3 new ways to think about breaking career-limiting habits

Topic: Resilience

We all have them – habits that we know will hold us back if we don’t get a handle and yet we never quite get around to breaking. If willpower and traditional goal planning methods aren’t getting you the results you crave, let science guide you through a less conventional path to a healthier you.

TAKE A VACATION FROM YOUR BAD HABIT

You start every day with a to-do list, but by midday, your carefully laid plans are in the shredder and you’ve reverted to type: frantically firing off emails left, right and centre, responding to last-minute demands and curveballs as they come flying into your inbox.

You’ve tried setting aside dedicated time for email management, but no sooner have you started a new task, you find yourself drawn like a magnet to the send/receive button.

Neuroscientists describe the brainwork at play in this example as the conflict between the basal ganglia (the part of the brain which plays a key role in the development of emotions, memories and pattern recognition) and the prefrontal cortex (where decisions are made).

When we’re faced with new challenges, the prefrontal cortex goes into overdrive. But when we’re on autopilot, as we are when we’re in habit mode, the decision-making part of your brain is effectively asleep.

Conventional wisdom suggests that in order to stop unhealthy behaviours, you have to wake up that pre-frontal cortex – override your basal ganglia with a decisive instruction to act in a different way. But it’s not that easy.

What works more effectively, argues The Power Of Habit author Charles Duhigg, is to present yourself with different cues, so that your basal ganglia isn’t awakened at all, and your prefrontal cortex has to do some work.

“It's a great reason why changing a habit on a vacation is one of the proven most-successful ways to do it,” he says. "Because all your old cues and all your old rewards aren't there anymore. So you have this ability to form a new pattern and hopefully be able to carry it over into your life.”

Obviously, you can’t take a mini break every time you want to switch a workplace behaviour, but you can look for ways to change the context you’re working within. In the above example, that could mean hot-desking in a different part of the building where there’s no Wi-Fi or booking into a meeting room with just a pad and paper where you can work in a different, distraction-free environment.

Do this for a week and you might see your relationship with email changed in the long term.

OUT WITH BABY STEPS, IN WITH FULL THROTTLE

Avoidance is the keyword you’d use to describe your approach to exercising, networking and planning your team 1-2-1s.

You know all that needs to change so you’re working up a plan. “When eating elephants, one bite at a time,” is the advice often given to someone embarking on challenging goals.

But when it comes to breaking bad habits, research out of the Centre for Mindfulness and Human Potential at the University of California, suggests that by taking a ‘baby steps’ approach you might be short-changing yourself.⁽ⁱ⁾

Students tasked with making lasting alterations to their routines were more likely to have made substantial emotional and cognitive changes if they had dramatically overhauled their lifestyles than those who made smaller, incremental tweaks.

The same was true six weeks after the end of the crash course in new behaviours – the effects had stuck. “The true limits of cognitive, affective, and neural plasticity remain a mostly unexplored frontier of scientific understanding,” the authors wrote.

In layman terms, if you really want to break a long-held habit, all guns blazing might see a better outcome than measured caution.

WHEN SELF-CONTROL DOESN’T WORK, TRY SELF-MANIPULATION

Rather than trying to control your thoughts, take control of what’s controlling you.

The subtle difference between these modes of behaviour was a pattern seen in study participants who managed to effectively break their career-limiting habits.

“As we reviewed what separated the successful few from the rest,” writes Social Scientist Joseph Grenny , we found a quirky distinction: The successful people talked about themselves the way an experimental psychologist might refer to a cherished lab rat.

For example, a shy manager with executive aspirations talked about how he took himself to the employee cafeteria three times a week to eat lunch with a complete stranger. Tickling with anxiety, he stripped himself of his smart phone before exiting his office — knowing that if it was with him, he would retreat to it. He knew that if he simply ensconced himself in these circumstances, he would connect with new people — a habit and skill he wanted to cultivate.”

These insightful individuals were using knowledge of the habit that was controlling them, to control the habit.

“Seventy years of social science evidence says … that we have far less control over our behaviour than we think. We are profoundly shaped by outside forces that manipulate, distract, arouse, and impede us,” says Grenny.

“Those in our study who were best at changing their behaviour were the ones who bowed to this fact and made it work in their favour.”

Techniques they employed to manipulate their cognitive processes included:

creating distance (if you’re trying to avoid procrastination, don’t sit near people who like to chat)
finding good habit role models (mixing more with those whose behaviour you’d like to emulate, less with those who possess habits you’re trying to shift)
and continual practice (see the habit as something you will only eradicate by doing something else in its place, over and over again until a replacement habit is formed).