Habits and Strategies

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.

As an example: Imagine you’re on a great basketball team, you have the ball, and you’re on a fast break down the court. You see your teammate up ahead with a great position, so you pass him the ball so that he can shoot. You could have taken the ball all the way down the court and maybe taken the shot yourself, but you passed it to your teammate instead.

Is that a compromise?

Not at all. As a team, we are working toward the same goal: we want to win the game. To win the game we have to play together as effectively as we possibly can. We have to know our teammates extremely well. We have to pay attention to where they are and what they’re doing. We have to be focused on the goal, and committed to playing together at the highest level possible.

This is not compromise; it is a conscious understanding of goals, priorities and strategy. There is nothing so disappointing in a sports team as a bunch of phenomenal players who each think that they are the star, and whose focus is primarily on their own personal glory.

To win as a team requires that everybody see himself as part of that team, and to think in terms of the team’s success and glory. The level of commitment to achieve this is total. It can’t be 99%. We can’t have part of ourselves thinking, “Gosh, maybe I don’t want to be doing this, maybe there could be another option…”

The difference between a 99% commitment and a 100% commitment is huge.

In a marriage, when we commit to curiosity about our partner’s internal world, to getting to know them extremely well, to wanting to keep learning what matters to them, what their dreams and hopes are, what their vision is for our marriage, we are getting to know our teammate. We will come to understand how they respond to different kinds of communication, how to ask for what we want in ways that they are likely to hear, the different moods and events and timings of activities that work and don’t work.

This is something that we both need to do as allies with the same vision for our marriage.

When the two of us spend time together clarifying and refining our vision for our life together, we’re setting the stage for success toward that vision. We are defining the shared direction toward which we both want to head, and we are consciously creating the kind of relationship we want to live together in.

This will be a different direction than we would be heading if we were single. Alone, we would of course have a different vision. But we also could not create the same kind of life as we can together. It might be a great life, but it would be a different kind of life.

Just imagine one superstar basketball player facing off against a full squad of players. He couldn’t do much, because that game is about the relationship between great players.

A marriage is about the relationship between two great people.

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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 my assessment of 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.

We generally work very hard to confirm our existing beliefs, stories, and biases – because the familiar story that we live within gives us a sense of security and constancy. It’s comforting to feel that what we think we know is true, that what we believe is true, that our sense of the world is true.

…even when it’s not actually true.

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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.

Continually revisiting past painful experiences digs those feelings in deeper, keeps them active in our life today, and we can come to see the world through the lens of meaning and pain we felt in the past. Our feelings about every situation, every interaction that remotely resonates with those memories can amplify out of proportion to the current reality.

I’ve had clients whose lives were put on hold for decades, frozen in the hope that through going over and over a past painful relationship, or an awful event, they could somehow “heal” from it. What was unspoken was the belief that if they thought over the event enough, they could actually change the past—which is just not possible.

Winston Churchill once said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” Here’s the way to keep moving through those stuck memories, meanings, and feelings, and come out better on the other side:

Instead of treading the same painful ground over and over, dispute the assumptions you bring to that event. Look to view them from a different perspective. Look for other elements of the event that you were not focusing on at the time.

Sometimes we can take things personally that are not personal to us at all. Somebody who snaps at us in anger may actually be in the midst of something completely unrelated to us; or a comment that we took as rejection may have been meant as a courageous gift of valuable feedback.

Our feelings are not objective facts. Feelings come from our experience; they are a subjective response to the meaning that we make of events. That’s how two people can experience the same event and come away with entirely different meanings and feelings associated with that event.

The trick to stop ruminating is to dispute your assumptions.

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Giving and helping others are wonderful things. We are appreciated when we give to others through charity, volunteer work, or other acts of kindness; and rightly so. When we can help another person in some way, it creates a spirit of goodwill, and it’s one of the single most important acts we can do for our own happiness.

What’s often overlooked though is how much consciousness, caring, time, money, and energy each one of us already puts into significantly helping other people every day – through the work we do.

Every hour we’ve spent in a classroom, in an internship, and at work is an hour we’ve spent honing and perfecting our skills. Every dollar we’ve spent for tuition, books, seminars, travel – and of course those most expensive of seminars, the cost of failure or loss that have added to our wisdom – is a dollar we’ve spent investing in our ability to do our work well.

And every ounce of energy we’ve spent thinking about, worrying over, creating ideas for, and sweating through hard work and difficult times is an ounce of energy that increases our ability to provide some kind of product or service to another human being.

It’s popular these days to dismiss all this because we’re doing it for the money; as though earning money cheapens our efforts, makes our efforts base, selfish, or materialistic.

But earning a living from what we do makes it possible and reasonable for us to do it. When demagogues lecture young college graduates to forego making money, and instead to do something else that helps people, they are telling them that what we do to make money does not help people.

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Money is the great measure of value. That some people get money through deceit or fraud or through the use of political power or manipulation does not negate the fact that most of us make our livings doing something that is of value to other people – and to enough other people that the aggregate of what they pay allows for us to afford those things we need and want.

The contractor we hired to remodel our house some years ago was not simply willing to hammer some nails to help out in our time of need. He makes his living doing what he does. We paid him a lot of money, and in return we got all the skill, experience, and knowledge, familiarity with the sub-contractors, and accountability that led to the finished product we were happy with. The work he did then continues to add to our quality of life every single day.

He didn’t do this as a sacrifice; it was the most moral and benevolent of human interactions: it was an exchange.

Think of the work you do. How many hundreds or thousands of hours have you invested in learning the skills you use? How many years have you spent practicing those skills to earn the level of competence you bring to your work today?

This is what you give back to the world each and every day, without even thinking about it.

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Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise.

• Hans Selye

It is common knowledge that too much stress is bad for us; yet stress is also a necessary and vital part of living well. Anything that you do that involves challenging yourself, confronting situations that require your best efforts, or pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone will involve a degree of stress.

Happiness is not the absence of stress; it is living with a degree of stress that we can manage. And there’s new research that turns what we thought we knew about stress on its head – what’s most important for our health and well-being is not the stress itself, but what we believe about stress.

When we’re feeling too much stress in our lives, there are two things that we can do:

• Do less of what causes us stress
• Learn to manage a higher level of stress

Legendary UCLA Basketball coach John Wooden said, “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” That one sentence contains great leverage for decreasing stress. A major cause of stress is worrying and spinning our wheels trying to do things that are outside of our control.

When we focus on what we can’t do, we feel both revved up to want to do something, and simultaneously helpless to actually do anything. It’s like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake at the same time. To that end, focusing most of our efforts on what we can do will make us more effective, and less stressed out.

Another thing we can do to decrease external stress is to take stock of our environment, and find what increases our stress. Do you spend a lot of time commuting? Are you in an environment that overloads your senses, or in which you feel threatened? If you can change such things you can lower your stress levels.

Here are three simple but effective things we can do to increase our capacity for stress:

• Deliberately breathing more slowly and deeply (not too deeply that you hyperventilate): Practicing breathing between 4-6 breaths per minute for a few minutes a day can help calm your system overall.
• Practicing relaxing: Meditation, prayer, giving yourself time to look at the stars at night… anything that trains your body and mind to relax will strengthen your ability to relax when you need to.
• Regular physical exercise: There are huge psychological and physical benefits to regular exercise – from strengthening our capacity for stress, to decreasing anxiety, to preventing and relieving depression, to increasing your overall health and resilience.

And beyond these, one of the most effective strategies for managing stress is to make plans.

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Change and growth is, first and foremost, an active, creative process. Charting a new course for ourselves, even if we’re only talking about a specific habit or two, involves envisioning what we would like different, how we would like it to be different, and what steps we need to take to get there.

Then, most importantly, it requires the commitment to take action, which involves creating the structures that will guide us through the steps and keep us on track; the scheduled appointments, the deadlines, the people who will keep us accountable.

Successful people actually use less willpower than less successful people, because they set up effective rituals, appointments, and accountability structures that build into their day what they would otherwise need willpower to achieve.

Twyla Tharp, the great dancer and choreographer, in her book The Creative Habit, talks about “rituals of preparation:” what creative people do that prepares them to work. This is hers:

I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 am, put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91^st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

Such rituals let our entire system know that we are ready, that it is time to work; they shepherd all of our psychological, emotional and physical resources and make them available to us, so we can focus and absorb ourselves in our task.

It’s the daily consistency that makes such rituals so powerful. As Tharp says:

All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they impel you to get started. Whether it’s the act of carrying a hot coffee mug to an outdoor porch, or the rock ‘n’ roll that gets a painter revved up to splash color on a canvas, or the stillness of an herb garden that puts a chef in a culinary trance, moving inside each of these routines gives you no choice but to do something. It’s Pavlovian: follow the routine, get a creative payoff.

What are some of your rituals of preparation? Chances are you already have some, even if you haven’t thought of them that way. What do you do that gets you in the frame of mind to function at your best?

Identifying what already works and doing more of it can boost your success, but sometimes creating new behaviors means starting from scratch. If you think about one of the habits you’d like to begin, stop or change this year, what is the first action you need to take to get that started?

If you can identify the first action and commit to a specific time and place to do it, you will triple your chance of success.

Then, if you really want to make creative changes, the essential, irreplaceable element is to commit 100% to making those changes. Commit to the changes, commit to taking that first step, and commit to the strategy and the rituals that will deliver you to your goals.

Commitment is everything. In over 40 years of working with people to help them make positive changes in their lives, I have never seen a single person make such changes without a firm commitment to do so. There’s a palpable quality that radiates from a person when they commit, as though an energetic path that had once been hidden has opened before them toward their goals.

Rituals express a commitment in action. The wish without the commitment is passive; it puts us in a place of helpless longing. The triumph of creation comes with an active, purposeful vision, with concrete steps and consistent ritualized structures that will hold us to our goals, and total commitment that we re-affirm every day.

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My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.

• Ellen DeGeneres

It’s no secret that exercise is good for our physical health. But exercise is vital for our mental health as well; and sitting a lot and not exercising is tremendously harmful for our emotional and psychological life.

There has been an upsurge in depression over the past several decades. One major contributor to this is how little physical activity we get. Exercise is just about the best treatment for depression, yet today 50% of men and 60% of women don’t exercise more than ten minutes per week.

Yes, that’s per week.

The most popular treatment for depression is medication. It’s quick to administer, it’s easy to do, but, statistically, for mild to moderate depression it’s actually no better than placebo. It also has side effects that can be pretty unpleasant over time, and when the medication stops, so do its benefits.

Exercise isn’t as easy as medication; it takes work, self-discipline, and perseverance. It requires us to do what we often don’t feel like doing (I’ve jumped into a swimming pool thousands of times, and to this day I have never liked that moment of entering the water).

But exercise is as much as two and a half times as effective as medication for overcoming depression.

Once we develop the habit of exercise, we can easily overcome the inertia and the discomfort; then the benefits we gain against the depression continue, and the side effects are all positive.

But overcoming the inertia and discomfort – or even the self-concept – that exercise requires can be tricky.

We can develop an idea of ourselves that gets in the way of changing our bad habits to better ones: “I’m not one of those people who exercises…” There is a common feature of anything we do that challenges and grows us: our habitual feelings and behaviors can trick us into thinking that they are somehow more genuine or authentic than other feelings and behaviors that we’d like to have.

But they’re not.

What feels familiar to us is simply and purely what we’ve practiced over and over and over again, to the point that it feels natural. So when we want to change our behavior from sedentary to more physically active, the momentum of a sedentary life can make that lack of physical activity feel more genuine, more in line with our nature.

It can also feel as though our habits hold some kind of magical sway over us: something must have happened to us, or there must be some kind of genetic pre-wiring that makes us helpless to counter those habits.

But it’s not magic, and we’re not helpless… it’s just what over time we’ve told our brains to impel us do automatically. It does take considerable time and energy to establish new habits – which means that it’s not something that any of us will do lightly.

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