If you want to change the direction of your life, change the defaults that you live by.
If you want to change the direction of your life, change the defaults that you live by.
The incredible power of habit creation comes into its own as the default shifts: when I move from being someone who by default writes no articles each week, to someone who by default writes on article each week. Or when I move from someone who by default doesn’t exercise every work day to someone who by default exercises every work day.
The number of mentions of ‘mindset’ on the internet and social media must have gone up by 100 times in the last 10 years. And that’s with good reason: when we change our mindsets, the whole world can look completely different. We see things we couldn’t see before and therefore respond completely differently to what happens to us.
What is crucial in mindset shift is the moment when by default we assume different things.
That is, for example: if by default I assume that when someone drives irresponsibly they are doing it because they are a reckless idiot, my physiology, mood and more goes one way. If by default I assume they are doing their best and are on the way to see their dying mother in hospital (not necessarily true, but definitely more useful as a belief) then my physiology, mood and more goes the other way (and a way which is generally far more advantageous and preferable).
Similarly, if by default I assume every email that annoys me has been sent by a malicious individual, the world looks one way. If by default I assume it’s been sent by a good person doing their best, the world looks another.
The default doesn’t mean it always happens that way. It just means that as long as nothing significantly out of the ordinary happens, it will go in the default direction.
Changing our defaults isn’t easy.
It takes practice.
Remember: we become what we practise, and we are always practising something.
When I was starting out in my business, my coach gave me a challenge: to make a certain (outrageous) number of proposals to potential clients over a 90 day period. One of the crucial parts of this was it forced me to change the default: by making it a game, I looked at every opportunity to speak to a client about working together differently. Instead of my fear/anxiety/worry/not-wanting-to-be-too-pushy making the default ‘no conversation about money and working together unless I get a strong signal that it’s the right thing to do to make a proposal’, if I wanted to play the game and win it, I had to go into all conversations with potential clients with the default being ‘Make a proposal unless I get a strong signal it’s NOT the right thing to do’.
The result of this change in defaults: more proposals, and because I’d given more people the chance to say yes or no, I got more Nos, but also more Yeses.
And, over the period of the challenge, a shift in my default for the long term.
The power of a gratitude practice, which as I understand it is something which research shows has a strong impact on our wellbeing, is to change the default. We force ourselves to notice things we are grateful for (trumping our normal defaults of resentment, frustration, exhaustion etc). And by doing this we let our mind practise being grateful.
We become what we practise, and gradually that default changes.
From my investingations into habit changing on the 12-Minute Method Podcast, my feeling was the time period is often about two years with significant habit creation. Somewhere roughly around that period, the default shifts.
That might sound like a lot but it doesn’t feel like that much to me: we’ve been alive much longer than 2 years, practising - for example - not going to the gym. So if in two years I can change it so that I by default go to the gym four times a week, then that’s not bad at all.
And if you force yourself to play a game like my coach did with me and money conversations, it can happen over just a few months.
Some mindset shifts can happen much faster. Sometimes catching an insight in the right way and having the chance to apply it can mean we feel differently about people in our lives, or about how the world looks, in just a few hours.
But the crucial question is: where do you have default assumptions or behaviours that you would like to change?
Then: what do you want the default to be? And how do you start practising it?
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PS Read my latest long-read article in the Leading With Honour series, here: The Transformational Practice of Telling the Truth (Leading With Honour II)
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.