Making Changes In Your Life

April 12, 2011

Interview with Kerry Patterson, author of the book Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success

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Mike Carruthers:
Change is hard. But some people do it, how? Well it turns out it’s not just about willpower.

Kerry Patterson:
People believe that if they just have enough willpower they can overcome their eating habits. And they can start exercising and whatever it might be – and they’re mostly wrong, willpower is never enough.
 

Kerry Patterson, author of the book Change Anything, studied 5,000 people who made a big change in their life like losing weight or quitting smoking and he discovered…

You have to employ at least 6 different sources of change if you expect to change. One of them was they’d have to either transform accomplices - you have 2 kinds of people around you: accomplices (people who are helping support you in your bad habit) and friends (people who are not ). And they talked to someone who was an accomplice and say, “I need you to not smoke with me or drink with me or gamble or spend or whatever”. Or other times they would distance themselves, other times they would make new friends.

Another technique is called visiting your default future.

We had a friend, for example, who was diabetic, a young woman who was having to prick her fingers like 18 times a day and hated it and wouldn’t do it. And her father said, “Well, let’s see what happens if you don’t take care of this diabetes”. Took her down to a place where diabetics went for dialysis, talked to them, saw them without limbs, and she saw her future – didn’t like it and changed.

Changing friends, visiting your default future, these are just 2 examples of the kinds of tools you need to incorporate if you’re going to change. And 6 is the magic number.

We found that if you bring 6 or more tools to your change project you’re 10 times more likely to change.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here