This week I’m seeing a few new faces over at the gym in the morning.
A few old faces I haven’t seen in awhile, too. Even if I didn’t know the date on the calendar, it’s obvious something lit a fire under some rear ends.
What’s sad is that it won’t last. Come the first week of February, the place will look more or less like it did in November.
Much as I do enjoy my serene gym experience, it’s pretty terrible that these folks who come in with the intention of bettering themselves are going to fall off (even if they don’t know it yet).
The familiar patterns that grab hold of our daily routines are like a witch’s curse. Like a curse they can be banished, but it takes a true desire and commitment from the cursed, along with a skilled hand trained in the weird ways of banishment.
If you don’t bring the tools and the fuel, don’t be surprised that your resolution fails.
Resolutions don’t create lasting changes for the same reason that obsessing over workout routines and diet plans and fads fail.
Lots of excitement and enthusiasm and energy is wasted on the painful symptoms while the true causes go untreated.
Build the most perfect machine out of facts about exercise physiology and kinesiology and you have not touched the true springs of change inside a person.
Theory is nice to have, but it tends to blind us to the present reality of the real person right in front of us.
I call this the “One Part Error”. Fitpros, almost to the man or woman, insist on isolating the body from reality, and then isolating the body from itself with “knowledge bomb” lectures about all the facts of biomechanics and kinesiology and biochemistry that they know.
But a body belongs to a person who lives a life. Very few of us have the desire, much less the option, to treat our physical condition as an abstract art project with no impact on everything else we do.
Most of us would be over the moon to have a shapely, lean body that can move without pain and not run out of energy by three in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, the obstacles, advantages, bottlenecks, and opportunities that our present reality provides us go unnoticed and under-leveraged.
The painter is part of the scene that he is painting. If you don’t know what I’m getting at, search for M. C. Escher and browse a few pieces of his art.
Here’s what you must understand:
Nobody directs the behavior of a living organism. Life is not a machine that you can program and manage in your pretty spreadsheet.
All we can do to a living organism is disturb it.
What does it find meaningful? What will it respond to?
Find out, and then delight it with carrots and punish it with sticks.
What’s neat about that question is that you can ask it of a muscle group that you want to grow… and you can ask it about the client that you are coaching who wants to grow that muscle.
You could ask it of the Fortune 500 globo-corp that the client works for you. They all obey the laws of living things.
Here’s my point:
That New Year enthusiasm could be directed into creating disturbances instead of the doomed attempt to rebuild your life from scratch.
Systems are changed by acting on their leverage points. There’s a ladder of leverage points, in fact, according to how much change you get in return for pushing on them.
Fiddling around with the details of a workout or diet or your Atomic Habits is down near the bottom rungs. Most people spend their down time here, and as a result they get low returns on their energy investment.
The real jet-fuel of leverage is up closer to the top where information flows. The rules and incentives, the goals and purposes of the system are major pivot-points with high returns.
Real magic happens when you change the paradigm. A paradigm is what someone believes. Belief doesn’t mean the collection of shiny fact-baubles accumulated from social media “value bombs”. Belief is not information.
By change of belief I mean a change of perspective: what you see, what is significant to you, and what that vision means to you.
You could call it a change of heart that expands your horizons beyond your present point of view.
Change what someone believes and everything down the rest of the ladder changes with it. Paradigm change isn’t taught through dry facts. It must be demonstrated and experienced.
Which means that changing behavior, even in a small way, is the most effective way to change beliefs.
Small changes that stick, in high-leverage moves, beat resolutions that put you back on the couch by day 21.
And it’s a LOT easier than you think.
If you’re interested, you might want to join us in the community where we’re making real life-altering transformations.
Matt Perryman