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

by Marshall Goldsmith

When we’re not anticipating the environment, anything can happen.*1

Quite often our smartest response to an environment is avoiding it.

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. And dealing with the shock and distress when we fail.

To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur.

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).

Creating represents the positive elements that we want to create in our future. • Preserving represents the positive elements that we want to keep in the future.

Eliminating represents the negative elements that we want to eliminate in the future. • Accepting represents the negative elements that we need to accept in the future.

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.

Accepting is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition we are most loath to accept. It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior.

If we reflect on it, I’d wager our episodes of nonacceptance trigger more bad behavior than the fallout from our creating, preserving, and eliminating combined.

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.

The wheel is equally useful one-on-one. Even if we’re alone in a dark and quiet room, intent on contemplating our future, we’re still being distracted by the competing voices mumbling and shouting inside our heads. Posing big-picture questions to ourselves crowds out the distracting voices and shuffles the niggling issues and daily nuisances that upset us to the back of the line, where they belong.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?”

People don’t get better without follow-up. So let’s get better at following up with our people.

Did I do my best to set clear goals today?

Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals today?

Did I do my best to find meaning today?

Did I do my best to be happy today?

Daniel Gilbert shows in Stumbling on Happiness, we are lousy at predicting what will make us happy.

Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?

Did I do my best to be fully engaged today?

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.

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

Adding the words “did I do my best” added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process. After a few weeks using this checklist, I noticed an unintended consequence. Active questions themselves didn’t merely elicit an answer. They created a different level of engagement with my goals. To give an accurate accounting of my effort, I couldn’t simply answer yes or no or “30 minutes.” 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.

This “active” process will help anyone get better at almost anything. It only takes a couple of minutes a day. But be warned: it is tough to face the reality of our own behavior—and our own level of effort—every day.

The list isn’t working if it isn’t changing along the way—if

There’s no correct number of questions. The number is a personal choice, a function of how many issues you want to work on.

your Daily Questions should reflect your objectives.

Are these items important in my life? • Will success on these items help me become the person that I want to be?

If you’re like most people, the objectives would fall into a predictable set of broad categories: health, family, relationships, money, enlightenment, and discipline.

There would be a goal or two about intimate personal relationships (being nicer to your partner, more patient with your kids); a couple of diet and fitness goals (reduce sugar consumption, sign up for yoga, floss daily); and a time management goal (get to bed before midnight, limit TV watching to three hours a day).

There would be something involving your behavior at work (asking for help, expanding your contacts, looking for a new job) as well as something more specifically careerist (start blogging, join a profe...

There would be something involving intellectual stimulation (reading Middlemarch, taking an art class, learning Mandarin Chinese) and stopping an undesirable personal habit (biting your nails, saying...

And, since we like clear short-term targets, there would be something very specific to achieve in the near future, as trivial as completing an errand o...

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.

It is incredibly difficult for any of us to look in the mirror every day and face the reality that we didn’t even try to do what we claimed was most important in our lives.

Emily’s story is an instructive template not only in the mechanics of doing Daily Questions right—picking the questions, keeping score, monitoring yourself, sticking with it—but in the choices and tweaks we make that influence the outcome.

Successful people show up with an arsenal of previous achievements that they can apply to new challenges.

One of the unappreciated benefits of Daily Questions is that they force us to quantify an unfamiliar data point: our level of trying. We rarely do that. We treat effort as a second-class citizen. It’s the condolence message we send ourselves when we fail. We say, “I gave it my best shot,” or “I get an A for effort.” But after a few days, quantifying effort rather than outcome reveals patterns that we’d otherwise miss.

On Day 63, when she stopped the strict juicing program, Emily had lost 56 pounds. She had also passed her Stage 2 Master Sommelier exam. She was swimming or going to yoga classes at least five days a week. She had achieved the longest sustained stretch of planned behavioral change in her young life. She was feeling good about herself. The hard part was just beginning.

we change by creating, preserving, accepting, or eliminating. So far Emily was focused on eliminating.