The One You Feed - Essential Concepts: Key Strategies to Making a Change

Episode Date: September 21, 2019

This mini episode is about the tactical and emotional aspects of changing behavior.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. It's Eric here with a mini episode. I did one of these before. I'm calling them essential concept mini episodes, and I'm here to do another one. And what Eric here with a mini episode. I did one of these before. I'm calling them essential concept mini episodes, and I'm here to do another one. And what I want to talk about for this one is the idea of how do we actually make a change to our behavior? And through the coaching work

I've done with people and talking to lots of people, I really think there are two key aspects of this. And if you can get them both right, you can change behavior. And so I want to talk through what each of those are and some of the key concepts in there. And the way I think of them is one is sort of tactical. It's all the things in your life that you need to arrange. It's the basic blocking and tackling. You got to get that right.

And then the second part is more the emotional piece of it. What are the emotional blocks and the emotional levers you can pull that help you to make a change? So I'm going to use an example from one of my coaching clients right now by the name of Sam. And what Sam wanted to work on, among other things, but one of the big ones was staying on top of the family finances. It was making sure that the budget was there, it was kept, bills were paid on time, they

had a few more complicated things that needed to be done, and it really needed some attention on a regular basis, and Sam simply wasn't giving it the attention, right? And so let me sort of illustrate how these two aspects of behavior change play into this. And the first one, as I said, is tactical. I call this the blocking and tackling of behavior change. It's really about planning. And we talk about this a lot on the show. Knowing when and where you're going to do something increases the likelihood that you're

going to do it by about five times. So coming up with a really specific schedule, when are you going to do this? Where are you going to do it by about five times. So coming up with a really specific schedule, when are you going to do this? Where are you going to do it? Anticipating what might get in the way. Very basic stuff, but absolutely critical to making behavior change. And so we've got to get that piece of it done. We also talk a lot about small steps, not taking on too much. A lot of people, when they start trying to make a change, they try and do everything all at once. So another tactical part of behavior change is making sure that the size of what we take on, we're actually capable of doing. We want to succeed. It's really important to build momentum and motivation. And we do that by being successful at what we do. So taking small steps is another really important part of the tactical aspects of behavior change.

Designing your environment so that it's set up right is another piece. The obvious example of this is if you want to eat better, don't have junk food in the house, right? We also hear about if you want to get to the gym, changing your gym clothes before you go to bed or lay them right next to the bed. There's lots of little environmental tweaks that we can do that really make it far more likely we're going to succeed in whatever it is we're trying to do. And then another big part of tactical is dealing with the distractions. What are the distractions or the things that get in your way, both ones that come from the outside world and ones that sort of come from within you? And what are the strategies that we can do to sort of minimize those distractions and plan and prepare for them?

So the tactical aspects are really, really important. I often say that ambiguity is the mother of procrastination, but ambiguity is really our enemy in any type of change we're trying to make in life. The more specific we can be in all of those areas I just listed, in our planning, in our environment, and how we handle our distractions, the more specific we can get, the better our chances are of succeeding in making a change. And so we've got to get this tactical piece done. And it's a critical and important piece, but it's not the only piece. And so I see a lot of work done on the tactical piece.

We can do a lot of reading about that, and that's important. But then comes the second piece, and this is really around emotions. As time goes on, I've gotten to see how critical this is, the emotional piece, more and more. And there's a lot of science these days, and there's a lot of great thinkers out there who are really talking, again, about the tactical parts of behavior change. But they're not talking as much about the emotional parts. And I think that's partially because for a long, long time, when we thought about changing behavior, we thought all about motivation. Am I motivated? Am I motivated? Am I motivated? Right? And, and this has been a swing back to the other side,

where it says, look, there's really a lot of strategies, there's a lot of science, there's a lot of tactical things we can do to get better. And so that's been a useful correction. But I think to leave emotion out misses a big piece of that. And the two main elements emotionally that I think are worth talking about are how we handle difficult emotions. So emotional regulation. And then the second piece is motivation. Although motivation is not sufficient to cause behavior change, it is important. And it's important to keep it in mind and to use it as a tool. So let's talk about emotional regulation.

What does emotional regulation mean? Well, to me, what it means is that we are able to recognize our emotions. We're able to allow them to be there. We're able to deal with them in a skillful way. And then we're able to act in them in a skillful way, and then we're able to act in a way that lines up with our values. So that's emotional regulation. And it's that last step that often gets us in trouble. This is what we often refer to when we say we let our moods decide what we do. So whether it's something I'm trying not to do or something that I want to do,

we get to the point where we have a choice and life is a series of choice points. We get to that choice point and then we don't take the behavior that we wanted to take. And that is almost always a emotional decision. And that's partially why getting the tactical figured out is so right. Because once we have the tactical figured out, we know what we're supposed to do when, and now we can see, are we doing it? So if we go back to Sam and his thing around finances, what we did was we decided when and where he was going to work on the finances.

All right, I'm going to do it on Tuesday and Thursday nights at 7 p.m. I'm going to do it in the office. We talked about minimizing distractions. We talked about all this stuff. So now we've got a framework in place that works for him. And now we see on Tuesdays at 7.30 p.m., does he sit down and do it? And the answer turns out to be some of the time. So the tactical solved some of the problems.

We saw improvement, but we didn't see constant and consistent success. So we had to kind of go, well, what's going on here? And so we really started to look at emotional regulation. And again, I sort of described what emotional regulation is. When I'm working with somebody on emotional regulation, what we're looking at is really a multi-step process. You know, first we're recognizing, wow, okay, emotion is driving what's going on here. So we've got to recognize that. The second step is we go in and we investigate the emotion and what's happening and we work to sort of soothe ourselves or to sort of orient ourselves. A lot of this is making what's sort of happening in an unconscious level more conscious.

in an unconscious level more conscious. So we do that. The next step is that we then also look at what are the thought patterns that are going on. So this is sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, but applied in this way. So I'm kind of trying to address both the emotional and cognitive aspects of this, right? Because a lot of times our underlying beliefs are what's driving the emotion. So let's go back to Sam for a minute. What's going on with Sam is that when he thinks of doing finances, all sorts of negative emotions come up. Fear, he doesn't think he's good at it. It's been a source of a lot of problem before in his life. And so what happens is when he thinks of finances, automatically, boom, there's all this negative emotion. And so again, if emotional regulation is recognizing the emotion is there,

allowing it to be there, working with it skillfully, and then behaving according to his values, then what happens is when that negative emotion comes up, he recognizes that's what's happening. He stays there with the emotion. He explores the underlying thought processes or even the subconscious beliefs that might be driving it. And then he does the finances, right? And so it's a multi-step process. But what we can do is we can really start to zoom into these choice points. When we decide or don't decide to do something. We can zoom into the choice point and really explore what is our emotional and mental state at that point.

And we use things like cognitive journaling and the RAIN method and lots of other ways to sort of really dive into these choice points. So emotional regulation is critically important. When we had Tim Pitchel on, who's one of the world's leading experts on procrastination, he said, you know, procrastination is largely a failure of emotional regulation. And that's a really true thing to say.

So is emotional eating. So is addiction. So is overspending, right? Lots of these things, they are a failure of emotional regulation. We get to the choice point and our emotions overwhelm us and they drive our behavior. And emotions are important. They have a lot to tell us, but we don't want them to be in the driver's seat of our behavior. So emotional regulation is really important and it's something we do a lot of work on. And then the last aspect is motivation. And motivation is

relatively simple. Again, it's gotten kind of a bad rap in the habit or behavior change world over the last few years where we've talked a lot more about other things. But motivation is important. Why are you doing this? What is the why and what is the reason? And the more that we can drill into that, the more we can get to the emotion that's underneath the motivation, the better off we are, right? And so it's really important when you're thinking about why do I want to do something, you'll get an answer. Ask yourself why that matters. You'll get another. Ask yourself why that matters. You want to keep driving down until you get to the really emotional heart of this, because motivation is important. We want to know why

we're doing something and we want to be able to remember that. We want to be able to bring that back to consciousness at times when whatever we're trying to do is difficult. So getting really clear on why you're doing something, the deeper why, and then either writing it down or having it accessible. But being able to bring that to mind when you need to is another really helpful part of the emotional aspect of behavior change. So that's a kind of a quick run through of the two aspects of behavior change. And I see a lot of people working on one aspect or the other. It's really important to bring the two together. You do the tactical, you get all that in place,

then you can start really working on the emotional piece. And when you have both those things happening, you're really a lot more capable of making changes in your life. So I hope that is helpful to you. If you're interested in working with me one-on-one to do some of this work, you can go to ericzimmer.coach application.

You can fill out an application there and we will talk for about 30 minutes. I am not a high pressure sales guy and I always try and make sure that regardless of whether we work together that I deliver something of value to you at the end of that call. So that's ericzimmer.coach application. But either way, I'm hoping you can take the concepts in this whether you decide to work with me or not, you can take some of these concepts and apply them in your own life and have some more success. So thank you so much for listening to this to all our episodes. I'm really glad that you are here with us on this. And if there's anything I can do for you, let me know. Take care. Bye.