Because we are creatures of habit, we develop patterns of behavior over our lives. We go through our lives mostly on autopilot.
Wake up, make coffee, check our phones, read the news, take a shower, and go to work. At work, we have other patterns that take over. After work, we go home and feed the dog, make dinner, and see what’s on Netflix.
Those might not be your patterns. You have your own. It’s worth taking a moment to identify them.
Autopilot is good. If we had to think of everything we need to do consciously, our minds would be overwhelmed. We don’t want to think about the micro-movements we use when driving a car, for example. Our feet and hands work autonomously, so we can devote our cognitive resources to navigating traffic and reaching our destination safely and efficiently.
The problem is that we don’t decide what goes on autopilot. We just let it happen, which is why change becomes hard, or even impossible.
That’s why we struggle to change our diet or our exercise routines. It’s why our companies don’t adapt to new competitors or market conditions. It’s why we fail to achieve the things we deserve.
Your life and your business are systems. They are patterns of behavior interacting in ways you don’t see. The only way to change is for a disruptor to enter the system. Some call this a change agent.
Why do athletes have coaches? Because they need a disruptor to break their patterns. I travel the world with a yoga mat. I call it my accountability coach. It sucks at its job. It sits in the corner of the room, rolled up, mocking me. Sometimes I unroll it and put it on the floor. Only then do I get on the mat and do some yoga.
For about 5 or 10 minutes. That’s about when my mind kicks in, telling me, “That’s probably enough. This is hard. It’s uncomfortable. You have more important things to do. Emails are waiting!”
If I manage to get myself to a yoga class, though, it’s different. An instructor is disrupting my patterns of behavior for an hour. And the difference in results is remarkable.
About a decade ago, I realized that all of my problems were of my own making. Everything starts with the mind. Just categorizing something as a problem is a story that takes place in the mind. So if I wanted to change my life, I needed to change my mind.
James Clear wrote a book called Atomic Habits. He spoke at one of our quarterly Thought Leaders Business School immersions. He talked about linking habits to create change. If you want to create a new habit, link a new behavior to something that’s already habitual.
Coffee. Every morning, without fail, I drink a cup of coffee.
So I developed a new morning pattern. Get up, make coffee, and then sit with my headphones on, listening to someone talk about the nature of the mind. Then I meditate for 30 minutes. That’s been my autopilot for almost 10 years now.
But this week I was listening to a new book, No Self, No Problem, by Anam Thubten, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. In it, he wrote that our minds tend to avoid discomfort, even during meditation. If our meditations only bring us peace and relaxation, we are not growing. We should seek discomfort as a path to positive change. You’ll hear this at the gym too. “Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” is a favorite of fitness coaches.
As I reflect on my last decade, I have experienced a massive change in the way I view my mind, and therefore the world. Everything that brings me suffering or joy is just a manifestation of my mind. I categorize some things as painful and others as joyful. But those are just stories.
It’s taken me ten years of listening and meditating to exact that change. Along the way, I’ve employed disruptors to help me. I had a coach, Karen Love Lee, who, in our two to three-hour sessions, always had me in tears. For a few years, I had sessions with a Jungian therapist every week, often ending the same way. It was hard, painful work that I eventually stopped. In each case, I convinced myself it was too expensive, that I needed time to integrate, or that I was ready for something else. But it was likely my mind pushing back. Our minds don’t like being uncomfortable.
During the last decade, I’ve also been a coach or mentor. And I’ve seen my clients do the same thing. They resist the disruption and return to their prior patterns. Growth is hard, scary, and painful. I’ve always made it easy to end my engagements when either party isn’t receiving value. In hindsight, that doesn’t serve my clients because the change they really want is going to be hard.
As a mentor, my job is to challenge you. There are plenty of people in your world who will tell you what you want to hear. We all need more people telling us what we DON’T want to hear.
And when that happens, if it’s easy to quit, what’s the fucking point? So from today on, my mentoring engagements will require longer commitments. Not because it’s what I want, but because it’s the only way to create lasting change.
What change do you want in your life or business? What disruptive agent can you introduce to break your patterns? And how can you set it up so that when your mind convinces you it’s time to stop, you have to push through to achieve real change?
Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Addair
