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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

O Is for Obstacles

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An obstacle is something that blocks your path or prevents or hinders your progress. If there’s one thing that’s certain in life, it’s that things won’t always go the way you want them to or according to your plan. Like many people, you may think that’s always a bad thing. But obstacles and setbacks are part of life. They don’t mean anything in and of themselves. That doesn’t mean they don’t have an effect on you, but you’re the one who imbues them with meaning.

Obstacles can be external or internal. The external ones can range from a traffic delay on your way to an important meeting to an uncooperative family member or co-worker to serious illness or a natural disaster. My temperament is such that it’s easy for me to experience life itself as one giant obstacle. In Enneagram terms, I resist impact from the environment and there’s a lot of environment to go around. So I have considerable experience coming to terms with the nature of obstacles, including the fact that my attitude is not always helpful. Maybe you can relate.

A few other ways you can be your own biggest obstacle are by:

  • failing to get all the information or acting on unverified assumptions
  • dropping the ball (not following through on something)
  • communicating or behaving in a manner that results in an undesirable outcome
  • having unrealistic expectations of yourself and others

Of course the major obstacle, at least when it comes to behavior change, is your own brain, which is intent on maintaining the status quo. If you fail to recognize this particular obstacle, you’re in for a rougher ride than you need to be as you try to figure out why you keep doing what you’re doing when what you want to do is something entirely different.

One Interesting Thing about Obstacles

Imagine reading a story or watching a movie in which the protagonist faced no obstacles. Would you read a novel or enjoy a movie like that? People who write for a living are betting you wouldn’t. A rule of thumb for writers is there should be some element of conflict on every page. The more conflict, the better. The more obstacles the characters have to deal with, the better.

When something goes wrong in your life, just yell: “Plot twist!” and move on. —Anonymous

Conflict and obstacles make things interesting because they’re unexpected. They also force you out of your comfort zone. You can be proceeding through life on autopilot (System 1), driving along a familiar route, when suddenly you notice a mudslide has closed the road ahead. System 1 calls on System 2: What should we do now? If what’s on the other side of that mudslide is something you really want or someplace you really want to go, you’ll try to figure out another way to get there. Which brings us to…

One Useful Thing about Obstacles

I’m not going to claim obstacles are opportunities or tell you they’re gifts or blessings in disguise. You can interpret them that way if you like, but obstacles are just obstacles: things that get in the way of what you want to do or where you want to go. I’m also not going to insist that obstacles (or overcoming obstacles) make you stronger or tougher because maybe they will and maybe they won’t.

There is one significant benefit obstacles can provide, however, although not everyone benefits equally. Experiencing an obstacle can help you think globally—step back and see the bigger picture—not just about the obstacle you’re facing but in regard to other unrelated situations or unrelated tasks. As a result, you’re more likely to come up with creative solutions in a variety of different settings.

The basic cognitive processes elicited by obstacles help people to find more creative means towards their goals. —Janina Marguc, University of Amsterdam

But there are two caveats.

First, in order to reap this benefit, you have to be motivated to follow through with what you’re doing. If you’re not already motivated, you’ll be more likely to see an obstacle as an excuse for slacking off or giving up than as a spur to action or invention.

Second, you’re more likely to think globally as a result of encountering an obstacle if you have what is referred to as low volatility. Art Markman, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today says:

People who are not that volatile tend to engage with a task and stick with it even when it gets difficult. Those people who are highly volatile tend to skip from task to task to task.

For the latter group, encountering an obstacle does not make them more likely to think globally. That makes sense, given that volatile means excitable, unpredictable, or irresolute. If you’re highly volatile, you prefer to move on rather than stick around feeling uncomfortable or temporarily discouraged.

But even if you tend toward high volatility, you can make it more likely you’ll achieve a goal or create or change a habit if you do the legwork up front to make sure you really want what you’re going after—that your desired outcome is extremely desirable. The more motivated you are, the less likely you’ll be to give up in the face of an obstacle.

The most practical and realistic approach to take when you want to achieve something is to assume the path ahead won’t be a smooth, straight line. Then you can figure out ahead of time how to respond to the twists, turns, and bumps you’re bound to encounter.

If you get as many of your ducks in a row as you can, you’ll be in a better position to deal with the obstacles you will inevitably encounter. And if you encounter one that’s an actual deal-breaker, it will be easier for you to identify it as such, stop beating your head against that particular boulder, and scrap your plan without guilt or regret. That’s worth a little upfront effort, isn’t it?

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

N Is for Narration

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The unconscious part of your brain processes far more data, moment-to-moment, than the conscious part of your brain is aware of. Since you’re missing more than you’re consciously taking in, how can you have the seamless experience of reality you have? You should be a lot more confused than you actually are.

The reason you aren’t more confused is that you have an inner narrator or inner interpreter who makes sense of your experiences and observations, decides which are important and what they mean, and weaves everything together into a unified whole. The inner narrator gives your life a sense of continuity, the result of which is that your experiences feel sequential and (usually) logical rather than segmented and random.

If you tune in to your inner narrator, you may be able to catch it in the act of putting the pieces together for you, but that takes a little practice.

Filling in the Blanks

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, discovered “the left-brain narrating system,” which he dubbed “the interpreter” in the late 70s when he and Joseph LeDoux were conducting research with split-brain patients (individuals whose corpus callosum had been severed in an attempt to alleviate epilepsy symptoms).

In the most well-known experiment, Gazzaniga and LeDoux flashed pictures in front of a patient, one to the right hemisphere (which is nonverbal) and another to the left hemisphere (which controls language). The patient was then shown several additional pictures—to both hemispheres—and asked to select one that went with the first (right-hemisphere) picture and another that went with the second (left-hemisphere) picture. The patient was able to point to appropriate matches for each of the two pictures and to explain the relationship between the two left-hemisphere pictures. That result was expected.

The surprise was that he also had a ready explanation for why he had chosen the right-hemisphere picture. Given that his left-hemisphere had not seen the first right-hemisphere picture—and there was no communication between the two hemispheres of the subject’s brain—he should have been confused about why he chose that picture. Not only wasn’t he confused, he was completely confident in his answer.

As it turns out, when faced with incomplete information, the left brain quite convincingly fills in the blanks. Essentially it spins a story by making things up that you believe to be true.

The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

Your inner narrator views your inner and outer world through the lens of your mental model of the world, which largely determines what you pay attention to, how you interpret events, and the meaning you assign to them. This inner narration doesn’t just weave your world together; it also keeps change at bay by reinforcing the status quo (what is normal for you). If you want to alter your behavior—change the status quo—you have to loosen the grip on your belief in the story you currently have about yourself. This is hard to do because, like everyone else, you probably believe most, if not all, of what your inner narrator tells you. It seems as though it’s just reporting on reality, not creating it.

The Story of You

We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity. A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meaning. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Your inner narrator helps sustain the illusion that there’s a single you—a single self that’s at the center, having all these thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Not so, says neuropsychologist Paul Broks. He says neuroscience shows there is no center in the brain where things do all come together.

Julian Baggini, author of The Ego Trick, expands on the idea:

When you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn’t a central control spot in the brain. There is no kind of center where everything happens. There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it’s because of the way that they all relate that we get this sense of self.

This is what Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga, Joseph LeDoux, and many other researchers have discovered. The difference in function between the left-brain and right-brain is only one division of labor.

In fact, the brain contains a swarm of specialized modules, each performing a special skill—calculating a distance, parsing a voice tone—and all of them running at the same time, communicating in widely distributed networks, often across hemispheres….The brain sustains a sense of unity…amid a cacophony of competing voices, the neural equivalent of open outcry at the Chicago Board of Trade. —Benedict Carey, New York Times

If you believe you have a fixed self, a permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, as Julian Baggini says, then you’re kind of trapped. If you want to change something about the way you think or the way you respond to things, you have to believe that the way you think and the way you respond can be changed. Of course, you can’t change everything about yourself, but the more you believe in a fixed, essential self, the more difficult it will be for you to make significant positive attitude or behavior changes to that self.

Note: The image is Emma Thompson as author Karen Eiffel in the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which she narrates the life of her character, Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell. It’s one of my favorite movies.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

M Is for Mental Model

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Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

But how does your brain do it? How does it decide what to prune and what to allow into your consciousness? It would be highly inefficient if it had to process all of this data bit-by-bit. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to since it operates by association, which is much faster, and by filtering incoming data through the model of the world it constructs that represents what’s normal in it for you.

Built by Association

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

  • It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
  • It doesn’t discriminate very well.
  • It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to your particular worldview (mental model) makes you feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—your possibilities. That means it limits your powers of discernment, your ability to increase your understanding of the world around you, and your creative potential. It closes the world off instead of opening it up.

Your Particular Model of the World

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations that are either confirmed or denied, assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

So it stands to reason that you won’t be successful in making long-lasting changes to your behavior, beliefs, or attitude unless you are able to change your mental model.

Changing the Status Quo

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If you want to live a fuller live, if you want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, you first need to recognize that your greatest constraints are imposed by your own mental model.

You can’t do away with your mental model—or “think outside the box,” since the box is your mental model. But you can expand it through learning, through exposing yourself to new situations, people, and ideas, and through physical movement. You can grow new neurons and generate new neuronal connections and pathways. Those new neuronal pathways represent alterations to your mental model, a change in your status quo to a new normal for you.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

L Is for Luck

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Plans, practice, and preparation are all useful, even essential, if you want to accomplish anything significant in life. But no matter how rock-solid they are, your plans, practice, and preparation cannot immunize you against random occurrences, aka luck. Your luck in a given circumstance may be good or bad, but by its nature it isn’t predictable.

A good definition of luck is:

The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events.

It’s important to recognize that, statistically speaking, random events occur far more often and have a far greater impact on us than we recognize. Events outside our control will occur. When everything goes according to plan or falls into place, we can thank our lucky stars. But we can’t count on being lucky. And we can’t take credit for luck.

The fact that luck is something we can’t control automatically casts it in a bad light. Both the nature of it and the outcome are uncertain and uncertainty gives the unconscious part of our brain the heebie jeebies. We prefer to operate under the illusion of control, maintaining our belief that we can influence outcomes even in the face of significant irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Thus there are people who believe they create their own luck. “Chance favors the prepared mind,” said Louis Pasteur. And in some circumstances that’s true. You can’t necessarily take advantage of advantageous circumstances if you don’t know how to respond or are not prepared to do so. You can, to an extent, be ready to open your arms to random good fortune—which would certainly be more welcome than bad fortune.

Estimating Impact

However, good fortune does not always lead to good outcomes. Take lottery winners, a group that has been the subject of numerous studies. Not everyone who wins the lottery ends up worse off than they were before—but a surprising number of winners do. And most report being no happier after winning than people who didn’t win.

Our beliefs about outcomes are strongly affected by one of the cognitive biases we’re afflicted with. This one is known as the impact bias, and it has two parts. We think we know whether a future potential event will affect us in a positive or in a negative way. And we’re usually pretty good at getting that prediction right. We also think we know how large or small that impact will be and how long it will last. That’s where we often miss the mark by anticipating that both good and bad events will affect us more—and for longer—than they actually will.

Something that is pretty predictable is that you’re more likely to overreact to bad luck when you aren’t fully committed to your current plan of action. If you’re more or less going through the motions, it won’t take much to blow you off course or permanently derail you. You might think what you’re up to is just not meant to be or that you don’t have what it takes.

That’s why it’s critical to get very, very clear about your desired outcome ahead of time. If you have a strong commitment to what you’re going after, you’re more likely to consider bad luck a bump in the road. Maybe it’s a small bump or maybe it’s an enormous boulder. Nevertheless, you’ll be more inclined to figure out how to navigate around it and continue on your way if you really want what’s on the other side and if you know the next steps you need to take.

Enter the Black Swan

Sometimes luck, good or bad, has a relatively minor effect. On the other hand, luck—in the form of what Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans—can be life-changing. Taleb describes a so-called Black Swan this way:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

The majority of swans are white, so black swans are unexpected. As Taleb says, on September 10, 2011, the events of September 11 were not reasonably conceivable. If they had been, something could have been done to prevent them.

A Black Swan event can permanently alter your course or at the very least make it vastly more difficult to pursue. But you can’t anticipate such events or know whether they will be positive or negative. What you can be certain about is what is meaningful to you. If the course you’re on is massively disrupted, you will still have the knowledge of what’s important to you, even if you have to find a completely different way to create it in your life.

If there’s something you want to do and the main thing holding you back is uncertainty, try imagining a world where all is preordained, everything is known in advance, and there is no possibility of surprise. Is that really a world you’d want to live in?

You can’t predict the future no matter how much your brain wants you to believe you can. Although you can—and should—plan ahead, it’s important to remember that the path from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

In the long run, how you respond (persevere) in the face of setbacks and random events is more important than achieving instant or quick success. And you can take all the credit for persevering.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

K Is for Know-How

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Knowledge and know-how have a lot in common, but they’re not the same thing. You can read a book, watch a DVD, or listen to a lecture and gain knowledge—maybe even a lot—but that knowledge is theoretical until you actually apply it. Memorizing a camera’s instruction manual, for example, won’t give you the know-how to use your camera effectively, easily, or creatively in a wide range of situations. To be able to do that, you need hands-on experience and practice—the more practice, the better.

You probably know how to do a lot of things you didn’t always know how to do.

  • Drive a car
  • Operate a computer
  • Search the internet
  • Use a smartphone
  • Purchase airline reservations and board a plane
  • Order food in a restaurant
  • Speak in front of a group
  • Assemble furniture using an Allen wrench
  • Knit a scarf

Learning how to do all those things—at least to do them well, with confidence, or in some cases, safely—involves actually doing them, not just knowing what to do or how to do it. Drivers’ education, when I took it, included both classroom learning and operating a vehicle with an instructor in the passenger seat. A few of my classmates who demonstrated great proficiency in the classroom didn’t do so well on the road. I still remember one of a series of near-misses with Susan N. behind the wheel. Our instructor frantically gestured for her to pull the car over and park it, after which he got out and strode up and down the sidewalk for several minutes, repeatedly rubbing his hands over his face.

And if you think you can sit right down and knit a scarf using, say, the garter stitch (a relatively easy knitting project), after having watched someone else do it or reading the pattern instructions, you’re in for a surprise when you try manipulating the yarn and needles for the first time.

Getting to Carnegie Hall

We expect that in learning how to do something that involves a procedure, a sequence, or the use of tools or equipment we will need to practice doing it in order to master the activity. In fact, we expect to spend the majority of our learning time not on theory, but on practice.

But we don’t approach changing our behavior the same way. We seem to think that having knowledge or information is enough—or more accurately, should be enough. When it turns out not to be, we don’t rethink our approach or beliefs. We decide there’s something wrong, either with the knowledge and information or with us.

I think one of the reasons for this is that we don’t recognize that the same mechanism of action is involved in almost all behavior change. So putting the practice time in will eventually pay off not just in one area, but in many areas. It’s similar to learning how to play the piano. Mastering playing the piano doesn’t just give you the ability to play one song or one type of music. Yes, playing improvisational jazz is different from playing classical sonatas, but the underlying mechanism of action is the same. The piano skills you develop are transferable.

Theory and Practice

Mastering the art and science of change involves both theory and practice, too. In the realm of theory, you need to understand some things about the brain, including:

  • The difference between System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness)
  • Why your brain keeps “correcting” you back to your old way of doing things
  • How your brain creates habits, with or without your participation

You also need to know how to make use of the way your brain is wired or how to work around it when you need to. That involves developing various tools, including:

  • Setting goals and following through on them
  • Keeping your attention focused on your intentions
  • Making use of rewards to activate memory and learning circuits

That’s a lot of information to absorb. It’s a lot of knowledge to process. But it’s not enough.

Even if you know everything there is to know about how the brain works in regard to behavior, and even if you understand the reasons for and the absolute best ways to use goals, habits, intentions, and rewards, if you don’t engage in regular and deliberate practice, you won’t be able to master the art and science of change.

When clients begin my Goals, Habits & Intentions course, I always tell them the most valuable thing they’ll get from the course is coming face-to-face with how they get in their own way. If you really want to master behavior change, you need to develop the kind of self-awareness you can only get when you’re in the midst of trying to change something. For example:

  • How do you respond to feedback?
  • What do you do when faced with obstacles, delays, and distractions?
  • What beliefs and assumptions do you have about yourself and the way the world works that you don’t know you have?

Regular and deliberate practice is the only way to fully grasp the tools and make them your own. Regular and deliberate practice combined with knowledge and information helps you develop the know-how to master making the changes you want to make in your life and to help others do the same.

Change is not easy. It takes a lot longer than you think it will or than you want it to. It can be messy and discouraging, too. In his book Mastery, George Leonard says:

To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so—and this is the inexorable fact of the journey—you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

That’s the challenge. But once you really get the hang of it—once you develop the know-how—you’ll have it for the rest of your life.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677