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problem worse, actually. In the decade leading up to the 2002 Justice Department study, the states built more prisons and judges imposed longer sentences. The result? The rearrest rate actually went up by five percentage points, from 62.5
passionately in this idea. My mission is to replace those three misconceptions about change—our trust in facts, fear, and force (the three Fs)—with what I call “the three keys to change.” In the pages that follow I
change, which I call the three Rs: relate, repeat, and reframe. THE FIRST KEY TO CHANGE Relate You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable
the ability to change. They have to sell you on themselves as your partners, mentors, role models, or sources of new knowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or strategies that they employ. THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE Repeat The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time
THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE Reframe The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in
The common denominator, it turned out, was that going to therapy inspired a new sense of hope for the patients—the belief and expectation that they would overcome their troubles. The key factor was the chemistry of the emotionally charged relationship formed by the patient and the therapist or the group, not the specific theories or techniques that differentiated the particular school of therapy.
research on this topic had been led by John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, who concluded that changing organizations depends overwhelmingly on changing the emotions of their individual members. This alerted me to the
We’re guided by ideologies about all kinds of matters, not just politics, and they’re vital to understanding change. Instead of “ideology” you can refer to it as a “belief system” or a “conceptual framework” (“frames,” for short). Whatever you call them, these are the “mental structures that shape how we view the world” in the words of Berkeley professor George Lakoff.
You can give the same facts to liberals and conservatives but people on each side will interpret the facts to support their own beliefs.
We take the facts and fit them into the frames we already have. If the facts don’t fit, we’re likely to challenge whether they’re really facts or to dismiss the information and persist somehow in believing what we want to believe.
with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid.”
In politics we might be liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, left-wingers or right-wingers, with shadings and subtleties, of course. But nearly all of us have a deep conviction about the awesome power of science and technology, and that includes a strong belief in “scientific medicine.”
Still true?
older, 91 percent said they trusted doctors to tell the truth, which put physicians ahead of everyone else:
When the Harris Poll company conducted a similar survey among Americans, who are markedly less trustful than the British, 77 percent said they trusted doctors to tell the truth, ranking doctors second only to teachers at 80 percent. When Harris focused on Americans
Denial is one of the biggest reasons it’s so difficult to motivate other people to change. We think we can enlighten them by telling them the facts, but they’re in denial because they’ve already confronted the facts and they can’t handle the facts. We try to use fear to motivate them to change, but they’re in denial because the fear is too overwhelming.
by fear. If you’re hopeless, then what you need is someone to inspire a new sense of hope—the belief and expectation that you can change your situation and overcome the difficulties you’ve struggled with. And that’s exactly what happens in the first key to change.
The whole conceptual framework of Western medicine further hampers
doctors’ efforts because it casts doctors in active, heroic roles and relegates patients to passive, hopeless roles. Trained thoroughly in this mindset, which is second nature to them, doctors don’t believe patients can change, which in turn doesn’t help patients believe they can.
Fortunately the techniques of salesmanship have been very well known for a very long time by many people (although this knowledge isn’t taught at medical schools). It helps if you believe in what you’re selling. It helps if you’re passionate about it. It helps if you build rapport with your prospective customers and show that you care about them. It helps if you start out by speaking their language and by working within their existing beliefs. Even though Ornish himself
Kotter says it’s always vital to identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for the emotional lifts they provide. When organizations of all kinds try to change the habitual ways their members think, feel, and act, they need “victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum,” Kotter says. “Without sufficient
powerless in society, and it’s the most corrupting thing I know. Because they live at the bottom of things, they’re always passive recipients. People say that power corrupts. I can’t say strongly enough how much powerlessness corrupts.”
Repeated personal experience over a long time is what conditions our gut-level emotions and strongly held beliefs. It takes new firsthand experiences, repeated over and over and over again, to begin to change our “frames.” Reframing isn’t something that happens just by hearing another person explain a new way of looking at things. You have to do things a new way before you can think in a new way.
millions of dollars? One of the reasons we resist change, unconsciously at least, is that it invalidates years of earlier behavior.
solution that operates outside of our awareness. Psychologists now theorize that there isn’t some immutable “self” that defines who you are and always will be; instead, “we constantly construct and reconstruct our selves,” writes Jerome Bruner, a cognitive scientist at New York University. And we do it by the stories that we tell about our lives. We’re constantly rewriting our
it. I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’”
happen. The lesson, going forward, is that the next time I’m stuck with difficult
problems I haven’t been able to solve through my own efforts, I should actively seek out a new relationship—and be well aware that it may take time and persistence to find the right one.
The first key to change doesn’t have to mean forming a new emotional relationship with a new person. It can involve a new relationship with a new community. Indeed, one of the most difficult
Change is a paradoxical process, and trying to change your own life means opening yourself up to new ideas and practices that may seem illogical or even insane to you, at least until you’ve experienced them for long enough to develop a new understanding. “People will struggle with
close to us. Dr. Dean Ornish likes to say that “people don’t resist change, they resist being changed,” a one-liner that resounds
came to the site in two months. By offering an easy tool for people to send e-mails to friends telling them about the films, Amex captured the names and e-mail addresses of 250,000 people—five times as many as it had hoped to get.
