto his computer. When he accidentally brought one of the photos to his laptop screen in a meeting, he was busted and hauled off to jail.
“It was horrible,” Jacob continued. “Even though I hadn’t done anything like that, those handcuffs felt like my handcuffs. It was as if I had been given a privileged view into my likely future, and the warning hit me hard.”
Glimpses into worst-case scenarios often propel people to change—in all kinds of areas of their life, not just addictions. Consider bike riding—a healthy habit. But what if you ride without a helmet? The odds are that nothing serious will happen to you. But then there’s the unlikely but horrible head injury. So, given the low likelihood of a head injury, who is most likely to go to the inconvenience of wearing a helmet (and the loss of feeling the wind in their hair)?
To answer this question, one of the authors talked to his neighbor—an emergency room nurse—inquiring how many emergency room employees wear helmets when riding bikes or motorcycles.
“We all do!” she exclaimed. “We work in an emergency room. We see firsthand what happens to bikers when they’re hit by a car or truck. It’s often lethal. That’s why we call motorcycles ‘donor cycles.’ People without helmets crash and destroy their brains, and we then harvest the rest of their organs for transplants.”
Obviously, these emergency room workers feel differently about wearing helmets than much of the public does because they have different experiences. They see where an unsafe practice just might lead them. When it comes to our own unsafe, unhealthy, and troublesome habits, we need to shine a light on reasonably possible worst-case scenarios before we experience them. Instead of purposely ignoring the data, we need to bring it to the forefront of our minds now, where it can help propel us in the right direction before it’s too late. Creating a tangible way for you to visit your default future is a powerful way to do that.
Many of us have already taken a peek into our future and know all too well what will happen to us if we continue down our current, unhealthy path. We just don’t feel it. And the reason we don’t feel it is that we play mental tricks with ourselves to keep from doing so. We think only about the partial and convenient truth. For example, we say “might” even though we know the truth is “most certainly.” We assume that our fate will follow luck rather than natural law. Mostly, we distract our attention from the default future by filling our mind with the present experience. In short, we nurture massive gaps in the truth—rather than fill in the ugly details.
Changers know better. When facing temptations, they take great care to tell themselves the whole story. Consider Michael V., an alcoholic ex-con and one of our amazing Changers. Michael started drinking at a young age and moved quickly from drinking to drugs and from drugs to crime—to pay for his addiction. After several years of breaking and entering, theft, and addiction, Michael lost his wife, his family, most of his friends, all of his possessions, and eventually his freedom—ending up in prison.
As we’ll see throughout the remainder of this book, Michael used influence strategies from each of the six sources to get back his life. When it comes to Source 1, personal motivation, Michael explained how creating a habit of telling the whole vivid story works to his benefit.
“When I’m watching TV, an advertisement will come on showing a group of people enjoying a martini at a piano bar. To this day that commercial can get my thoughts heading in a dangerous direction. My natural inclination is to start thinking ‘I can do that.’ Sure, I’m a recovering alcoholic, but why not enjoy a social drink with friends? What harm can that be?
“But that’s not my story, nor is it the whole story. My story plays out differently. If I join the group at the piano bar, I’ll drink the martini. Then I’ll be back tomorrow. Then I’ll shift to hard liquor, I’ll soon be on a binge, and one day I’ll wake up lying in my own vomit or maybe even in jail. And by the way, that’s not merely what might happen to me. That’s what will happen to me.”
You’ll notice that when telling the story, Michael doesn’t merely tell the whole story; he also uses rather vivid language. Instead of suggesting that a drink would be bad for him, he describes potential consequences in vibrant detail. The power of Michael’s labeling tactic isn’t something known just to him; it’s actually based on solid science. For instance, ongoing research is showing that subjects who set aside money for generic “long-term savings” are less faithful in making their monthly contributions than those who choose to create a “New Roof” account.5 Specific and meaningful labels identify specific consequences and as such are more motivating than watered-down generic terms.
So, as you tell your whole story, use vibrant language. Replace innocuous terms such as “unhealthy” and “problematic” with poignant terms such as “bankrupt,” “fired,” “divorced,” and “emphysema.” Stop comforting yourself with fairy tales, innocent language, and half-truths.
Use the same type of poignant and vivid language when portraying what will happen when you do the right thing. For instance, you’re not merely going to be healthy; you’re going to play with your grandkids on the floor. You won’t just have more money for your retirement; you’ll cruise the Mediterranean. When considering both healthy and unhealthy actions, you deserve the whole truth, the vivid truth, and nothing but the truth.
For this next tactic we pay a quick visit to one of the most fascinating restaurants and rehab centers on earth—Delancey Street in San Francisco, California. It is there that we find Mimi Silbert, the founder and genius behind the most successful life-changing facility on earth. The entire facility is run by Mimi and fifteen hundred residents—each with an average of eighteen felony convictions. Delancey Street admits drug addicts and criminals and transforms more than 90 percent of them into productive citizens.
With a near-perfect record in a field in which a 5 percent success rate is common, you can bet that Dr. Silbert relies on all six sources of influence to work her magic. When it comes to learning to love what you hate, Mimi explains how she teaches former drug dealers, thieves, gang leaders, and prostitutes to link their actions to their values.
“We talk about values all the time. Even when we’re teaching a new resident how to set the table while he’s withdrawing from crack cocaine, we don’t just talk about knives and forks; we talk about pride. We talk about showing respect for those who will sit at this place at the table. You’re not just setting a table; you’re working as part of a team. You’re carrying your fair share of the work. You’re not letting people down. You’re becoming trustworthy. It’s values, values, values—all the time.”
What Mimi is explaining here isn’t merely a matter of semantics. It’s about keeping in mind some of the more important reasons behind your current actions and sacrifices. For instance, the Brazilian catadores at Gramacho Garden derive pleasure from their job, not by focusing on the disgusting elements of sorting garbage but by connecting their activities to their values. In their words, they’re helping save the planet. In a world full of polluters, they’re “green masters.”
You can enjoy the same benefits with your own personal challenges. Stop obsessing over the unpleasant aspects of what you’re required to do, and focus your attention on the values you’re supporting. The words you use to describe what you’re doing profoundly affect your experience of the crucial moment. For instance, when sticking to a lower-calorie diet, don’t undermine your own motivation by describing your choices as “starving” or “going without.” You’re doing far more than manipulating calories. You’re becoming healthy; you’re sticking to your promise; you’re sacrificing so that you’ll be mobile when playing with your grandkids. This difference in description may sound small, but words matter. They focus the brain on either the positive or negative aspects of what you’re doing.
An interesting example of the power of value labels comes from Stanford psychologist Lee Ross. He had subjects play a game in which they could either cooperate or compete. In each round, subjects had to decide whether to share money with others or keep it for themselves. Half the subjects were told it was the “Community Game.” It was introduced to the other half as the “Wall Street Game.” Both groups played exactly the same game, but the second group was far more likely to steal, lie, and cheat. By connecting their actions to their image of “Wall Street,” subjects (and this is truly unfortunate) felt more comfortable behaving like scoundrels and feeling good about it. In contrast, those who used the word “community” felt fine about winding up with less money because they were sacrificing for the “common good.”6
Learn from Drs. Silbert and Ross. Carefully choose the words you’ll use to describe your vital behaviors. You aren’t merely going without your favorite goodies; you’re keeping a promise to yourself. You aren’t simply climbing stairs; you’re choosing health. In short, you’re supporting your values—and that thought can be very satisfying.
Next we take a trip to New Zealand and look in on two teams of thirteen bruising men as they push and kick each other to gain control of a leather ball. What exactly are these people doing? They’re engaging in the sport of rugby—and they’re doing it for fun. They’re enjoying themselves because they’ve transformed smacking one another into a contest with winners and losers, posted scores, uniforms, and prizes.
When facing a personal challenge, many successful Changers increase their personal motivation by turning chores into games. A game has three important design elements:
Limited time.
A small challenge.
A score.
For instance, Peter K., a Changer from just outside Toronto, finally completed his doctoral thesis by turning it into a game. For years he had procrastinated writing the 180-page tome that would be his dissertation. Threats from his adviser, a pending promotion that required the final document, and pleading from his loved ones couldn’t get Peter to step up to the daunting task.
But then one day, Peter made it all a game. First, he gave himself ninety days to finish. Tasks turn into games when you’re racing against a clock. Next, Peter broke the ninety days into one-day increments. Each day he would produce two pages.
“Two pages I could do standing on my head,” Peter explained.
By sizing the challenge to his current level of motivation, Peter increased the likelihood he’d take action. Each day would be a “win” if he merely finished two pages. Breaking the goal into smaller chunks was enormously motivating to Peter, as it gave him ninety triumphs along the way rather than only one big success at the end.
Next, Peter took a picture of himself in borrowed doctoral robes. Then he cut the photo into ninety pieces. Each day as Peter finished his pages he would add one block of his mosaic to a chart in his bedroom. Three weeks into his game, Peter reported bashfully, “I’m embarrassed to admit how happy it made me feel to simply glue a piece of my picture onto the chart. It was the biggest thrill of my day.”
By breaking his goal into small wins, setting a limited time frame, and developing a meaningful way of keeping score, Peter turned something noxious into something surprisingly motivating by making it fun. After he received his PhD, his employer gave him a ten-thousand-dollar-per-year raise. Now that’s fun.
It’s hard to overstate how much easier it is to love what you hate when you turn a tough task into a game. Another compelling example of learning to love what you hate comes from young diabetics. Imagine how hard it would be to get a newly diagnosed eleven-year-old to give herself six painful shots per day. Who could love a shot? Fortunately, the vast majority of kids today manage to follow this regimen just fine because the goal of long-term management has been turned into a game.
Several times a day, kids put a drop of blood on a meter that gives them a “score.” They know they’re winning if their score is between 60 and 120—a healthy blood-sugar reading. So now they’re playing a game. They have a limited time frame (every couple of hours); a small challenge (stay between 60 and 120); and a score (the current reading).
These three elements turn the drudgery of worrying about one’s long-term health into an engrossing and motivating game. We’re not suggesting that diabetic kids prefer the testing game to an hour on their Wii—but their experience of the process of diabetes management changes profoundly when it’s broken down in this way.7 It also transforms something far-off and fuzzy (health management) into something short-term and in control. By focusing on the short term and turning the task into a game, far more diabetic kids are now succeeding in the long term by living long and healthy lives.
Consider the experience of the rather remarkable Changer Rosemary C. She escaped a life of prostitution, drug dealing, and heroin addiction by transforming into a healthy, nonaddicted citizen. She did it by relying heavily on, of all things, a simple statement she would review whenever temptations overpowered her. By reciting her simple but personally powerful statement, Rosemary caught a glimpse of this person—the healthy, nonaddicted version of herself—and pulled that vision to the forefront of her mind every time she faced a temptation.
It all started when Rosemary courageously left the streets behind and secured a clerical job working for a woman she deeply admired. One day Rosemary completed a difficult assignment a bit early and proudly gave it to her boss. As she turned to leave, her boss looked at the polished assignment, looked back at Rosemary, and said, “Thank you for being so dependable.”
“Dependable”? No one had ever called her dependable before. She had never seen herself that way either. She had been described as a hooker or a dealer or an addict, but never dependable.
That word became Rosemary’s anchor. Over the next two years, during crucial moments when she was tempted to give up on her aspirations, she promised herself that before she made a choice, she would recite a brief statement that said, “I am not a hooker. I am not a dealer. I am not an addict. I am the kind of person others can depend on.” It was nothing eloquent. But it shook Rosemary’s insides most times when she recited it. And it created a seismic shift in her feelings about the choice she faced. Her temptations seemed less interesting. Doing the right things seemed a little more satisfying.
Where is Rosemary today? She has just earned her bachelor’s degree. Now, that’s pretty dependable.
So, as you’re doing your best to stay on the right path, remember Rosemary. As you face crucial moments during which you must decide whether to stick to your exercise plan, hold tight to your budget, get up each morning and hit the books to advance in your career, or otherwise do something challenging, use the power of a Personal Motivation Statement to rewire your thoughts about your choice.
A good statement can include references to your default future. It can tell the whole vivid story that you might otherwise ignore in these moments. And it should be laden with value words.8 One of the simplest ways to create a first draft of a Personal Motivation Statement is to have a trusted friend conduct a motivational interview with you. This is a handy but powerful process that starts with a simple structured conversation.
To see how powerful this special conversation can be, let’s go back to the emergency room for a moment. But this time we’re not talking helmets and organ transplants. Instead we’re face-to-face with an inebriated fourteen-year-old.
You’re treating a young man who passed out after an all-night drinking binge. To make matters worse, the boy was drinking alone—a foreboding sign that he’s at risk for alcoholism. And you’re not a social worker; you’re a nurse. The boy has now sobered up, and his parents are waiting to take him home. You’ve got fifteen to twenty minutes to do something to help him find some motivation to change—a hopelessly short amount of time for what seems like a serious problem.
Recent studies had emergency room professionals conduct motivational interviews with the patients in similar circumstances, and discovered that this brief chat can have a powerful effect. There is overwhelming evidence that those who benefit from one are significantly more likely to change—long after the emergency room conversation ends.9
After treating the patients’ injuries, caregivers conducted a fifteen-to twenty-minute interview wherein they asked injured abusers to discuss the future they’d like to live, how they were going to get there, and so forth. In the end, subjects crafted a powerful statement of their default and desired futures along with a few thoughts about their plan to get what they wanted. When the subjects are allowed to envision for themselves what lies ahead if they do and don’t change (even if only for a few minutes), many make profound improvements in their lives.
You can access a basic agenda for a motivational interview at ChangeAnything.com/exclusive.
As you work on your change effort, rid yourself of the notion that success will require a lifetime of self-denial. You can take steps to change how you feel about both negative and positive choices by making your likely future salient, poignant, and real. You can learn to love what you hate. To do so, keep the following tactics in mind.
Visit Your Default Future. Is there a way to get a clear view of your most likely future? Visit someone or someplace that is pretty close to where you’re heading. The more vivid you make the visit, the more powerfully it can influence you.
Tell the Whole Vivid Story. What are the specific descriptive words that sum up where you are or where you’re heading?
Use Value Words. You know the sacrifice you’ll be making—but why are you doing it? What principle are you adhering to? What quality are you developing? What standard are you adhering to?
Make It a Game. Is there a way you can set a time frame or small milestones along the way to achieving your greater goal? Is there someone you can compete with for encouragement?
Create a Personal Motivation Statement. Reconnect yourself to your reasons for changing during crucial moments by preparing a Personal Motivation Statement. Draw on your default future. Tell the whole vivid story. Use value words in a concise way that will change how you feel when you most need to.
Review each of the five tactics and decide which best suit your needs. Build one or more into your written change plan. Since all Source 1 tactics deal with how you think about both the future and the present, they’re only a thought away. That makes them immediately available and totally under your control. Source 1 can be a wonderful ally.
However, don’t forget: We’ve examined only one source of influence so far. When used in isolation, one tactic is likely to be insufficient to either motivate or enable change. So, keep reading. Learn tactics from each of the six sources and then carefully apply them in combination. There’s no need to show up at a gunfight with only a Nerf gun.