The premise of change is simple: Nothing changes unless...something changes. However, the outcome is less simple. Despite your best efforts, some changes fail while others succeed—and it’s usually unclear why this happens.
As it turns out, successful change depends on three essential elements: 1) your rational side, 2) your emotional side, and 3) the environment you shape. We’ll discuss the role of each of these elements and how to harness their power for change—first, by giving your rational side clear direction; second, by harnessing the energy of your emotional side; and third, by shaping a change-supporting environment.
Your rational side makes goals, plans for the future, and analyzes problems before taking action. This is the ideal “you.” However, your rational side can actually hold you back from making changes by overanalyzing problems and solutions and getting stuck in details and options. If you don’t give your rational side clear direction, it becomes paralyzed. There are three ways to push your rational side out of analysis into productive action.
Often, when we want to make changes, we look at the problems and possible solutions. Instead, we should be seeking out success stories that we can emulate—essentially, look for what’s already working, and do more of it. This exercise guards us against three major issues that often block change:
Imagine you’re having trouble getting your employees to use a new feedback system. Instead of spending time and energy “fixing” those who are struggling, look for an employee who has successfully incorporated the new system into her workflow. Have your struggling employees spend an afternoon with her—they’ll learn practical ways to make the change within the context of their work, and they will naturally trust the solution more because it’s coming from a peer.
When presented with too many options or ambiguity, humans naturally default to the most familiar option. Making familiar choices lets you function on autopilot, which doesn’t require you to expend any energy on decision-making. On the other hand, change creates unfamiliarity that disrupts your autopilot. You’re forced to weigh options, make deliberate decisions, and supervise your behaviors—especially when the change you’re trying to create is ambiguous.
This quickly depletes your rational thinking power, allowing your emotional side to take over control. And of course, your emotional side will always choose the instant gratification of the status quo instead of the difficult work of change.
To avoid defaulting to your status quo, reduce options and ambiguity as much as possible. Lay out precisely the actions that are most critical to making the change stick. This helps you know what to do, without deliberation. You can’t put guidelines in place for every imaginable scenario—focus on several specific behaviors that cover numerous situations.
For example, if you’re trying to eat healthier breakfasts, you can’t predict what foods will be available to you every morning. Instead, you might put together four critical guidelines:
Over time, these guidelines become less unfamiliar and more instinctive—the status quo that your autopilot defaults to. This creates sustainable change because the desired behaviors will no longer require your rational side’s concentrated effort or self-supervision.
Change is most successful when you can paint a clear picture of a not-too-far-off destination you want to head toward. For example, making changes to lose weight might have the destination of “fitting in my favorite jeans again.”
Often, when faced with an ambitious goal, your rational side will get stuck deciding if there’s even a problem that needs to be solved and wondering what the best possible solution might be. Reframing your goal as a clear destination points your rational energy in a productive direction in two ways:
Your emotional desire for instant gratification may occasionally control your behaviors. These bumps are normal, but be very careful not to rationalize anti-change behaviors.
Rationalizing anti-change behaviors moves you in the opposite direction of change. You believe your rational side is still in full control, simply allowing a small sidestep from the path. However, these small, controlled sidesteps are anything but—they’re your emotional side’s sly way to drag you back to square one before you realize what’s happening.
When you combine a strong sense of where you’re going with clear guidelines with no wiggle room for rationalization, you’re aware of how far you’re going off track and avoid the subtle trap of rationalization.
Your emotional side acts instinctively and is driven by instant gratification. When changes fail, it’s usually your emotional side’s fault—change hinges on the ability to delay gratification and make short-term sacrifices in exchange for a long-term payoff. However, because your emotional side is much stronger than your rational side, it will do most of the legwork in getting you to your goal, if you can harness its energy.
There are three ways to get emotional energy moving in the right direction.
Most people think that all change follows the process: analysis→ thought→ change. You receive information, carefully analyze it, think of a solution, and execute the change. However, this process only works for small, defined changes, such as deciding to stop buying paper towels.
Using this process to try to get people on board with large, ambiguous changes is a waste of energy. It misdirects your efforts—you’ll assume that your audience isn’t changing because they don’t understand the information well enough to see the problem.
However, your audience usually understands the information—hearing it again won’t make them care, or see the need for change. Most people naturally feel that they’re better than others, which helps them rationalize away information.
When large change is at stake, the process looks more like: experience→ feel→ change. That is, you have to create an experience that sparks a strong emotion—such as outrage, joy, or disgust—that will drive people to change. Emotions are hard to rationalize away.
Context has a large part in determining which emotions you should appeal to.
One of the most distracting factors along the path to change is the possibility of instant gratification. The gratification that far-off goals offer is too distant—your emotional side naturally starts looking for more immediate ways to feel satisfied. Keep your emotional side on track by building frequent opportunities for gratification into the journey. You can do this in two ways.
People are naturally more motivated to work toward a goal when they feel that they’re already partway there. When progress isn’t immediately apparent, your emotional side becomes demoralized and distracted. However, a “head start” on your goals feels like immediate progress—giving your emotional side a boost of satisfaction and confidence that carries you to the next benchmark of progress. Motivate change by demonstrating the progress that’s already been made.
Keep in mind that any achieved goal is just a collection of small, doable actions. Shifting your focus toward these small actions, instead of the result, can prevent discouragement.
You can do this in two ways:
1) Start small. Instead of considering the overwhelming work to be done, think: What is the smallest task I could complete that would be a step in the right direction? Completing this small first task gives you a quick fix of instant gratification, motivating you to complete the next task.
2) Create milestones. Building small, frequent milestones into the journey and celebrating them ensures a regular supply of instant gratification opportunities. For example, if you’re learning French, you might set the following milestones: 1) Read and understand one article from Le Monde, 2) Watch a season of your favorite show with French subtitles, 3) Listen to and understand one French podcast episode, 4) Write an entire essay without using a dictionary.
When trying to get people on board with ambiguous ideas or big changes, it’s most effective to appeal to identity—the essential part of your sense of self and the way you make decisions. Identities can be relatively flexible in that you naturally adopt different identities throughout your life, such as parent, world-traveler, or musician. However, identities can be rigid in that if you propose a change that contradicts someone’s identity, they’ll naturally resist. Therefore, you need to either align your proposed change with someone’s identity or align their identity with your proposed change. Start by asking yourself if the people you’re appealing to would say: “I want to be the kind of person who makes this change.”
Start small—ask your audience to perform a minor change-supporting behavior. The behavior makes them think that they do align with the identity you suggested. Subsequently, they start performing more behaviors that align with the change—reinforcing the identity.
Creating a successful path toward change means keeping your rational and emotional sides moving forward together by eliminating instant-gratification distractions and removing any obstacles that might spark overanalysis. Interestingly, your environment can either work independently of or in tandem with your rational and emotional elements.
There are three ways to build support into your path toward change.
The first way to smooth your path is to create a change-supporting environment—that is, an environment that makes good behaviors easier to perform, and bad behaviors harder to perform. Create a change-supporting environment by modifying your routines or your space.
Change-supporting routines: Change up your routine to surround yourself with tools that make good behaviors easy and roadblocks that make bad behaviors difficult. Imagine you’re trying to start running every morning and want to spend less on unhealthy food. Make good behaviors easier by setting your coffee to auto-brew at 7 a.m. so you’ll be more motivated to get up, and packing your lunch the night before so you don’t order takeout at work again.
Make bad behaviors more difficult by finding a running buddy you’ll have to contact if you want to skip your run, and only ordering takeout with one specific credit card that you keep in an inconvenient place like your garden shed.
Change-supporting spaces: Physically rearranging your space can guide you toward performing more change-supporting behaviors.
It’s not always possible to change your environment—in these cases, work on building habits that trigger good behaviors. When desired behaviors become habitual, autopilot behaviors, you’ll naturally and effortlessly fall back on them to conserve rational energy.
At the base of good habit-building are “action triggers.” These are the triggers we set up to prompt a certain action. For example, “When I leave work (trigger), I’ll go to the gym (action).”
Powerful habits come from combining action triggers with preloaded responses—practiced and memorized reactions. Your preloaded response happens reflexively in a situation that calls for it. Pairing action triggers with preloaded responses prevents you from getting lost in possible solutions or pulled off track by your emotional wants.
While creating preloaded responses, reframe your thoughts from “What is the right thing to do?” to “What is my action trigger, and how can I get the right thing done?”
Your action triggers need to be specific and visible—otherwise, they won’t be strong enough to trigger your preloaded response. For example, you’re trying to cut down on drinking. You identify specific situations where you’ll be tempted to drink and create preloaded responses that make you do the right thing: not drink.
These triggers—“when the waiter asks me what I would like to drink” and “when I’m walking home”—are specific enough to prompt your response. On the other hand, a vague action trigger such as, “When I go out, I’ll drink seltzer instead of wine,” leaves room for deliberation: “We’re at dinner, which isn’t really going out. Just one glass of wine will be fine.”
You can also use the people around you to support change. Humans, as social creatures, figure out how to behave by watching others—when you’re not sure how to react to a situation, you’ll look for cues in the behavior of those around you. This means that behavior is contagious between people. There are three ways you can ensure that your environment sends contagious, change-supporting social signals.
Get people on board with changes by broadcasting just how many people are performing change-supporting behaviors. People take this information as a social signal that indicates what they should be doing—and they feel ashamed when their actions fall short of this standard.
At times, your proposed change will be an idea that everyone already agrees with—you just have to attach social signals to it in order to make it a widespread practice. When the idea has a concrete shape, it can be publicized and incorporated into common knowledge and opinion.
Cultural changes can be difficult because they disrupt the “way things are,” which is often closely intertwined with people’s identities. Put your efforts toward helping change-supporters find one another and cultivate a new identity and culture. In doing so, they’ll feel more emboldened to speak up for change—thus sending out social signals to a larger audience.
Getting your change in motion is half the battle—now, turn your sights to making that change stick for the long term. There are three ways to accomplish this.
1) Reinforce change: Change doesn’t happen in an instant—it’s a long process of repeated behaviors that slowly get closer to your goal. You can motivate continued attempts at change by celebrating behaviors, no matter how small, that represent progress toward the goal.
2) Give the change time to settle in: The beginning stages of change are the hardest simply because you’re not used to them—but you’ll find that changes become acceptable and start to snowball as you give them time to settle in. This happens for two reasons:
3) Remember that change is a pattern: When change works, it’s because you got your rational side, emotional side, and your path all on track—change follows this pattern in all contexts. This knowledge helps you with change in two ways:
No matter where you’re trying to effect change—at your organization, in yourself, in society—nothing changes unless...something changes. This feels fairly common sense, yet many attempts at change fail. On the other hand, you’ve likely experienced plenty of changes that succeed, such as starting a new career, having children, or sticking to a daily exercise routine. Oftentimes, we don’t know why some of these changes work, we just know that they do.
In this summary, we’ll discuss the patterns of successful change and how you can regularly engineer them, significantly improving your change success rate. First, it’s important to understand the three main elements of change.
Your rational side is the part of you that sets goals, plans for the future, and carefully analyzes problems before taking action. In short, this is the “you” that you want to be.
However, there’s a major hidden flaw of your rational side that actually holds you back from making changes. Your rational side tends to overthink problems, overanalyze possible solutions, and get stuck in details, information, and options. Though your rational side wants to make a change, it paralyzes itself and holds you back from taking action.
Your emotional side is the part of you that acts instinctively and is easily driven by the possibility of instant gratification. When changes fail, it’s usually your emotional side’s fault—change hinges on the ability to delay gratification and make short-term sacrifices in exchange for a long-term payoff.
However, there’s a major hidden advantage of your emotional side that can drive successful change. Your emotional side is much stronger than your rational side—if you can harness the energy of your emotions and point it in the right direction, it will do most of the legwork in getting you to your goal.
When change fails, it’s often due to a conflict for control between your rational side and your emotional side. Jonathan Haidt explains this conflict in The Happiness Hypothesis, where he compares the struggle between your rational side and emotional side to a rider atop an elephant, urging it forward. The elephant is far stronger than the rider—if they have different ideas about where to go, the rider will lose every time.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of The Happiness Hypothesis for a closer look at Haidt’s rider and elephant analogy.)
The “path forward” is the environment you create around a change—a successful path is shaped to keep both the rational rider and the emotional elephant moving forward together.
A clear, successful path has two important elements:
Interestingly, the path can either work independently of your rational and emotional elements, or it can work in tandem with them.
In this summary, we’ll discuss the tools for using each of these elements productively and aligning them with one another.
Reflecting on failed changes and the misalignment of your three elements of change (rational, emotional, environmental) can help you understand the importance of getting them in sync for your next attempt.
Describe a change you recently tried to make but didn’t succeed with (for example, spending less time on social media).
What did you want to happen, rationally?
How did your emotional side throw you off course?
Though the change ultimately wasn’t successful, were there any aspects of your environment that were helpful to your attempt (for example, your partner reminding you to put down your phone)?
What unhelpful aspects of your environment significantly contributed to going off course (for example, your phone pinging you with incoming messages)?
Often, when we want to make changes, our rational selves focus immediately on the problems and possible solutions. Instead, we should be seeking out success stories that can inform decisions or be emulated—essentially, look for what’s already working, and do more of that.
This exercise performs the essential function of interrupting your rational side’s analysis and reflection. While analysis and reflection can be helpful in some contexts, too often they stop the process of change completely—examining one problem reveals 10 more, and it’s easy to get mired in the details. Finding a success story to emulate is what gives your rational side a clear direction to move in. Suddenly, the way forward seems obvious—“we need to do more of that.”
Examining success stories helps us avoid two major issues that contribute strongly to the inability to change.
1) Our rational tendency to examine problems instead of solutions means that we’re often preoccupied with the scale of the problem—therefore seeking large, complicated solutions to large, complicated problems. However, success stories usually reveal that effective solutions can be much smaller than the problem at hand.
2) We naturally feel defensive or argumentative toward “outsider” solutions, for two reasons:
“Insider” success stories send the message, “That does work here,” and give us the satisfaction of having solved our own problem.
Now we’ll examine how seeking out success stories can be applied in the context of personal change, organizational change, and social change.
Solution-focused therapy shows how identifying exceptions to a problem can effectively drive change. This type of therapy doesn’t look into the past to analyze and unravel the sources of your problems. Instead, solution-focused therapists examine the immediate problem and its solutions through a simple series of questions.
First, they ask “the miracle question”: If you were to wake up tomorrow and the problem was miraculously solved, what would be the first small indication that something was different in your life?
Then, they move on to “the exception question”: When was the last time you saw a little indication of the miracle solution, for any small amount of time?
A couple approaches a therapist because they’re bickering constantly and can’t seem to get on the same page.
The therapist asks the miracle question: “If you woke up tomorrow magically back in tune with your spouse, what would the first indication be?” The wife answers, “If he brought me a coffee in the morning. I’d know that he listens when I talk about how hard it is for me to wake up.” The husband says, “If she didn’t start chatting as soon as the coffee perked her up. That would show me she’s mindful of how much I dislike talking in the morning.”
The therapist moves to the exception question: “When was the last time you really felt like you were listening to one another?” They agree on their answer. “A few weeks ago. We went to dinner and had an amazing conversation over a bottle of wine.” The therapist pushes, “Why do you think this dinner was special?” The wife replies, “For once I didn’t blow off plans to finish up work. And I felt good because he spent time with me instead of going out with his friends again.”
This conversation stops the couple from searching for the source of their communication issues or overanalyzing past disagreements—instead, successful solutions snap into focus.
When pushing organizational change, it’s tempting to focus on underperformers and try to bring them up to speed. Instead, look for team members who are incorporating the change exceptionally well, and use them as an example for their colleagues. Not only does this “insider” demonstration prove that the change is achievable and practical, it also saves you the time and energy you’d otherwise spend trying to explain the importance of the change.
For example, you want the managers at your company to raise the communication scores on their direct reports’ feedback forms. You check their scores in one month. One of the managers has exceptional scores, four haven’t boosted their low scores, and one has gone down slightly.
You have the successful manager explain her system:
You have each of the underperformers spend a day at the office with the successful manager. With a clear peer example, they see how to fit feedback sessions into their schedules, and have several clear methods to increase communication within their own teams.
Counterintuitively, success stories are often met with suspicion in many organizations. When someone performs exceptionally well, it’s assumed that they must be gaming the system in some way or fudging their results. Be careful not to fall into this thinking—success stories in your organization are an opportunity to improve, not a trick.
Social change comes with two particular challenges:
Seeking out success stories can pinpoint local solutions that don’t have to be on the same scale as the problem.
Jerry Sternin was tasked with ending child malnutrition in Vietnam in six months, on a tight budget. He had a lot of information about the problems that exacerbated malnutrition—poor sanitation, high levels of poverty, lack of clean water, and so on. However, this information was useless to him, as he didn’t have the time or the money to solve all these deep-rooted problems.
Instead, he sought out healthy children. Local mothers were tasked with weighing the children in their villages and taking note of any particularly big or strong children. These exceptionally well-nourished children revealed that a successful solution was already in place and being used by local mothers.
He studied the practices of the well-fed children’s mothers, considering how they were different from other mothers’. He came away with three key findings:
With these findings, he created a program where locals shared food-making duties for their villages’ children, using the recipes of the success-story mothers. He showed mothers across Vietnam that they already had the means to make their children healthier—they just had to make it standard practice. The villagers were receptive—the solution was local, not an “outsider” idea, and was practical and sustainable within the context of the villagers’ lives. The new cooking practices stuck. Six months later, 65% of the children were better nourished.
Often, the best solution to a problem is one that’s already working but may have been overlooked.
What is a problem you’re facing? (For example, “I eat too many snacks between dinner and bedtime.”)
Think of how you have already seen a successful solution to this problem, no matter how small. Describe the solution. (“I don’t snack much when I have dark chocolate in the house because it seems to satisfy my cravings right away, in a way that other snacks don’t.”)
How can you compound on or replicate this solution to solve the problem? (“I’ll stop buying snack foods and will make sure I always have a bar of chocolate on hand.)
Humans are predisposed to “decision paralysis”—that is, when you’re presented with too many options you tend to default to whatever feels easiest or most familiar, or you don’t do anything at all.
You default to familiar options because doing so saves energy. When you’re functioning on autopilot—that is, making familiar choices—you’re not expending any energy on decision-making. Change disrupts your autopilot, forcing you to consider options, make deliberate decisions, and supervise your behaviors. This quickly depletes your rational thinking power, allowing your emotional side to take over control. And of course, your emotional side will always choose the instant gratification of the status quo instead of the difficult work of change.
Decision paralysis doesn’t only come from having too many options—it also stems from getting trapped by ambiguity. Unclear options trigger overanalysis and questions, and we can’t move forward until we feel we have an answer to those questions.
Reduce the options and ambiguity around a change by setting specific actions as behavioral guidelines. The specificity of these guidelines pushes you toward your goals while cutting out the need to deliberate about “good” behavior—conserving your rational energy. You don’t need to create guidelines for every imaginable scenario. That would be close to impossible. Instead, focus on several small, critical behaviors.
For example, if you’re trying to eat healthier breakfasts, you can’t predict what foods will be available to you every morning. Instead, you might put together four critical guidelines:
Over time, these guidelines become more instinctive than unfamiliar—the status quo that your autopilot defaults to. This creates sustainable change because the desired behaviors will no longer require your rational side’s concentrated effort or self-supervision.
Erasing ambiguity is important when trying to get others to change their behaviors, because what you consider the “right” choices aren’t always the most obvious choices to others. They, like you, have a rational side that will overanalyze their options, seek solutions on the same scale as the problem, and get caught up in useless details. When presenting others with a proposed change, make the new way of doing things crystal clear—don’t assume that they’ll figure out how to accomplish it on their own.
Students in Miner County, South Dakota—a shrinking town with few jobs and South Dakota’s highest rate of youth emigration—wanted to prevent their county from disappearing from the map. They set a huge, ambiguous goal: Save Miner County.
Locals supported the idea but had no idea what changes they needed to make to accomplish it. Should they focus on sparking interest in the county’s history? Find a way to leverage their location? Turn their efforts toward diversifying their demographics? The complexity of the problem and the range of possible solutions sparked decision paralysis.
The students discovered that most Miner County locals were doing their shopping in towns far outside the county, but if they spent just 10% more of their disposable income within the county, they’d add $7 million to the local economy. They offered a straightforward solution to a complex problem and clearly scripted a critical behavior: Spend more money in Miner County.
Within a year, the economy grew by $15.6 million, and the taxes generated by local spending supported the community’s schools, public spaces, and businesses. Over the following years, as money went back into the community and revitalized it, the county reestablished itself on the map with new industries like organic beef production and wind turbine repair.
If you’re trying to make a change, you need to specify the actions needed to get there, or you risk getting trapped by options and ambiguity.
Describe a change you’re trying to make or a goal you’re trying to reach. (For example, you want to learn a new language.)
How are having too many options or too much ambiguity holding you back from working toward this goal? (For example, you might get bogged down in thinking about whether an online or in-person course will serve you best, which concepts and vocabulary would be the best starting point, how long it will take to achieve fluency, and how to track progress.)
What are a few concrete, clear ways you could work toward making this change? (For example, join a trial period of each type of course, list the concepts you’re most interested in learning, write down what progress means to you.)
Based on your last response, what are four critical goal-supporting guidelines you can put in place for yourself? (For example, do one online and one in-person class per week, learn 10 new vocabulary words per week, listen to a podcast every Saturday morning and reflect on comprehension.)
One problem that many people run into when making goals—both on a personal level and an organizational level—is that they focus on an ambitious, ambiguous result. These types of results don’t have a clear metric for measuring “success” and often take a long time to reveal themselves. When you can’t quantify or immediately see success, you quickly become discouraged. And, if your goal is too far off, you lose sight of what you’re working toward. Imagine you set the goal to “lose weight.” With an ambiguous goal like this, you don’t know exactly what you’re aiming for, which makes it hard to understand your progress.
Change is most successful when your goals have two essential elements:
For example, make your weight loss goal feel more achievable by setting a clear destination such as, “I want to fit into my favorite jeans again.” This tangible destination means that you know exactly what you’re aiming for. And, you can measure your success—every few weeks, you try on your jeans to see how much you’ve advanced toward your destination.
Clear destinations are an essential counter to the over-analytical nature of your rational side. When your goals are too vague, you open up two avenues of overanalysis.
On the other hand, coming up with a vivid destination helps direct your rational energy away from the problem and toward the solution, in two ways:
1) It articulates why change is necessary and worth the effort. You don’t have to think about whether there’s a problem, because the problem is immediately clear.
2) It interrupts your tendency to get caught up in the thinking and planning phase and pushes you into the doing phase. Instead of mulling over the details of your current situation and the many ways you could move forward, your thinking shifts to specific ways you can work toward the destination.
Even with a clear destination in mind and a genuine desire to change, you can all too easily be pulled off course by your emotional desires. Your emotional side is incredibly strong—as soon as you let it take over as your decision-maker, your rational side starts coming up with rationalizations of your anti-change actions.
Imagine you started an exercise routine to reach your “favorite jeans” destination. After a few weeks on track, you decide to stay in bed for an extra hour and skip your morning walk. You rationalize the choice: “I’ve been on track so far. I deserve a day off. And I shouldn’t do too much exercise or I might injure myself.”
In rationalizing your anti-change actions, you destroy your change potential in two ways:
The best way to stay on track with your rational side’s desires and avoid emotional takeover is by blending short-term guidelines with your longer-term destination.
The reason short-term guidelines and long-term destinations work so well together to create change is that successful change depends on having a strong beginning and a strong ending. What happens in the middle doesn’t matter as much—it usually looks nothing like you expect it will, and it usually sorts itself out as you successfully get the ball rolling with short-term change-supporting actions and have a vivid idea of where you’ll end up.
For example, you set your “favorite jeans” destination and create short-term guidelines that don’t leave any wiggle room for rationalization.
Along the way, you might discover that you prefer to do Pilates twice a week instead of walking, you tend to overindulge in wine but have control with low-cal beer, and ordering sushi a few times a week is healthier than the meals you cook up on busy nights. You change your guidelines accordingly. The strict starter guidelines did their job of getting you moving in the right direction, and your vivid destination ensures that your guideline tweaks keep you on the path.
Visualizing a vivid destination that’s not too far out of reach can help you stay on the path toward change by reminding you of what you’re working toward.
Describe a goal you’d like to accomplish, personally or within your organization. (For example, “I’d like to lose weight,” or, “I’d like to see departments collaborate more.”)
How can you reframe this goal as a vivid destination? (For example, “I want to fit in my favorite jeans again,” or, “I’d like for at least two projects per month to be a collaborative effort between editorial, marketing, and sales.”)
What are some short-term guidelines you could put in place to get you on track toward this long-term destination? (For example, “Walk two miles every day and never drink beer.” Or, “Projects must be presented together by the three departments involved, and every Friday, meeting will involve a fun 15-minute interdepartmental exercise.”)
Once your rational side identifies a destination and solutions, get the driving power of your emotional side to spark action. In these next three chapters, we’ll focus on productively harnessing emotional power in three ways: appealing to the right feelings, minimizing the change, and cultivating identity and failure tolerance.
Many people think that all change follows the process: analysis→ thought→ change. That is, you’re presented with information, carefully analyze it, and execute a solution. However, this process only works for small changes that are quantifiable and defined, such as changing your route to work to hit an extra 1,000 steps each day.
When large change is at stake, the process looks more like: experience→ feel→ change. That is, when you experience something that makes you feel strong emotion—such as outrage, joy, or disgust—you’ll automatically feel driven to make a change.
Understanding the process behind change is crucial because it determines the success rate of getting others on board with your idea for change. When you’re stuck on the incorrect process of change, you assume that people aren’t changing because they simply don’t understand the rational explanation of what needs to be done, and why.
This misdirects your efforts—thinking that the audience doesn’t understand the problem leads you to put your efforts toward finding a way to explain the problem in a way that will make them care. However, your audience usually already knows everything you’re explaining—hearing the information again won’t suddenly make them care or see the need for change.
Most people unconsciously have a “positive illusion bias”—that is, most of us think much more highly of ourselves than we think of others. There are three ways this bias makes it hard for people to understand the necessity of change:
1) When you think highly of yourself, you don’t believe that there’s anything about you that needs to be changed.
2) When you assume that your behaviors are better than others’, you can more easily rationalize those behaviors.
3) When your actions have known negative effects, you believe that you’re “above” these effects in ways that others aren’t.
Rational information about why change is necessary doesn’t work because that information is filtered through the positive illusion bias—it gets warped in such a way that it can be easily ignored. To get people on board with your ideas, you need to appeal to their feelings by creating an experience (like the vegan message) that will elicit a strong emotional response—emotions can’t be rationalized away like information can.
You try to get a drug addict to commit to rehab. You give him information about the possible deadly contaminants in his drugs and show him rates of fatal overdose in your city, hoping he’ll see the danger of using. Instead, he easily rationalizes away the information: “I don’t use dealers that would push contaminated drugs, and I won’t overdose. I know my limits.”
You change your methods and find a way to appeal to his feelings. You set up an intervention with his family and a few of his close friends. His daughter expresses how sad she is that she can’t spend time with him like her friends spend with their dads. His parents explain that they live in a cloud of worry, always waiting for a call from the hospital or the cops.
If you’re going to effectively appeal to emotions, you need to be sure you’re focusing on the most useful ones for the context.
Negative emotions, like sadness, shock, or disgust are most effective for specific, personal changes because they tend to prompt specific actions—such as getting an addict to stop buying drugs, or convincing people to stop buying bottled water.
Within the context of an organization, however, things are a bit different. Some organizations try to motivate their employees to change by creating crises—by announcing layoffs, for example—that foster negative emotions. However, instead of creating organizational change, this method only prompts employees to make small, short-term changes that will keep them out of danger.
Organizational goals are usually achieved through ambiguous, long-term, and evolving changes—which depend on an appeal to positive emotions like surprise, empowerment, or excitement. These emotions broaden your vision and increase the number of things people might think about or explore. This grants you the flexible, sustainable, and creative solutions that large, long-term changes require.
In 1992, Robyn Waters joined Target as a trend manager. The company had an ambitious goal—they wanted to become an “upscale discounter,” revamping their image to stand out from huge competitors like Walmart.
At the time, Target buyers relied heavily on copying trends—they pinpointed fashion bestsellers, then made and sold knockoffs. While this kept Target stable, it also kept it stagnant. Instead of riding trends, they were following them. Waters wanted to change this mindset, getting her buyers on the forefront of trends instead of following the herd.
She seized her chance for change when vibrant colors came onto the fashion scene in London and Paris. She couldn’t simply tell her buyers to go for color—their analysis of past years’ sales showed clearly that neutrals were big sellers, and colors sold poorly.
She appealed to the emotion color evoked instead: She brought brightly colored candies to all her meetings, talked about Apple’s new colorful iMacs, and showed off pictures of colorful window displays around the world. These colorful presentations made buyers feel intrigued and pleasantly surprised. She’d say, “Don’t we want our brand to make people feel that way, too?”
These meetings quickly fanned the flames of change-supporting emotions like energy, creativity, hope, and competition. The experience of color made them see the need for the change that information and analysis couldn’t—and shot them toward their trend-forward, upscale goals.
When information isn’t enough to make people care about change, spark their interest by appealing to their emotions.
Describe a change you’d like to see—for example, in yourself, your organization, a relationship, or your community.
Who do you need to motivate? What information can you give them about why this change is necessary?
How can this information be rationalized and ignored?
What emotions do you think would spark motivation to make this change?
What experience can you set up that causes this emotional appeal?
When you’re working toward change, one of the most distracting factors is the possibility of instant gratification. As soon as your emotional side senses an opportunity for gratification, it will head right toward it, regardless of what your rational side wants. To keep your emotional side moving in the right direction, minimize the effort by building small, achievable goals into your path. And, keep your emotional side’s craving for gratification satisfied by celebrating your progress every step of the way.
Not only does this give you ample opportunity for gratification, but it also creates a crucial sense of confidence. Looking at a distant goal from your starting point can make you feel discouraged: “I’ll never be able to run 10km. I can barely walk 2km now.” On the other hand, small, frequent goals ensure that you’re only looking at the very next step instead of impossibly far ahead. Each time you achieve a small goal, you become more confident you’ll reach the next one: “I’ve done a five-minute jog every day this week. It’ll be no problem to take on next week’s seven-minute jogs.”
Minimizing the effort required for a change creates a positive cycle of behaviors—the more you accomplish, the more you feel you can take on. In this way, the emotional momentum behind change builds by itself. There are two methods for minimizing the effort of change: 1) emphasizing the progress already made, and 2) building in opportunities for celebration.
A car wash company experimented to figure out how they could motivate their customers to use their loyalty cards more frequently, thus buying more car washes. They split their customers into two groups:
Although both groups of customers needed 10 visits to claim their free wash, only 19% of the 10-punch card customers returned ten times to claim their free wash. On the other hand, 34% of the 12-punch card customers returned 10 more times.
This result revealed a quirk of human nature—people are naturally more motivated to work toward a goal when they feel that they’re already partly finished with it. This is largely because your emotional side feeds on instant gratification, quickly becoming demoralized when progress isn’t immediately apparent. When you create a sort of “head start,” the perceived progress gives your emotional side the boost it needs to make it to the next benchmark of progress.
When you’re pushing for change, look for ways to remind people—or yourself—of the progress that’s already been made.
Often, it’s hard to get started on a huge goal because you’re focused on the result. The distance between here and there seems insurmountable, which discourages you and turns you off from even making the first step. However, keep in mind that any achieved goal is just a collection of small, doable actions. Shifting your focus toward these small actions, instead of the end result, can prevent discouragement.
Instead of considering the overwhelming work to be done, think: “What is the smallest task I could complete that would be a step in the right direction?” Completing this small first task gives you a quick fix of instant gratification, motivating you to complete the next small task.
Dave Ramsey’s “snowball method” of paying off debt follows this idea. Focusing on a huge pile of debt can be discouraging, especially when you’re making minimum payments here and there, barely chipping away at the mountain. On the other hand, when you clear your smallest debt right away, you get the satisfaction of completing a task and you get a boost of motivation and confidence that drives you to take on the next debt.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover to learn more about the snowball method.)
Keep your emotional side engaged beyond this first accomplishment by building small, frequent milestones into the journey and celebrating them—this ensures a regular supply of instant gratification opportunities.
For example, if you’re learning French, you might set the following milestones:
Building these types of small wins into a long journey accomplishes three goals:
(Shortform note: Read our summary of The Power of Moments for more pointers on building and multiplying celebration-worthy milestones.)
Make a change more motivating by reflecting on the progress that’s already been made toward the goal and building in regular opportunities for celebration.
Describe a change you’re trying to make in your organization or personal life. (For example, trying to eliminate sugary drinks from your diet.)
What progress has already been made toward this goal? (A year ago, you were drinking at least three Cokes every day. Now, you’re only drinking two per day.)
How can you break the goal down into small, attainable milestones? (For example, 1) Switch to diet soda, 2) Only drink soda in the afternoon, 3) Cut down to one soda per day, 4) Switch to flavored seltzer water.)
How can you celebrate achieving each of these milestones? (For example, you treat yourself to your favorite takeout after at least one week of maintaining a milestone.)
When making decisions, we usually follow one of two lines of thinking:
1) The consequences of the decision. We do a cost-benefit analysis to determine which decision will have the most satisfying outcome. We usually follow this line of thinking when it comes to small, simple decisions—such as what to get for lunch.
2) Our identity. We ask ourselves: Who am I? What would the kind of person I am do in this situation?
Identities can be relatively flexible in that people naturally adopt different identities throughout their lives, such as parent, world-traveler, or musician. However, identities can be rigid in that if you propose a change that contradicts someone’s identity, they’ll naturally resist. Therefore, you need to either align your proposed change with someone’s identity or align their identity with your proposed change.
When proposing a change, start by asking yourself if the people you’re appealing to would say: “I want to be the kind of person who makes this change.” If so, you don’t have to convince them of much—they’ll happily make a change that nudges them closer to an identity they want to have. If the person doesn’t aspire to be someone who makes the change, you’ll have to convince them to adopt a new identity.
To do this, start small. Ask your audience to perform a minor change-supporting behavior. This small behavior prompts them to see themselves differently—the behavior serves as evidence that they do align with the identity you suggested. In turn, they start performing more behaviors that align with the change, which reinforces the idea that they’re the type of person who makes the change.
In 1977, the St. Lucia Parrot was well on its way to extinction due to hunting, the illegal pet trade, and habitat destruction. Paul Butler, a freshly-graduated conservation student, was tasked with saving the St. Lucia Parrot on a shoestring budget.
He’d studied the parrots and came up with several crucial steps for preserving the species. However, each step required law changes that depended on the support and votes of the public, who didn’t care about the fate of the parrot. To save the species, he needed to get St. Lucians on board with his plans.
He didn’t have enough fuel to approach the issue from an analytical angle—there wasn’t any financial gain to saving the parrot, and it didn’t make up a vital part of the ecosystem. Most St. Lucians wouldn’t notice the parrot’s disappearance at all.
Realizing he needed to use emotions to get the St. Lucians on board, Butler decided to appeal to their identity and align it with his cause by establishing the idea that St. Lucians are people who are proud and protective of their rare parrot. He started by making the parrot a public mascot of the island, inserting the parrot into every aspect of St. Lucian life.
The St. Lucians quickly adopted the parrot as a central part of their national identity and threw their support behind the law changes that ensured the parrots’ conservation.
You can convince people to take on new identities—or take on a new identity yourself—relatively quickly, but it can take much longer to consistently make the decisions and perform the behaviors of that identity.
This is important to keep in mind—there are usually numerous setbacks throughout the process of change. Approaching these setbacks with the right mindset is the difference between change that succeeds and change that fails. There are two main types of mindset: fixed mindset and growth mindset.
1) Fixed mindset: You believe that you are “wired” a certain way—there are things you’re good at and bad at, and they don’t change. The way you act is simply a reflection of your natural abilities. For example, you avoid social situations because you’re naturally shy or you volunteer for presentations because you’re naturally good at public speaking.
2) Growth mindset: You believe that ability is something that can be practiced and built up over time. Those with a growth mindset value effort over ability—they’re more likely to be successful because they’re not afraid of the hard work it takes to get there.
Imagine the student trying to be more environmentally conscious takes her car to work—a half-mile walk—every day for a week due to iffy weather.
The good news is, fixed-mindset people can develop a growth mindset. When facing a personal change or leading a group through a change, think about the different parts of the process and the inevitable failure you’ll meet. Change processes usually have two distinct parts:
When you reach this second stage, it’s crucial to remember that what looks like failure is in fact a learning process. Normalizing failure in this way reassures you (or the group you’re leading) in several ways.
When you feel reassured enough to push through the messy stage of failure—rather than quit—your chances of success increase. Getting through the failure and seeing problems untangle boosts your confidence and builds momentum.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of Mindset for more tips on fostering a growth mindset.)
If someone is resistant to a proposed change, find small ways to align their identity with the change.
What is the change you’re proposing? (For example, you’re trying to get your roommates to eat vegetarian.)
How might someone’s identity misalign with this change? (For example, they’re not interested because they’re “meat-lovers, not bleeding heart vegans.”)
What small change-supporting action can you have them take? (For example, you ask them to do Meatless Mondays with you, and promise you’ll make dinner on those days.)
What’s a second change-supporting action you can suggest soon after, once they’ve started to adopt a vegetarian identity? (For example, you ask them to calculate how much money three meatless days per week would save and suggest putting it in a “beer fund” instead.)
In the next three chapters, we’ll discuss how to build an environment and path forward that make your change as easy as possible, minimizing your temptation to go off-track.
The first way to smooth your path is to create a change-supporting environment—that is, an environment that makes good behaviors easier to perform, and bad behaviors harder to perform.
For example, one college experimented to see if being a good person or having clear instructions would make people donate more to a food drive. They polled students, having them identify which of their peers were most likely to donate and least likely to donate. They then created two groups with an even mix of “giving” and “selfish” students:
The students’ donations didn’t depend on who they were as people—they depended on how easy the good behavior of donating was. It’s easier to change circumstances than it is to change character—if you want to make a change, the best way to support it is to ensure that the environment surrounding the change process continually urges good behaviors.
There are two ways you can create a change-supporting environment: modifying your routines and modifying your space.
Think of ways you might change up your routine to surround yourself with tools that make good behaviors easy and roadblocks that make bad behaviors difficult. For example, imagine you’re trying to start running every morning and want to spend less money on unhealthy food and snacks.
Make good behaviors easier by:
Make bad behaviors more difficult by:
Other times, physically rearranging your space can help guide you toward performing more change-supporting behaviors.
For you, this might look like moving The Chair that sits by your back door and seems to gather clutter no matter what you do. If you remove this natural drop-zone, you’ll likely find that your clutter gets put away where it belongs.
Injury-prevention experts—responsible for inventions like childproof medicine bottles and crumple zones on cars—use a framework called the Haddon Matrix to think about how and why accidents happen. The Haddon Matrix has three parts: pre-incident, incident, and post-incident. For example, if your goal was to find ways to decrease fatal injuries from collisions between bikes and cars, you would consider:
When setting up change-supporting environments, you can use a Haddon Matrix thought process—consider ways to prevent bad behaviors from occurring, how to reduce harm when the bad behavior does occur, and how to respond in a way that minimizes the negative effects of the bad behavior.
Imagine you make a goal of eating healthier.
When helping other people make changes, keep in mind that good behaviors don’t naturally start happening once you suggest a new way of doing things. As a leader, your job is to identify the root causes of anti-change behavior. Then, consciously create an environment that cuts these problems out—making anti-change behaviors more difficult.
A San Francisco hospital wanted to reduce its nurses’ medication errors, which could be harmful or even fatal. Medication errors happened most frequently when the nurses were distracted—which was often, as the medication administration area was directly in the middle of the nurse’s station. Here, the core problem was discovered—the nurses weren’t the problem, but rather, the people around them. Even in the middle of medication administration, nurses were considered “fair game” for questions and orders.
Ideally, nurses would have a separate room to work in for medication administration, eliminating the possibility of interruption, but this wasn’t possible. The environment had to change in a way that would make interrupting nurses obviously “off-limits.” A hospital director suggested that nurses put on bright orange vests while in the middle of medication administration, to signal to others that they were busy and not able to talk.
Change is easier when you create an environment that makes good behaviors easier to perform than bad behaviors.
Describe a way that you’re struggling with a change you’re attempting to make—for example, going to bed earlier so you have less trouble waking up in the morning.
What do you think is the root of your struggle with the change?
How can you change your environment to help solve this root problem?
It’s not always possible to change your environment to fit your change—your cubicle at work might not have the space for a change-supporting revamp. In these cases, work on rebuilding your habits so that they trigger good behaviors instead.
When you make a habit of your desired behaviors, they become autopilot behaviors that you naturally fall back on to conserve rational energy—over time, they stop being a conscious effort and become an effortless reflex.
At the base of good habit-building are “action triggers.” These are the triggers we set up to prompt a certain action.
Using action triggers to prompt certain behaviors works well, but only under certain circumstances. They’re effective for actions you know you need to do, such as doing homework or finishing a project. On the other hand, they usually don’t work with things you don’t want to do—especially if they don’t need to be done.
However, when you combine action triggers with preloaded responses, you create powerful habits. A preloaded response is a reaction that you’ve thought through and practiced until it’s your reflexive response to a situation that calls for it.
Pairing action triggers with preloaded responses is effective because it prevents you from getting lost in possible solutions or pulled off track by your emotional side. You don’t need to decide how to act in response to an action trigger—you’ve practiced so many times, you already know what to do. You don’t needlessly tire out your rational side with deliberation and can focus your energy on getting the right thing done. In fact, research shows that using preloaded responses can increase your chances of achieving goals from 22% to 62%.
While creating preloaded responses, it’s helpful to reframe your thoughts from “What is the right thing to do?” to “How can I get the right thing done when my action trigger happens?”
Your action triggers need to be specific and visible—otherwise, they won’t give a strong enough cue to trigger your preloaded response. For example, imagine that you’re trying to cut down on drinking. First, remind yourself what the right thing to do is—avoiding situations that will tempt you to drink. You identify the situations that usually trigger you to drink, and create preloaded responses to them.
These action triggers—“when the waiter asks me what I would like to drink,” and “when I’m walking home after work”—are specific enough to prompt the good behavior you practiced. On the other hand, if you’d chosen a vague action trigger like, “I’ll drink seltzer instead of wine when I go out,” you could easily rationalize an anti-change behavior: “We’re at dinner, which isn’t really going out. Just one glass of wine will be fine.”
(Shortform note: Read our summary of The Power of Moments for more ways that pre-loaded responses can help you do the right thing.)
Habit cultivation is an essential leadership tool—when you help your team cultivate change-supporting habits, they naturally move toward your goals without needing continuous oversight. A good leader understands that change resistance is usually situational, not personal. People aren’t resisting change out of spite—they just don’t know how to make the change stick.
Help your team cultivate change-supporting habits that a) serve your mission and b) are easy to adopt.
You might help your team members decide which actions should trigger which responses—and remind them until the action and response become an established habit.
For future changes, have team members create their own action triggers—ask them when and where they’ll perform change-supporting behaviors.
Checklists are a useful tool in distracting or complex environments where people may forget change-supporting behaviors. Checklists force people to remember and perform all the behaviors necessary to change.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of The Checklist Manifesto for more tips on controlling complex situations and avoiding mistakes with checklists.)
Preloaded responses help ensure that you react to situations with reflexive desired behaviors.
Describe a situation that usually pulls you off track from a change you’re trying to make. (For example, you want to eat fewer unhealthy snacks, but Carol always brings baked goods to the office.)
What is your specific action trigger that should set off your preloaded response? (For example, “When Carol offers me a cookie…” or, “When I see baked goods in the break room…”)
What will your preloaded response to these triggers be? (For example, “I will say no, thank you” or, “I’ll go back to my desk and get a piece of gum.”)
An interesting aspect of humans’ social nature is the way that we figure out how to behave—when you’re not sure how to react to a situation, you’ll naturally look for cues in the behavior of those around you. This means that behavior is contagious between people. If all your friends are smokers, you’re more likely to become a smoker than if your circle consisted of mostly non-smokers.
When pushing for change, it’s crucial that your environment sends change-supporting social signals that will prompt contagious change-supporting behaviors.
When you’re making personal changes, you can increase your environment's change-supporting signals simply by surrounding yourself with people who behave the way you want to and distancing yourself from situations and people who encourage “bad” behaviors.
Trying to create change in others, on the other hand, can get complicated. Most people don’t like being told what to do or who they should spend time with. Instead of dictating how people should act, focus on highlighting and multiplying change-supporting behaviors until they become prominent social signals that others will look to for guidance. There are three methods to accomplish this.
Get people on board with changes by broadcasting just how many people are performing change-supporting behaviors. People take this information as a social signal that indicates what they should be doing—and they feel ashamed when their actions fall short of this standard.
Likewise, you can broadcast bad behaviors. This sparks change in people by creating discomfort—first, because they’re reminded that they’re behaving contrary to what's expected of them, and second because everyone now knows they’re not doing what they should.
At times, your proposed change will be an idea that everyone already agrees with—you just have to attach social signals to it in order to make it a widespread practice. In these cases, it’s necessary to give the idea a concrete shape that can be publicized and incorporated into common knowledge and opinion.
In the 1980s, the concept of choosing a designated driver to safely get everyone home after drinking was popular in Scandinavian countries, but virtually unknown in the U.S. Jay Winsten, a public health professor at Harvard, wanted to see this practice adopted across the country. He knew that there wouldn’t be any pushback against the idea—the need for a safe ride home already in the back of many people’s minds, and the solution would be easy to adopt.
He gave shape to the designated driver idea by repeatedly exposing people to it. He got more than 160 TV programs’ producers and writers to write designated drivers into their scripts—by giving characters a line where they’d mention choosing a driver, adding a designated driver poster in the background of a bar scene, and so on.
Cultural changes—such as in society or organizations—can be particularly difficult because they disrupt the “way things are,” which is often closely intertwined with people’s identities. For example:
As one person against a deep-rooted culture, you’re not in a position of change-making power. Instead, put your efforts toward helping change-supporters find one another and cultivate a new identity and culture. In doing so, they’ll feel more emboldened to speak up for change—thus sending out social signals to a larger audience, who in turn will send social signals to an even larger audience.
Here’s how this could work in an office setting: Tasked with improving the work-life balance in your corporate office, you propose a four-day work week. This calls for your employees to become more collaborative and efficient. You can help change the culture by creating opportunities or spaces where pro-change team members can validate one another.
When team members feel validated in their decision to adopt a pro-change identity, they’re more confident in speaking to their colleagues about their support, and sending out influential pro-change social signals. Naturally, this may create opportunities for conflict between pro-change and anti-change team members.
It’s tempting to shut down any friction that stems from your suggestion for change—you’re trying to get everyone feeling positively toward your ideas, after all. However, these conflicts can be valuable opportunities for pushing pro-change team members together.
Imagine you had a pro-change employee in conflict with an anti-change employee because the anti-change employee is constantly making snide comments about her work ethic.
Showing others that they’re the odd ones out with bad behavior can motivate them to fit in with the herd.
What’s an organizational change that some people are on board with and others not? (For example, you want your employees to send short status updates every Friday morning.)
How are people acting in line with the behaviors you want to see more of? (For example, some employees get their updates in on time, but most others are late or don’t send them at all.)
How can you publicize this good behavior in a way that makes bad behavior obvious? (Every Friday at 11 am, you send out an email: “Thank you to A, B, C, and D for getting their updates in on time this week! Still waiting to hear from X, Y, and Z.”)
Motivating change is half the battle—ensure the change progresses and sticks by reinforcing good behavior, giving the change time to settle in, and reminding yourself that change follows a pattern.
Have your goal clearly in mind and reinforce any behavior that represents a step toward this goal, no matter how small. This is important—many people become discouraged when change doesn’t happen quickly. Change doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a long process of repeatedly performing change-supporting behaviors. Recognizing and celebrating good behaviors not only encourages more frequent good behaviors, but also good behaviors that are increasingly close to your goal.
Practice Reinforcement in Your Organization
Many managers use “personality type” tests in an attempt to understand, and better manage, their employees. This approach usually isn’t conducive to change, because it makes you more likely to attribute anti-change behaviors to character and not circumstance. This “they’re just not wired to make those changes” quickly kills change potential.
Shift your focus from character to behavior. The most effective way to create change in your organization is to regularly praise employees for any sign of progress toward your goal, and expect them to do the same for you and their colleagues.
- This might look like going out of your way to thank a colleague for getting their report in on time, even if the formatting wasn’t quite right.
Reinforcement is especially hard in work settings because you naturally notice shortcomings more than progress, and it’s more fun to get together with colleagues to complain about, rather than praise, others. Stay focused on your goal and make a conscious effort to praise as much as possible.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of Radical Candor to learn how to give and receive sincere and helpful praise.)
Practice Reinforcement as a Parent
Work up to the behavior you want from your children by looking for vague approximations of the behavior—moments where your children are being polite, doing the right thing, or being helpful. Keep your goal in mind, and regularly ask yourself: Is this behavior in any way aligned with the goal? If it is, recognize and celebrate it.
Goal: Put a stop to the endless burp and gas jokes.
- Reinforcement might look like: I appreciate that you said “excuse me” after burping. That was very polite.
Goal: Get your daughter to share toys with her younger sister without tantrums.
- Reinforcement might look like: It was nice of you to let Katie sit next to you and watch you play with your doll.
Goal: Have your toddler learn how to clean up after himself.
- Reinforcement might look like: It was so helpful of you to clear your dishes! Next time let’s try putting them in the sink instead of in the trash.
The beginning stages of change are the hardest because adjustment to new behaviors and environments is uncomfortable. Be patient and don’t give up—once the initial discomfort of change wears off, you’ll find that your new behavior feels natural and your changes build off one another. There are two reasons for this:
Change that works always follows the same pattern—you synced up your rational side and your emotional side and created a low-resistance path. Successful change always follows this pattern, in all contexts.
This is important to keep in mind because it’s likely you’ve already made successful changes in your life—such as picking up a new habit, becoming a parent, or changing your area of study. This means that you've already used the pattern and already know that you can do it. Keep this reassurance at the forefront of your mind to push you through hard moments during a process of change, or to reassure you if you feel unsure taking on a new goal.
This knowledge should inform how you set yourself up for all changes, moving forward. When you’re considering any sort of change, be sure that it covers all parts of the pattern.
Regular celebrations, reflections, and adjustments go a long way toward keeping a change going once you’ve gotten it started.
Describe a recent change you’ve made.
Have you seen any small change-supporting behaviors recently that can be celebrated?
In what ways is this change more comfortable now than when you started?
Reflect on the pattern of change—rational, emotional, environmental. Do you think you’re supporting each aspect enough? If not, what can you change to make sure all three aspects keep moving in the right direction?