More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 5 - May 17, 2018
But here, for starters, are the three keys to 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.
THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE Repeat The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need.
THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE Reframe The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life.
These are the three keys to change: relate, repeat, and reframe. New hope, new skills, and new thinking.
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.
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.
“Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact,” says Lakoff, who’s a professor of cognitive science and linguistics. “We may be presented 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.”
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.
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.
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 wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems.”
The idea may seem weirdly paradoxical, but the Ornish program shows that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are sometimes easier for people than small, incremental ones. Ornish says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol.
But change is about selling, not telling. It’s about teaching as well as preaching. Instead of complaining that people don’t follow your orders, you need to start training them in new skills.
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.”
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.
One of the reasons we resist change, unconsciously at least, is that it invalidates years of earlier behavior.
Dean Ornish likes to say, “People don’t resist change; they resist being changed,” and that’s exactly what Stewart has found with his new philosophy.
KEY #1 (RELATE): A new relationship with veteran Delancey residents provides new arrivals with hope. They look to the veterans as role models for change.
KEY #2 (REPEAT): They receive daily training so they can change their “outsides”—how to dress, walk, and talk like members of the middle-class—and practice sobriety and non-violence.
KEY #3 (REFRAME): They learn an entirely new view of the world—the “middle-class mind” instead of the “criminal mind.”
PSYCH CONCEPTS (SO FAR) 1. Frames 2. Denial and other psychological self-defenses 3. Short-term wins 4. The power of community and culture 5. Acting as if 6. Recasting a life’s story 7. Walk the walk
Unless you work on it, brain fitness begins declining at around age thirty for men and a little later for women.
The idea is to escape from your expertise and become a novice in an entirely different pursuit. It’s about taking on challenges that you’ll be bad at for quite a while rather than always returning to pursuits you’ve been good at for many years.
Most of my Princeton classmates had no problem learning foreign languages from their teachers and with their fellow Princetonians, but I needed different relationships. Learning and change aren’t one-size-fits-all phenomena.
When you realize that change depends on relationships, then you can seek a “change agent” much as you do any other important, emotionally charged relationship with a person or community, whether it’s seeking a lover or spouse, or joining a church or spiritual group, or hiring colleagues for your company. It’s a hit-or-miss endeavor that takes time, energy, frustration, and resilience. But when you find the right relationship, anything is possible.
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.
But you need to walk the walk for a long time before your actions really change the way that people think, feel, and act. After years or decades of experiencing the old ways, people aren’t going to believe you when you tell them that things are different now, even if they really are different. People need to experience it first.
When you’re locked into the mindset that helped you succeed, then it’s difficult even to think about the profound changes you’ll have to respond to. But if you practice change, if you keep up your ability to change, if you use it rather than lose it, then you’ll be ready to change whenever you have to.
The process of change can be threatening, so it often helps if we learn new skills and mindsets through relationships with people who feel comfortable and familiar because they share our old skills and mindsets.
Think of change as what you do to remain successful and become even more successful, not as what you’ll have to do when your success finally runs out.
The lesson is that even while we’re creating new “neural pathways,” the old ones are still there in our brains. Until the new ones become completely second nature, then stress or fear can make us fall back on the old ones. But it’s all right. The next time you can take a new route instead of Van Ness. And then take it again and again. Eventually the new pathway becomes fully “automatic.”
