Once you know your own personal answers to “why to change,” and “what to change,” you may be thinking, “okay, great, but, like…how to change?”
Glad you asked! I have an excellent and aptly titled book recommendation for that.
Katie Milkman’s How to Change is packed with actionable, practical advice on intentional transformation distilled from decades of research in psychology and behavioral science.
I loved Katie’s engineering (and tennis)-inspired perspective on approaching change with a clear understanding of, and tailored solution for, the oppositional forces you will inevitably encounter on your path to the new you.
Each of the book’s chapters addresses a particular common obstacle to change and provides a summary of the most current behavioral science-y ways of addressing them. This structure definitely warmed my clarity-and-simplicity-obsessed heart!
The obstacles she addresses are:
Getting Started
Impulsivity
Procrastination
Forgetfulness
Laziness
Confidence
Conformity
With a final chapter on what I imagine is the thorn in many a side:
Changing for Good
Speaking of which, one of my favorite takeaways from the book was this:
“In medicine, doctors recognize that chronic diseases require a lifetime of treatment. Why do we assume that behavior change is any different?
Study after study (mine included) has shown that achieving transformative behavior change is more like treating a chronic disease than curing a rash. You can’t just slap a little ointment on it and expect it to clear up forever. The internal obstacles that stand in the way of change, which I’ve described in this book—obstacles such as temptation, forgetfulness, underconfidence, and laziness—are like the symptoms of a chronic disease. They won’t just go away once you’ve started “treating” them. They’re human nature and require constant vigilance.”
Did you hear that? She said CONSTANT vigilance! As in relentless, unflagging, eternal, CONSTANT VIGILANCE! Change is freakin’ hard! She compared behavior change to chronic disease for God’s sake! Maybe you can remind yourself of this the next time you falter at any point on the timeline of your ambitious new life plan.
There are a ton of other gems in the book, but just to highlight one more I found particularly noteworthy, Katie Milkman and Angela Duckworth were on a speaking tour in London when private equity firm managing director Lloyd Thomas asked,
“Which of the many behavioral insights he’d learned about was most important to helping him achieve his goals?
Angela didn’t hesitate before giving her answer—to her, it was blindingly obvious: cue-based plans [i.e., a plan formatted as “when ___ happens, I’ll do ___”]. Forming these kinds of plans most effectively sets you up for success, she told him. It’s the best insight behavioral science has to offer on this topic.
Angela pointed out that in addition to reducing forgetting and short-circuiting the need to think about what you’ll do in the moment, planning forces you to break big goals into bite-size chunks. This turns out to be really important to making progress on ambitious projects
when you have a big goal you hope to achieve, such as “earn a promotion in the next year,” planning forces you to do the critical work of breaking it down.”
For whatever reason (possibly the fact that my life tends to unfold as a fractal kaleidoscope of chaos and unpredictability), cue-based plans/implementation intentions have never really done it for me. BUT, I absolutely agree that being forced to “break big goals into bite-size chunks” is without a doubt vital for success in effecting intentional change. And to whatever extent you’re able to get specific about exactly when you will do exactly what, you are going to be very much headed in the right direction on the royal road to change.