Behavioral change: What separates successful attempts from unsuccessful attempts?

The answer I most hate is “you have to want it badly enough, it won’t happen until you really want it”.

1. It’s incredibly vague. It’s no different from saying it won’t work out until it does, which is a meaningless statement. See also: no true scotsman fallacy.
2. It’s needless ego stroking for people who happen to succeed. It’s myth-building. We’re supposed to believe that successful people are successful because they’re somehow better than the rest of us, they possess superior qualities, they’re hungrier, etc. This might be true, I concede. But I think the narrative that we establish makes them seem more superhuman than they actually are. I’m much more partial to ideas like the Mundanity of Excellence- people do well because they do the right things right and they prioritize properly and manage their time and emotions and psychology. This is hard stuff but it’s doable. It’s not magic.
3. It makes unsuccessful people feel like shit. I think this is the greatest tragedy of all. People give up on things because they tried and failed a few times. This shouldn’t have to be the case. We should all fail forward, over and over again. It’s immoral that we don’t teach this properly. (Amongst many other things.)

Encourage people to try again

We should be encouraging people who fail. I don’t mean celebrate failure as if it were a good, pleasant thing. Failure sucks. But we should encourage people who fail to disassociate the outcome of their efforts from their identities. Failing does not make you a failure. And succeeding does not make you a success, either. Stop labelling people. It’s unhealthy shorthand that very quickly runs into issues. If you’re a success because you did great things, you then get straitjacketed into needing to succeed again and again. You may never do anything ever again. See Elizabeth Gilbert’s TEDtalk on this.

But okay, back to the topic of behavioral change. Let me try and recall the VSIRP system I once sorta memorised. You need Vision, s?, incentives, r? And an action plan. (Oh, S is skills and R is resources.)

I’m not sure what the skills and resources are in this picture, but vision + incentives + plan is definitely crucial. Here’s how it played out for me, I think.

Vision

You need to believe and have a vivid mental image of what life is like without cigarettes. You need to get to a point where you really acknowledge not only that cigarettes are doing you damage (every smoker acknowledges this), but that you want to be free from it. And you must really, truly believe that it’s possible. A lot of smokers will say that they want to be free, and they mean it, but they don’t sincerely believe that it’s possible. Or at least, that it’s possible anytime soon. You might think that it’s possible a year from now, a few years from now, once you’ve got the rest of your life in order. I wasted a lot of time on this, I smoked far too many sticks unnecessarily because of this. Well- maybe there is some truth to the idea that you have to keep doing it until you’re well and truly sick of it.

Jason Mraz helped me quit smoking

For me, it was Jason Mraz that helped me believe it’s possible to quit. You see, Jason Mraz used to be a smoker. And he wasn’t just someone who smoked on the side- he was a real smoker. He loved smoking so much that he wrote a song about it. And then he quit, he read Allan Carr’s Easyway and he quit. And now he’s this health junkie dude who drinks fruit shakes and is really happy. And I decided that I could cope with becoming a little bit more like Jason Mraz. I too read Easyway (for the second time), and at the time I still had a pack of Dunhill reds and my wife had a pack of U Kretek menthol, and I smoked those cigarettes as I read the ebook. I would meet my friends the next day- all smokers- and I would smoke with them too, but the whole time I was smoking I had started to realize that it wasn’t working for me anymore. The whole thing seemed like an elaborate farce.

Experience and reflect on being in a different environment where people do things differently

I can’t talk about quitting without talking about work. Work helped me quit smoking- none of my colleagues smoke. Everybody’s fit and healthy and non-smokers. And my boss would chat with me about it, and I tried on his perspective for size- that it must be really frustrating and annoying to have something else control your mind, something make decisions on your behalf.

And that’s what cigarettes are. They initially give you a taste of freedom and control in your small world, from your shitty routines and your shitty life, but over time the cigarettes become the new routine. You don’t use them as an escape anymore, they’re everywhere around you. They ARE you. You are a smoker and you have to live your life according to the cigarettes’ rules- according to the cravings.

For some smokers, maybe for all smokers, this is actually quite a bittersweet thing. It’s a sort of surrender. You give in to it. You allow it to control you. This I think is symptomatic of broader things. And this is why I always feel a sense of cameraderie with anybody who’s a serious/heavy smoker (I define this as a person who’s smoked daily for over 5 years).

You especially need a plan for dealing with the inevitable triggers. First list out all the circumstances in which you will normally smoke. Then list out precisely what you will do in those situations. What will you do when you have a craving after a meal? After a meeting? What will you do when an old smoker buddy offers you a cigarette? When you’re having drinks and your judgement is impaired?

You need to change your self-perception entirely

But all of that is secondary I think to your central identity and belief system. If you want to change your behavior chances are that you’ll need to change your identity too, in some way, to some degree. Sometimes the change is simple, just a refinement of what’s already there. Modifying a jogging habit to a gym habit, because you decide that “I want to be fit” is better expressed through lifting weights than through cardiovascular exercise. That’s a relatively simple move. Going from being a coach potato to being a person who jogs, however, is a much more dramatic jump. To a much more precise point, too. Which makes you much likelier to fail.

It may be helpful to reduce it to something similar but simpler. Commit to say, walking the stairs for 1 floor. Commit to getting out of the house. Literally, just getting out of the door and maybe walking to the corner store for a bottle of water. Make that a habit. Get these “foot in the door” habits nailed down, and the harder habits come next. Just like in a video game.

Prepare for failure in advance

I didn’t have a full set of answers to those questions the first few times I attempted to quit. I simply thought that I’d remind myself that I want to quit, and that I’d improvise my way out of it. (One of the stupidest things I tell myself that I’ll do, with one of the highest failure rates.) Improvising is a fool’s game, especially when dealing with new and unfamiliar things that are going to be painful and uncomfortable. Quitting smoking is difficult and painful and you need all the bloody help you can get. You shouldn’t be thinking of what to do when confronted with a trigger, because giving in is the easiest thing to do. Everything you say afterwards is after-the-fact rationalization.

I got tired and stopped writing. More on this next time, maybe. As a quick recap- you need to believe that it’s possible. You need to look for other people who’ve done it before you, and follow in their lead. You need to latch on to better people. You need to get rid of your old friends, or at least stay away from them for as long as you can, for as much as you can. You need to articulate your problem, and you need to articulate a solution- meaning write that shit down and paste it on your fridge or on your wall. Write it on a piece of paper and keep it in your wallet and look at it everyday. I laughed this stuff off for a long, long time but it really works. It’s all about priming. We get primed by advertising and Facebook and all sorts of things every minute of every day of our lives anyway, so it’s not like it doesn’t work. There’s no reason why we can’t use it to improve ourselves, to prime ourselves with things that WE want to hear, that WE want to be reminded of.

You can do it

Whatever it is that you’re going through, you can overcome it. You can be rid of it. You can be free of it. You are immense, you are more than everything that you think you are. You are more than your habits, because you can discard them. You are more than your failures and your successes and all of that stuff. You can be almost anything you want to be. But the challenge is to be clear about where you want to go, and then to be even clearer about where you are, and MOST OF ALL, to be CLEAREST about what’s the single next step you should take. I believe in you, and I’m right here.