Say it Better

Change a Habit in 30 Days and See Other Great Changes Happen

"If you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment," goes the Tibetan saying. This may seem childlike but I always find it easiest to make a change in my life by picturing a very specific and compelling reward for the change:

• How will I have moved closer to being my true self?

• What wonderful, new experiences could I attract?

• How could I use my talents more fully, for myself and for others?

Conversely, what boring, irritating or anger-provoking task or person will I now experience in a more comfortable light or no longer have to experience at all?

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself," wrote Leo Tolstoy. What habit do you want to drop or pick up? From body fat to a bright new job we obsess about but often block our own change. Here are some steps that have proved helpful to me.

1. Find Your True North

There is a Thai word, "sanuk", which means whatever you do you should enjoy it. First be clear about choosing a habit-changing goal that is powerfully valuable to you. 

Why put effort in an "ought to do" goal, based on others’ wishes for you, when you can serve your true self by going for the one that you’ll truly find most satisfying?

As Keniche Ohmae wrote in The Borderless World, "Rowing harder does not help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction. Applying more muscle is no solution if the course is off."

Perhaps you are choosing a new habit that is someone else’s goal for you, not your own. If you really don’t enjoy moving toward that change, you may be acting against your deepest preferences. "Problems that remain persistently unsolvable should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way," wrote philosopher, Alan Watts in The Book.

2. Picture Being Your Hero

Keep picturing the experience of your success when you are tempted to fall back. As Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th Century Danish theologian said, "People celebrate achievements and spotlight heroes but the truly heroic act is not the outcome but in starting out and not knowing if you will succeed."

"A vivid imagination," wrote Aristotle, "compels the whole body to obey it." Emile Couce wrote in Willing, "It is the imagination and not the will that is the dominating faculty of man. It is a serious mistake to advise people to train their wills; they should learn to control and direct their imaginations."

Keep picturing yourself as the hero who has succeeded to make a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than talking about what you are giving up or how you might fail, always think and talk about your goal as the inevitable future—what is going to be.

3. Use Your Innate Homing Device

Look inside for your "Homing Device" of your most powerful motivation or passionate interest that can be related to your goal. As Dr. Beverly Potter wrote in her book, Finding a Path With a Heart: How to Go From Burnout to Bliss, "When we pay attention to our Homing Devices and follow their guidance, we invariably feel right about ourselves and in perfect harmony with people and activities in which we are involved in the moment…Not all targets (goals) are the same. Some are easier to hit. Some are more fun. Compelling targets have a magnetic force that pulls you toward them."

4. Surround Yourself With Support

To keep your resolve, surround yourself with those who want you to succeed.

In The Healing Brain, psychologist Robert Ornstein and physician David Sobel, suggested we learn that the need for community is a key part of our evolutionary heritage and a way we can learn to change.

The brain’s primary purpose is not to think, but to guard the body from illness and despair. "The brain acts as an internal health maintenance organization, governing everything from the release of stress hormones to the functioning of the immune system.

Your brain cannot do its job of protecting your body without contact with other people. We have evolved to be dependent on others. Evolution has less regard for the individual than for the survival of the species. "For your evolution toward your goal, plant yourself firmly among those who will reinforce your desired behavior."

5. Know How You Get Detoured

"The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn." wrote David Russell. Notice your pattern for avoiding your course toward your goal. What …

• Activities do you use to get sidetracked?

• Time of day or day of the week is it most likely to happen?

• Else is happening that can numb you into avoidance?

• Colleagues and friends help or hinder you on your path?

Discover these patterns now and you will be more powerfully productive toward this and all the next goals you set for yourself. But don’t be too hard on yourself when you’re not perfect. As Charles Garfield wrote in Peak Performance, "On course doesn’t mean perfect. On course means that even when things don’t go perfectly, you are in the right direction."

The keys?

1. Habit: Do the same thing at least three times a day for 30 days?

2. Habit witnessed by at least one other person: Get an accountability buddy.

3. Group committed to collective change: With even a small “cell” group committed to shared success in changing a behavior, there are more witnesses to keep each other in line, celebrate small signs of progress – bring out the disciplined side in each other.  Inevitably such groups forge strong bonds.  That mutual accountability is key to Delancey Street’s success. 

Think of all the variations of AA groups (from food to alcohol addiction).  Think of the small interest groups within Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.  Think of military squadrons. I am still involved with the three small groups in which I worked on the Obama campaign. Read more about this effect in Influencers.

6. Confirm That You’re on the Right Path

Notice how your feelings change as you practice your new habit. Discomfort - yes, yet is there an underlying, growing comfort with yourself? How are others close to you reacting? What new experiences happen?

As you change, everyone around you will change in reaction to you. Some will be uncomfortable with your growing comfort. Others will be happy for you and inspired to change as well. Many will not consciously notice the actual change yet will feel better around you.

As Jean Shinoda Bolen wrote in The Tao of Psychology, "Synchronistic events can assure us when we are on the right life path; and advise us when we are not; at the most profound level, they assure us that we are not mere observers but always participants in an interconnected cosmic web."

Put simply, see how the changes you make affect your self-image and your relationships with others. Simply speaking, do you enjoy your life more?

7. Be Your Best

I believe those who will gain the most professional satisfaction in an increasingly challenging and competitive workplace will be those who choose to get very good at one single skill.

Like goal-setting, the more specific you state the change, the more likely the success and sense of satisfaction you’ll gain. We may not all be as lucky as Billie Jean King (I certainly wasn’t) who wrote in her autobiography, Billie Jean, "When I was five or six… (I) told my mother I’d be the best at something; by the time I was twelve, I knew what I’d be best in. But it is never too late in life to choose your "best."

8. Plan a Great Reward

Before you start a new habit, plan how you will celebrate when you meet your goal. The bigger the change, the more bountiful the reward. 

The most meaningful, memorable celebrations usually involve collective rituals and recognition where everyone involved with your change, however inadvertently, gets to share the spotlight with you.  Enable those who supported you or worked on the same goal with you, to savor the behavioral change with you. Your celebration may well be the needed nudge to sway them to start on their path towards living a bigger, better life by making some small changes in their habits.  

When Worry is Worthless, When Fear is a Friend

My friend Colleen Wainwright calls "anxiety, my old friend." 

We women generally worry more than men.   For example, "While men are bearing the brunt of the job losses, women report much higher levels of fear and worry about their families’ financial security than men do" and women worry more than their husbands about prostate cancer coming back.

Yet it is vital to recognize the difference between worry and fear. How, for example,  can we know when a fear for personal safety is justified and when a worry is sapping our spirit and making us see the world simply as a dangerous place?

“Our fears are fashioned out of the ways in which we perceive the world,” wrote Gavin Becker, author of The Gift of Fear:  Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.

Better to learn how to recognize when someone’s hostile or other less apparently dangerous actions are, in fact, a danger to you, so you can act to protect yourself, and not let unfounded fears and worry contaminate your life. 

What can we do?  Revise FDR’s advice, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” by using our gut instincts well, with this variation:  “There is nothing to fear unless and until you feel fear.”

Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death.  

Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections.  When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.” 

When you feel it, take notice to find the link back to see if you need to take action.  How rational are our fears?  In the 1960s a study was done on what single word evoked the greatest psychologically strong reactions of fear.  The study included words like spider, snake death, rape, murder and incest.  Shark evoked the strongest reaction. 

But why?  Sharks rarely come in contact with us.  Three reasons:  the seeming randomness of their strike, the lack of warning for it and the apparent lack of remorse.  

Yet man is a potential predator with far more abilities to approach, disguise and deceive.  While the media often portray human violence as random, de Becker points out how it seldom is, and how you can anticipate the patterns in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action. 

DeBecker’s book describes how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.

Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture. 

Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear.  Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear. 

Worry will not bring solutions.  Worry distracts from finding solutions.

See it as a form of self-harassment. 

To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is.  Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:

• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something.  Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.

•  Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others.  Worry somehow shows love.  The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person.  As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

• Worry is a protection against future disappointment.  After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it.  Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. 

But how would you want to spend the time while you find out:  worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?

For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman.  Some people feel it wards off danger.  They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening. 

Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur.  This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.

The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering.  Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life.  Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life.  Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.

When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?” 

To be free of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques: 

1. When you feel fear, listen.

2.  When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

We Choke on Anxiety

Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty.  it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence.  If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job. 

Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do.  

You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty.  It is worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us. 

Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law:  “Only that which is absent can be imagined.”  In other words, what you imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not happening.

The bleeding billboard evokes a reaction…

… akin to the candy bars that call out to you as you wait in the grocer’s check-out lane. In the most important moment both capture your attention. Change your behavior. The candy bar is a “POP” or point of purchase impulse buy.

However the stakes are much higher for the impulsive change evoked by the billboard by the New Zealand highway. The first day it rains every year more people drive carelessly. Some are killed.  The usual admonition, “Drive to the conditions” is dry (’scuse the pun), rational and not behavior-changing. 

Yet when the first rains come blood starts flowing from the boy’s eyes, nose and mouth.  If you are driving by you instantly get the picture.

Slow down.

Like POP the billboard evokes an emotional response at a significant moment.  For New Zealanders it is a teachable moment. So far, no more fatalities on that road since it was installed.

The lesson for us all?  What is an important moment for you to “touch” your customers, colleagues, friends or loved ones?  What behavior would you like to change in that moment?  What image and/or words will evoke that change?

How a Fertilizer and a Snack Stand Out - And You Can Too

Want to sell or secure support? You’ve got less than a minute, experts say. Much less it turns out. With the first three to five words, listeners instinctively tune in or tune out.

To compound the problem, you may know too much.  The deeper your expertise, the less able you are to offer the vivid detail up front that motivates them to listen longer.

Instead we start with background, qualifiers and other “underbrush.”  Meanwhile they go on a mental vacation.

To make your idea or product stick in their minds, here are two tips and examples that have helped me:

Two tips

1. Hot Button: First offer the point that most matters to this listener

Craft the sequence of words in your first sentence like a string of pearls, with each word solidly connected to the next. That way you build the briefest, “most valuable benefit” statement. Add supportive points if:

• They relate to the main point, and

• Can be said in three words or less.

2. Memory Anchor: Say it so they can see it

Offer the vivid, supporting detail that evokes a relevant and positive mental picture and thus anchors the benefit in their mind.

Two examples

1. Hot Button:

The natural fertilizer that outgrows the leading synthetic fertilizer, doesn’t burn plants and comes in recycled packaging.

Memory Anchor:

Terracycle's fertilizer is made from worm poop.

 

2. Hot Button:

Because they are made of dried fruits and nuts bound together by honey KIND bars are healthier than other health bars. We use whole natural ingredients  - not paste.

 Memory Anchors:

• Mango Macadamia is a favorite.

•  A Yale pilot study found that eating two KIND bars a day can help people lose weight.

Create a Tag Line to be Top of Mind in Your “Market”

"Because the earth needs a good lawyer" is one of my favorite tag lines. It is specific, emotional and short. 

What shorthand description do others use when describing your cause, business or other group?  If it’s not the one you cite then maybe you want to create a more compelling one.  Why not craft an apt, memorable tag line or slogan that describes your organization’s core value to us?

An extra benefit is that a clear, specific and vivid slogan provides a focal point for doing “first things first” and for making other choices when one seems overwhelmed with options. Ask “What choice now most reflects our tagline?”

Here are three tips I gleaned from last year’s winners of Nancy E. Schwartz’s Getting Attention contest for non-profits’ best tag lines:

Tag line tip #1:

Craft a (clean) double entendre.

• A clearinghouse for finding performance and rehearsal space called NYC Theatre Spaces: “Where Actors Find Their Space”

Tag line tip #2:

Evoke an emotion-tugging physical image.

 • The American Lung Association: “One Breath at a Time”

Tag line tip #3:

Piggyback on a concern with a pithy slogan as a solution.

• Oregon Center for Public Policy provides balanced coverage of state issues, many of which are hotly contested where opinions and facts are blurred in the public debate: “Because facts matter”

 As John Haydon adeptly notes, “Rather than having a tagline about the mission of the non-profit, they all speak about the client's experience and what's important to them - on an emotional level.”

Share your tag line for this year’s contest and keep a look out for fresh ideas when Nancy announces the results later this year.