Reading time ~6 minutes
All my blog posts from this month (December 2021) are on the topic of “CHANGE”. These include:
#1 – Implementing better Habits for a successful 2022,
#2 – Prioritizing the Priorities as Time Passes and we get Older,
#3 – Letting Go of the Things that Hold us back.
While all of these are simple things to understand, these can be extremely hard to follow. Life is easy to Talk. But it is difficult to Live.
It is Incredibly Hard to Change Ourselves. No one can make us change unless we truly want to.
We all know the ideal person who we’d want to become. We all want to be a person who’s energetic, who’s healthy and fit, who’s a good spouse, an engaged parent, a responsible citizen, a person who’s successful at work, someone who has a good sense of humour, and on an overall basis, a person who’s less stressed and less busy than how he or she is right now.
Yet, we are not there yet (sometimes even after years of trying).
I read an extremely interesting book “Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last” on this topic which is written by one of the world’s foremost Leadership Coaches – Marshall Goldsmith. I highly recommend that you read this book. According to Goldsmith, meaningful behaviour change is very hard to achieve, and no one can make us change unless we truly want to change ourselves.
In the book, Goldsmith says “Fate is the hand of cards we’ve been dealt. Choice is how we play the hand.”
Goldsmith writes that our environment (internal and external) is a nonstop triggering mechanism whose impact on our behaviour is too significant to be ignored.
Internal Environment: According to Goldsmith, we are geniuses at inventing reasons to avoid change (especially if someone else wants us to do those). We read advise books and think ‘this is common sense’. Yet, we seldom act on it. Similarly, we procrastinate change incorrectly believing we’ll start the change tomorrow (which never arrives). Or we often compare ourselves with others (who are much worse than us); and give ourselves a false sense of immunity. Our internal beliefs trigger failure even before it happens. Such beliefs sabotage our lasting change by cancelling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify inaction and then wish away the result. Ultimately, it sustains the gap between the ‘ideal you’ and the ‘real you’.
External Environment: As a coach, Goldsmith had to travel a lot. When he started catching flights over 30 years ago, he could catch up on his reading and writing (or on his sleep). Those were his silence zones – with no telephone or other interruptions. However, as the in-flight entertainment options increased, his productivity dropped. That is when Goldsmith realized that we are not in sync with our environment but we’re constantly at war with it. He writes “We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us. We think our external environment is conspiring in our favor—that is, helping us—when actually it is taxing and draining us. It is not interested in what it can give us. It’s only interested in what it can take from us.”
Think about it. We are all a victim of the external environment. Overspending at a high-end-mall to buy things we do not want? Jumping to our smart phone to check the ‘likes’ on our recent post (every minute)? Or binge watching an engaging TV show on Netflix and consequently waking up groggy eyed the next morning?
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So how does one work on achieving a behaviour change, if they’re constantly bombarded with the internal and external triggers whose only objective is to derail any meaningful progress? That is where Goldsmith says a feedback loop helps.
What is a Feedback Loop?
Goldsmith gives an example where people routinely ignore the speed limit signs on highways and drive above the maximum permissible speed limit (unless of course, a cop car is monitoring the motorists speed limits). He states that this happens because the drivers don’t have a feedback loop.
When, however, Radar Speed Displays were posted above the speed limit signs showing a digital readout measuring “Your Speed”, the feedback loop was completed, and the speeding reduced considerably. Goldsmith writes, “Radar speed displays—also called driver feedback systems—work because they harness a well-established concept in behavior theory called a feedback loop. The RSDs measure a driver’s action (that is, speeding) and relay the information to the driver in real time, inducing the driver to react. It’s a loop of action, information, reaction. When the reaction is measured, a new loop begins, and so on and so on.”
The same feedback loop can be used to trigger a behaviour change.
Using a Feedback Loop for Behaviour Change
Goldsmith states that we can use a similar feedback loop to identify the areas where we require a behaviour change, and then collect a feedback on it every single day. Let’s assume that someone has the following 5 goals at present:
- Exercise
- Meditation
- Eat healthy food
- Learn something new at work
- Stay in touch with friends and family
Then the feedback loop can be the following matrix, where the person scores his or her success every single day (on a scale of 1-10) It could even be a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ Question if rating oneself seems objectively difficult:
The objective is to be as transparent as possible, so you get your own report card on a daily basis. Over time, you will see a pattern. There is no excuse that we can build into this simple daily task. You are either successful, or you are not.
Goldsmith says that most people unfortunately discontinue with such tracking after about two weeks. And they stop not because this technique does not work. They stop because it does! The system is brutally honest, and it is hard for people to digest seeing their own failure, day after day. Its better to quit, than to see yourself fail.
I must admit that being consistent is hard. I tried this technique for several weeks on several occasions (and gave up multiple times). It is hard but I know it does deliver.
Goldsmith says that with his ridiculous travel regime, he has every reason to get himself off the hook when it comes to matters that are most important to him (e.g. his own health, his family and friends). That’s why he pays someone to call him each day, and they go through his own list of 30 odd items. Every Single Day. He says that unless there’s another human to take stock of how you are doing, it will not get done.
FEEDBACK LOOP ACTIVE QUESTIONS
Over time, Goldsmith has drilled down to six ‘active’ questions we should ask ourselves every day in order to not let ourselves off the hook on the important things we need to achieve in our own lives. These questions are:
Did I do my BEST to:
- Be happy?
- Find meaning?
- Be fully engaged?
- Build positive relationships?
- Set clear goals?
- Make progress toward goal achievement?
On each of these parameters, Goldsmith says that we alone have power to make a change (no outside factor can influence these). In fact, when he taught this technique to three senior doctors, each doctor had a confused look when they came across the first question. When Glodsmith asked them, “Do you have a problem with being happy?”, the three senior doctors sheepishly said, “It never occurred to me to try to be happy.”
Goldsmith writes, “All three had the intellectual bandwidth to graduate from medical school and ascend to chief executive roles, and yet they had to be reminded to be happy. That’s how difficult it is to know what we want to change. Even the sharpshooters among us can miss a really big target.”
If you have an hour to spare, you can watch this extremely insightful presentation by the man himself.
Final Thoughts
Using the power of positive feedback loops, we can not only make an impact on the big things in our lives, but we can even target the little areas of our lives where we need positive behaviour change.
Viktor Frankl, in his legendary book Man’s Search for Meaning, has observed that “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’
The feedback loop model can even be set up for that “empty space” between the stimulus and the response. For instance, if your existing behaviour is to make snap comments at others (only to regret those later), your feedback loop can be designed to state: “Did I do my best to take a pause before I opened my mouth today?” All I can tell you is that it works.
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Cover Photo by Celpax on Unsplash
In one line consistency helps …though it is very difficult to maintain beat it is exercise, work, reading or anything else. Good article …