Before I was a personal coach, I coached senior managers in global companies to help them improve customer service, profitability and their staff experience and engagement.
The first hurdle to doing this was to get them to understand that it is possible to improve all three of these things at the same time. The mental model that most managers have is that there is a trade-off between these, for example, you can provide great customer service but that is expensive. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
So you can see that the first barrier to improvement isn’t the staff or the technology, but the mental models held by the senior manager. I would go on to teach them that many of their mental models or beliefs were flawed and that by changing them they could make huge improvements in all three of the aims of the project. Some of my clients saved millions of pounds every year while at the same time delighting customers and having a happy workforce.
There is a theoretical underpinning of the methodology I used which is called the ‘Ladder of Inference’, developed by Chris Argyris[i]. The Ladder describes the process we go through in making a decision, often unconsciously.
This same Ladder of Inference was adapted by Dave Gray in his book ‘Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think’.
So when I read This Naked Mind, by Annie Grace, which referenced Dave Gray’s book, it all made perfect sense to me. If you want to change your behaviour, you need to first change your thinking and Liminal Thinking is the art of creating change by surfacing and changing your unconscious beliefs.
Gray uses the old parable (which dates from around 500 BCE at least) about blind men encountering an elephant to illustrate how we all build our reality differently depending on our experience.
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, "is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.
What seems obvious to us is therefore built on a foundation of:
· Our experience
· What we pay attention to
· Our theories about the world
· Our judgements
· Our beliefs
Much of this is unconscious and it is all necessary to help us navigate the world. If we had to stop and work things out from first principles every time we encountered something requiring a decision, we would be paralysed into inaction.
However, this process creates blind spots for us that can stop us from seeing other possibilities for action or change. These limiting beliefs are often what hold us back from reaching our potential.
Let me give you an example from my life. Because I wasn’t good at drawing as a child, I somehow developed the limiting belief that I was not creative. I generalised this belief to contexts beyond drawing, such as writing and music. So although I had a desire to make the music I love (house music), I was put off for years because I thought I was not a creative person. Once I decided that I would try to do it anyway, I found that this belief was untrue – I can be creative but it takes work and practice to get there (as it does for everyone).
This is why the This Naked Mind approach to changing habits is so radically different.
The most popular organisation to treat people with drinking issues is Alcoholics Anonymous, with more than 2 million members worldwide. Their fundamental belief is that there is a class of people called ‘alcoholics’ who have a condition that makes them, “bodily and mentally different from his fellows”.[ii] They are completely powerless against alcohol, “The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His defense must come from a Higher Power.” [iii]
While many people have been helped by AA, neither the twelve steps nor the meetings address the core problem, which is that people with drinking problems still desire alcohol. Without changing the fundamental beliefs and emotions about alcohol (the things Dave Gray identified as lying under the surface of our actions), then the AA participant often still feels deprived and may well still crave a drink until the day they die.
Modern medical thinking is that there is no binary distinction between alcoholics and non-alcoholics. The contemporary term is alcohol use disorder (AUD), which is considered to be a spectrum between mild and severe.
I think this is tremendously empowering, as this gives agency back to people who find themselves somewhere on this spectrum and does not imply that you have to wait for some mythical ‘rock bottom’ to admit that you are an ‘alcoholic’ and need to change.
The simple truth is that alcohol is an addictive substance that triggers the reward pathways of our brains—everybody’s brains—which has the potential to cause AUD. Think of it as a bell curve. At the extreme left you have non-drinkers, perhaps for religious reasons, they don’t like the effects of drinking or just don’t like the taste. Just to the right is your Aunty Maud, who has a small sherry on special occasions, gets tipsy and tells inappropriate jokes. Way over on the right-hand side are the unfortunate people with severe AUD who struggle to function in society. But the vast majority of people sit somewhere in the middle.
These are the people whose problems with alcohol are largely ignored by society but whose struggles are very real indeed. Many of these people spend inordinate amounts of time wondering if they are “alcoholics”; they are at war with themselves with one voice telling them to drink to relieve the stress that they feel when they don’t drink, and the other voice telling them that they need to stop or cut down to protect their health, their relationships and their bank accounts. For more on this see my earlier blog.
Now the reasons why some people develop more of a problem than others are multi-factorial. There’s a genetic component, but there is no single gene for AUD and nobody is born destined to have a problem. Rather it is the interplay of many factors, including the age of first introduction to alcohol, social factors, personality, life experiences, affluence and so on.
The approach of This Naked Mind is to re-wire your subconscious beliefs about alcohol so that you no longer desire it.
This is not achieved by hypnotism or any tricks, but by following three simple steps:
Knowledge – understanding what alcohol does to your body and its place in society.
Emotion – changing your emotions with respect to alcohol by examining and changing your subconscious beliefs. This is done by reflection and journalling and can be greatly accelerated and embedded by coaching.
Action – putting on your metaphorical white coat and getting really curious about your drinking; finding out what it really does for you and what it is really like to stop for a while. Here too, coaching can help you to reflect and understand your own experiences with drinking, or not drinking.
What is really important is that we help our clients develop positive emotions about moving towards a goal, which is a life free from the worries of drinking and one where they are free to live to their full potential. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love…”
This is so much more powerful than moving away from negative emotions, and there's a body of research to support this. For example, Dr B J Fogg of Stamford University, in his book Tiny Habits, wrote:
"The positive emotion you feel as you do or think about the new behavior is actually what wires it into your brain as a habit. There is a physical restructuring of your brain that happens because of emotions."
So, not only do positive emotions make it easier to change, just thinking about it in a positive light helps to re-wire your brain to pave the way. I am sure this makes sense to you intuitively. If you think about any project you were involved in that was successful, perhaps a home improvement project or something at work, I bet you had positive emotions about the results and even the process rather than negative emotions because it was something you had to do.
As coaches we have seen this work in ourselves—we have all had struggles with alcohol in our past—and we see it every day with our clients. It is a beautiful thing to behold.
Paul
[i] Argyris, C., 'Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning,' 1st Edition 1990
[ii] ‘The Big Book’ Alcoholics Anonymous. Chapter 3.
[iii] Ibid.
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