In April I invited others to join me in my attempt to not interrupt anyone for 30 days. During this same time frame I also committed with a friend to go gluten-free and sugar-free for 5 weeks.
Some thoughts on lessons learned or reinforced by these two behavior-change endeavors:
1) Focus less on the “stop doing” and more on the “start doing”.
As I’ve written before, frame your goals as something a dead person couldn’t do better. Simply committing to not interrupting or not eating flour or sugar wasn’t enough to keep me on track, or to get back on the track when I had fallen off. Behavior change is often hard work and it’s easy tell yourself it’s not worth it or doesn’t matter that much. I needed to continually remind myself of the value in listening and the benefits of feeding myself whole, unprocessed foods in order to stay committed to my goals.
In fact, do this before you attempt to change anything. I suspect your life is already busy and full of enough challenges. Make sure the new challenges you take on are connected to your values and what matters most to you.
2) Practice self-compassion.
These two behavior-change projects were the perfect chance for me to practice what I continually tell my clients: that looking upon your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness isn’t about letting yourself off the hook. As Heidi Grant Halvorsen writes in her Harvard Business Review blog “To Succeed, Forget Self-Esteem”, self-compassion actually helps you take an accurate look at what’s getting in your way and figure out what needs to be done differently next time.
3) Recruit an accountability partner
Whether it be a friend who is working on the same goal, a co-worker who will give you honest feedback, or a paid professional coach, recruit a partner. I had a partner for the gluten and sugar free experiment with whom I checked in daily and shared trials & tribulations and successes. I was much more successful in that arena than I was in my no-interruptions challenge, where I was without an accountability partner, other than a husband who would occasionally give me the look which silently communicated “being interrupted is irritating but it’s even more irritating when you told me you aren’t interrupting.” Which I must admit was effective, but only when he was around.
The good news is that even when we are unsuccessful in changing our habits, we can learn a lot from the failure. As the chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin said, “the moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.”
What have you learned from successful or unsuccessful attempts at change? How can you use that knowledge to achieve your current goals?
