I hated change*, so, naturally, I made it the focus of my life.
As a young person, I loved certainty and stasis. My earliest understanding of STEM fields was not the curiosity-driven, hypothesis-testing scientific method, which seeks to advance human knowledge by helping us identify where we’re wrong. Rather, I loved elementary school math class. Every problem had one right answer, and I knew it. I did not like uncertainty. I really did not like change. (I was upset by changes including but not limited to: Jorge Posada replacing Joe Girardi as catcher on the Yankees, my gymnastics center moving across town to a space large enough to contain a full-size floor exercise mat that was separate from the vault runway, and the mere possibility of a beloved outhouse being replaced by a flush toilet.) I saw change as a threat to the world I understood and loved. What I didn’t understand, even as a clever and exceedingly goal-directed child, was that change was the only way to get virtually everything I wanted in life.
This understanding didn’t arrive in a flash of insight.** It accumulated slowly, over years of building expertise, evidence, and experience. Some of my insights were amassed intentionally through years of scientific research. Others came via incidental “deliberate practice”, when a job required the ability to function at elite levels amid ambiguity, embracing constant change in mindset, behavior, location, and priorities.
One day, after typing the words “behavior change” for what felt like a trillionth time in my career, I stepped back and said, “Isn’t that ironic? I, a change-hater, have made change my profession.” My work on change didn’t start out as masochism or trying to understand my enemy in order to defeat it. It happened by accident. I began my work on behavior change because of two things that I loved and cared about: the scientific understanding of human behavior and the desire for more people to spend more years in great health. In pursuit of those passions, I conducted scholarly research (first at Dartmouth, then CDASR, followed by CUCHANGE) about a range of topics associated with the cognitive, affective, neural, and behavioral correlates of health. Engaging in health behaviors is a driver of longevity, quality of life, and reduced risk and severity of noncommunicable disease. For many people, health and thriving require behavior change. In my PhD research, I designed, conducted, and evaluated different interventions to help people change behaviors that often feel challenging: eating enough fruits and vegetables and being adequately physically active.*** Among several findings**** from that body of work was this set of insights:
Even if we know a behavior is in our interest, we might not do it if we think it’s unpleasant or too hard.
If we have an impetus to begin doing it anyway, we start to get better at it, and we start to like it more.
Our increased efficacy and liking can help us maintain the behavior over time.
By doing it more, this behavior that previously seemed too unpleasant or too hard can even become a part of our self-concept.
I realized that was the truth of my own story about change, too:
I didn’t like it.
I thought it was hard.
I did a lot of it anyway.
It got easier because I got better at it by doing it, and I grew to like it more.
Now I identify with it.
Change is now a major, beloved part of my life and career. Much of my work focuses on supporting others through their own changes so that they can attain their goals. I believe that embracing change in our mindsets and behaviors, even (especially!) when it’s challenging and uncomfortable, can help us all craft healthier, more meaningful, more enjoyable lives and careers.
Notes.
* I can make similar statements about: veggies, depression, and stress. However, I’ve always loved delayed gratification & intertemporal choices, goal pursuit, reward, joy, leadership, public speaking, and words. I promise, I have receipts.
** In fact, I believe that most flashes of insight, moments of brilliance, and sparks of creativity arrive this way: after a lot of investment in gathering and integrating insight, enriching the metaphorical soil of our minds. It looks like it springs up all at once, but that suddenly visible sprout is the product of lots of quietly accumulated effort and metabolism.
*** Then and now, my work focuses on what to do, not what to avoid.
**** You can read more about this research in 3 peer reviewed journal articles (here, here, and here) and 2 press releases (here and here). Read more about the Theory of Planned Behavior and Self Determination Theory to learn even more about these topics, including many other scholarly findings about attitudes, self-efficacy / perceived behavioral control, identified regulation, and autonomy in health behaviors.