Habits and Strategies

My client Frank was having a very hard time with his money. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway’s bankrupt character Mike in “The Sun Also Rises,” money problems tend to happen gradually, then suddenly.

Frank was, fortunately, still in the “gradually” stage, feeling anxious and a bit untethered. The frustrating thing was that he knew exactly what he needed to do… he just didn’t do it.

Well, to be more precise, he usually didn’t do it.

When he saw that his credit card balances were creeping up, and he’d lost track of what was happening with his investments, and he started worrying about bills that he hadn’t prepared for, then he would pay attention to his spending and check diligently on his investments… for maybe a week, maybe a month.

But when the anxiety subsided a bit as he adjusted his behavior, he would begin to feel less urgency, and eventually the old habits would reassert themselves, slowly re-creating the same problems that had been troubling him.

And the cycle would repeat itself.

We can know the right things to do. We can know how to do them. But until and unless these behaviors become automatic habits, we will never actually do them reliably over time. It just takes too much energy, focus, and willpower to consciously think of everything all the time.

As the great American psychologist William James said about a hundred years ago:

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

This is one of the enduring truths of human nature. If we want to establish a behavior over time, we need to make it automatic.

Unfortunately for James, it turns out that the “miserable human being” he was describing, was himself. As his biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote, James’s was “…a man who really had no habits – or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits – and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”

Sometimes we can teach best what we most need to learn. In that sense James was a fantastic teacher regarding habits.

So how do we establish strong, positive, and consistent habits?

We create rituals that hold us to those habits.

Rituals are rote behaviors that create structure in our lives. They can take the form of an “if-then” statement:

• “If the clock shows that it’s 5:30 am, then I’ll get out of bed, get my workout clothes on, drink some water, and be at the gym by 6.”
• “If I spend more than $100 for food and supplies on a given day, then I’ll spend less than $50 for food and supplies the next day.
• “If it’s 9 am, then I will sit down and practice my instrument for the next 3 hours.”
• “If it’s written in my planner/to do list, then I will do it.”

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.

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An essential ingredient for success at anything – beyond the most mundane of rote tasks – is curiosity.

Curiosity is about exploration and discovery; it creates energy, possibilities, and movement. It also allows us to create relationships, and to grow more deeply and delightfully connected with one another. It allows us to play – and excellence in work can be like play for adults.

In my work as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Life Coach, and Business Consultant, I would be utterly useless without curiosity as a central deliberate practice. I need to get to know, before I do anything else, who this other person is – or who these people are if it’s a couple or a work team. I need to be keenly interested in knowing and understanding them, their circumstances, and what their goals and challenges and strengths are. That’s all about curiosity.

You might think, “Well, that sounds like you start with empathy…” But empathy, in my experience, follows from curiosity. If we’re curious about the other person, that’s the portal through which our empathy and care for other people enters.

Think of your own work, your own family, your own friendships. With those with whom you enjoy a good relationship, I would bet that you also are curious about who they are as people. On the other hand, if there are people from whom you feel more distant or critical, you might find that bringing more curiosity about their internal worlds can bring fresh energy and interest – and perhaps greater compassion as well.

In our work, our success and prospects grow with curiosity. The antithesis of curiosity is a sense of or desire for certainty.

Curiosity is a quality that allows us to deliberately expand our awareness, to explore and search for possibilities.

In contrast, when we look for certainty, we’re looking to end the search, and bring the exploration to a close.

The need for certainty can reinforce the need for more certainty, as we narrow our possibilities. We become more defensive in the pursuit of being right; we’ll tend to replay events as we interpreted them, rather than wondering what we may have missed. We’ll tend to look for and hold on to stereotypes, avoiding too much empathy or self-reflection in favor of what we think we know.

Needing certainty locks us down into familiar dogma. It makes us rigid, saps our energy, and leads ultimately to bad decision making – since we will have closed off a whole world of information that doesn’t already fit our model of the world.

This is why in my profession – and in many other professions as well – spending more time practicing does not often lead to greater skill. Unless we continue to explore and learn and practice new skills deliberately. That all requires curiosity.

As Harry Truman said, “An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting certainty. There are times when curiosity is not called for. Pure, well-practiced, rote competence and focus can make the difference between life and death when we’re driving in a dangerous situation; it can make the difference between success or failure on an objective test, or putting together a precise piece of machinery.

So there are times where exploration and curiosity are not what we need. But when we’re habitually looking for certainty, eager to end the search, we’re severely limiting the possibilities for living a rich and fulfilling life.

We may also be limiting our health, including how long we live. When curiosity and mortality were studied over five years, in 2,000 older adults between the ages of 60 and 86, the single most important quality that determined whether any of them were still living at the end of the 5-year study was – you guessed it – curiosity. Their age, whether they smoked, or any other medical conditions such as cancer or cardiovascular disease… none of this affected their mortality as much as curiosity.

Growing our sense of curiosity is also something that we can do fairly easily – and it can be a lot of fun, once we get the hang of it. Of all the major personality traits, curiosity and openness are the most malleable; curiosity is something we can grow on purpose, and we can do this at any time of life.

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When we see someone who truly excels at what they do, one quality often jumps out: they make it look easy.

But what is it that gives us the impression of ease?

They seem to take their time. Even when you’re seeing an elite athlete making lightning quick moves, it seems to be moving more slowly than the actual elapsed time. They’re not panicked, they’re not forcing things; the moves look fluid.

When someone has reached a state of mastery, with all the deliberate practice that requires, they’ve accumulated a vast store of knowledge and experience in their working memory. So when they get to work, they don’t need to take time to look things up; or when it’s a physical skill like athletics or music, they don’t have to think about the movements themselves.

Because of this, they also don’t feel rushed to act. They have time to orient to the problem or the task, and before they take action, they will have scanned their working memory for the information they need – the facts, the experience, the causes and effects they know – and then when they do act, they do so magnificently.

In my college astronomy course, our professor brought in a guest speaker one day who had once shared an office with Albert Einstein. He told us how Einstein had been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and during this time this (then very young) professor was working on a complex formula on the board in their office. He was stumped by one section of the formula, and had not made any headway on it for most of those two weeks.

When Einstein returned, he was curious about the formula, and he began asking what seemed, to this professor, to be some very simple – and kind of dumb – questions. This went on for about twenty minutes, during which time this professor was beginning to seriously question the great genius of Albert Einstein.

But then, all of a sudden, Einstein said, “Oh, well then…” and he promptly completed the formula, easily solving the problem that had flummoxed the professor for two weeks.

When approaching a problem, a true expert will approach it with curiosity, take their time, orient to the situation, and get to know the problem first, before they act.

Novices, on the other hand, will tend to jump in quickly, getting to work on the problem before they really understand what they’re dealing with.

Those who have spent a lot of time at their craft, but without the kind of deliberate practice we talked about in the last column, will also tend to move too quickly to action – because they assume they know it all already, and so they have suspended their curiosity in favor of their familiar toolkit.

How does this help us if we don’ t actually have expertise yet?

As novices, what we’re missing is the vast store of accumulated knowledge in our working memory. That takes a long time of deliberate practice to achieve. But we can do the next best thing: when faced with a problem, be patient, do some research, ask advice, find the information and the understanding that we need, before we act.

A true expert will quickly sort through their internal working memory before taking action, but they will still take their time with it, orienting completely, and with abundant curiosity to the problem before diving in – just like Albert Einstein did with that “unsolvable” problem.

When we’re not yet an expert, we need to take even more time and learn what we need to know first before acting. This will be slower and less reliable than would be the case for somebody with decades of experience of growth through deliberate practice. To get the best results given that reality, spend some extra time learning and orienting to the problem first.

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We can learn a lot about gaining our own expertise from seeing how the great masters gained theirs.

Back in the 19^th century, Sir Francis Galton in his book “Hereditary Genius,” argued that performance of skills for mature adults improves rapidly at first, but then at some point “Maximal performance becomes a rigidly determinate quantity.” What limits any significant improvement beyond that, in Galton’s view, was whatever nature endowed us with.

Other researchers – as far back as 1899 – added to this that it may take over 10 years to become an expert. The idea that this is a relatively orderly process, moving from novice to intermediate to expert, led to the belief that we can judge expertise through someone’s social reputation, education, accumulated knowledge, and length of experience.

There’s truth to this, of course, but it’s missing something important.

Because it turns out that people’s level of training and experience don’t always predict high performance. From psychologists to software designers, to wine experts, to decision makers and forecasters on investing, research has shown that the amount of time spent in the field is not a reliable measure of performance.

Something else is essential, which K. Anders Erickson and his co-editors map out in their tome, “Expertise and Expert Performance.”

What makes the difference between a Mozart or a Beethoven and somebody who can play quite well? What makes the difference between a Michael Jordan and a good overall basketball player?

There is a role for raw talent, of course. You have to be capable of accomplishing such feats as these incredible masters to begin with. There is a role for genius and natural ability. There is also the role played by parents and mentors from an early age, which is usually significant.

But there are plenty of people with loads of talent and ability who never, ever come near their potential. There are a lot of people with very high IQs who never really challenge their mental capacities.

Everybody knows that we have to practice something to get good at it. But there are plenty of people who spend years and years at their instrument or profession or sport, but who reach a level of basic competence and go no farther. The now famous 10,000-hour rule, or ten years of experience, doesn’t apply when we just go through the motions doing what we already know.

The one element that is most crucial for developing and maintaining an exceptional level of performance is deliberate, conscious, and concentrated practice.

Deliberate practice involves actively, purposely focusing on each precise skill of our endeavor, paying attention to the details, and consciously adjusting and modifying what we do so that we are bringing out the very best outcome that we possibly can.

This is hard work, and it can be emotionally challenging to consistently open ourselves to the kind of feedback and criticism that it sometimes takes to keep our skills growing.

With most everyday skills like typing, driving a car, or learning how to play a game like tennis well enough to have fun with it, there is an initial learning period, which involves intensive focus and attention to detail.

But the goal for most of these skills is not excellence, but the ability to perform them easily and nearly automatically. This usually takes no more than about 50 hours to get to the point where mistakes become rare, and the performance is relatively smooth and competent.

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Where do we find the energy to achieve big, long-term goals?

How can we persevere over time and through adversity to create something that requires a commitment of several years?

Simple. It has to matter to you.

Not just a little bit. It has to matter enough that you’ll see it through.

When someone calls me for coaching, once we’ve established the goals that they want to accomplish, one of the first questions I ask is “Why is it important for you to reach these goals?”

If the reason is something like “My parents want me to…” or “My boss wants me to…” or “I’m supposed to…” I know we have some work to do before we get to the nuts and bolts.

Somebody else wanting us to do something is rarely a strong enough motivation to make changes in our lives.

And reaching big goals usually requires making big changes.

Changing behavior, learning new skills, overcoming personal limitations – all take consciousness, time and willpower.

Habits are powerful forces; we can change them but not lightly.

Frankly, we have to have a darned good reason to change.

And we have to have an even better reason to maintain these new habits through adversity. Read More