Habits of thought and action

Business coaches will often advertise that they help people work less, make more money, make a greater contribution, and have more fun, while falling back in love with their business.  The key to the coaching experience is the ability to form new habits of thought and action.  One approach is the “Not-To-Do” list.  But, while this is a cute idea, there's a good reason not to overly focus on the “not-to-do’s”.  This has to do with how the brain works.

Everyone knows that trying to break a bad habit is devilishly hard.  Of that there is no doubt.  The “Stop smoking” industry, the diet industry, the self-help industry are all built on the fact that it is indeed devilishly hard to break habits that have taken hold in our minds, such that there is a lot of repeat business in those industries.  Because of the recent advances in our understanding of the human brain and how it works, we have a better idea of why this is so hard.

In the 2012 book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg of the New York Times talks about the habit loop, which shows how a reward reinforces habitual behavior, and suggests figuring out ways to achieve the same reward with different behavior.  A lot of this has to do with how the reward is defined.  If the “reward” is itself the enjoyment of a cigarette, then changed behavior to get there will not be much help.  If the reward is an intensive business-oriented visit to Egypt, as with one case study, the behavior required to achieve that higher reward served to overwhelm (if that’s the right word) a number of habits that appear to get in the way of achieving the new (complex) reward.

Another perspective is provided by David Rock’s 2006 book Quiet Leadership.  As Rock points out, reinforcing mechanisms in the brain are what make it so devilishly hard to break a habit.  “The more we focus on a problem we have, the more ingrained we make it”.

Rock suggests that business leaders (acting as coaches) can benefit by helping people focus on thinking itself.   Get employees (or clients) to think about their own processes of thought, and then help lead them into the creation of new habits of thought, and action.  His specific advice on how to help a client or employee form new habits can be summarized by the acronym: CREATE – understand their Current Reality, Explore Alternatives, and Tap into their own Energy for positive change.

We are still in early days of fully understanding the workings of the human mind.  Recent advances in the science of the brain are starting to give us new knowledge of how habits are created, and how they can replace destructive behaviors.  This is giving us, as coaches and managers, powerful new tools to help our clients and employees improve their lives.

One key area to focus on is the habit of happiness.  This is worth some special attention.
 
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