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December 20 - December 20, 2019
Now Emily would have to come up with cooking and eating habits that went beyond the quick fix of juicing. She was entering a second phase of behavioral change, one where she was creating rather than eliminating. The old Daily Questions no longer applied. She needed to retool her goals into a plan that made sense for the rest of her life. Here’s what she came up with:
Emily’s story is ongoing, with no firm expiration date.
Like each of us, she is always at risk of reverting to previous undesirable behavior.
We can always get better at something, even if it’s just preserving the progress we’ve made.
They reinforce our commitment.
Daily Questions are what behavioral economists refer to as a “commitment device.”
Daily Questions are serious, too, if only in how they press us to articulate what we really want to change in our lives.
They ignite our motivation where we need it, not where we don’t.
there are many areas where our motivation—intrinsic or extrinsic—is less than optimal. Daily Questions press us to face them, admit them, and write them down. Until we can do that, we have no chance of getting better.
They highlight the difference between self-discipline and self-control.
Self-discipline refers to achieving desirable behavior. Self-control refers to avoiding undesirable behavior.
They shrink our goals into manageable increments.
Daily Questions neutralize the archenemy of behavioral change: our impatience.
We see the gap between the effort required today and the reward we’ll reap in an undetermined future—and lose our enthusiasm for change. We crave instant gratification ...
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Daily Questions, by definition, compel us to take things one day at a time. In doing so they shrink our objectives into mana...
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By focusing on effort, they distract us from our obsession with results (because that’s ...
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Daily Questions remind us that: • Change doesn’t happen overnight. • Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out. • If we make the effort, we will get better. If we don’t, we won’t.
At the most basic level, a coach is a follow-up mechanism, like a supervisor who regularly checks in on how we’re doing (we’re more productive when we know we’re being watched from above).
A Coach reminds us of the unreliable person we become after we make our plans.
All of these factors—shame, guilt, cost, obligation, decency—conspire to influence us, solely because of the trainer’s presence. This is how we do what we intend to do. The Coach meshes our inner Planner with our inner Doer. This is how successful change happens: in situations big or small, we make choices that marry intention with execution.
If we do it, we get better.
This is one of the minor miracles of Daily Questions. If we do them consistently and properly (and let’s face it, how much skill do we need to score ourselves on effort?), we get better. We don’t get many guarantees in life, but this is one of them.
We get better faster.
Eventually we become our own Coach.
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. That’s what Coaches do. But over time, after many reminders, we learn and adapt. We recognize the situations where we’ll likely stray from our plans. We think, “I’ve been here before. I know what works and what doesn’t.”
And after many failures, one day we make a better choice.
That’s the moment when the Planner and Doer in us are joined by the Coach in us. We don’t need an outside agency to point out our behavioral danger zones, or urge us to toe the line, or even hear our nightly scores. We can do it on our own.
The Coach in us takes many forms. It can be an inner voice, akin to conscience, whispering in our ear to remember an earlier time when we did the right thing. It can be a song lyric, a spiritual talisman, a meaningful motto, an instruction on a card, a memory of someone important to us, anything that triggers desired behavior.
Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic?
The moral: 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.
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.”
“Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.”
The Buddhism is inward-facing; it’s about maintaining our sanity in the presence of others. The Drucker is outward-facing; it’s about confining our contributions to the positive.
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. AIWATT creates a split-second delay in our prideful, cynical, judgmental, argumentative, and selfish responses to our triggering environment. The delay gives us time to consider a more positive response. The nineteen-word text deserves close parsing:
Am I willing implies that we are exercising volition—taking responsibility—rather than surfing along the waves of inertia that otherwise rule our day. We are asking, “Do I really want to do this?” At this time reminds us that we’re operating in the present. Circumstances will differ later on, demanding a different response. The only issue is what we’re facing now. To make the investment required reminds us that responding to others is work, an expenditure of time, energy, and opportunity. And, like any investment, our resources are finite. We are asking, “Is this really the best use of my
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When our facts collide with other people’s beliefs.
Confirmation bias—our tendency to favor information that confirms our opinions, whether it’s true or not—is an established psychological concept.
When decisions don’t go our way.
decision makers have it, the rest of us don’t. Sometimes the decision makers’ choices are logical and wise, other times irrational, petty, and foolish. That doesn’t change the fact that they are still the decision makers. It’s the rare person who can make peace with that fact.
When we regret our own decisions.
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.
AIWATT isn’t a universal panacea for all our interpersonal problems. I’ve given it prominence here because it has a specific utility. It’s a reminder that our environment tempts us many times a day to engage in pointless skirmishes. And we can do something about it—by doing nothing.
That’s one of structure’s major contributions to any change process. It limits our options so that we’re not thrown off course by externalities.
Imposing structure on parts of our day is how we seize control of our otherwise unruly environment.
When we formulate our bucket list we’re imposing structure on the rest of our life.
When we join a reading group, we’re imposing structure on our reading habits (and possibly restructuring our social life).
we discount structure when it comes to honing our interpersonal behavior. Structure is fine for organizing our calendar, or learning a technically difficult task, or managing other people, or improving a quantifiable skill. But for the simple tasks of interacting with other people we prefer to wing it—for reasons that sound like misguided variations on “I shouldn’t need to do that.”
This is the payoff built into the core structural element of this book—the Daily Questions. Asking ourselves, “Did I do my best…” is another way of admitting, “In this area I need help.” Answering the questions every day without fail is how we instill the rigor and discipline that have been missing from our lives. The net result is a clarity and unequivocality that makes us confront the question we try so hard to avoid: are we getting better?
We do not get better without structure, whether we’re targeting an organizational goal or a personal one. But it has to be structure that fits the situation and the personalities involved.
Why do our discipline and decisiveness fade at the end of the day, to the point where we opt to do nothing instead of doing something enjoyable or useful?
