Habits and Strategies

One of the most common questions I get in my coaching practice goes something like this:

“My (husband, wife, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, etc.) has this behavior, or belief, or way of doing things… How can I get them to change it?”

Now, if it’s a very specific behavior, and changing it would make a big difference in your relationship, it’s always worth just simply asking, for example, “When you talk with your mouth full it really bothers me, could you please do your best to not talk while you’re chewing?”

But often what we want the other person to change is much bigger and more abstract than that.

Of course, we’ve all felt this at some time or other – “If only this person we care about would just stop being so negative, or change this one belief… then they’d be so much better off.” (It’s always something that seems so obvious and simple… to us.)

The big problem with this is that it’s hard enough to change a big habit or belief within ourselves, when we want to. Trying to get somebody else to change a habit or belief, that maybe they don’t want to change, is really a long-shot.

I’ve been working with people to – in part – help them change their beliefs and habits for over 40 years. It’s something I enjoy very much, and have a lot of success with. But it’s not easy. It takes time and energy – and often a good deal of courage – to face our troubling behaviors, and the fears that sometimes accompany them.

When we nag, lecture, cajole, or manipulate those we love to be more the way we think they should be, in that moment we’re not really in relationship with them. In that moment we’re not seeing them as a human being, with all the complexity and unique internal experience that we each live within. We’re seeing them as a thing to make different. In order for them to live up to our expectations of them.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t generally love or understand them, but when we go into that particular mode of “teaching,” and what we’re teaching is the lesson we think this person needs to learn… in that moment, we’re disconnected from that person.

When was the last time you changed somebody else’s behavior by nagging or lecturing them? Or better yet: When was the last time you changed your behavior from somebody else nagging or lecturing you?

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New Year’s resolutions usually don’t work very well. The reason is that we often will pick a general life changing scenario liken “get more fit and healthy,” or “turn my finances around.” Or it could be a big specific thing like “quit smoking.”

What’s missing with this – which is why it’s not very effective – is that underlying these behaviors are habits. Often strong, long practiced habits. And a single behavior may include several habits.

To make effective changes in our lives, we must focus on the habits underlying the behavior, and create a plan of action for changing them, and to keep them changed over time.

That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

For most living creatures, instincts take charge of the necessary ordering which life requires: finding food, finding a mate, sleep cycles, protective behavior… But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our conscious mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival… or not.

Because of this, we can do something pretty amazing: with our conscious minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. We do this by creating habits. The habits we practice daily, weekly, monthly… are all maintained through neural pathways that we’ve established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines.

These habits – if they are good ones – help us to build a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. They are what allow us to persevere and reach long term goals. Without habits, we’d need to use our willpower for every single action we take.

The trouble is, we acquire many of our habits by default: from routines that our family valued and practiced, or that we learned in school, or from influential people in our lives… or from adapting to challenging circumstances as best we could.

This can be wonderful if the people we learned from all had good habits and great values, or when our adaptations have strengthened us. It can be awful if the habits we learned are awful.

But even in the best of circumstances – a loving family, a supportive community, great opportunities for learning, responsibility, and growth – the habits we learned earlier and that come easily to us may not be the best ones for our current and developing lives.

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Most couples wait six years or more from the beginning of trouble to when they seek help with a counselor, even though prevention is much easier and more effective than repair.

When I was working primarily as a marriage and family therapist, it was heartbreaking when a couple would come to my office as enemies, having long ago crossed the point of no return.

Once trouble starts, if a couple ignores it or just “lets things work out on their own,” that bond can degenerate quickly, and two people who were once deeply in love can find themselves in an agonizing cycle of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling (silent brooding) – what relationship researcher and therapist John Gottman calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

That’s why I now work with couples primarily as a coach. It seems to take less time for couples to seek a coach than a counselor or therapist. With less accumulated pain and fewer hurtful habits, we can dive right into work on that prevention part.

The problem isn’t conflict. Successful marriages have plenty of conflict. The problem isn’t even unresolved conflict. Successful marriages also have plenty of unresolved conflict.

Conflict is where our differences meet; in many ways, our conflicts help us to get to know one another. A marriage without conflict is also likely a marriage without much intimacy.

It’s how we treat each other when there’s conflict that is the essential difference between a happy marriage and a miserable – or a finished – one.

A marriage is not a game; it’s not a trophy to win or a position to battle for. A marriage is a connection between two people who love each other, trust each other, respect each other and enjoy being with each other. It’s not about winning something over the other person; it’s about achieving something together, with the other person.

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An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

At first I was tempted to say yes. Compromise is certainly one part of two different people sharing a life together. We can’t do everything we want whenever we want it; we have to find ways of adapting to each other’s needs and inclinations.

But thinking about it a little more closely, I instead said an emphatic, “no.” Compromise is not really the key. Compromise is kind of like when one person wants a room painted yellow, the other wants it painted blue, and we compromise and get green – but neither of us may even like green. Compromise is sometimes win/win, sometimes not. There are certainly times when we compromise, but it isn’t the driving force of a great relationship.

What is the driving force of a great relationship? A winning premise; a conception of what our relationship is all about that includes a shared vision of the two of us together.

A relationship is a creative process between two people. The two of you create what the two of you choose to create – whether you do that consciously or based on unexplored habits and beliefs is what can make the big difference between a happy, successful relationship, or a less happy, less successful one.

A great relationship is founded on the premise that you and your partner are allies; that you are a team together.

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A healthy relationship with the truth is essential for a happy, successful life.

But this is not a simple thing; the ability to see, acknowledge, and accept what’s true – about ourselves, our circumstances, our relationships; our own strengths and weaknesses, and the challenges we face – is actually much harder than it may seem.

We have all known people in our lives who are smart, self-aware, and curious, but they keep making the same mistakes over and over in one particular area of their lives. You see it, other people see it, but they don’t seem to see it at all.

It’s even more difficult when other people are seeing things that we don’t see – and seeing that we don’t see them.

I remember as a young psychotherapist in my 20s (I’ve been doing this for a very long time!) discovering a new approach or technique that seemed to do wonders. All I could see was the success, and it was exciting.

What I wasn’t seeing was my own confirmation bias, that would minimize where it didn’t work very well, and maximize where it did.

It took some time and experience to see that every approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and every client I work with is unique – what’s helpful with one person may do nothing for another.

And this sort of confirmation bias is something I still have to stay continually vigilant about – because our biases never disappear.

We are made for learning and growth. Our success in life depends, to a significant extent, on increasing our awareness and understanding of the world. Yet we have a tremendous array of biases that color our interpretation of what we perceive, what we experience, and what we think we know.

These biases are not flaws in our system, they exist because they are functional. Like our habits, in most situations, most of the time, these biases work pretty well for us, and the automatic nature of them allows us to live without being continually overwhelmed with bringing consciousness and willpower into every tiny aspect of our lives.

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To ruminate means literally to chew over and over again. It’s what cows do with grass so they can draw as much of the nutritional value from it as they can.

When we dwell too much on what hurt us in the past, we are doing a different kind of ruminating. We “re-chew” our negative thoughts and memories, drawing as much pain and suffering out of them as we possibly can.

This is one of the worst things we can do for our sense of happiness and well-being.

The compulsion to ruminate can be powerful, especially if we’ve practiced it a lot. We can develop an irresistible urge to replay the events that have made us miserable. Yet some older popular notions from psychology can lead people to believe this is a good thing. We think we are figuring something out. In fact, it’s more like re-striking a bruised injury thinking that will help it to heal.

When we purposefully remember painful memories over and over again, without changing our perspective towards them, we actually reinforce the pain with each visit.

Remember, our narrative memories aren’t facts, they are stories that can contain facts—but they can also contain mistaken ideas or conclusions. So when we ruminate we are not exploring Truth with a capital “T,” we are replaying a painful and helpless story.

I don’t say this to deny anybody’s experience or to minimize anybody’s trauma, but the best thing we can do with painful experiences is to have them take their proper place in history.

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