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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Q Is for Questions

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If you want to get good answers, you have to ask good questions. That seems pretty obvious. What may be less obvious is that it’s also important to know what question it is you’re answering—because, in some cases, it isn’t the one you were asked or even the one you asked yourself.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of what he calls “answering an easier question” aka “substitution.”

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 [the unconscious] will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

Even with his examples, substitution was nothing but an abstract concept to me until I happened to experience it myself.

Not long after I read this chapter of Kahneman’s book, I was standing in my kitchen looking out the window waiting for water to boil for a cup of tea. It was an overcast and dreary early winter day. I hate winter, and that’s putting it mildly. Gray days are demotivating to begin with, and I already wasn’t interested in any of the work I had to accomplish that particular day. So as I stared out the window, I asked myself a question: If I could do anything right now, what would it be?

Almost immediately, I caught myself in the act of answering a different—and much easier—question: What more enjoyable thing can I do right now that’s practical?

Had I not been reading Kahneman’s book, I would have missed this sleight of mind. Instead, I did notice that I couldn’t answer the original question. I didn’t know what I would do, if I could do anything. Upon further consideration, I realized that I didn’t know what I really wanted, period, which is why I couldn’t answer the question. As someone who usually knows my own mind—or who thinks I do—I was intrigued.

What Do I Really Want?

The result was that I created an exercise for myself so I could discover what I really wanted—not just the small or temporary stuff, but the big stuff—the big picture stuff. I ended up referring to these things as Big Picture Wants, and I created a course (What Do You Want?) so that other people could find out what they really want, too.

You can’t discover Big Picture Wants directly (that’s the hard question). An easier question to answer is what do I want right now? It turns out that by answering the easier question over and over (and over…and over…), you can eventually find the answer to the hard question.

Identifying Big Picture Wants is the “art” part of mastering the art and science of change. If you don’t know what you really want in life, you lack a compelling context for making decisions and setting goals. Knowing where you’re headed—why you’re doing something—helps you keep your eyes on the prize. Otherwise, one path seems to be as good as another, and distraction, procrastination, and self-doubt are your constant companions.

What Impact Do I Want to Make?

The phenomenon of substitution also shows up in my Personal Impact course, which I created after hearing many of my amazing clients talk about wanting to make an impact. When I asked them what impact they wanted to make, they could usually tell me what they were doing or wanted to do, but almost no one could describe the impact they wanted their “doing” to have. I think it’s Dan Ariely who said that thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant. Add to that what Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke recently said in their podcast, Two Guys on Your Head: Brains look for efficient ways to get on with it.

It’s no wonder we immediately shift to the question we can answer: because trying to answer the deeper, more difficult question is unpleasant and because our brain wants to get on with it.

And per Daniel Kahneman:

[A] lazy System 2 [consciousness] often follows the path of least effort and endorses a heuristic answer without much scrutiny of whether it is truly appropriate. You will not be stumped, you will not have to work very hard, and you may not even notice that you did not answer the question you were asked. Furthermore, you may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind.

We spend two-thirds of the Personal Impact course focusing on the what and the who—and trying to separate them from the how. (Yes, some of our conversations sound like we’re reading Dr. Seuss.)

Making an impact is all about changing the status quo, but on a bigger level than the personal, which makes it even more challenging. That’s why it’s extremely important to be not only clear, but also passionate, about what impact you want to make and why you want to make it.

Asking Why Forward

But asking why questions can be tricky, too. For one thing, we tend to ask them in the wrong direction. We ask why did that happen? Why did that person do what he/she did? Why did I do that? Why am I the way I am? 

Asking why backward is an attempt to find an explanation, rationale, reason, or maybe even an excuse. It’s easy to get stuck in the past searching for answers to questions about the present or the future.

Asking why forward instead of backward, however, is extremely useful. An example is asking why do I want to do this thing or make this impact?  Instead of providing an explanation, which is neither useful nor powerful, the answer to that question can provide definition, motivation, and determination.

The backward why is just a habit of thought. It can’t take you anywhere new—or anywhere at all, really. The forward why is where all the action is. It can break through the limits and barriers imposed by the past. It can open up and expand your world.

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

P Is for Perseverance

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A common explanation for the failure to accomplish something, reach a goal, or change a habit is a lack of willpower (or self-control). If only you had more willpower you could resist temptation, whatever form it might take: a piece of chocolate cake, binge-watching a favorite TV show, surfing the internet, adding unnecessary items to your wardrobe, or even just staying up late when you have an important meeting in the morning.

Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much. —John Ortberg

It seems like common sense that if you had the ability to say no in the face of temptation, you wouldn’t be in whatever pickle you might be in.

And there’s a bit of truth underlying that belief. Willpower can be both useful and powerful. And yes, some people appear to have more willpower, at least in some situations, than other people. But willpower is an unreliable resource that can be easily exhausted. You can benefit from developing more of it, but it’s not the most effective tool in the behavior-change box.

Don’t Crash and Burn

When you’re bursting with willpower, you feel like you’re faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It feels great in the moment, but the moment doesn’t last. You may find yourself burning out before you get very far and end up abandoning your entire project. If at first you don’t succeed, you might decide it’s not meant to be or not worth the effort. Why bother? Just go with the flow. Or you might chalk it up to being weak, not wanting it enough, or lacking discipline.

It’s important to remember that the unconscious part of your brain has a bias for immediate gratification, which means you do, too. So after the initial burst of energy is gone it’s natural to find yourself distracted, derailed, or maybe even down for the count.

Worse, you may think what happened means something about you or your ability to follow through, which is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because multiple failed attempts actually train your brain to not take you seriously. That means your next attempt will be even harder to follow through with than the last one was.

If  you recall the story of The Tortoise and the Hare from Aesop’s Fables, you’ll remember the moral of that adventure was slow and steady wins the race.

You could compare the unconscious part of your brain, which is extremely fast and processes 11 million bits of information at a time, to the hare. The conscious part of your brain, which is responsible for exerting willpower and self-control among other things, is like the tortoise. It’s much slower and more deliberate, and it processes only 40 bits of information at a time.

Change the Default

Repetition and perseverance, not willpower and self-control, are the keys to changing your behavior and accomplishing your goals. Repetition means doing the same thing over and over again until it becomes your brain’s default response. Perseverance means steadily moving toward your desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as you go, and taking in at least some of the scenery. Just keep moving at a steady pace until you get where you want to go.

You don’t need to chastise yourself if you get off track. You don’t need to make up excuses. All you have to do is pick up where you left off and keep going.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. —William E. Hickson

It’s amazing how much time and mental effort we put into berating ourselves or trying to figure out what’s wrong with us when we don’t behave according to our own expectations when, much of the time, it’s simply due to the way we’re wired. It would be far more effective to recognize that until we convince it otherwise, our brain is going to keep on correcting us back to our previous path. So falling off the horse is just part of the process. The important thing is to get back up there.

Perseverance isn’t the same as dogged persistence. Sometimes there’s a good reason to stop attempting to do something or at least reassess. On the one hand, you’re more likely to persevere if you’re committed to what you’re trying to accomplish and clear about your desired outcome. On the other hand, that commitment and clarity can help you recognize you aren’t really headed where you want to go—or maybe that you’ve bitten off too big a chunk and need to scale back.

If you want to make any change to your status quo, you have to convince your brain to go along with the plan, and that won’t happen overnight. Getting your brain to accept a change in the status quo as the new normal, for example, requires changing your mental model. That’s probably going to take a lot more perseverance than you’d like or that you expect. You might be tempted to give up when the results don’t come quickly, but that would be a mistake.

Perseverance isn’t flashy or sexy or stylish. It’s often linked with discipline and endurance and sounds like something that’s good for you or that builds character. But it’s the key to creating sustained change. And if you develop the habit of perseverance, you can still use willpower but you won’t need to rely on it to power yourself through. That means your brain will be working for you, rather than against you.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That’s why I call perseverance magic!

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

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.

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