031 Sometimes Actions Think Louder Than Thoughts

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This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good.

I want to take a moment to explore a concept that's often overlooked when it comes to discussions of personal development and self help and high performance. That if you want to improve your actions, your behavior, your skills, that you start at your thoughts. If you're scrolling through Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook and you see these memes and these quotes, they're often talking about how your thoughts shape your actions. And in fact, many of the books out there As a Man thinketh, Think and Grow rich, right? These things are all about thinking and then that translating into the behavior that you desire or the behavior that you want to exhibit. The same holds true for many of the quotes from famous people that we've heard of. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, you become what you think about. James Allen, who wrote as a man thinketh, said a man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts. Mahatma Gandhi said, a man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes. So the conventional wisdom out there is often limited to change your thoughts and your behaviors will follow. But that is limited because it's not always true. You can actually flip that on on its head. Your behavior can actually dramatically affect your thoughts. It can dramatically affect your beliefs.

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So, while a lot of advice centers around changing thoughts when you want a change, sometimes you change behavior when you want a change, and then the minds will follow. Now let's get back to this cause and effect thing. This is the case in most things, in influence and especially in the domain of body language. In the world of body language, what we express outwardly is often a reflection of what's inward. But also, if we were to take on the behavior, it will affect how we feel inside. So take, for example, Amy Cuddy's research on power poses. This is something that's often quoted. Little shorts and videos and all these things are circulating and they continue to circulate. Strike a power pose, put a power pose on. If you're nervous about public speaking, put a power pose on. Where did the power pose come from? The power pose came from when people were confident already. This is what they exhibited. This was the behavior they exhibited, what they felt and experienced and thought they expressed in this form of a power pose. That was their behavior. The power pose was their behavior, and vice versa, which is what Amy Cuddy's research is. If you strike the power pose, it can help you induce a feeling of confidence, meaning the behavior shapes the inside emotion and thought and feeling. The same thing goes with all the research on smiling and feeling happy or joy in the moment. When we are happy, we smile, but also if we induce a smile, we will tend to feel happier. And they did that with just simply holding a pen in the teeth, like across the way in the teeth, so that you use the muscles of a smile can actually make you feel happier. Might also be that it's a little weird to be holding a pen in your teeth, but nonetheless, it the. When you feel happy, you smile. When you smile, you feel happy. The same thing goes for other physiologic responses. If you're anxious, your heart rate goes up. So when your heart rate goes up, sometimes you feel anxious, sometimes your heart rate goes up and you feel excitement, Right? And other times when you feel excitement, your heart rate goes up. So our behavior affects our emotions and our thoughts, and vice versa. And the reason I'm bringing this up is only to say, don't limit yourself to changing your thoughts, to change your actions and your habits and all these things, because just like Ralph Waldo Emerson said, you become what you think about. There's actually something that sounds like it's opposite from Aristotle, who said, we are what we repeatedly do. We are what we repeatedly do. So you become what you think about. But we are what we repeatedly do. Which one's correct? The answer is yes, and they both are. By the way, the rest of his quote was, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. Now, there are other quotes to think about, and I think this one's worth reflecting on. William James, who was a psychologist and a philosopher, he said, action seems to follow feeling. But really, action and feeling go together. And by regulating the action which is under our direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling which is not. Now, let me break that down. With your will, you can affect your action, and your action affects your feeling. He said, action seems to follow feeling. It seems to follow feeling. But really, action and feeling go together. And by regulating the action, which you can control with your own will, you can regulate your emotional response or your feeling or your thoughts. And if you think about the work of Leon Festinger, who coined the cognitive dissonance theory, where he said that we become more committed to a belief or action once we've already taken steps in that direction, even if those steps were inconsistent with our prior beliefs. In other words, if you take an action towards something that is inconsistent with your beliefs, those steps can actually affect your beliefs and your feeling and your emotions. And there's analogous theories and principles. And from other social psychologists. Dr. Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence the Psychology of Persuasion, talks about commitment and consistency. If you've already taken steps down a path, you're more likely to remain consistent with it. Not only are you more likely to remain consistent with it in your behavior, but your beliefs and your thoughts and your feelings around it will self organize to be consistent with it. If you think about it, we can't talk politics or religion and work because all of our lives we've committed to one of those. Let's say you committed to one party or another or always committed to a third party, like whatever the thing is. But your family voted that way. They talked about it. They went to the polls and talked about it. Maybe they even volunteered at the polls. They maybe even donated to campaigns. If all your life you were consistent in supporting a certain political view, then when the time comes and someone challenges that, it can be a moment of confrontation because it's so solidified. This is where commitment and consistency, like you dig your heels in. And it's because of the behavior, not because of your thoughts. The behavior shaped your thoughts around it, the behavior shaped your commitment around it, the behavior made you committed to it that you're willing to argue over it or even fracture some relationships. So these ideas about behaviors affecting thoughts exist in lots of different people's works, right? Read the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Look at Amy Cuddy's work, look at Leon Festinger's work, look at Robert Cialdini's work. All of them are talking about the behavior affecting the feeling and the thought. The reason I'm bringing this up is that sometimes when you want to change, you should focus on the thoughts. You should focus. In fact, if you looked at framing and reframing and deframing, one of the most powerful skills that you will ever encounter if you're a coach or a hypnotherapist or a therapist, like, reframing is ultra powerful because with a sticky frame, you can change someone's behavior, beliefs, everything from all moving forward, right? But aside from that, actions are often more powerful at inducing change. In fact, when I give talks about influence and persuasion, and I give the seven simple rules of influence, the first rule, the most important one, is to manage your state. Manage your state because your body language is an expression of your inward state, right? And your body language affects how you relate to other people. It affects how they perceive you. It affects how they perceive the conversation, all that stuff. Right? If that's the case, then if we manage our state, then our body language will follow. Our behavior will follow. However, if you were to look at, I have a handout that's called 101 ways to manage your state. 101 ways to manage your state. And if you look at that handout, and by the way, I think you can get it@drtori.com 101 but if you look at that handout, the 101 ways to manage your state, you will find that 97 of them are actions. They're not thoughts, they're actions that change your state. Actions, behaviors that change your state. So don't limit it to say, oh, I have to change my thoughts for my actions to change. You can also change your actions and that will change your thoughts. Keep this in mind. And this is precisely why when I created the Influence Book Club, which you can go to it at influencebookclub.com, which is a shameless plug, but not really shameless. Here's why. Because it's if you want to change how you relate to other people, you have to change your behavior. You have to change your skills. It's not enough to think about it. If you just, just think for one moment about all the books you have, you might have a ton of books that you haven't read yet on your nightstand or on a shelf somewhere or on your desk, or you might have them in your Kindle or on your, in your Audible account. A ton of books that you haven't gotten through. Even if you did get through them, did they change your behavior? It might feel great. It might feel good to read it. It might feel good to learn the thing. But did it change your behavior? Probably not. The flip side of this is, okay, I don't have time to read all these books, but there are these apps with these little summaries and bullet points and all these things and I subscribe to a few of them and I look through them and there's bullet points and there's quotes and important takeaways and take home notes and things like that. Do those change your behavior? Do those change your relationships? No. And here's the problem. Those books are full of gold. If you read the books by Chip Heath, Dan Heath. If you read the books by Charles Duhigg and the books by Jonah Berger and Robert Cialdini, if you read their books, you'll see inside there, there is gold. If you're actually able to implement it, the challenge here is is that we don't implement it because it's living in the domain of thoughts. It's not actually living in the domain of behavior. And this is exactly why I created the Influence Book Club 1, so that I can help other people develop the skills, but also selfishly so that I can implement the skills. It's not enough to read them. You have to actually deliberately practice them, deliberately put them into action. And when you put them into action, it will change your thoughts. It will change what you've committed to, what you're consistent with. So stop trying to change your mindset first. A lot of people do a lot of work on mindset and think, I'll change my mindset and then the rest will follow. Sometimes you take the action and then the mindset comes along. So stop trying to change your mindset first. Start taking action, no matter how small, and let your thoughts catch up. If you want to skill up and influence and conversation, leadership, relationships, then when you join the Influence Book Club, you'll learn how to translate what we've learned into action, into behaviors. And so that's what it's all about. Sometimes action thinks louder than thoughts. I'll see you in the next episode. And also, if you're up for it, I'll see you in the Influence Book club@influence bookclub.com.

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