We are here today with Peter Zeeuw van der Laan to talk about behavioral change and to
understand how we can apply it to become better leaders.
Peter is an entrepreneur, very experienced in behavioral change techniques.
He has applied a lot of these techniques to his on life Peter welkom.
Thank you.
Our participants have by now identified some of the changes that we want to apply to their
own lives.
Where do they start?
If you want to start to change your own behavior.
It is very important to first to understand the concept of willpower.
Research has established that willpower behaves as a muscle:
if you use your willpower you exhaust your muscle of willpower.
Or to frame it differently you can see willpower as a sort of reservoir of self-control.
Every time you do something that requires willpower or self control you deplete the
reservoir.
If it’s a reservoir with a limited amount of willpower or self-control,
I can imagine that you want to apply it in the best possible way,
to get the best outcome out of it.
How do we do it?
The best way to change you behavior, given this concept of willpower,
is by creating new habits or new rituals.
A habit or ritual is an action that you do automatically,
therefore it does not require any willpower or self-control,
you just do it without thinking.
Luckily, there is a lots of research available on how
people can change their habits or rituals.
Tony Schwarz has made a very useful checklist for this.
Let me illustrate this checklist with a personal example of a situation in which I was able
to change my behavior.
I had some back problems and therefore I had to work less.
The first check was about creating an ambition that is on the one hand very realistic but on the
other hand it is also motivating enough to get you exited.
What I decided up on was to finish every day at six.
This was realistic as well as motivating.
The second check is about how you define it.
It should be very precise and very specific.
In my case finishing every day at 6 is neither really precise nor specific.
It more an outcome than actually doing something.
Therefore I framed it as: “Start every day with those tasks that needed
to be get done that day, instead of doing something else”.
That is specific enough to get me going.
So for instance not starting with fun email or going on Whatsapp?
Start with the task at hand in the morning.
Yes exactly.
That is a good point.
That is also where to third check is about: You need to understand what are you going
to resist, when you are implementing this habit.
Because typically you already have some type of behavior.
You need to be conscious: What am I not going to do and what am I going
to do instead.
That is check number 3.
Number four is more about understanding what are other commitments that I made,
that I now need to compete against.
For my case I was also committed to professional excellence or doing a good job.
Sometimes I thought at six o clock, if I work on this a little bit longer this
will be better.
That were the sort of internal conflicts I had to resolve before I could implement my
new habit.
That is number four.
Number five is about understanding that you can only implement one significant new habit
at a time and that this takes time.
This typically takes about 30 days.
I can imagine that it is quite hard to do that 30 days.
It is very important that you realize that this is a struggle.
It is not going to be easy and there are going to be instances where you not complying with
your new habit.
You need to except that and cut yourself from slack and just start over again.
Until you can do it without thinking, it just takes some time.
So at the first day of the 30 days it takes a lot of willpower and self-control to conscious
choose something else and you say that in the cause of the 30 days it becomes less difficult
It becomes more as a ritual.
It’s more in your system and hence after 30 days is going to be fully ingrained and
than you can move on to the next thing you want to change.
– Yes – I understand this be still it sounds very difficult.
Do you have any other thoughts or advise for us?
Yes, you can become more strategic about your reservoir
of willpower.
To give you an example you can think about, what are the situations that are typically
requiring my willpower, which are not really essential to my life
and than trying to eliminate those situations.
In my case: Every morning when I got up I would have a
full range of serial options.
One of them was really healthy and the others were very unhealthy.
Every morning I would require my self-control, I would tap into my reservoir of willpower
to make the right choice about my breakfast, while it was not really a useful decision.
What I did was, I eliminated all those other options.
I got rid of them; I did not buy them anymore so that I only
had one type of serial in my house.
This is allows me to use my willpower of implementing new habits.
Thank you Peter that sounds like a very good checklist that we can start working on.
We will do that with the participants.
They will take one thing that they want to change and they will try to follow the checklist
and apply it.
We will see what comes out of it.
Thank you very much for your time and I wish you a wonderful day.