Beware the 'Valley of Despair'
Today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics: Change. When you think about it, change is just a mind game. In order to fully thrive in work and life, you need to accept two facts:
Change is inevitable: Things around you—at work and at home—are always changing and how you deal with and accept those changes matters a lot.
Progress is optional: How you create change, the kind of change that leads to growth, matters more.
There is a fundamental dynamic at work that impacts both aspects of change. Think of it as a tug-of-war between two parts of your brain: the rational (thinking) side and the emotional (feeling) side. The better you understand how this dynamic works for you, the better at change you will be.
In other words, it’s like riding an elephant.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt first used this metaphor in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Chip and Dan Heath expanded on it in Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard, one of the best books on change you can read. “Change isn’t an event, it’s a process,” the Heath brothers write. “When people try to change things, they’re usually tinkering with behaviors that have become automatic, and changing those behaviors requires careful supervision.”
Luc de Brabendere, author of The Forgotten Half of Change, offers a complementary framework. “If you want to change, you have to change twice,” he says. The first change is simply imagination. You invent the future state in your mind. The second is actually carrying out the change you envisioned.
This technique of changing your perception can work in all facets of life, whether you’re learning a new software program at work, trying to lose weight, or starting a meditation practice. You must see the change before you can be the change. This will help make the concrete steps needed to perform the change feel more attainable, which helps the Rider (the rational side of you) guide the Elephant (the emotional side).
This is especially effective at work where people want to be seen as talented, valuable and, at minimum, competent in their jobs. When you ask them to learn a new skill or software program, they don’t know how at first. This fear of “temporary incompetence” is what leads people to resist change and fall into the Valley of Despair.
Have you ever been in the Valley? I hope so, because it’s where growth happens. But it’s also where people often give up, frustrated with the feeling of incompetence and the feeling that “this will never work” or “I will never learn this.” The key is to make this incompetence temporary; you have to keep pushing through the valley to get to the other side.
The best approach is to make the change as small as possible. The Heath brothers call it “shrinking the change.”
The common thread that runs through it all is that doing something, however small, is the best way to start to change. Then develop a system you can repeat consistently. This is also the foundation for The Butterfly Impact: small, specific changes aimed to create a ripple effect downstream that becomes much more significant.
I finally found my way to fitness more than 20 years ago with a goal of going to the gym once a week. I had previously tried a few New Year’s resolutions and audacious new fitness plans that began with five days a week of working out. All of them failed. Benjamin Hardy knows why.
“Your willpower is gone. It was gone the moment you woke up and got sucked back into your smartphone,” Hardy wrote in Willpower Doesn’t Work. “White-knuckling your way to change doesn’t work. It never did. Instead, you need to create and control your environment.”
Change doesn't have to be scary. Start small. And think "progress not perfection."