Special Episode: Knowing vs. Doing (cont.)

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hello everyone, Welcome back to the next installment in this little series I'm calling why It's so hard to turn what we

know into what we do. This is a problem we've been trying to solve from the very beginning of this show, which is really how do we get ourselves from thinking about things knowing things to doing things? Because it's in the doing of things, it's by applying things that transformation really happens. We are all exposed to so many life changing ideas every day we consume so much information, we learned so many things, but we don't necessarily make the

step into these things transforming us. And I've thought a lot over the years about why this happens, how we can overcome it. A lot of our interviews have been about this, and I wanted to create a bit of a series here that talks about those It's actually gonna be two episodes. The first episode we already had it talked about the first main obstacle that I thought of, which is that we think we have to make big changes.

And then this is going to be the next installment, and I'm going to cover three different ideas that are important here as to why it's hard for us to turn what we know into what we do. So the next idea that's really important, the next big obstacle, is that we simply don't have a clear plan. So let me ask you this, which of these do you think is more likely to succeed? Do you think Billy who says, well, I need to really get in better shape. I'd sure like to be healthier and I'm going to start to

exercise more. Or Sally who says I'm gonna run for twenty minutes at eight am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and do yoga Saturday morning at nine am. Right, it's pretty obvious which of those two people is going to be more likely to succeed. Right, If we were to lay a bet on this, of you would probably put your money on Sally. The other ten percent of you are really bad gamblers, and thus you should never do it.

Before we go into the rest of this episode, though, just pause a minute and think about something in your life that you've been wanting to change, something you've been saying you're going to change, or you've been trying to change or wanting to change. So bring that to mind, and then just ask yourself, you know, how clear and specific of a plan do I have? And then bear those things in mind as we kind of go through the rest of this episode. So you've got something to

sort of apply this too. So in general, the rule is the more specific we get on what we're going to do, the better. I often say that ambiguity is the mother of procrastination. We procrastinate for a variety of reasons, but not being quite sure on what we're doing is one of the biggest. So the rule here is always more and more specificity, let me be clearer and clearer about what I'm going to do in my own life. Right.

I've gone through different periods. I've always wanted to meditate, exercise, and right each day, and so there have been periods of time in life where that's kind of what the goal is. I'm going to meditate, exercise and right each day, and I have some degree of success doing that. As I've learned more about behavior change, maybe I get to seventy successful with that. But I get up at seven fifteen and right for thirty minutes. Then I meditate with my Zen group at eight, and I get on the

bike right after that. At that point, right, I go from about seventy percent successful to upwards of successful. Just that clarity what I'm doing and when I'm doing it is really really valuable. So the process here is to really move from a desired outcome something like, oh, I want to be in better shape, into a series of very clear behaviors. Oh, in order to do that, I'm going to run, I'm going to do some strength training, and I will do yoga, and then we put those

behaviors into very clear time slots. That's the basic process. So to ask yourself kind of what am I doing? When am I doing it? Where am I doing it? And where can be important? It sounds silly, but if we're thinking about exercise running, am I running outdoors? Am I running at the gym? Right? Those are all very helpful, and we know that when students put these things into practice. When a student decides when they're going to work on an essay, they are much more likely to get it done.

There's been a variety of studies that show this. And then the other real big culprit here is we may be able to come up with all, right, I'm going to do these things at these times, which is really a big step forward, but we don't have a coherent plan or path that leads us in a continuing method

through the changes we want to make. One of the things that was so helpful to me about a A was that it gave me a series of steps to follow in order that we're really well thought out, so there was a coherent path to move from where I

started to a deepening process of recovery. So the next reason that we really struggle with this turning what we know into what we do is simply that we don't remember to do it right, whether it's remembering to take our supplements, remembering to be mindful throughout the day, remembering to move between calls or meetings, remembering to write in our journal before bed. There are so many different things that we want to do, and it sounds silly, but

often we don't remember. I have been rehabbing a hurt shoulder. I've talked a little bit about this on the show here and there, and I'm not going to go into a ton of detail about it, but part of rehabbing it are physical therapy exercises that I need to do every day. They're not hard to do, they don't take a long time to do, but I often forget to do them. So it's just that I don't have them as part of a routine. I haven't really figured out where they fit, and so I forget I don't do them.

So it might be helpful, before we go too much further into this, for you just to think of something in your life that you've been wanting to do but you're having trouble remembering to do, just so you have an example in your mind that you could be thinking about. As we walk through these ideas, one of the terms that is used in psychology, whether it be psychology in general or the part of psychology that studies behavior change, is the idea of triggers, and a trigger is really

any stimulus that impacts behavior. So a lot of times trigger is thought of in a negative term. I've spent a lot of my life in the recovery community, and the recovery community of the word trigger is indicated to means some event or place or person or thing that happens that triggers you to want to use drugs or alcohol. So a trigger in this case is negative. Right. We more and more here trigger warning before a certain show

or segment because of somebody has trauma. Seeing something or hearing something can retrigger that trauma can bring it back up right. So those are examples of triggers in a negative sense. But another type of trigger is simply the alarm that goes off on your phone that reminds you to do something. I have medicine that I take at certain times, and I have an alarm go off on my phone to remind me to take it. It's a trigger.

So there are different types of triggers and we can use them in different ways and That's really where I want to spend The bulk of this episode is talking about the different types of triggers and how you might use them, because they're really important. So we talked before about being specific, right, we need to be specific and have a plan. Well, the other part of specific and plan is having a trigger or a reminder, and so I'm going to talk about what the different types of

triggers are. So the first is simply time. This is a it's two PM, and I'm going to do something. So if I take my medicine at seven PM and I have an alarm golf on my phone at seven pm, I have a time based trigger. The alarm goes off at seven pm. I look at it. I go, oh, yeah, it's time to take my medicine. I take my medicine very straightforward. Another type of trigger that is similar to time but not exact, is what I call a preceding event trigger or this is offering, referred to as anchoring

or sometimes habit stacking. And what this means is you take something that you're already doing in your life and you add the new habit or behavior you want to create to it. So, for example, I've had a bunch of clients in the past who have dogs. And so what we have is a trigger that looks something like this, when I get back from taking the dog out in the morning, I will sit down and write in my journal. Right, So I'm not tying it to a time in this case,

I'm not saying at seven thirty am. I'm saying, based on this preceding event, after I get back from taking the dog out. Because taking the dog out is something that happens every single morning. It's very very consistent. So you don't want to anchor something. You don't want to anchor, say this writing in your journal to something that's more sporadic, right, You want to really anchor to something that happens every

day taking the dog out. Right, For most of us, brushing our teeth before bed is another really good anchor point. After a meal as an anchor point. So looking for these preceding events that we can stack something else on top of can be really helpful. Another is a location And what do I mean by a location based trigger. A location based trigger would be every time I go in the kitchen. So for example, I might say, every time I go in the kitchen, I will take two

deep breaths. Every time I arrive at a red light, I will take two deep breaths, so their location. When we hit a certain location, it's a reminder to us to do a certain behavior. There is also random triggers. What does a random trigger mean? Well, I use this in a very specific way, and most of the scientific literature doesn't talk about this, but it's a trigger I've sort of I wouldn't say I've invented it, but I've

really used it a lot. We use it in the Spiritual Habits program and use it with coaching clients, which is we get an app on our phone that randomly goes off and gives us a reminder. Well, why would I ever want to do that? You might ask, Well, if what I'm trying to do is to say, have more presence throughout my day, A great way to do that is have a random ding go off, and every time that ding goes off on my phone, it reminds me, oh, yeah, all right, now I'm gonna do, say an exercise like

grounding myself in my senses. So that's an example of a random one for trying to sort of in calculate a behavior throughout all different parts of the day, a random trigger can be really helpful. And then finally, the last type of trigger is an emotional state trigger. Now, these are very often unconscious and negative, which is I get stressed so I eat, or I feel sad so I play video games. These are emotional state triggers that again are unconscious to a large extent and are not

very helpful and sometimes unwinding a bad habit. We have to start to realize what these are. But an emotional state trigger can be really powerful to be used in a positive way. So, for example, if I'm trying to learn to practice taking more perspective in life or taking a different perspective in life, it can be really really

helpful to have an emotional state trigger. And the emotional state trigger looks something like when I notice that I'm feeling really tense, then I will insert perspective exercise right. And the more that we can train emotional state triggers, these become very powerful because it's our emotional states that often lead us into trouble. So if we can start to recognize an emotional state and we can think, okay, when this emotional state comes up, I want to react

in this way. These become very powerful triggers that allow us to transform at a deeper level. So designing the right type of trigger is really important. What's the behavior that I want to change, what's the thing I want to do, and what's the right type of trigger to design. So again, if it's something that's supposed to have been every day at a certain time, a time based trigger

makes a ton of sense, very straightforward, very easy to do. If, on the other hand, you want to do something every day, but you don't want to be locked to the clock. A lot of retired people have this. They're like, look, I've been locked to a clock in my whole life. I don't want to be and yet they want some consistency in their lives. And so what we'll do is we'll design preceding event triggers or anchor triggers. After I

have lunch, then I will meditate as an example. Right, so it's something they do every day they have lunch. We don't want to pin down launch to be like every day at noon, you have to do this. They want a little bit more flexibility, so we use the preceding event type trigger. I talked about how to use the random trigger, right it's a trigger that goes off to remind you to do something. And then finally, the

emotional state trigger can be a really powerful one. If you're trying to cultivate a practice of looking at the positive more than the negative, an emotional based trigger can be really good. Every time I notice that I am thinking negatively, then I will whatever your exercise of positive thinking or gratitude is right, So we can cultivate these different types of things. So having the right type of trigger is really really important when it comes to changing

our behavior. And if you don't have the right types of triggers, very often what's going to happen is you're just not going to remember again, whether it's something simple like doing my shoulder stretches, taking your vitamins, or something a lot more profound, like really trying to unwind the way you think about certain situations. If you don't remember, you won't practice, and so we have to remember in order to practice, and designing the right type of trigger

is really really important for that. So that's the third obstacle. And then the last obstacle is similar to the problem overall. Well, what do I mean by that? Well, we've titled this program why it's so hard to turn what we know into what we do. Right, Well, the last obstacle is that we know too much. We have too much information, and I sort of described that as part of the problem we're trying to solve, right, We have too much information.

But it's part of what makes it hard to apply anything, to turn any of what we know into what we do, is that we end up knowing so much and we keep adding to our collection of what we know. As I'm saying this, it strikes me that one of the phrases I've heard about spiritual development that I love so much is that spiritual development at a certain point becomes much more about unlearning than learning. It's things that we

let go of. It's subtractive rather than additive. Anyway, it's a little aside as we head into this, but the reality is we do take in so much information, but just knowing things doesn't change us. That's part of what we've been talking about all along here. I can have an exhaustive knowledge of what foods are good for me, but if I'm not eating them, that's not going to

do me any good. As an obvious example, and so I think a lot of us are searching for these Aha moments or these silver bullets or these magic things like when I just read the right book, when I get the right piece of information, everything will change. And while there is truth that occasionally we have an insight

or an AHA moment that is very transformative. I remember one back from when I first got sober at twenty four, and it was a line from the A A big book that was saying selfishness, self centeredness, is the root of our problem. And I remember it hitting me all of a sudden, like, oh my goodness. Yes, the last seven or eight years of my life, all I've thought about is me and how I feel and whether I'm getting high. That was the soul orienting principle, and it

was profoundly self centered. And I remember that moment. It was boom. You know, It's like a light turn on. And so we have these moments. I'm not saying that they don't happen. They do happen, but they're somewhat serendipitous, and they tend to be few and far between, and we can't control them. What we do control is intentional application of an idea or intentional practice of an idea

or a principle that's important to us. And even if we do have one of those aha moment insights, we still have to figure out how do I integrate it into my life? How do I practice it? Me realizing that selfishness, self centeredness was the root of my problem did not make it go away. Okay, now I know what the problem is. Now I know where I need a direct effort. But boy, I still have a lot of effort that I have to put in, and I

have to remember again and again and again. Early on, was one of the first guests on the shows, Todd Henry. I was probably in our first ten episodes. Those old old episodes aren't even available on the feed anymore, but all episodes are available on our website. You can check those out. But this old episode with Todd Henry, I remember him saying something to the extent of most people just read, read, read, read, but they're not being changed by what they read very much. And if we adjusted

our ratio of consuming to applying, everything would change. And so his point was, if you spend an hour a day reading, just change that and spend thirty minutes a day reading, and then spend thirty minutes a day thinking about how what you read applies to your life and where you're going to put it into practice. And I don't even think we need to go that far. I don't think we need A fifty fifty split would still

be remarkable. Right. A lot of you listening to the show are readers of personal development and self help books, right, and most of these books of exercises in them. I'm guessing that most of you don't do the exercise right. You're reading and you just want to keep reading because reading is easy. Doing the exercise is hard. We have to stop, we have to reflect, we might have to

get out a piece of paper. It's harder than consuming and so we don't do it very much, which means we keep taking in information, but it's not really doing anything. We could read twenty blog articles in a day. I do this sometimes, you know. I'll just be out there on the internet reading one article after the other. At the end of the asked me what did you just read and learn? I probably would be able to recall one thing, maybe, And if you asked me eight hours later,

I probably would say, um, well, I'm not sure. Right, I might remember a couple of things, but but certainly nothing that transformed me. And so this idea of all, right, let's change this ratio of learning new things to a ratio you that gives us some learning and some applying, right, some knowledge gathering, some application, some thinking about specifically how it implies in my life, some integrating it into my life.

And as we look at great spiritual traditions, there's a lot of examples of where this happens, and even not spiritual traditions. If I think about Ben Franklin and his virtues, right, Ben Franklin identified thirteen virtues that he thought were really important to human life, and so basically what he did was he just would work on one virtue for a period of time. I don't know if he did them weekly, bi weekly, I don't know exactly what frequency went through them.

But the idea was to focus on them one at a time. His thirteen virtues, some of which were pretty common ones temperance, silence, order, resolution, Right, So to focus on them one at a time instead of trying to think of them all and stay with that one virtue for a period of time, then move on to the next and then cycle back through. The Jewish practice of mussar is a very similar one in the Catholic tradition.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignacious of Loyola, often just called the Ignation Exercises, was a set of meditations, contemplations and prayers that were written and you were intended to work through them, and then you do it again, and you do it again. Right. A A has the twelve steps. We worked through the same twelve steps over and over. We talked about them over and over. And that's probably

the best example of my life. I think the most transformation I ever had in a short window of time was in a A. And I think there are a variety of reasons for that. One is, obviously I was

newly sober. There was the ground was rich for transformation, or should I say there was there was a lot that needed transforming, right, It was a lot of low hanging fruit, maybe, But nonetheless, there was something about a A in which we had this common vocabulary, or we kept talking about the same things over and over, and so we got to really think about applying them in a deeper way. We didn't keep learning more and more

and more and more and more. You could learn the twelve steps of a A in an afternoon, right you memorize them. There you go, right, It didn't take very long for me to do that. We read them at every meeting. They gave me something to keep practicing. We kept reading the same book, the a a big book, or maybe you added in the twelve and twelve, but still you're talking a few hundred pages at most of total material that we went over again and again and again.

And of course there are limitations to that, but there's also tremendous benefit in not trying to keep adding more information and to really work on going deeper into a particular piece of information. I've experienced this again in my Zen practice. The last couple of years. I went from this very wide spiritual practice to a narrower one and Zen and where we keep sort of working on the same things. It's the same ideas, We have the same

chance after every sitting session each week. We have different readings that we do, but the readings repeat week after week. So there was a real formula and a repetition of things that allows these ideas to sink in more deeply, allows us to see them in greater clarity and to really think about how they apply to our own lives. And this is really important. And so what I find helpful is not that we have to do this exclusively. This is not a only think of one idea at

a time. What I found for me worked really well was that I do this podcast every week, right, I'm recording another episode and reading in another book every week. So I'm exploring and I'm seeking. But I also landed on a home base, and that home base was for now zen practice because it kept me in some core

ideas over and over and over again. And really, as I was designing the Spiritual Habits program, this was sort of the idea was to say, let me pick a small number of principles and let me really think about application. How do they apply? How do we apply these principles? And in the program, we work on a principle a week, so we spend a whole week on a principle and it allows us to really practice more deeply with that.

And then you know, you can go back through that material, which leads me to the end here and I sort of want to recap. The question is why is it so hard to turn what we know into what we do? And there are a variety of reasons, but I picked four that I wanted to focus on here right. The first was we think we have to make big changes. We set out to do something really big, doesn't work. The second was we don't have a clear plan. We're not specific about what we're doing. We don't know what

we're doing. There's just not much clarity. The third obstacle is we don't remember. We don't have the proper triggers in place to tell us what to do and then find only. The last obstacle is we're trying to consume too much information. We basically think knowledge will save us. And so now I talk about the Spiritual Habits Program for a second, because the Spiritual Habits Program enrollment opens on May third. Depending on when you listen to this,

it may be open, it may not be. But the Spiritual Habits Program was my attempt to really take everything we've learned in three fifty episodes, everything I've learned over plus years in recovery, everything I've learned from coaching hundreds of people from around the world, and put it into one practical program that allowed us to take what we know and make it something that we do in the spiritual realm. And by spiritual I want to be clear

I don't necessarily mean like anything really wacky. I mean taking what really matters to us, And that's kind of for me, spirituality, what really matters, what's important, Taking what matters to us and the values that we have in life, and finding a way that we apply them so that all aspects of our lives change and transform. And so the Spiritual Its program is designed very much to solve these four problems we just talked about and others, and

what it's doing. It's taking a small number of widely accepted spiritual principles, and it's combining it with the science of behavior change in a way that will allow us to practice and embody these principles so they actually have a chance to really change us. And I'm really proud of the program. I think it's a great program. The people that have gone through it have had great things

to say. I've had several people say they've taken many programs across their lifetime, many courses across their lifetime, and I've heard a bunch of people say this was the best program they've ever taken. And I don't say that to brag. I just I'm proud of it. And I think if you love this show. You're gonna love this program. There's a chance to get to know the other people in the program in a real deep and intimate way.

People who were in the last group, the last cohort that went through last year, a lot of those people are still friends today. The small groups are still meeting. Friendships that came together then are still coming together today and supporting each other. And I've seen some really beautiful connection out of it. And it's a program I just feel really good about and really wholeheartedly can encourage you to sign up for. So if you'd like to, you

can go to spiritual habits dot net. The program opens for enrollment on May three. You'll get all the details, their course dates, everything that we cover, cost all that at spiritual habits dot net. Whether or not you sign up for the Spiritual Habits program or not. I hope these little ideas have been helpful and you can apply them in your life. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back with our regularly scheduled interviews next week. Thanks bye.

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