|
|
|
|
An Interview about Habit Formation - Part Two
by Rick Hoogendoorn
In part one of our interview with Jim, he stated that changing any habit starts with your basic desire for change. But if we have that, can we change any habit? Rick: “Is there a place you can get to where you can see that any and all habits that you happen to have are, and maybe this is ‘in theory’, actually changeable. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t then have habits. It’s just that I would have more habits that were designed than foisted upon me by past history.” Dr. Jim: “Well, what comes to mind for me is the life of the monk. Whether it’s a Buddhist monk or a Catholic monk. What they do is they give up all of the attachment, the emotional attachment that they’ve ever had to anything, and replace it with a whole new attachment to a higher power and a higher order of values. And that means that they may have to keep, in the case of Buddhist monks, something like 250 precepts every day, that they’ve got to be mindful of, and they’ve got to observe. And these represent dramatic changes in the habits of thinking and the habits of action from their life before they came into the monastery. They would say that this is the ultimate kind of choice. That you choose to do these kinds of uncomfortable and different things. After a while they settle into them and they do get comfortable with them. But they are a great example of a radical departure from the habit patterns of life into a wholly different kind, and that’s driven by a selection of commitments that have to do with their own need for personal realization, with their belief in a higher power in some cases, with what they think God is urging them to do. That kind of thing is what drives them to get in there. Now after that there’s a whole list of other things I think have to kick in for them to be successful in it. But what gets them in the door, and gets them hanging in for the required period of time, maybe a year and a half, two years, three years, until the point where they’re now ordained, is a complex process of a huge desire plus a lot of learning of new behaviors and ways of thinking.” Rick: “So here are the options. You either have the desire to change or you don’t. If you don’t have the desire to change, whatever.” Dr. Jim: “Fogetabaddit’ Rick: Fogetabaddit. If you have the desire to change, you are either taking action on that desire or not. And if not, maybe it’s about the skills, and if it’s not about the skills it will be about something else...at which point it would be worthwhile finding out what that is. Given you want to change and you’re having difficulty doing so. What are the skills required to change a habit?” Rick: “I think that there is a beginning skill that has to do with discerning what is the nature of your own desire. Let’s say you’ve reached a threshold in your life where you feel like you want to reinvent your life. There’s a great book about this which I’ve just been reading which is a collection of stories of people and one of the things they come up against is, they may say ‘well, I’ve left this job or this profession I’ve been in for a number of years. All I know is I want to get out of that. I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know what I want.’ So they have to go into a process of what I call ‘discernment’. Which is, what are the things where passion exists in your life? What is it that you care about? What desires do you have? You have to ask those kinds of questions. And that isn’t as easy for some people as it sounds. If people are clinically depressed they may be so flat emotionally they can’t locate anything, but most people who are reasonably healthy are going to be able to find something that they care about and then start to explore that and see where that takes them. So that may be a process where they need some skilled help. Some skilled facilitation. The second thing is, once they’ve done that, out of that comes the creation of some kind of vision. Some kind of picture of what it is you’re working towards. So in the area of money, you might say ‘well, I’ve never been in love of keeping track of money. I’ve never been interested in the stock market. When my accountant talks to me my eyes glaze over. Clearly this is just not an area that interests me. However, what really does interest me is this project that I’m concerned about where I need to build up a large amount of cash to make it go forward. It might be building a new house. It might be putting my kids through university, or whatever. Now you’ve got my attention. How can I do this?” Rick: “Context.” Dr. Jim: “So the context changes. And that context, around setting up those new habits, is fueled by the creation of a very powerful vision. Then I think the next thing that happens is that you have to set in motion a series of new actions. These are things that you haven’t done before. They may be things like reading financial magazines. Going to talk to a financial analyst. Paying attention to the stock market. Paying attention to your own money. Watching it grow. Making a game out of building revenue in your mutual fund. That sort of thing. All of that involves something that is really pretty simple to understand in everyday language, and that’s persistence. Like you just have to do that all the time. But that’s a skill. Persistence is not something that some people have in their repertoire of behavior. They don’t do anything consistently unless it’s really comfortable, habitual stuff. They don’t persist on things that make them uncomfortable.” Rick: “And in order to change a habit you actually have to persist for some consecutive period of time before the brain actually changes and takes over the automatic nature.” Dr. Jim: “That’s right. It’s no fun when you start out to learn, in the case of my fiddle experience, it’s no fun at first to learn a fiddle tune. It’s just not fun. It sounds like crap. You hear it played by somebody who’s really, really good. You think it sounds wonderful. You think ‘oh, that really sounds wonderful. I’d really like to learn that’. You try it and it sounds horrible. But you find gradually, after you practice, if you stick with it, that it starts to fall into shape. It starts to sound closer to the way you hear it in your mind. But it’s uncomfortable and you have to put up with that discomfort. So persistence, really, is a kind of training in what’s being called ’emotional intelligence’. That is, you’re not slaved into the way your emotions typically drive you — back into feeling comfortable, as opposed to feeling nervous, frightened, like you’re going to fail. You don’t want to fail. You don’t want to let yourself down. You don’t want to feel stupid. All those things that we’ve had conditioned into us out of the past.” Rick: “So, I picture two islands. Both are comfort zones. And in between the islands you have a body of water that is utterly uncomfortable, cold and so on. In order to get from one to the other you have to go through the discomfort. You must. There’s no way around it. And, at the other end, though, is a new comfort zone. Like you’ll actually be comfortable playing the fiddle tune well at the end of the day. If you persist. It’s not that you will be forever uncomfortable.”
Dr. Jim: “That’s right. I think that’s a really good analogy, and in some places and in some contexts people are actually trained how to do that sort of thing so that they’re not slaved into their emotions. A good example is, I was reading in the National Geographic about the Tibetan monastery where the nuns would sit a good part of the day scooping up seeds and letting them fall slowly over a plate, back into the bag. And they would do this repetitive behavior over and over again. Now you might think that would make you really crazy after awhile because it’s going to engage all kinds of reactions. Like you’re going to say ’why am I doing this crap?’ ’Why am I putting up with this stupid assignment I’m supposed to do here?’ Or your mind will wander off and play and you’ll be off playing with other things so you don’t have to think about how you’re feeling about this. Like you might feel angry, or frightened, or nervous, or you may say you’re bored but bored really means you’re anxious. So it brings up a lot of emotional stuff. All of those things get in the way of us doing what we need to do in life. So that kind of practice training is a way of overcoming that. I had an experience a few summers ago where a friend of mine and I were out on a boat and I’m not very mechanical, and I’m generally very wary of trying to fix anything on a boat. But we had a problem that we had to overcome. We were hooped if we didn’t. Or we would have had no stove on our boat. We wouldn’t have been able to cook food or make tea or do anything, and this was the first day of the trip. So we had to fix this thing. One of the things that I notice about myself is that if I can’t fix it within the first five minutes I’m ready to phone the mechanic. But we didn’t do that. We went over it and over it and over it and over it and over it and over it. And finally we said ‘wait a minute! What’s this wire for?’ You know, that wire was invisible to me for probably half an hour, but noticing there’s a wire here. It goes somewhere. Where does it go? It goes to this switch. Oh, you turn on the gas with a switch! They showed us that. I forgot it. Ya, we forgot.’ So afterwards, my partner and I, we’re feeling really proud of ourselves. We solved this problem. Now this is not a big deal exactly but it’s a big deal in the sense that having not been persistent we wouldn’t have seen it.” Rick: “And it was a learning for you in that your habitual pattern, which was to quit, was actually shown in new light. You actually got perspective on this pattern. Whereas before you would be in it. And then react.” Dr. Jim: “So if you don’t see that you’ve got the pattern you can’t do anything about it. It’s a great teaching example because it later on, last summer when I was on another boat I had lots of problems, and in one case I did have to call a guy in to fix it because I just had no idea. I had no idea where the problem was at. But there were some other problems that I did work on persistently and I did eventually solve, and I think it was very reinforcing to me, and I think I won’t forget that when I hit this place, I need to keep at it. Now sometimes I don’t have the knowledge that’s required. But I think that eventually what you come around to is ’ya, well I need more knowledge. Hey, read the manual. Oh my God! Read the manual.’ And that generates patience. And this whole thing about persistence, the underlying emotional state is one of patience. That you’re willing to keep at this and find out. It’s when persistence shifts into patience that it stops being a problem to persist.” Rick: “That’s good. I find that what paralyzes people from taking action is that they’re looking at the barrier. They’re looking at the water instead of the other island. They takes their eyes off the prize, as it were, and they get totally focused on how they’re going to get where they want to go, or how difficult it’s going to be or how uncomfortable it’s going to be and then they don’t take the first step and continue. Like my pattern is always to wait for a shortcut. I’ll stand on the island and wait for a shortcut to get to the other one but it never comes. Duh.” Dr. Jim: “One of the things that I’ve learned in doing pretty consistent meditation practice the last couple of years is that the more you are attached to some kind of outcome the harder it gets to sit there. If you’re nervous about not having achieved the third Johnny of consciousness, or achieved enlightenment after six months, then you’re going to have a big problem getting your butt onto the cushion every day. And in fact, in meditation teaching, some meditation teaches would tell you that if you came in with a big story about your flamingly wonderful experience where lights flashed and God’s face was revealed to you and all this kind of stuff I know one meditation teacher who would nod his head and say ‘ooh, ya, passing scenery. Very nice. Keep sitting.’ In other words, the more you get caught up in trying to freeze everything around that experience the harder it is to keep on going. What we do usually around avoidance is we’ve frozen our fear. Or we’ve frozen our resistance or our reluctance to look stupid or whatever thing it is. So when you talk about looking to the other island and saying ‘oh it’s too far away’, well what you’ve got to do is create a series of steps. So if you were working to get to that island and you weren’t a very good swimmer what you would do is every day you’d swim another 5 feet until you could finally swim across. Then you discover that you’re there. And I think that learning patience or probably when we think about how our society is organized, and I hate to get into this type of discussion too much because it tends to get off the ground pretty fast, but if you think a lot about what we are all conditioned to do. We want what we want when we want it. So marketing and sales and everything is organized around pretty quick turn around and pretty quick gratification. Now in traditional environments, and I think this is a thing that people who live in those traditional environments, say 75 to 100 years ago, are sad to see gone is there was a time when having pie didn’t mean going down to the supermarket and buying a frozen pie and putting it in the microwave and heating it up. It meant going through a process so that at the conclusion of it there was a total experience of gathering the apples, cutting them, making the pie, baking it, smelly it bake, presenting it and eating it. And there was a total experience there. And people had appreciation for the pie at a different level than for something that was just handed to them out of a microwave. All of that sort of thing tends to teach you to have an appreciation for process. Rather than just be focused on gratification.” Rick: “So, in other words, enjoy the actual process of changing your habits. I mean that would be revelatory for somebody to actually enjoy the discomfort. Or enjoy the fact that it’s actually becoming easier.” Dr. Jim: “Well, I think that one of the ways we do that, let’s say in financial management is if you can turn it into a game. Like it’s a game every month and you get to see how much money you’ve acquired or grown. Or how much you’ve done in the game of playing with stocks or investing in mutual funds or whatever it is going to be. If you can do it with that kind of enjoyment and detachment then that’s all to the good. But in order to get there you would have to handle your fears and handle your habits.” Rick: “You talk about this whole idea of patience. You talk about the idea of how it used to be with regard to more traditional cultures and so on. It’s about time. If we’re talking about habits, it’s derived from our physical brain which is all about, I would think, impulses. And impulses do not exist over long periods of time. An impulse, by its very nature is ‘right now’. And so all the marketing in society, all these things are feeding into that idea of ‘right now’. If I’m orienting my life based on my impulses, who is going to think about the future? If I’m going to orient my life based on something that has no ability to have a long view, which would be my brain impulses, what’s going to take care of the long term?” Dr. Jim: “Another thing that comes to mind is that if you collapse the time frame by rapid gratification. If you develop a lot of relatively automatic habits around acquiring gratification, then what really suffers there is the ingenuity that is needed to solve problems. That will provide things for you. If you see this incredibly horrifying show with Paris Hilton where she and her girlfriend, these two bimbos, they go to an Arkansas farm and they have never had to think about where milk comes from. ‘Oh, you mean bacon comes from pigs?’ So put Paris Hilton into a situation where she has to survive with a whole new set of rules and you can’t go for instant gratification. You’ve got to bake your own pie. You’ve got to cut your own firewood. You got to do all this kind of stuff. This is the stuff of movies and stories and of course it’s the fish out of water premise. But that’s really uncomfortable for a lot of people. That they would have to solve problems. They would have to use their ingenuity in order to provide for themselves. And I think that instant gratification teaches you basically where to put the money in the slot. It doesn’t really teach you how to create or solve problems in a broader sense. It doesn’t teach you a generalized problem solving ability in the same way it doesn’t teach you a generalized persistence which leads to patience. In that state you can start to solve problems. Rick: “I ran out of cream for my coffee, for example, last night. So where do I go for the cream? The 7/11 which is a block away and I’d have it quicker, or Fairways which is 7 blocks away and is cheaper. The mode I’m in now, I now go to the Fairways because it’s cheaper, and I’m grinding the expenses down etc. But there is such a cost to this convenience. The more convenient it is, the more costly it is. And yet we’re all into fast and quick and then, as a result, we’re on this wicked treadmill that keeps us on the treadmill as we keep going for costly convenience and wonder why we can’t get ahead.” Dr. Jim: “There are a lot of regulators in our environment. If you don’t have a cell phone people look at you like you’re crazy. And if you’re not on email? Forget about it. I mean you’re a dinosaur. So the expectation is for much more rapid response and a lot less reflection. And I think that part of what we’re talking about here, is that habit change really requires some reflection, and some cautious addressing of skill change. And for many people that’s out of the question because they don’t have the time. A friend of mine was telling this story about a cousin of his who was at Princeton on the faculty in Physics when Einstein was there some years ago, and he asked him ‘well, what was Einstein like?’ And he said, ‘well, he was smart, but we were all smart. Everybody there was smart. You couldn’t be on the faculty of theoretical physics unless you were a pretty smart guy. But where I could concentrate on a problem for maybe 5 minutes he could concentrate on it for 20. I think it’s the quality of attention to stay focused.” Rick: “Which would be a habit to foster, or develop, over time. And that would only come with practice. You can’t just decide to be focused.” Dr. Jim: “Well, some of it is temperamental. In the work on Emotional Intelligence they based some of the work on Emotional Intelligence on a study called the marshmallow kids.” Rick: “I remember reading that, ya.” (Mentioned in our very first edition of Rick & Cheri’s Times—January 1996)(reference OLD newsletter!) Dr. Jim: “So the kids who would sit in the room with the marshmallow and inhibit their response to grab it, these 3 and 4 year old kids. These kids had very different lives later on in life than the kids who didn’t. They were much more successful in life. So some of this has got to be temperament, plus conditioning attached to it. You know, there’s a mixture of both.” Rick: “But also their focus was on the end result not the process. They were looking at getting two marshmallows instead of one if they waited. And the other kids were looking at ‘I’m going to get one marshmallow now.’” Dr. Jim: “That’s right. I believe that the kids who inhibited eating the marshmallow had been trained in patience. I think they had been asked to sit and wait and they had been rewarded by some conscientious parent.” Rick: “Learned that they could trust that there was a payoff to waiting. So perhaps the other kids didn’t trust that there was a payoff to waiting. So again, their frame of reference is time. It’s longer. Some people actually don’t think in longer periods of time.” Dr. Jim: “And that has to do with temperament So you’ll see a very young child who’ll be down on the floor colouring or working on a puzzle and they’ll work on it for maybe 25 or 30 minutes. This is a long stretch of time for a little kid. Nobody is maybe paying any attention to them at all. They just naturally do that. So there are some kids that seem to arrive on the scene wired to want to do certain things. Like I know a kid, I was working with a client kid who was hyperactive ADHD. The kid was all over the place in the classroom. Can’t manage a regular class. Has to be in a small, special class. But this kid is a diver. He is a competitive diver and his coach thinks he is Olympic level material. He also is a black belt in karate, and he’s 13. So if it’s of interest to him he’s right on the money. You have to be very, very focused to dive, but you don’t have to do it for a long period of time. So the difference between a normal kid and this kid is the sustaining of the attention over a long period of time.” Rick: “Desire, persistence, attention.” Dr. Jim: “Desire, persistence, attention, and ingenuity. In order to do this, first of all you have to stay in the situation. You can’t leave the field of the problem. So ingenuity rests on persistence and attentiveness.” Rick: “So waiting around until the answer comes instead of reacting to whatever.” Dr. Jim: “Ya. And we can think of all kinds of parallels ranging from Babe Ruth striking out more times than he hit home runs, but hitting a lot of home runs. Guys who have hung in running experiment after experiment after experiment that failed until they finally hit on the solution.” Rick: “Thomas Edison being the prime example, with his invention of the light bulb. He had the great habit of never quitting until he found a solution.” Dr. Jim: “It’s where you wait until the breakthrough comes. My boat thing is a little example of it. I would have not been able to solve the problem had I left the field. But what happens is, if you’re paying attention and you’re persisting, things start to look different. You’ve got to start seeing different takes on the problem.” Rick: “Thanks, Jim!” The purpose of this interview was to explore some of the issues around habit change and, perhaps, get you thinking about some of the habits that you have, financial or otherwise, which aren’t serving you. These might not be common ’bad habits’ like smoking, eating poorly, or other ‘actions’. We also have habits of thinking. We have habits of mood. We have habits of attitude. In order to change a habit, as Dr. Jim says, we first have to have a ‘desire to change’. Then we need to have skills, including the skills of discernment and persistence. We have stick with the new thing until it becomes a habit, and it becomes an ingrained habit when we have done the new action consistently enough over a long enough period of time and in such a way that our neural pathways have actually changed. At this point, it is actually easier for us to follow our new pattern, than to follow our old pattern. We have a new comfort zone. And if we make enough changes like this, we will start to see big changes in the results we are getting in our lives.
A special 'thank you' to Jim for agreeing to do this interview ! You can find out more about Jim and what he has to offer by visiting his website at:
|
|
Counter established Nov.7th,2003 copyright
2004 Cheri Crause & Associates Inc.
|
