Why Change Is So Hard Part 2

March 16, 2010

Interview with Dan Health, co-author of the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

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Mike Carruthers:
If you want to go on a diet or quit smoking or make some other big change in your life…

Dan Heath:
It’s often easier to eliminate temptation, for instance, than to fight it.
 

Dan Heath, co-author of the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Every dieter knows that the first thing you’ve got to do is get the junk food out of the house. And why is that? Well it’s because you know if you get yourself in the moment of weighing whether to eat those Cheetos or not chances are you’re probably going to eat them.

So it’s better to eliminate the temptation in the first place. And Dan says another good strategy in making a major change is to shrink the change down.

And I’ll give you an example of what I mean: there’s an online organizational guru named the FlyLady that has this great tactic for house cleaning. She says take a kitchen timer and wind it up to 5 minutes and then as it ticks down you should rush into the dirtiest room in your house, and do your best. And when the timer dings you can quit with a clear conscience. The trick there, of course, is nobody’s going to quit. But the genius with starting with 5 minutes is it’s so small that it doesn’t engage that fear reaction.

And interesting finding in Dan’s research on change was…

Rarely did solutions come in the same scale as the problem. Rather big problems were often solved by a small solution that snowballed. And so I don’t think anybody should feel like it’s inadequate to start a change by doing something that feels almost trivial.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here