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

by Marshall Goldsmith

the best leaders function like our favorite high school coach: teaching, supporting, inspiring us, and occasionally instilling some healthy paranoia to keep us surging ahead.

we don’t know that we need to change. We are in denial, convincing ourselves that others need help, not us.

while he may have improved the content of the idea by 10 percent, he reduced the employee’s ownership of the idea by 50 percent. He was stifling debate and creativity—and driving away talent.

Meh!—instead

Daily Questions. 1. If we do it, we get better.

2. We get better faster.

Griffin only needed a month to solve his Clinking Cubes Problem—as if after eighteen months of being coached at work, he not only got better, but he became more efficient at the process of getting better.

We expect this sort of progress with activities that require physical dexterity, from cooking an omelet to performing heart surgery. The more we correctly repeat an actio...

We don’t expect this progress as readily with our warm and fuzzy emotional goals. They’re not technique driven. They’re influenced by other people’s responses and a changing environment. But it happens.

once they’ve learned how to change one behavior, they can do it again with another behavior—more smoothly and swiftly than the first time.

3. Eventually we become our...

It makes sense given the gap between the Farsighted Planner and Myopic Doer in us. Coaches can bridge that gap because they’re objective, not caught up in the environment that so often corrupts us. They can remind us of our original intentions. They can recall the times when we displayed desirable behavior and help us summon up the will to do so again.

The woman from the Red Cross was measuring children’s arms to determine who ate, who didn’t. If their arms were too large, they were “not hungry enough” and given no food. If their arms were too small, they were beyond saving and also given no food. If their arms were in the midrange, they were given a small portion of the available food.

Be grateful for what you have. No matter the disappointment or supposed tribulation, do not whine or complain, do not get angry, do not lash out at another person to express your entitlement. You are no better than these African children. Their terrible fate, undeserved and tragic, could have been your fate. Never forget this day.

sulk

when I hear that my plane will be delayed I remember the photo and repeat this mantra: “Never complain because the airplane is late. There are people in the world who have problems you cannot imagine. You are a lucky man.” The photo is a positive trigger in an otherwise negative environment.

Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic?

AIWATT (it rhymes with “say what”).

there’s never anyone in the other boat. We are always screaming at an empty vessel. An empty boat isn’t targeting us. And neither are all the people creating the sour notes in the soundtrack of our day.

I like to make this point in leadership classes with a simple exercise. I’ll ask a random audience member to think of one person who makes him or her feel bad, angry, or crazy. “Can you envision that person?” I ask. A nod, a disgusted face, and then, “Yes.” “How much sleep is that person losing over you tonight?” I ask. “None.” “Who is being punished here? Who is doing the punishing?” I ask. The answer inevitably is “Me and me.” I end the exercise with a simple reminder that getting mad at people for being who they are makes as much sense as getting mad at a chair for being a chair.

The common sense comes from Peter Drucker, who said, “Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.”

two notions that we have trouble holding in our heads simultaneously. When we have the opportunity to demonstrate our brainpower, we’re rarely thinking about a positive result for the other people in the room. We’re actually issuing what I like to call “false positives”—making statements to upgrade ourselves, often at the expense of others—and they appear in many forms:

pedantry

“I told you so.”

moral superiority

complaining

We’re only thinking about elevating ourselves. We’re trying to prove how smart we are to an empty boat!

AIWATT is the delaying mechanism we should be deploying in the interval between trigger and behavior—after a trigger creates an impulse and before behavior we may regret.

responding to others is work, an expenditure of time, energy, and opportunity.

The time we spend on topics where we can’t make a positive difference is stolen from topics where we can.

laudable

Honesty is stating enough truth to satisfy the other person’s need to know. Too much disclosure has a more ambitious reach—often to a point where the other person suffers and feels ashamed.

dud,

Confirmation bias—our tendency to favor information that confirms our opinions, whether it’s true or not—is

It afflicts how we gather information (selectively), interpret it (prejudicially), and recall it (unreliably).

“the backfire effect”

Peter Drucker

“Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.”

tauto...

When we regret our own decisions—and do nothing about it—we are no better than a whining employee complaining about his superiors. We are yelling at an empty boat, except it’s our boat.

No idea looms bigger in Alan’s mind than the importance of structure in turning around an organization and its people.

We do not get better without structure.

jarring

ego depletion

decision fatigue, a state that leaves us with two courses of action: 1) we make careless choices or 2) we surrender to the status quo and do nothing.

Decision fatigue is why

we put off decisions; we’re too drained to decide now

Ego depletion

depletion’s impact on our interpersonal behavior and our capacity to change.

shopping, deciding, and resisting temptation are depleting,