Making Changes

I’m talking at the moment to a lot of people who are thinking about making changes in their lives in the New Year. It therefore seems like a good time to write a blog about successful change strategies. At the same time, I want to talk about how this applies from a performance psychology perspective too, so that you can use this information to enhance your career outcomes.

Making drastic changes
When people decide to make changes in their lives, they typically adopt a fairly radical approach. They want to make quick changes, achieving a dramatic turnaround in as short a time frame as possible. This is understandable. Usually, by the time we reach the point where we’re ready to change, we’re so ready to change – so “over it” – that we just want it done. Now.

Sometimes these attempts at sudden and dramatic change work. People do go on radical diets and lose weight. They do go “cold turkey” and manage to stay off cigarettes. They do take up intensive exercise regimes and stick to them. Sometimes.

More often, however, people fail using this strategy. Typically, people who try to make big, quick changes succeed at first, only to fall back into their old ways once the initial burst of enthusiasm has passed. There are solid psychological reasons why this is the case.

Why drastic attempts at change often fail: The hare.
Sudden, dramatic changes tend to be unsustainable and there are some very good reasons why this is so:

1. Even when we really want to change, at some level change is frightening. Change creates uncertainty because it involves departing from familiar, safe ways of being. This can activate the anxiety centre in the brain (the part of the brain that’s responsible for the fight or flight response) which then over-rides our capacity to think rationally and make strategic decisions. The bigger the change you’re trying to make, the more likely this primitive fear response. And this fear response undermines your efforts at change because its agenda is to maintain the status quo, to keep you nice and safe.
2. Attempts to make sudden changes completely ignore the way your old behaviours have been working for you. You see, your old habits are there because they’ve been working for you in some way. If a habit wasn’t providing you with some benefit, some payoff, it simply wouldn’t be in your life. It might be uncomfortable for you to acknowledge that, but it’s certainly true. The problem with just dumping a habit is that you’ll likely create some gaping hole of unmet need in its absence. If you’re a comfort eater, for example, what will you do with all those tricky emotions when you ban yourself from comfort eating? You’ve solved one problem but created another.
3. Sudden, dramatic changes are not always positively received by the people around us, who may be perfectly happy with the way things are. Dramatic changes are more likely to be met with resistance from loved ones.

Put simply, attempting to make radical changes is a high risk approach that works sometimes but has a high failure rate overall.

A different approach: The tortoise.
The alternative to making sudden, dramatic changes is to make small, incremental changes. The key to making this approach work is to make each individual step so small that you can easily accommodate it within your existing life structure. To start, find one small change that will move you in the direction of your goals and then take that step. Once that step is a part of your routine, take another step, making sure that the new step is also small. The idea is to continue taking tiny steps until the journey is complete.

I can understand that in today’s age of instant gratification, this strategy might not have much curb appeal. It doesn’t deliver instant results and it doesn’t create a heroic tale that you can relate to your friends either. In its favour, however, is the fact that it actually works. There are reasons why the small steps approach to change has a high success rate:

1. Each individual change you make is so small that it bypasses the brain’s primitive fear response.
2. Small changes don’t immediately rob you of the payoffs you’ve been getting from your old behaviour. Change happens at a pace that allows you to find new ways to get the payoffs.
3. Small changes fit easily into your life, which increases the likelihood that you’ll follow through with them.
4. Small changes are less threatening to loved ones and are therefore less likely to be met with resistance.

The most important thing to note about small, incremental changes is that small changes add up to big changes over time.

If you want to make big changes in your life, you don’t have to do it all at once. You’ll probably get better results and have a much more pleasant time of it if you approach change gradually. The tortoise usually beats the hare in the race for change as well as in the fairytale.

The tortoise and performance psychology
There are some very important reasons why you should be careful about introducing changes (especially in your technique or methodology) if you’re seeking optimum performance, particularly if you’ve already achieved a fairly advanced level of skill.

The main issue is this: If you’re already quite skilled, then you need to juggle your desire for improvement against the need to protect the skill you already have. Let me explain what I mean.

If you’re already good at what you do, much of what you do has become automatic. You don’t have to think about it. It just happens. You still exert some conscious control, but much of what you do – more than you’re probably aware – happens outside of your conscious awareness.

If I asked you to describe every single thing you do when you ride a bicycle, you could undoubtedly tell me a few important points, and Lance Armstrong would certainly tell me a few more. But neither you nor Armstrong would be able to tell me every single step involved in riding a bicycle because your body does much more than your conscious mind knows.

The same is true in other areas too. Opera singers and musicians, for instance, have highly developed techniques, but their brains and bodies still perform many tasks outside of conscious awareness. Expert stock market traders may have rules and decision making systems that they adhere to, but their brains perceive patterns subconsciously and this subconscious information influences their decisions, even when they’re not aware of it.

The closer you are to being an expert in your area, the more developed and influential your subconscious knowledge base. This is what being an expert is all about.

So when someone suggests you make some technical change, they’re not tampering with an isolated mechanical function, they’re tampering with a complex, sophisticated system. A change in one area will likely have flow-on effects in the rest of the system, and some of these effects cannot be predicted because many of the processes in the system are unknown.

If that’s all too complex for you, just remember this: In developing the skill you have now, you’ve developed something that works for your unique physical and mental profile. This may not be quite the same as what someone else does, since we’re all different, but it works for you.

Seek change, by all means. But if you’re already highly accomplished, treat your current skills with respect and protect them. Take a tortoise approach to change, and run like a hare if someone suggests a radical overhaul.