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

by Marshall Goldsmith

our environment is a relentless triggering machine. If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us. And the result turns us into someone we do not recognize.

Feedback—both the act of giving it and taking it—is our first step in becoming smarter, more mindful about the connection between our environment and our behavior. Feedback teaches us to see our environment as a triggering mechanism. In some cases, the feedback itself is the trigger.

A feedback loop comprises four stages: evidence, relevance, consequence, and action. Once you recognize this, it’s easy to see why the radar speed displays’ exploitation of the loop works so well. Drivers get data about their speed in real time (evidence). The information gets their attention because it’s coupled with the posted speed limit, indicating whether they’re obeying or breaking the law (relevance). Aware that they’re speeding, drivers fear getting a ticket or hurting

someone (consequence). So they slow down (action).

This is how feedback ultimately triggers desirable behavior. Once we deconstruct feedback into its four stages of evidence, relevance, consequence, and action, the world never looks the same again. Suddenly we understand that our good behavior is not random. It’s logical. It follows a pattern. It makes sense. It’s within our control. It’s something we can repeat.

As a trigger, our environment has the potential to resemble a feedback loop. After all, our environment is constantly providing new information that has meaning and consequence for us and alters our behavior.

Where a well-designed feedback loop triggers desirable behavior, our environment often triggers bad behavior, and it does so against our will and better judgment and without our awareness. We don’t know we’ve changed.

Which brings up the obvious question (well, obvious to me): What if we could control our environment so it triggered our most desired behavior—like an elegantly designed feedback loop? Instead of blocking us from our goals, this environment propels us. Instead of dulling us to our surroundings, it sharpens us. Instead of shutting down who we are, it opens us.

Many people meditate to dampen the internal trigger they refer to as an “inner voice.”

We want short-term gratification while we need long-term benefit. And we never get a break from choosing one or the other. It’s the defining conflict of adult behavioral change. And we write the definitions.

We define what makes a trigger encouraging. One man’s treat is another man’s poison. The sudden appearance of a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream may trigger hunger in us and disgust in our lactose-intolerant dinner companion. Likewise, we define what makes a trigger productive. We all claim to want financial security; it’s a universal goal. But when we get our year-end bonus, some of us bank the money while others gamble it away over a weekend. Same trigger, same goal, different response.

Pain, of course, is the ultimate discouraging trigger: we immediately stop a behavior that hurts.

As insights go, locating myself on the wrong side of the matrix is a small and humbling lesson, reminding me that a trigger is a problem only if my response to it creates a problem. To lose the ten pounds, it’s up to me to escape the upper left quadrant where I prefer what I want to what I need.

This may be the greatest payoff of identifying and defining our triggers—as the occasional but necessary reminder that, no matter how extreme the circumstances, when it comes to our behavior, we always have a choice.

Smoking cigarettes is a habit loop consisting of stress (cue), nicotine stimulation (routine), leading to temporary psychic well-being (reward). People often gain weight when they try to quit smoking because they substitute food for nicotine as their routine. In doing so, they are obeying Duhigg’s Golden Rule of Habit Change—keep the cue and reward, change the routine—but they are doing it poorly. Doing thirty push-ups (or anything physically challenging) might be more effective than eating more.

If I surrender to my nicotine craving and smoke a cigarette, I hurt myself. If I lose my temper with my child, I hurt my child.

Paradoxically, the big moments—packed with triggers, stress, raw emotions, high stakes, and thus high potential for disaster—are easy to handle. When successful people know it’s showtime, they prepare to put on a show. It’s the little moments that trigger some of our most outsized and unproductive responses: The slow line at the coffee shop, the second cousin who asks why you’re still single, the neighbor who doesn’t pick up after his dog, the colleague who doesn’t remove his sunglasses indoors to talk to you, the guests who show up too early, the passenger in the next seat wearing super-loud headphones, the screaming baby on the plane, the friend who always one-ups your anecdotes, the person standing on the left side of the escalator, and so on. These are life’s paper cuts. They happen every day, and they’re not going away. They often involve people we’ll never see again. Yet they can trigger some of our basest impulses.

Even more perilous are the small triggering moments with our families and best friends. We feel we can say or do anything with these folks. They know us. They’ll forgive us. We don’t have to edit ourselves. We can be true to our impulses. That’s how our closest relationships often become trigger festivals with consequences that we rarely see in any other part of our lives—the fuming and shouting, the fights and slammed doors, the angry departures and refusals to talk to each other for months, years, decades.

For example, your teenage daughter borrows the car and two hours later calls to say it’s been stolen. She left the keys in the car while she ran into a convenience store for a snack. A low-probability event (the theft) made more probable by a silly mistake (forgetting the keys). As a parent, how do you respond? Your daughter wasn’t harmed. She’s not in danger or legal peril. She’s a victim. At worst, you’ve lost property. What’s your first impulse? You can get angry. You can do a variation on “I told you so” or “You always do this,” reinforcing the message that 1) parent knows best or 2) your daughter is not as smart as she thinks she is. You can be consoling. You can ask, “Do you need a ride home?” You have options. I don’t have the perfect answer. I do know that this phone call is a supercharged triggering moment, even though it is brief and unexpected and in the grand scheme of things, small. The damage is done. It’s not a tall tale to entertain your grandkids years from now. But how you respond is important and consequential. Will this unfortunate event trigger more damage in the relationship between parent and child, or will something good come out of it? Will you give in to the perfectly natural impulse to express your scorn, or will you take a breath and make a smarter choice?

Whether you’re leading other people or leading the follower in you, the obstacles to achieving your goals are the same. You still have to deal with an environment that is more hostile than supportive. You still have to face other people who tempt you away from your objectives. You still have to factor in the high probability of low-probability events. And you still have to consider that as the day goes on and your energy level diminishes, your motivation and self-discipline will flag.

What if the planner in each of us, like an effective leader with his or her subordinates, could size up the situation at any point during the day and adopt the appropriate management style for the doer in us? It’s a simple two-step: measure the need, choose the style. Many of us already do this kind of self-assessment automatically. When it matters, we have an instinctive sense of how much self-management help we need. Some goals demand little to no direction and oversight. We don’t write the goal down, or slot it for a specific time, or ask our assistant to remind us to do it. The planner in us is delegating the job to the doer in us—and assuming it will get done. Other tasks and situations, however, demand a heavier guiding hand. For example, in the matter of showing up for my daughter’s wedding, my need for guidance and self-management is low. I’m not likely to forget time and date, the address, and what to wear. Absent an unforeseen catastrophe, I don’t need direction to get me to the church on time. It’s so important nothing can distract me from achieving it. On the other hand, in the matter of how to behave at the wedding my need for direction is slightly higher. I say this feelingly because it’s what happened at my daughter Kelly’s wedding in 2013. Before the rehearsal dinner, she took me aside and gave me my marching orders on what I could say or do and who I had to be especially careful with. “Dad, don’t act like you’re teaching a class,” she said.

The boxer-philosopher Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” As we wander through life, what punches us in the face repeatedly is our environment.

Forecasting is what we must do after acknowledging the environment’s power over us. It comprises three interconnected stages: anticipation, avoidance, and adjustment.

Successful people are not completely oblivious to their environment. In the major moments of our lives, when the outcome really matters and failure is not an option, we are masters of anticipation.

When our performance has clear and immediate consequences, we rise to the occasion. We create our environment. We don’t let it re-create us.

The problem is that the majority of our day consists of minor moments, when we’re not thinking about the environment or our behavior because we don’t associate the situation with any consequences. These seemingly benign environments, ironically, are when we need to be most vigilant. When we’re not anticipating the environment, anything can happen.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”

It’s no different with our environment. Quite often our smartest response to an environment is avoiding it.

A bigger part, though, is our fundamental 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.

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.

I don’t usually cite politicians as role models, but they are masters of avoidance. Unlike my high-achieving clients (who can’t foresee error-inducing situations because they’re neither used to erring nor admitting its possibility), politicians are terrorized by the specter of a career-ending gaffe. So they develop perfect pitch for any environment that might tempt them into making a gaffe. When they refuse to answer a no-win question at a press conference, they’re practicing avoidance. When they won’t be seen in the same room with a polarizing public figure, they’re avoiding. When they abstain from a controversial vote, they’re avoiding.

It’s a simple equation: To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur.

The challenge is to do it by choice, not as a bystander. Are we creating ourselves, or wasting the opportunity and being created by external forces instead?

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.

Successful people, by definition, are doing a lot of things correctly, so they have a lot to preserve. But they also have a baseline urge that equates steady advancement with constant improvement.

So we rarely ask ourselves, “What in my life is worth keeping?” The answer can save us a lot of time and energy. After all, preserving a valuable behavior means one less behavior we have to change.

The real test is sacrificing something we enjoy doing—say, micromanaging—that’s not ostensibly harming our career, that we believe may even be working for us (if not others). In these cases, we may ask ourselves, “What should I eliminate?” And come up with nothing.

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. Accepting is the rare bird in this aviary of change. Businesspeople, reluctant to admit any defeat, can’t help equating “acceptance” with “acquiescence.”

But our natural impulse is to think wishfully (that is, favor the optimal, discount the negative) rather than realistically.

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.

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. Accept it and see.

But there’s hope. Nadeem defused an imagined enemy by altering his behavior in public forums. Rennie became a better manager by carrying an index card. Stan reduced family friction by avoiding family meetings. These behavioral transformations didn’t happen overnight. Nadeem needed eighteen months to get the nod from his colleagues. Rennie still carries an index card to meetings. Stan complained for months about being shut out of “his” foundation before he could serenely accept his new family landscape.

We don’t just need specific targets; we need to see ourselves nearing, not receding from, the target. Anything less is frustrating and dispiriting.

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.

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? Suddenly, I wasn’t being asked how well I performed but rather how much I tried.

We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.

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.

That kind of discipline at the start of any change process is not surprising given our natural enthusiasm in the early stages of anything. The shorter the time gap between our planning and our doing, the greater the chance that we’ll remember our plan. As the time between planning and doing increases—and our environment intrudes with all its temptations and distractions—our enthusiasm and discipline fade.

You can’t be tempted by a plate of cheese and crackers, or a bowl of ice cream, or even a healthy handful of almonds if you banish them from your environment.