Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Can You Muscle Your Way to Change?

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choice muscle3

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power over us. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to have a salad for lunch, but if you’ve been having burgers and fries on a regular basis, your brain is going to “choose” the burgers and fries. You may want to take a walk in the morning before going to work, but if you’re in the habit of spending that time with an extra cup of coffee and the newspaper, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” for you.

The part of your brain that can image you making—or having made—a different choice is not the part of your brain that makes choices.

The unconscious part of your brain is only interested in making a different choice if your immediate survival appears to be threatened. Your unconscious doesn’t engage in long-term planning or prediction. So even though both replacing burgers and fries with a salad and replacing sitting and reading the newspaper with half an hour of walking might increase your long-term health and well-being, those changes have no impact on your immediate survival.

Besides, you might not enjoy the salad as much as you enjoy the burger and fries—at least at first—and you might not enjoy trading the extra cup of coffee for going outside to take a walk—especially if the weather isn’t all that great, you’re tired, or you woke up late. The unconscious part of your brain wants to pacify you. And if you start paying attention, you’ll discover that you’re often all too willing to be pacified.

It requires very little energy on the part of your brain to get you to do what you’ve done before. But it does require energy for your brain to get you to do something different. So if you do indeed want to change your behavior, you need to persuade the unconscious part of your brain to get with your program instead of continuing with its program.

You might think strengthening your willpower or self-control would be a good strategy for changing your behavior. Perhaps you can muscle your way through. It’s true that willpower might be effective when your motivation is high when you’re first trying to start or change a habit. Motivation is often higher, for example, at the beginning of a new year when we attempt to implement resolutions. But willpower is a fickle and easily exhausted resource, as is self-control. They both draw from the same well—conscious attention.

The Will Is Capricious and Temperamental*

You can’t count on having enough willpower or self-control available when you want or need it. If you’re anxious or stressed, tired, ill, distracted, in an unfamiliar environment, have been trying to solve a difficult problem, or are in love, your conscious attention is likely to be depleted to a greater or lesser extent.

And when you repeatedly try to start or change a habit (make a different choice) and fail, you end up worse off than you were before. That’s because you’re likely to use your lack of success as evidence that there’s something wrong with you. Perhaps you have less willpower or self-control than other people. Or maybe you’re sabotaging yourself. Or you don’t really want to change.

The bottom line is that you think the problem is you rather than the method you’re employing. Maybe you keep trying or maybe you give up. In either case, over time you persuade your brain not to take you seriously when you set out to change your behavior. And so the status quo becomes even more entrenched.

If you want to master the art and science of change, you need to learn how to use your brain to change the status quo instead of going with the flow and allowing your brain to maintain it.

*Cordelia Fine

Note: This is the second in a series of posts. To follow the thread, select the category Making Different Choices in the box in the sidebar under Explore.

On Radical Change

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60s

To a great extent, the term radical was co-opted by the 60s. That decade represents many of my formative years, so the word has a particular connotation for me it may or may not have for you. In the 60s, being radical meant being politically extreme. It meant hippies, student activists, anarchy; civil rights, feminism, black power; free love, free speech, free school; the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Yippies; sit-ins, demands, protests, the burning of draft cards and bras.

It meant upheaval and disruption on a massive scale—an attempt to change political, economic, and social structures at their fundamental levels. In fact one definition of a radical is: one who advocates fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions.

With or without the subtext of the 60s, radical is often used interchangeably with extreme. It’s interesting that we currently refer to radical Islam and Muslim extremists but Christian fundamentalists when we mean essentially the same thing in both cases. The word originates from the Latin radicalis, “of, or having, roots.” So radical refers to something fundamental, while radical change refers to change at a fundamental level, i.e., extreme change.

Radical activists in the 60s wanted extreme change, and they wanted it now. Other radical or extremist groups have wanted the same thing. There are all kinds of disruptive events and activities that may lead to social upheaval, just as there are all kinds of disruptive events and activities that may lead to personal upheaval. But upheaval isn’t synonymous with radical change. If you have any doubt about that, consider the uneven record of successes of the 60s activists.

If you want to make fundamental changes—socially or personally—you have to change mental models. And there is no short-cut for doing that. Changing mental models requires commitment, repetition, and persistence. It takes time.

People are looking for short-cuts, though, which is one of the things that’s so appealing about movements, charismatic speakers, advertising, political jingoism, and quick-fix self-help concepts. We’re exposed to these things every day, just as we’re exposed every day to things that could make us sick. Someone with a weak immune system will be more susceptible to germs and viruses than someone with a strong immune system. In the same way, if we don’t have a sense of who we are fundamentally and what we’re up to in life, we’re more susceptible to whatever comes along that promises to help us figure it out—and get it—pronto!

So I assert that taking the time to identify what we really want in our lives is perhaps the most radical act we can take. It’s radical because it can change us fundamentally by allowing us to determine and create consistently meaningful and satisfying lives on our own terms. If we’re living meaningful and satisfying lives, whether the going is easy or rough, we’re much less susceptible to snake-oil salesmen, politicians, or movements of any sort because we aren’t looking for meaning or salvation out there.

In order to effect radical change in the world, we need to take radical action on our own behalf. Being clear about what we want infuses us with a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose is what keeps us focused on getting and maintaining the things that truly matter instead of wasting time on ineffective, trivial, destructive, or self-destructive pursuits. As members of the human race, each of us contributes, in large ways or small, to what doesn’t work in the world simply because of the way our brains are wired. However, it’s entirely possible to decrease our contribution to what doesn’t work and increase our contribution to what does work.

It’s entirely possible to be a catalyst for radical change in our own lives and in the lives of others. Identifying what we want and going after it is the most effective way to make a difference—on a fundamental level—not just in our own lives, but in the wider world, as well.

2 Prerequisites for Change

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changeThe Farther to Go! program is all about change-making. Change is what we want and what we struggle with because many of the things we’ve tried simply don’t work.

On the way to creating and developing Farther to Go!, I focused first on information about how the brain and mind actually function, which involved debunking quite a bit of conventional wisdom. Then I attempted to incorporate effective tools that had a proven track record and were based on what is now understood and widely accepted about the brain and the mind.

It didn’t take long before I recognized that something significant was missing. I could offer reams of information—and, believe me, I have reams of information to offer—and all the tools in the world, but by themselves information and tools don’t automatically result in change.

Direction!

I discovered that people don’t know what they want. Not only that, they often don’t even know how to ask or answer the question.  It’s hard to commit to, and follow through on, a path of action if you don’t know why you’re taking it.

Since the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is focused on maintaining the status quo, you might say it’s allergic to change. So our path of least resistance is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. Information and tools can tell us exactly what to do in order to get something different, but first we need to know what it is we really want.

That requires some prolonged dialogue, so to speak, between System 2 (the conscious part of the brain) and System 1 (the unconscious) to identify the things that matter most to us at this particular point in our lives. These are what I call Big Picture Wants. They provide the direction; the information and tools provide the navigation.

Not too long ago, I realized that I was missing another very significant piece of the change process.

Urgency!

System 1 (the unconscious) is powerful and compelling. Think of it as an extremely high-speed processor that keeps you humming along in your well-worn rut. You may know where you want to go, and you may have the information and the tools to help you get there, but still you may find yourself treading water or even falling back into your rut.

We need a force that is as compelling and powerful as System 1 if we want to counteract it. That force is a sense of urgency. Urgency propels us forward in spite of obstacles, delays, diversions, distractions, and the influences of System 1. When we have a sense of urgency, quitting or standing still just isn’t an option. Instead of being wasted on activities like second-guessing or weighing pros and cons, all of our energy goes into taking the next step, and the next, and the next after that.

Urgency doesn’t eliminate uncertainty or difficulty, but it diminishes the power those things have over us. When we have both a clear direction and a strong sense of urgency, we simply do what needs to be done—using the best information and the best tools available.

Direction + Urgency

Direction without urgency is a waste of time because it usually leads to giving up in one form or another. Giving up, especially repeatedly, reinforces the belief that we can’t or don’t want to change. And the status quo remains not only undisturbed, but even more entrenched.

Urgency without direction is a waste of energy because it usually results in running off in multiple directions without a plan or goal in mind. Because it, too, is ineffective it also reinforces the belief that trying to change is futile—and possibly also exhausting.

It’s important to bear in mind that urgency—which means crucial, pressing, great, compelling, and top-priority—is not the same thing as anxiety. Many people have varying degrees of anxiety about changes they want to make but have no sense of urgency about making them.

As long as you think you have a choice about whether or not to do something, you’re either unclear or uncommitted—or both. When you have urgency, you don’t exhaust time and energy trying to decide what to do next. You have direction; you know what to do. You can’t necessarily predict the outcome, but the path immediately ahead is clear.

What Do You Want?

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I want that!
I want that!

If you can rattle off your answer to this question by ticking items off on your fingers, good for you! If your response is a blank stare, however, or a shrug of embarrassment, you’re definitely not alone.

Maybe you believe you should know what you want, and you think there’s something wrong with you if you don’t. Maybe you have a vague idea. Or a mental basket you’ve stuffed full of ideas over the years that’s done nothing but accumulate dust.

Maybe the only thing you’re sure about is what you don’t want.

Or maybe there’s something powerful that’s pulling you in a particular direction, but you need a lot more clarity in order to figure out if that’s where you really want to go.

There are plenty of books and courses out there that begin by claiming you really do know what you want. Do they mean to imply that you’re just being stubborn when you insist that you don’t? There are also a few books aimed at helping you figure out what it is you want and then showing you how to get it.

I won’t say the books and courses in the first category don’t have anything to offer, because many of them do. The problem I found with them is that their starting points were premature. I wasn’t there yet. Sure, there were a lot of things I could do and have thought about doing. But I wanted to dig deeper and do some more exploring first.

Books, courses, and workshops that focus on helping you figure out what you want (or want to do) are generally designed to take everyone through the same series of exercises and processes. I don’t like the one-size-fits-all approach for many reasons, but the biggest one is that most people simply don’t follow through. Maybe the exercises are too daunting. Maybe they simply aren’t appropriate for everyone (or for the stage of life a person is in). Maybe as we get older, we tend to rebel at doing homework. Maybe life gets in the way. Sometimes it’s a combination of all those reasons and more.

The upshot is that there are a lot of good ideas, exercises, processes, books, workshops, and courses that already exist. But a year and a half ago, when I was ripe to engage in the process of figuring out what I wanted to do next, I couldn’t find anything that felt like a good fit. I needed to start from the place where I was at right then and there. So I did, making it up as I went along.

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads.
Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

–Rosalia de Castro, author and poet

Ultimately, not knowing is the very best possible place to start from. So if you don’t know, but you’d like to and you’re curious, then right now you’re in the perfect place.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677