Changing By Yourself Doesn’t Work: Here is Why
If you are failing at making changes, it is because you’re going at it alone.
If you’re trying to make change by yourself, you are probably failing.
The reason for the failure isn’t that you’re broken.
The reason is that you are using the wrong strategy.
Here are the 5 reasons why changing alone doesn’t work:
- The process of change has too many pieces for one person to manage
- Not enough distance for problem-solving
- Too easy to self-deceive
- The people around you predict your success
- Investing in support increases commitment
When you drop the solo approach to change, your results will improve almost overnight.
Changes you have struggled with for years will suddenly start to happen.
You will feel a surge of confidence and belief in your future.
And you don’t have to pay money to do it. You can get a friend or two to serve as an accountability buddy, for instance.
Once you make change a team sport, the possibilities for growth are endless.
1. The process of change has too many pieces for one person to manage
Here is a summary of the steps involved in a change.
As you can see, each takes a fair amount of expertise, perspective, and effort.
- You need subject-matter knowledge, so you read a bunch of books or articles or take a training course.
- You need a strategy to apply that generic knowledge to your unique situation.
- You need to create a plan to implement that strategy in your life.
- You need to keep track of your progress.
- You need to review your progress, see where you need to improve, and then start back at step 1 or 2 to apply that to your life.
- When your plan runs into obstacles, you need subject-matter knowledge to figure out how to overcome them.
You also need enough distance from the problem (forest vs the trees) to see a solution.
While you might get started well, it’s too easy to hit a roadblock if you’re on your own.
One day you won’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth needed. Maybe you need to do an hour or two of research, plus another half-hour of planning.
Say you hit this obstacle on a Tuesday, you might put your plan on hold until the weekend when you have time to do the extra work. By the time the weekend arrives, your momentum is lost and the change seems too hard anyway.
In short, change requires too many parts and too much task-switching to be effective as one person.
2. Not enough distance for problem-solving
Having someone else on your “change team” also provides distance for problem-solving.
Why do you need this?
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to solve other people’s problems?
Yet — when it comes to your problems, they feel intractable.
This is because you are too close to the problem and too emotionally invested in it.
You can’t metaphorically see the forest through the trees.
When you add another human (or several) to your change goal, all of that transforms.
1 brain + 1 brain > 2+ brains.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
3. Too easy to self-deceive
Another issue with changing alone is that we are MASTERS at self-deception.
If we could sell tickets to the magic show that we play on ourselves, we would be rich (except that everyone else has the same magic show in their heads).
Studies have shown that when people log anything — their eating, drinking, time, money spent, TV watching — the reality and their perceptions are WAY OFF.
Numerous cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, have been discovered in our arsenal of self-deception.
It’s not a problem, however.
Once you accept that all humans do this — that our internal mirror is metaphorically broken — you can simply correct for it.
The best way to correct for our inevitable self-deception is to create transparency.
Doing some form of logging or tracking is often a great place to start. However, it’s hard to stay honest with the logging— and to derive the best conclusions from the data — on our own.
It’s too tempting to disregard inconvenient data and too hard to see potential solutions from our emotionally-invested, in-the-trees position.
4. The people around you predict your success
Who you spend time around is who you become.
In a landmark study of three decades of health data, researchers Christakis and Fowler found that your chances of gaining unhealthy weight are statistically higher if a friend of yours gains weight.
They also found that your chances of gaining unhealthy weight are statistically higher if a friend of your friend gains weight — even if you don’t know that other friend!
If science isn’t your thing, nearly every personal development guru cites your social environment as the #1 predictor of the results you’ll produce.
Hang out with people playing video games all day, and your video game playing will go up.
Hang out with multimillionaire entrepreneurs, and pretty soon your entrepreneurial prowess will develop.
That’s why you want people on your “change team.”
By getting an accountability buddy, coach, or mentor, you are automatically upgrading your social environment.
You are spending time around others with a skill you want to develop. They not only help you develop that skill, but their other mindsets and goals rub off on you too. This is one of the most important reasons I never change alone.
5. Investing in support increases commitment
When you invest money through hiring a mentor or coach, you also benefit from higher psychological commitment.
When we pay money for something, we value it more. We want to make good on our investment.
Usually, this desire to make good on our investment works against us. We keep buying a failing stock. We sit through another 90 minutes of a movie we don’t like because we paid for it. Psychologists and economists call this the sunk cost bias.
However, you can use the sunk cost bias for good by investing in your change goals.
Want to get in shape? Pay a personal trainer for 20 sessions upfront. I guarantee you won’t miss a session.
As I mentioned in this article, the best investments in yourself are in skills that broadly impact your work effectiveness and/or life satisfaction.
Conclusion
Change creates growth.
And growth is the building block of a happy satisfied life.
As coach Lou Holtz says:
“In this world you’re either growing or you’re dying, so get in motion and grow.”
Change is hard to do alone.
But when you make change a team sport, you will achieve great things.
Changes you have struggled with for years will suddenly start to happen.
You will feel a surge of confidence and belief in your future.
Once you make change a team sport, the possibilities for growth are endless.
Ready to Level Up?
If you want to make willpower-free changes and eliminate procrastination, I’d recommend downloading my free guide to Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s bestselling book, Willpower Doesn’t Work.
