…there wouldn’t be a YOU making choices. The unconscious mental processes that make most of your choices also create your sense of self. It’s an endless loop. Your brain uses your sense of self to predict the choices to make (and make them). And the choices you make reinforce your sense of self.
That’s why one of the biggest impediment to creating positive sustained change is the belief that we always have a choice: that regardless of our circumstances, we can always choose how to think, feel, and react. If we want to change something, all we have to do is make a different choice.
This belief is meant both to empower us and to remind us that responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions, moment-to-moment, rests squarely on us. It’s a double-edged sword at best, though. If you could change an outcome simply by making a different choice, why don’t you just do that?
It isn’t really empowering; nor is it true—at least in the way it’s used. But this is true:
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. —Donald Berwick
Moment-to-moment, our thoughts, feelings, and actions are the result of what neuroscientist David Eagleman refers to as zombie systems and alien subroutines: systems that routinely produce dependable results. We may not like the results, we may not want them or approve of them, but they’re the outcome of systems that are doing exactly what they are designed to do. By the time we experience those results, we have little, if any, immediate control over them; it would be more accurate to say we’re at the effect of them.
In spite of the fact that neuroscientists estimate we spend 95% of our lives operating on autopilot, we are loathe to give up the idea that we always have a choice. We worship the idea of choice to such an extent that we would rather believe we’re making bad or dumb choices intentionally than that our behavior and experiences are a result of well-oiled unconscious systems.
Our belief in the value of having options and of keeping our options open keeps us from creating consistently satisfying and meaningful lives and getting what we want.
You can have what really matters to you—or you can have the freedom to NOT have it—but you can’t have both.
The only way to consistently get what you really want is to create systems that support those results. Moment-to-moment choice just gets in the way.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I previously determined that walking a certain amount of time every day contributes significantly to my sense of vitality and to stable heart function, two things I really want. There are plenty of days when walking—or walking the full amount of time—is not what I feel like doing. At all. I’m tired; I have too much work to do; I have some physical issue; I just don’t want to. But I have walked for 785 consecutive days because I have taken choice out of the equation. Walking every day is the natural result of a system that produces a consistent result, not through willpower or self-discipline, but automatically.
That’s what the Inner Architect can do: design a system that gets you what you really want by taking away the moment-to-moment choice to NOT get it. These systems can build on each other, too. Architect Ole Scheeren suggests we could think of architecture as complex systems of relationships, both in a programmatic and functional way and in an experiential and emotive or social way.
The system that has produced my 785 consecutive days of walking connects with other systems. In fact, it makes creating new systems easier.
Of course before you can train your Inner Architect to create systems that produce consistently great outcomes for you, you have to know what you want.