5 Change Myths That Sabotage Goals
Here are research-based approaches to use instead
Change isn’t easy.
But it isn’t hard either — when you have the right strategies.
Here are 5 myths about change that may be derailing your goals.
By understanding what you can do instead, you can accomplish goals that were previously stalled.
1. More is better
Some superhumans can overhaul their lives with massive changes, but the vast majority of us can’t.
There are two problems with doing massive changes:
- It makes changing very difficult.
- IF you do succeed, sustaining the change will be hard.
Let’s look at New Year’s Resolutions.
The failure rate tends to be a dismal 72%. You may know this from your personal experience.
John Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton, researched 17,000 people’s New Years Resolutions. The main culprit he’s identified in the failure of New Years Resolutions is that individuals try to take on too much change at once.
In his book The Resolution Solution: Creating and Keeping New Year’s Resolutions, he says the number one tip is to “try to change less.”
The better approach is to be changing every week in small ways. Think of changing less like an amusement park roller coaster and more like a department store escalator.
2. You just need to be more motivated
Have you ever wanted to do something and not been able to get yourself to do it?
We all have.
Psychologists call this the “intention-behavior gap.”
A meta-analysis of studies on the intention-behavior gap with exercise, for example, found that intentions did not translate to behavior 46% of the time.
Other studies found similar results, where a large increase in motivation / intention did not lead to an equivalent increase in behavior.
So, despite what some superhuman self-help gurus preach, don’t try to use motivation as your fuel.
Instead, focus on building change through habits.
Another study demonstrates how habits and past behavior predict action much more than motivation.
In it, a team of researchers surveyed 2,389 blood donors about their intentions to donate blood in the next 6 or 12 months.
“At both 6 month and 12 month check-ins, past donation experience was a much stronger predictor of behavior than intention,” the researchers wrote.
So, focus on starting small and building regular momentum with a new behavior.
As you build a track record of past behavior, you will better be able to create future behavior.
3. You just have to change your mindset
Dr. Benjamin Hardy explains in Willpower Doesn’t Work that your environment shapes your behavior.
The reason is that your physical environment is full of habit triggers and your social circle influences you subconsciously.
That is why parents care about who their kids hang out with.
This is why addiction treatments tell addicts they can’t spend time in the same environments they used to.
A simple environmental change is to structure your environment so good choices are easier and bad choices are harder.
Doing this, ateam of researchers increased children’s fruit consumption without trying to persuade them. They simply repositioned the fruit’s location in the cafeteria and added more attractive labels. When they did, fruit consumption went up.
Your environment is a powerful tool for change, both good and bad. Don’t overlook it.
4. Difficulty Is A Bad Sign
Difficulty is an important step in the growth process.
It’s actually built-in.
To illustrate this, let’s look at The Learning Cycle, developed by Noel Burch in the 1970s.
Think of tying your shoes, driving a car, or brushing your teeth.
When you master such skills, you can do them without consciously think ing— you are “Unconsciously Competent.”
However, to get to this desired place, you must go through difficulty in the previous learning phases, which are characterized by:
- High effort
- Slow processing
- Mistakes
In the second stage, Conscious Incompetence, you use conscious effort to do the skill badly— ugh. This is difficult.
In the third stage, Conscious Competence, you can do the skill relatively well, but only with concentrated mental effort, which is difficult.
So, these phases take a long time and a lot of effort to produce mostly average results — no wonder these phases sucks.
But this IS learning.
The only way to get to Unconscious Competence is through this fire.
Slow, effortful, crappy work is a necessary stage on the path to mastery.
Knowing this is powerful.
You won’t think you’re doing something wrong when difficulty sets in. You won’t flee back to your comfort zone.
You’ll learn to embrace the difficult period.
In fact, highly successful learners get excited by it since they know it means they are making progress and that they’ll break through soon.
5. You Should Focus On The Outcome And Benefits
When we change our diet, begin meditating, or try a new workout, do things suddenly get better?
No.
Not only that — they even get worse for a period! (See above about the inevitable, uncomfortable part of the Learning Cycle.)
Since there is a lag period before benefits become real, the trick is to not focus on the benefits and the outcome. Instead of an “outcome” goal, make a repeatable “process” goal.
A process goal is about executing the process that will get you to the outcome.
Since you won’t get the benefits of your new behavior for a while, you can set other rewards as you complete your process goal steps.
Then, when you have some momentum and the outcome is closer, you can switch your focus to an outcome goal.
Studies have found this approach of starting with a process goal (and then shifting to an outcome goal later) works best leads to higher goal attainment.
Conclusion
Change doesn’t have to be hard. Much of success is achieved by structuring your change correctly.
As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War:
“Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.”
Win your battle by structuring your change for success.
Call To Action
If you want to eliminate resistance and put great behaviors on autopilot, I highly recommend doing the short exercises in my free cheat sheet on Atomic Habits, James Clear’s #1 New York Times Bestseller.
