Why You Can't Make Change Happen - EP:099

One of the reasons why we put our ideas together in the first place is because we want to make real change happen. But what happens when you're the one that wants to change and it's not happening? Well, it turns out we may be solving for the wrong kind of change, and that's what we're talking about this week on Find the Red Thread. I'm your host, Tamsen Webster, of TamsenWebster.com. This week's episode was really personal, frankly, because I was in that situation and I'm still kind of in it and working my way through it where I wanted to do a thing, I wasn't doing the thing, and I kept asking everybody else like, how do I do the thing? Well, thankfully I asked my friend and former client Michael Bungay Stanier that question. I said, How do I write this book about the Red Thread that people are asking me for? I said, I feel like I've asked everybody, I've read all the things, and I'm still not doing it. So what's going on? Now, Michael knows a fair amount about all of this because he's the author of The Coaching Habit, which has now sold over half a million copies. But what he said next blew my mind because he said, oh, well, you're probably solving for the wrong kind of change. I was like, what do you mean the wrong kind of change? Change is change. He's like, no, no, no, there's two kinds of change. There's technical change and adaptive change. And technical change, as he explained to me, was change that happens because you've acquired new knowledge. So just, I don't know how to knit, now I know how to knit. Or I want to be able to put videos on Instagram, and then I learn what the steps are, and now I can do that. But adaptive change is what happens when you say, I want to go on Instagram, I understand all the mechanics of doing it, and I can't make myself, as my other friend Brian Fanzo would say, press the damn button. What's going on there? And that's exactly what was happening with me and this book. Now, the work of this adaptive change, technical change, and a process that Michael worked me through was something that was developed by Lisa Leahy and Robert Keegan from their research, but also that's in their book called The Immunity to Change. And the process was really fascinating to me because it's about understanding not what from a technical standpoint is missing with what's going on behind, behind a change, but what are in fact the arrangements of beliefs and goals and framings of problems and truths that are getting in the way. Now, the process that Michael walked me through was pretty simple. It said, well, what is the thing that you want to do? And you kind of start there. So, well, I want to write a book. That's the thing that I want to do. And the second step— now, these questions get much harder. Now, it's not because you don't know the answers to these questions, but it's because you don't want to say the answers to these questions out loud. So, the second step is to say to yourself, "Well, what am I doing that's supporting this?" But more importantly, and Michael was really emphasizing this, more importantly, what are the things that you are, you know, not doing instead of doing the thing, right? So, either what are the kind of distracting behaviors or the other activities that you're doing instead of the thing that you want? So, what was I doing instead of writing a book? So, I could clearly say, "Okay, well, I keep researching it." as if that's gonna help, but I really had gotten to a point of like, what else could I possibly learn about my own idea or about publishing a book that's really keeping me from writing it for nothing? And there's also the thing of what are you not doing? And I was like, okay, well, I'm not making the time. I'm not setting it aside. I'm not even putting it on my weekly to-do list, which is how I get everything else done. So after first identifying what is the thing that you wanna do, and then second, what are you doing or not doing actually instead of that thing? You know, the next question is, what do those activities reveal a deeper commitment to? Now, this was something that immediately resonated for me because I often would say, particularly to my Weight Watchers members, that listen, if you're not doing the thing that you want, it's because there's something else you want more. Now, you may say, I want to lose weight. You may say you want to write a book, but you may actually want more kind of the coping mechanism that comes from eating. That certainly was true for me in the midst of my panic disorder. I've talked about this, that on Find the Red Thread before. Because it was much more— I wanted the comfort of a coping mechanism that I knew more than I wanted to get past it. But once I could recognize that, and this is the key, then I could start to change it. And what I was figuring out that I wanted more with the book was a lot of the same thing. I kind of wanted the safety of not having my idea questioned, not having me questioned, not even bringing up in certain cases some deep dark childhood stuff about like who was the writer in the family. All sorts of stuff. Like I said, these questions, these questions are simple, answers are hard. And the final piece, and this is what this is what Michael called kind of calamities, is to really think through and to answer that question for yourself of what if. So let's say you've got this commitment to not having your idea question, which is the case for me. Like, what is the worst-case scenario that you are kind of unconsciously spinning in your head that you think is going to happen? You know, in this case, you know, the worst-case scenario was that Well, somebody would say that everything's crap and this whole business that I've built on it would just crumble and I'd be bankrupt and I'd wasted 3 years and all that effort. And what was fascinating is even just saying it out loud can reveal that that's not helpful thinking for you or for anybody else. But the most important thing that going through this whole process does was that it showed me that it was actually a different way of approaching the same pieces of the Red Thread that we talk about all the time. Because by the time I got to that calamity that came from those competing wants, or the competing commitments is how Michael referred to them, I could see that, that based on what I thought was going to happen, it was helping me understand how I was looking at the situation, how I was looking at this as a situation of testing my idea, or rather than codifying my idea. So it was about, you know, that's, that's a problem of perspective, because as long as it was set up as a test, then there's pass/fail. But if it's codifying my idea, then it's putting in a position that I can help other people. Now, once I've got that new problem perspective, then I can start to search for the truth that makes it impossible for me to keep looking at it as a test. And the truth is the thing that people continue to say to me, is that they They want, they need to have me in their pocket, and that's the role I want to play for people. I want— I believe that people have all the resources they need, and I want this book to be like having that, or having me kind of sitting on your shoulder figuring this out along with you. That's the kind of person that I want to be, and I'd like to think that I am. So this process of figuring out change, whether it's for for yourself or for somebody else. Well, the first things we have to understand is whether or not we're dealing with something that's a technical change, because that's information. And if the technical change, they've got all the information to make the technical change, then we have to look deeper at that adaptive change. What needs to happen there? And that's when you're gonna start to either follow that process that Leahy and Keegan laid out, or you can also use the pieces of the red thread to codify that and clarify it. And then what you do is you start to swap out the pieces until the course of that story in your head makes sense, that's different. And I'm happy to report that literally within a week of having that conversation with Michael, I was having conversations with book agents, writing out the proposal, and starting to put a draft table of contents together. All of that happened simply because I was able to really understand what was going on deep down inside by using those fundamental pieces that all of us operate with, how we see the world. Because as we've talked about before, how we see drives what we do, which means if you're trying to change what you do, you have to change how you see. And hopefully, either the Leahy Keegan process or the Red Thread or both in combination, which is what I did, can help you do just that, whether for you or for someone else. That's this week's episode of Find the Red Thread. I'm Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, like, subscribe, or share it, or all three. And until next time.