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

by Marshall Goldsmith

Codifying our depleting events provides a clearer picture of how altered we may be at day’s end, how diminished in terms of willpower. Like monitoring our alcohol intake if we have to drive, we’re aware if we’re acting under the influence of depletion. And that bit of self-knowledge reveals where the risks are.

Making big decisions late in the day is an obvious risk. Thus, instead of meeting with your financial adviser after work to decide where your money goes—when

you’re literally SWI, spending while impaired—make it the first depleting event in your day, when you...

Coming home after work to a frenetic family household can be risky, too. If you’ve ever walked in the door and snapped at your family because the toys are on the floor, or the den is a mess, or the dog needs walking—the triggering irritant is irrelevant—you know depletion’s power. You had the option of being happy to see your fa...

Structure is how we overcome depletion. In an almost magical way, structure slows down how fast our discipline and self-control disappear. When we have structure, we don’t have to make as many choices; we just follow the plan. And the net result is we’re not being depleted as quickly.

If we provide ourselves with enough structure, we don’t need discipline. The structure provides it for us.

For example, the seven-day pillbox is a structural godsend for the millions of Americans who take daily prescription medication. It solves a major challenge in the doctor-patient relationship: patient compliance. We wake up on a Thursday, ingest the contents of the “Th” slot, and achieve compliance with little effort. We regard the pillbox as a convenience but on another level, it’s a structural surrogate for self-discipline. We don’t have to remember to take our pills. The pillbox does the remembering for us.

We’re probably not aware of how much depletion-fighting structure we’ve injected into our lives. When we follow an unshakable wake-up routine, or write down an agenda for our meetings, or stop at the same coffee shop before work, or clear our messy desk before opening up the laptop to write, we’re

surrendering to our routine, and burning up less energy trying to be disciplined. Our routine has taken care of that.

I can’t have enough structure in my day. I only wear khaki pants and green polo shirts to work (to add discipline to my shaky fashion sense). I pay a woman to call me with my Daily Questions (to discipline my self-awareness). I delegate all travel decisions to an assistant and never question her choices (to discipline my time). It’s an irresistible equation: the more structure I have, the le...

By taking personal responsibility for your own engagement, you make a positive contribution to your company—and begin creating a better you.

Another couple would soon be visiting Griffin for a three-day weekend and he was worried that as the visit stretched out, he’d ruin their time by betraying his real feelings. (In depletion terms, the effort of controlling himself would wear down his discipline—and he’d turn nasty.)

Griffin’s story seems to defy the notion of depletion. But it makes sense to me. Knowing he’d be tested hourly—and wanting to do well—meant Griffin didn’t have a choice about enjoying himself (or else he’d fail a test he’d written!). The structure took being a curmudgeon out of the mix. No choice, no discipline required, no depletion.

One other thing: when we decide to behave well and our first steps are successful, we often achieve a self-fulfilling momentum—Griffin called it “cruise control”—where we don’t have to try as hard to be good. Like getting through the first four days of a strict diet, if we can handle the initial stages of inhibiting

our undesirable impulses, we’re less likely to backslide. We don’t want to waste the gains of our behavioral investment. Good behavior beco...

The simpler the structure, the more likely we’ll stick with it. And Hourly Questions are fairly simple, comprising a series of steps that segue so smoothly from one to the other we bare...

Pre-awareness. Successful people are generally good at anticipating environments where their best behavior is at risk. They’re rarely ambushed by a tough negotiation, awful meeting, challenging confrontation. They know what they’re getting into before they walk into the room. For lack of a better term, I call it pre-m...

heading out onto the field, that a hyperaware mindset wil...

Commitment. Successful people aren’t wishy-washy about a course of action. Choosing Hourly Questions as a structure and articulating the specific questions is a commitment device—certainly better than hoping things will work out. It’s the difference between considering a goal and writing it down.

Awareness. We’re most vulnerable to our environment’s whims when we ignore its impact on us. Hourly Questions, impinging on our consciousness with precise regularity, neutralize the ignorance and make us vibrantly aware. We don’t have time to forget our situation or get distracted from our objective—because the next test is coming in sixty minutes.

Scoring. Grading our performance adds reflection to mindfulness. It’s a force multiplier for awareness. It’s one thing to do a task privately, another to do it while being watched by a supervisor. We’re more self-conscious when we’re being obser...

Repetition. The best part of Hourly Questions is their rinse-and-repeat frequency. If we score poorly in one hourly segment, we get a chance to do better an hour later. A b...

Hourly Questions are for the short game—when we require a burst of discipline to restrain our behavioral impulses for a defined period of time.

This is where Hourly Questions come to the rescue. I know I’m vulnerable in these situations, so I arm myself with as much structure as I can think of. I tell myself that I won’t eat the wonderful dessert. Sometimes I make a pact with the person sitting next to me: neither of us will succumb to the temptation of dessert. Sometimes, like Odysseus putting wax in his sailors’ ears, I ask the waitstaff to ignore me if I attempt to order dessert. But the most important structural element remains: I test myself every hour with the question, Did I do my best to enjoy who is here rather than what is being served?

There are no absolutes in behavioral change. We never achieve perfect patience or generosity or empathy or humility (you pick the virtue). It’s nothing to be ashamed of. The best we can hope for is a consistency in our effort—a persistence of striving—that makes other people more charitable about our shortcomings.

You know that there’s no such thing as a fully deserved reputation, not even among the most saintly among us. We all mess up once in a while.

The problem begins when this good enough attitude spills beyond our marketplace choices and into the things we say and do. The mustard on a sandwich can be good enough. But in the interpersonal realm—we’re talking about how a husband treats his wife, or a son deals with an aging parent, or a trusted friend responds when people are counting on him—good enough is setting the bar too low.