A short YouTube talk by Chad Silverstein introducing the "knowing-doing" trap: people (and organizations) often know what to do yet fail to act. The speaker uses obesity and fitness as primary examples, citing average American male height/weight changes (1965 vs. today) to illustrate growing weight despite similar height, and prescribes escaping the trap through baby steps and micro-goals rather than large, sporadic commitments.
Questions this video answers
5'9", 160 lb.
5'10", 195 lb.
Chapters
Modern psychologists, they do, they do a really good job of labeling things that have been truth forever. And they've got one of their labels is what they call the knowing doing trap. And it is when you know something, you may even know that you want it. And yet when we look at what you're doing, you're doing nothing to bring it into life. And it's a trap that we all, humans all fall in different stages. It never goes away. Like probably the most prevalent one in our world, in America's world today is we know that we're getting more obese as a people. We know it. If you just put into your Amazon search fitness books or books on diet, you can't even imagine there's more than any other topic. Sure, we know what we need to do, but we continue to do the opposite. Yeah, we're continuing, you know, in, in my generation, when I was in high school, this 1965 stat. So I wasn't quite in high school yet, but in 65, the average American male was 5, 9 a buck 60. Today we're 5, 10, a buck 95. We've known that we've only added an inch, but we're putting on the pounds. We're not doing what it is we need to do. So we fall into that trap as individuals, as companies, communities, and. There's only one way out of it. And that is to say, I know this and I'm going to baby step into this. We don't take giant leaps and do big things. I have a lot of clients that say, yeah, I'm going to do, I'm going to do a marathon. Like, okay, how many miles you run in a week? Well, I'm not running. Okay, well, okay, that is setting yourself up to stay in the knowing doing because what will happen is you'll go do a big run. Yeah. And then you go, I don't want to do that again. I can totally relate to that. Yeah, no, and then baby Bobby knows I can relate to that. Actually, we all can. Yeah, I mean we all can. So know the way out of that trap is to just baby step micro goals, little things, do a two mile run.
