Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

by Marshall Goldsmith

Part of the reason is inertia. It takes enormous willpower to stop doing something enjoyable. A bigger

misunderstanding of the relationship between our environment and temptation. Temptation is the mocking sidekick who shows up in any enjoyable environment, urging us to relax, try a little of this or that, stay a little longer. Temptation can corrupt our values, health, relationships, and careers. Because of our delusional belief that we control our environment, we choose to flirt with temptation rather than walk away. We are constantly testing ourselves against it. And dealing with the shock and distress when we fail.

This impulse to always engage rather than selectively avoid is one reason I’m called in to coach executives on their behavior.*2 It’s one of the most common behavioral issues among leaders: succumbing to the temptation to exercise power when they would be better off showing restraint.

It took Stan a few minutes to accommodate avoidance as a solution. Worst case, I explained, the fighting with his family would cease immediately. Best case, his wife and daughters might eventually turn to him for advice. But it wouldn’t happen until he took himself out of the picture.

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It’s a simple equation: To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur. If you don’t want to be lured into a tantrum by a colleague who gets on your nerves, avoid him. If you don’t want to indulge in late-night snacking, don’t wander into the kitchen looking for leftovers in the fridge. 3. Adjustment

Adjustment, if we’re lucky, is the end product of forecasting—but only after we anticipate our environment’s impact and eliminate avoidance as an option.

Adjustment happens when we’re desperate to change, or have an unexpected insight, or are shown the way by another person (such as a friend or coach).

But making mistakes is how we learn. She realized that a simple question can trigger a simple response that’s appropriate in one environment and completely wrong in another.

so fast. To understand a problem, you not only have to admit there is a problem; you also have to appreciate all your options. And with behavioral change, we have options.

It illustrates the interchange of two dimensions we need to sort out before we can become the person we want to be: the Positive to Negative axis tracks the elements that either help us or hold us back. The Change to Keep axis tracks the elements that we determine to change or keep in the future. Thus, in pursuing any behavioral change we have four options: change or keep the positive elements, change or keep the negative.

If we’re satisfied with our life—not necessarily happy or delighted that we’ve exceeded our wildest expectations, just satisfied—we yield to inertia. We continue doing what we’ve always done. If we’re dissatisfied, we may go to the other extreme, falling for any and every idea, never pursuing one idea long enough so that it takes root and actually shapes a recognizably new us. If you know people who flit from one faddish diet to the next—and never lose weight—you know the type. That’s chasing, not creating.

We always have a chance to create better behavior in ourselves—how we treat people, how we respond to our environment, what we permit to trigger our next action. All we need is the impulse to imagine a different us.

A politician once told me, “The most thankless decision I make is the one that prevents something bad from happening, because I can never prove that I prevented something even worse.” Preserving is the same. We rarely get credit for not messing up a good thing. It’s a tactic that looks brilliant only in hindsight—and only to the individual doing the preserving.

So we rarely ask ourselves, “What in my life is worth keeping?” The answer can save us a lot of time and energy.

praise. But Hersey wasn’t done with me. “You’re not investing in your future,” he said. “You’re not researching and writing and coming up with new things to say. You can continue doing what you’re doing for a long time. But you’ll never become the person you want to be.” For some reason, that last sentence triggered a profound emotion in me. I respected Paul tremendously. And I knew he was right. In Peter Drucker’s words, I was “sacrificing the future on the altar of today.” I could see my future and it had some dark empty holes in it. I was too busy maintaining a comfortable life. At some point, I’d grow bored or disaffected, but it might happen too late in the game for me to do something about it. Unless I eliminated some of the busywork, I would never create something new for myself.

Creating is innovating, taking risks on new ventures, creating new profit centers within the company. Preserving is not losing sight of your core business. Eliminating is shutting down or selling off the businesses that no longer fit.

In business we have an abundance of metrics—market share, quality scores, customer feedback—to help us achieve acceptance of a dire situation or the need for change. But our natural impulse is to think wishfully (that is, favor the optimal, discount the negative) rather than realistically.

That impulse is even more egregious in interpersonal relationships. Instead of metrics, we rely on impressions, which are open to wide interpretation. We take in what we want to hear, but tune out the displeasing notes that we need to hear. When our immediate superior reviews our performance with six trenchant comments, one positive, five negative, our ears naturally give more weight to the positive comment. It’s easier to accept good news than bad.

Accepting is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference.

It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior. • If our exquisite logic fails to persuade a colleague or spouse to take our position, we resort to shouting at them, or threatening them, or belittling them, as if that’s a more winning approach than accepting that reasonable people can disagree. • If our spouse calls us out on a minor domestic infraction (for example, leaving the refrigerator door open, being late to pick up the kids, forgetting to buy milk) and we are 100 percent guilty, we’ll dredge up an incident from the past when our spouse was at fault. We extend a pointless argument ad nauseam rather than say, “You’re right. I’m sorry.” • If our immediate superior rejects our proposal, we grumble to our direct reports about how shortsighted our manager is.

Asking people, “What do we need to eliminate?” fosters agreement more swiftly than asking, “What’s wrong?” or “What don’t you like about your colleagues?” One form requires people to imagine a positive course of action (even when it involves elimination). The other triggers whining and complaining.

Using the wheel of change as her template, Alicia told the team they only had to make four decisions: choose one thing to create, preserve, eliminate, and accept. Here’s what they came up with:

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That’s the simple beauty of the wheel. When we bluntly challenge ourselves to figure out what we can change and what we can’t, what to lose and what to keep, we often surprise ourselves with the bold simplicity of our answers.

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Good things happen when we ask ourselves what we need to create, preserve, eliminate, and accept—a test I suspect few of us ever self-administer. Discovering what really matters is a gift, not a burden.

Executing the change we hold as a concrete image in our mind is a process. It requires vigilance and diligent self-monitoring. It demands a devotion to rote repetition that we might initially dismiss as simplistic and undignified, even beneath us. More than anything, the process resuscitates an instinct that’s been drilled into us as tiny children but slowly dissipates as we learn to enjoy success and fear failure—the importance of trying.

In my coaching I have only a handful of “magic moves.” Apologizing is a magic move. Only the hardest of hearts will fail to forgive a person who admits they were wrong. Apology is where behavioral change begins. Asking for help is a magic move. Few people will refuse your sincere plea for help. Asking for help sustains the change process, keeps it moving forward. Optimism—not only feeling it inside but showing it on the outside—is a magic move. People are automatically drawn to the confident individual who believes everything will work out. They want to be led by this person. They’ll work overtime to help this person succeed. Optimism almost makes the change process a self-fulfilling prophecy. What makes these gestures magical is how effectively they trigger decent behavior in other people and how easy they are to do. This chapter introduces a fourth magic move: asking active questions. Like apologizing or asking for help, it’s easy to do. But it’s a different kind of triggering mechanism. Its objective is to alter our behavior, not the behavior of others. But that doesn’t make it less magical. The act of self-questioning—so simple, so misunderstood, so infrequently pursued—changes everything.

The standard practice in almost all organizational surveys on the subject is to rely on what Kelly calls passive questions—questions that describe a static condition. “Do you have clear goals?” is an example of a passive question. It’s passive because it can cause people to think of what is being done to them rather than what they are doing for themselves.

The result, argued Kelly, is that when companies take the natural next step and ask for positive suggestions about making changes, the employees’ answers once again focus exclusively on the environment, not the individual. “Managers need to be trained in goal setting” or “Our executives need to be more effective in communicating our vision” are typical responses. The company is essentially asking, “What are we doing wrong?”—and the employees are more than willing to oblige with a laundry list of the company’s mistakes.

Active questions are the alternative to passive questions. There’s a difference between “Do you have clear goals?” and “Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?” The former is trying to determine the employee’s state of mind; the latter challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action. Kelly was pointing out that passive questions were almost always being asked while active questions were being ignored.

I have spent years thinking about it and discussing it with professionals. Yet I too have had a checkered history with the concept. Why is engagement so hard to instill in some people, so easy in others?

these employees opt for the passive-aggressiveness of being superficially engaged with what they’re doing but conveying through their tone of voice that they really don’t care.

Answering the first question is at the core of my professional life. After that meeting, I significantly increased my exhortations to companies on the importance of follow-up after they train their employees. It’s one of my signature themes: People don’t get better without follow-up. So let’s get better at following up with our people.

There was nothing wrong with my message, but I was ignoring half of the equation: the employee’s responsibility for his or her behavior. The difference was not what the company was doing to engage the flight attendants. The difference was what the flight attendants were doing to engage themselves!

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The theory was that different phrasing of the follow-up questions would have a measurable effect because active questions focus respondents on what they can do to make a positive difference in the world rather than what the world can do to make a positive difference for them.

The second group went to a two-hour training session about “engaging yourself” at work and home. This training was followed up every day (for ten working days) with passive questions: 1. How happy were you today? 2. How meaningful was your day? 3. How positive were your relationships with people? 4. How engaged were you? The third group went to the same two-hour training session. Their training was followed up every day (for ten working days) with active questions: 1. Did you do your best to be happy? 2. Did you do your best to find meaning? 3. Did you do your best to build positive relationships with people? 4. Did you do your best to be fully engaged?

While any follow-up was shown to be superior to no follow-up, a simple tweak in the language of follow-up—focusing on what the individual can control—makes a significant difference. * Nikki Blacksmith and Jim Harter, “Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs,” Gallup Wellbeing,

Did I do my best to be happy today? People still debate if happiness is a factor in employee engagement. I think that because happiness goes hand in hand with meaning, you need both. When employees report that they are happy but their work is not meaningful, they feel empty—as if they’re squandering their lives by merely amusing themselves. On the other hand, when employees regard their work as meaningful but are not happy, they feel like martyrs (and have little desire to stay in such an environment). As Daniel Gilbert shows in Stumbling on Happiness, we are lousy at predicting what will make us happy. We think our source of happiness is “out there” (in our job, in more money, in a better environment) but we usually find it “in here”—when we quit waiting for someone or something else to bring us joy and take responsibility for locating it ourselves. We find happiness where we are.

Given people’s demonstrable reluctance to change at all, this study shows that active self-questioning can trigger a new way of interacting with our world. Active questions reveal where we are trying and where we are giving up. In doing so, they sharpen our sense of what we can actually change. We gain a sense of control and responsibility instead of victimhood.

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that I was slacking or letting myself down. I could do better the next day. Like most people who answer passive questions, I considered my mistakes more as a function of my environment than myself. As an experiment, I tweaked the questions using Kelly’s “Did I do my best to” formulation. • Did I do my best to be happy? • Did I do my best to find meaning? • Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? • Did I do my best to be a good husband?

I had to rethink how I phrased my answers. For one thing, I had to measure my effort. And to make it meaningful—that is, to see if I was trending positively, actually making progress—I had to measure on a relative scale, comparing the most recent day’s effort with previous days. I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.

The point is, your Daily Questions should reflect your objectives. They’re not meant to be shared in public (unless you’re writing a book on the subject), meaning they’re not designed to be judged. You’re not constructing your list to impress anyone. It’s your list, your life. I score my “Did I do my best” questions on a simple 1 to 10 scale. You can use whatever works for you. Your only considerations should be: • Are these items important in my life?

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Will success on these items help me become the person that I want to be?

Trying not only changes our behavior but how we interpret and react to that behavior. Trying is more than a semantic tweak to our standard list of goals. It delivers some unexpected emotional wallops that inspire change or knock us out of the game completely.

At the start of any self-improvement project, when our confidence is high, that’s a reasonable assumption. But in a world where we are superior planners and inferior doers, it rarely works out that way.

That’s the secret power of daily self-questioning. If we fall short on our goals eventually we either abandon the questions or push ourselves into action. We feel ashamed or embarrassed because we wrote the questions, knew the answers, and still failed the test.

When I meet clients, I’m casually forming a “change profile” in my head to gauge how much the clients can take on—and what they should leave for another time. I consider their commitment, their track record of success, and how much social interaction and self-control their change requires. Emily presented with four factors, not all of them working to her advantage:

That’s a significant disadvantage compared to successful businesspeople. To them, taking on challenges and succeeding is like exercising a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets—which instills confidence that success will happen in any situation.

Her next step was embracing the concept of active questions to focus on effort rather than results. She would phrase her goals as “Did I do my best to…” rather than “Did I…” Every night at ten o’clock her uncle would call and she would have her scores ready. Thus, the process of change commenced. With her Daily Questions and nightly follow-up by her uncle Mark, there was no turning back. Here are her scores for Weeks 1 thru 4: