If You Want to Change Your Life, Understand This First: The Cognitive Commitment Principle

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the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast and you want to receive inspirational texts from me directly to your cell phone, text me right now. 1-512-580-9305 once again, 1-512-580-9 305 that is for U.S. and Canada customers only. Sorry, they don't let us text outside of the United States of Canada. Today we're going to be talking about why change is so hard in the human brain. Like, why change neurologically and psychologically is so hard for us to do. For me, human psychology is the most interesting in the world to me. Like, why are we the way that we are? Why do we think the way that we think? Why do we act the way that we act? Why is it so hard for us to just do something that we know we should be doing or want to be doing to better our lives? And one of the most interesting things that kind of shape our actions is this principle that's known as the commitment and consistency principle. And basically what this means is that once we commit to something, whether that is a belief, whether that's behavior, whether that is a decision, we have a strong psychological urge to remain consistent with that commitment. And this consistency isn't just like an external habit. It's also more than anything else, it's mostly internal. It's an internal feeling that we have inside of us as well. People will always try to align their behaviors with. With their values and their beliefs and what they think things should be or will be. And any deviation from that means that we're not in alignment with what I think of myself. And it causes this thing, this mental. This mental discomfort. And that mental discomfort is something that in psychology knows cognitive dissonance. And so it's not usually consciously that we do this. Like you can. It's usually unconsciously. So you can say, I want to wake up in the morning and I want to be better, but you don't do it, or you do it for a couple weeks and you fall off. And the reason why is because it feels so out of line with who you think you are or who you have been your entire life that it's just easier to click back into place. And this cognitive dissonance pushes us to adjust our actions and to really fit in line with our beliefs and in turn, restore the feeling of harmony inside of us. And so it's super interesting if you can understand this. Number one, it's going to make you understand why change is so hard for you. But number two, it's going to make a lot easier for you to change, because you could come up against this resistance and go, oh, I know what this is now. So now I can push through this versus, you know, just leaning back anytime I feel this feeling. And so when you look at it, at its core, the commitment and consistency principle operates on the assumption that once a person makes a commitment, whether you stand up in public and make a statement or a personal belief or an action, once you commit to something, you are more likely to follow through in a way that reflects that commitment. And this drive for consistency inside of you creates this feeling, comes from this feeling, I guess you could say more so of the need to maintain a stable sense of self. And so, you know, if you think you are a certain way to act out of alignment with, that really feels unstable within yourself. And the reason why is because our sense of self, our personality, our identity, who we think we are is completely made up. It can change at any moment. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, one of my favorite sentences is Alan Watson. He says, you under no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago. And so we have this personality, we have this identity of who we think we are. And all of that is completely made up. It is a character that we continue to keep playing every single moment. And, you know, I write an entire chapter about this in my book Level Up. And it's the identity that we have for ourself we think is set in stone, but it is so frail, and it's like trying to build a house on quicksand. And our identity can change at any moment, but what we try to do is we try to keep our identity stable, like we like to think, in accordance with who we think we are. And so this whole principle was made popular by a psychologist named Robert Cialdini, who has an incredible book, best sales book I've ever read, in my opinion, which is called Influence. And in his research, he showed that once people commit to a small action, they're more likely to engage in a larger, related behavior down the line, even if those actions weren't part of the original plan. This is where it gets really crazy is. And I'll give you a small example of it, if you've ever traveled, there's this. Like, I see this all over Europe, but there's one specific bridge in Rome, walking over the bridge to Trastevere, where, if you've ever traveled, there's always these people that have clipboards, and they say, will you sign a petition against hard drugs? And, you know, people are like, yeah, I guess I could sign a petition against heroin. Like, that's something that I'm in alignment with. And then they sign it. And then as soon as you sign it, they then ask for a donation against hard drugs and rehabilitation for those who are addicted to drugs. And so it seems easy to just sign it. But once you sign it and say, this is who I am. I'm the type of person. And this is all done off of psychology. They know what they're doing. They say, hey, once you sign this petition, you're saying you're the type of person who is against hard drugs and who is for rehabilitation. And then after you sign it, they say, hey, would you like to make a donation after saying that this is the type of person that you are? And then what happens is, if you were just to go and say, hey, do you want to give a donation against hard drugs and for rehabilitating drug users? A lot less people would do it. And there's statistics and studies that show it. It's inside of that book. Influenced by Robert Cialdini to get a small micro commitment to say, this is who you are, makes you more likely to give a donation after. And this coincides directly with a concept that's called cognitive dissonance. And this is a term that was coined by psychologist leon Festinger in 1957. Cognitive dissonance basically means this. It's a mental discomfort that occurs when a person holds two conflicting beliefs or values or attitudes at the exact same time, or when their behavior clashes with their beliefs. And so, for example, imagine somebody who believes really strongly in living a healthy lifestyle and they also regularly smoked. So this conflict between their two beliefs in their health and their unhealthy habit creates this dissonance which feels uncomfortable within their body. And so to reduce this discomfort, they're going to do possibly a couple different things. Individual might try to resolve this inconsistency. They could either quit smoking, thereby aligning their behavior with their values, or they might downplay the risks of smoking, or convince themselves that their smoking isn't really that harmful as it seems, or hey, I only have a couple cigarettes a day versus an entire pack. So that therefore this dissonance disappears. And so this drive to reduce this cognitive dissonance helps explain why people are so committed to being consistent and why the consistency principle exists. And we will be right back. Teachers are deep into new units this time of year. 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dial and now back to the show. When we make a commitment or have any behavior or belief that contradicts that, it really makes us feel uneasy. So what do we do when we feel uneasy? We feel highly motivated to resolve. And so if like you think you're a loser and you've thought you're a loser your entire life because your dad told you you're a loser and now you're trying to make a better life for yourself, well then once you start taking the actions to make it a better life for yourself, there's going to be cognitive dissonance because your actions, your new actions don't align with your belief about yourself. So you're either going to have to change your actions or your beliefs and Like I said, your beliefs, you can change them at any moment. We think our beliefs are set in stone, but our beliefs are just thoughts that we've been thinking over and over again. And this is why people often stick to their choices, even if they later on realize that these choices weren't really good. It's easier to justify a previous decision than to admit inconsistency or fault. This is why people will lie to you or make stuff up. And so this is why, like, you can see it in politics all the time. Like, I fully remove myself from politics, but I love watching the psychology behind politics. This is why someone can vote for somebody and that person that they vote for does something completely stupid or completely out of alignment with their original beliefs, and then the person that voted for them will then downplay, oh, it wasn't that bad, or, you know, the other political side does so much worse. It wasn't that big of a deal. Like, I know I know somebody. Another example is I know someone who is a hardcore person on one side of politics, right? Hardcore. And they've been that way since the 80s. And that's like their identity is they think that they are this type of person and that political side is their political side. And when you ask them why, they'll tell you all of the reasons why. From the 80s, when they first went into that political party and started following it, they've. They only vote for that political party and they're hardcore on it, right? And when you look at the political party today, it's almost none of what it was in the 80s. It's completely different. But they stay with that political party because it's who they've always been for 40 years. And so to change that, oh my God, that's like changing their entire belief system according to them and what they think, right? So you could bring factual evidence to somebody and it still doesn't matter. And so it shows up in many ways in someone's life. Not just, you know, politics or any of that. It shows up in many different ways. The most important way for this podcast and what we're talking about is your personal identity, like who you think you are. You must understand that the desire for consistency often revolves around this self image and the identity of who you think you are. Once you've established a belief about yourself, it's really hard to change that. We are unconsciously driven to behave in ways that align with what we believe about ourselves. So, for instance, if someone identifies, once again, let's take a healthy person, right? They're More likely to choose actions such as exercising more or avoiding junk food because they call themselves a healthy person, they want to stay consistent with that identity. Even when they're faced with temptations like, hey, there's a cake in front of you. What do you do? Well, it's like, I know that cake's gonna taste really good, but it's not gonna taste better than how weird I'm gonna feel about myself if I change. If I, if I do something that is gonna bring cognitive dissonance, which is a action that doesn't align with my behavior. So even though I know that cake, that cake is really good, I'm still not going to do it because it makes me just feel weird. I can't feel uneasy about myself. And so, you know, when you look at people, this tends to be a really big self fulfilling prophecy, which, you know, a few weeks ago I did an episode on self fulfilling prophecy. But it's basically when people commit to a particular identity, they will become that thing. Like it's crazy how often this happens. And I see with people you will become who you think you are. So if you want to change something about your life, you're gonna have to change what you think you are. So like if somebody, and this usually happens from childhood. So if somebody thinks that they're, you know, if somebody has a great parenting system and a child is told that they're responsible and capable and that I believe in you and I'm so proud of you, they're more likely to commit to this view of themselves and then act accordingly and usually be more confident within themselves. On the other side of that, you know, if a parent talks down to their child and they said you're lazy or unreliable, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be, and talk negatively to the child, they're going to behave in ways that match that negative label, even if they have the potential to act differently. So some of you listening to this are holding on to lots of people listening to us, good and good side and the bad side are holding onto a belief about yourself that was told to you by another person when you were a child. And so you have to ask yourself that way. That my mom spoke to me and my dad spoke to me and the teacher spoke to me, was that positive or was that negative? And do I want to believe this about myself or do I need to change the way that I believe about myself because I don't want to hold onto somebody else's beliefs. And this is why it's so important how you speak to your Children, if you have children or if you want to have children, you are creating their internal narrative when you speak to them, and you're building their own identity of themselves. And so this is the basis of why change is so hard. You can see why it's so hard is because the actions to take, different actions that don't align with who we think we are just doesn't make us feel right internally. And so we'd rather not have the life that, you know, this is unconsciously right. We'd rather not have the life that we want and stay the same versus being like, you know what? I need to change my beliefs. And if I change my beliefs, my actions will then change because it's about doing something different first off. But if you're going to do something different, you must first believe something different about yourself, about the world, about what you can create. And once we commit to a belief or action or identity, it becomes increasingly hard to change once we have that belief. And so that's why I can see people in my line of work, I see people that are so amazing and so loving and have so much potential, and they just can't get themselves to change because they're holding onto this identity that somebody told them that they were younger or they created for their own self when they were younger. And, you know, it's. It's really hard because it's deeply tied to our sense of self, which we think is real. And so, you know, if you. A good example of this is like, even something, if you take it out of just your sense of self and you just kind of bring it a little bit more to, like, work in your career, if you work at a job, like, let's say somebody works at a job and they no longer find it fulfilling or it's not aligned with their personal values, but they've committed to that career, it makes it really hard to make a change. And so it makes it hard to make a difficult life change because it would require them to admit they no longer want to continue in a field because it might make them feel like a failure. They might feel like they are betraying their past self. They're leading to the significant cognitive dissonance and all of that. And so it's like, you know what? I do want to get out of this career. I do want to do something different. But I've been this way for 10 years. I've been doing this for 10 years. I went to college for 10 years. So I'm just going to stay this path because, you know, I've always been an accountant, so I guess I'm always going to be an accountant versus changing the belief about yourself. Like I was an accountant, but now I'm going to be something different. And this is also the reason why I like people stay in toxic relationships because they've made a commitment, quote unquote. And breaking that commitment would challenge their sense of consistency. Well, I said I was going to be this way, so I have to stay forever. And so they'll stay in toxic relationships. And this is so why it's so important to just like figure out who you want to be in this world and what you want to do. Because most of the times people who are listening to this podcast or come to me, myself included, for the first 30 something years of my life, we were just unconsciously doing what we thought we were supposed to do versus taking a step back and being like, what do I want? What do I want to do? What do I want my life to be? Who do I want to be? And so we're just unconsciously playing the character that we were told to be from our childhood versus being like, well, who the fuck do I want to be in my future? You know? And so we started looking at it and we're like, okay, well the choices that I've been making, do they align with who I want to be or am I just like holding on to past commitments that no longer serve me? And it's really, really important. This is why it is so important to take a deep dive into your own psyche. Who you are, who you think you are, what you believe about yourself, what you believe about the world, what you think you're truly capable of in this life, and how you speak to yourself in your own head. Because nothing's going to change until those things start to change. And so, so many people struggle to take the right actions, the actions that they want to. They can't figure out why. And it's because it doesn't line up with who you think you are. You are committed in the past sense. You have been committed to being this person because that's just who you've always been. And so this isn't like some motivational speaker believe in yourself bullshit. It's literally you will become what you think you are. It is a self fulfilling prophecy. And so you have to change your beliefs about yourself, not based off of who you were, but in like, what you've done in the past, but who you are becoming. Otherwise you're going to always act in accordance with the past version of yourself, but that's not who you want to be anymore. So your view of yourself must change. Otherwise, this unconscious cognitive dissonance and commitment principle is going to keep you stuck in the exact same place. So if you want your actions to change in the future, your beliefs about yourself and the world around you and your potential must change first. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me obdialjr. R O B D I A L J R. The only way this podcast grows is from you guys sharing it. So I'd greatly appreciate if you would share it so that more people could find it. We could help change the world even more. And if you want to learn a little bit more of how you can work with me and go a little bit deeper than just the podcast, go to mindsetmentor.com, check out mindset mentor plus, so that you can get a deep dive into every single episode that we create and, you know, hopefully change your life quicker. So once again, it's mindsetmentor.com and with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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