Bridging Insight Into Action

A couple of people noticed and pointed out that I didn’t answer question 7 in my personal example in the post Seven Powerful Questions – Personal Development Made Practical. I have updated the post by answering question 7. I got a little rushed getting that post out.

I told you I struggle with number 7, didn’t I?

The following reader comment and question is a great one and we will use it to explore “bridging” specifically. Systematically going through this real example will help you understand the four conditions that must be present to bridge insight into action and therefore reality. We wrap up this post with those four conditions…

Here is part of A Valued Reader’s email to me…

Hi, Otis!

On the 7 questions, how is #7 “How will you ‘bridge” the above into your life?” different from #3 “What is the #1 behavior you intend to do instead?”  I read the (excellent) article, but it ended with explaining #6.

Let’s say I choose “health” to be my #1 goal.  My behaviors need to be get enough sleep, eat well, meditate and schedule (and do) exercise, [two more personal things]…, putting an accountability structure around each until they become habit.  Are those actions the bridge?” — A Valued Reader

I love this comment and question. I will give my responses below. As I do, notice that a very common issue is conflating the answer to question 1 with question 7. Let’s tackle that, first.

Question 1: What ONE thing do you want to accomplish?

My response:

Regarding your ONE big thing — there isn’t one way of writing it and you have to know yourself to write it well. For example, you have defined what “health” would look like as six things — sleep, eat well, meditate, exercise, etc. (I left out the seventh thing — accountability structure — you listed, and you will see why later.)

To be clear, these six things are not your answers to question 3 or question 7. These six things define your answer to question 1. This will be more clear as I explain…

So let’s start with saying those six things actually define what you mean by health, and therefore belong as part of your answer to question 1 — not question 3 or 7. So your answer to question 1 might look like—

“The ONE thing I want to accomplish is to get better at attending to my health. And that looks like spending more of my time, focus, and energy doing some combination of the following six things — sleep, eat well, meditate, exercise, [two more things].”

By the way, another way to make your change goal more specific is to place an element of time on it.  You could simply say:

“I want to intentionally spend x hours per week on my health and feel good about the choices of how I’m spending that time. The primary ways I’d be spending my time is in one or more of six ways — sleep, eat well, meditate, exercise, [two more ways].”

Look at what I’ve done in the above response. I’ve encouraged A Valued Reader to more clearly define what they really want to accomplish in 2019 (question 1), moving six of the seven items they might have thought as “bridging” behaviors in question 7. This is quite common, actually.

Next, I turned my attention to helping A Valued Reader start to imagine the behavior they’d need to start doing instead. Here goes.

Question 2: How will you trip yourself up?

My response continued…

Now, let’s turn to look at behavior. We have to zoom out on this a bit, with a goal like this, because it seems like the behavior that is tripping us up is simply that we aren’t doing the six health-related things, right?

Well, let’s zoom out a titch and come at it back-arse-wards in order to sneak up on this little ditty. Ask yourself this:

“In order to have the time, focus, and energy to do one or more of those six health-related things and therefore attend to my health, what will I need to stop doing?”

Gulp.

Really let that question work on you. We have the illusion that we can fit in more stuff without giving anything up. This isn’t true for most people, because most people have all the hours of their day filled up with something and are already expending all the energy and focus they have. So do a fearless inventory of where you might get the time, focus, and energy to do this new thing. To the extent you can, assign time to what it is that you will need to stop doing in order to start doing the actions required to accomplish the ONE thing.

Let that question work on you, and your answer to question 2 — What behaviors will trip you up? — will emerge in front of your eyes. I’d write it something like this.

“The behavior that trips me up is I spend time, focus, and energy doing x, y, and z instead of attending to my health.”

Once you are clear on that, you know what you will need to sacrifice in order to have what you say you want. Then you should ask the question,

“Am I willing to give up these things in order to have the health I want?”

It is really important to answer this question honestly, because the honest answer may be “no”. Then, you can reimagine your ONE thing (question 1). Maybe cut down the scope of it. Or change it altogether.

I find it refreshing to tell myself straightforwardly what I will need to sacrifice in order to get what I want.

If you are really serious about what you want in 2019, and you are using those seven questions to help, I hope you are tracking with me here. A Valued Reader has brought up some of the most common “trip-up’s” to what appear to be very simple questions. Another reader emailed me a list of their answers to the seven, and the answers were so ambiguous that they are totally un-actionable.

The questions are simple, yes, but the more clear the answers are the easier the bridging process becomes. I went on to help A Valued Reader imagine what they might do instead of those things that are taking them away from health.

Question 3: What will you do instead?

My response continued…

So, then, how to answer question #3: What behavior will I do instead? It isn’t about doing those six things. Those six things belong to the answer to question 1. Those six things define success.

Instead, we are looking for the ONE behavior that will trump the answer you wrote to question 2 above. We are looking for the antidote. This is often more straightforward than it seems, and people struggle with it because it seems like it should be complicated. It isn’t. But the more clear the answer is to question 2, the easier it is to see the answer to question 3 straightforwardly.

So, staying with the example above, you might write your answer to question 3 like this…

“In situations where I’d normally spend my time, focus, and energy doing x, y, and z, I will catch myself, redirect, and pivot to spend all or some of that time, focus, and energy doing something for my health.”

I hope you can now see the difference the “zoom out” and “back our way in” makes. The answer to question 3 isn’t about doing those six things for your health. The answer to question 3 is the behavior that will enable you to do those six things for your health. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this insight.

In other words, the six things you want for your health define question 1, but they aren’t the answer to question 3. The answer to question 3 is cultivating a new behavior and dropping an old behavior that — for most people — will be incredibly difficult. Which is why questions 4 (what anxiety will come up when you sacrifice the old behaviors) and 5 (what you tell yourself to justify the old behavior) is so important.

We’ve now more clearly defined A Valued Reader’s:

• ONE thing, which means doing six specific activities.
• The behaviors that keep them from doing those six things, and
• One behavior they will do instead.

If you put yourself in their shoes, you will begin to see how powerful clear answers to these questions are. Now that we’ve tidied that up, let’s get to the bridging aspect.

Question 7: How will you bridge this into your life?

My response continued…

This is where one of the items you listed — “putting an accountability structure around each” — belongs. This one isn’t part of the definition of health. This is quite common — we mix the “what” (the six things) with the “how” (which is the nature of an accountability structure.)

To keep this somewhat simple, yet practical, my answer to question 7 usually involves three things:

1. Reflect Weekly: Put the answer to the seven questions in your journal, or someplace you will review them weekly. Ask the simple question, “So how’d I do this week?” Claim your wins, and face the setbacks. If the setbacks feel bad to you as you reflect on them, do self-compassion practice right on the spot. Then, rekindle your intention, and do something specific within 24 hours, even if it is small and only takes 2, or 5, or 15 minutes.

2. Test Weekly: Once per week, purposefully push yourself outside your comfort zone and into your discomfort zone related to those 7 questions.

The problem is, we often won’t do what we’ve outlined in the seven questions until we feel like doing it. Or when it is convenient.

Once per week, force yourself to do it — even if for only 2 or 5 or 15 minutes — despite the fact that you don’t feel like it or that it is inconvenient or whatever. In other words, once per week, be stoic. Care not about comfort or convenience. Do the action, however small, that interrupts the old pattern and freaks the ego out. This breaks the habitual patterns and this also puts our ego on notice that there’s a new sheriff in town.

The purpose of this test actually isn’t first and foremost to change the behavior. First and foremost it is an opportunity to see if the anxiety you wrote in your answer to question 4 and the justification you wrote in question 5 are actually valid.

They are very real, but are they true?

Secondly, acting in spite of the anxiety builds inhibitory fibers from your prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, meaning you are building the capacity to defy that anxiety and loosen its grip in driving your default behavior… those listed in the answer to your question 2.

Testing is about being stoic. Yet it is also about being kind to yourself. And be clear that being kind to yourself is different than being nice to yourself. When we are nice to ourselves, we may be supporting ourselves in our own weaknesses. We give ourselves what we want, not what we need. Kindness, however, implies keeping in mind and heart what is good for someone. In this case, for ourselves. Kindness, therefore, is not always “nice” and doesn’t always feel “nice”.

The point here is that you are intentionally subjecting yourself to discomfort, for even a short period of time. If this is done intentionally, whilst reflecting on your answers to 4 and 5, you will gain self-knowledge — knowledge of yourself. You will begin to see the underlying system that gives rise to the behaviors in your answer to question 2. As you bring that into the light of your awareness, the system starts changing. In turn, this makes doing the behavior in your answer to question 3 much, much easier.

Change the underlying system (internal dialogue, the swirling thoughts, emotions, and instinctual drives), and the behavior naturally and sustainably changes.

3. Report Weekly: Report what you are seeing, experiencing, and doing regarding all this to someone who cares for you enough to challenge you and also support you unconditionally. It is even better if they are also working on something and want reciprocity of unconditional support with radical candor. If there are three of you, even better.

This is what we refer to (Sara actually came up with the term) as a peer development group. The shared intent of the group is to be both a secure base for one another and provide unconditional support, and also give and receive a radical level of candor and challenge that defies our social conditioning and therefore our typical relationship experience.

So, the difference between questions 3 and 7 is this…

The answer to question 3 is the one specific behavior you will need to do in order for the ONE thing in question 1 to become possible for you.

The answer to question 7 is more meta than that; the answer to question 7 defines the structure(s) you will put in place. These structures are big assets that will help you:

(1) Not do your behavior from question 2 and instead do behavior more like question 3, and

(2) in so doing you learn about yourself, about the system running within you (partially captured in your answers to questions 4 and 5).

(3) Then you can more easily sustain action towards the ONE thing that came up for you in answering question 1. AND, in the process…

(4) You are not only achieving the ONE thing and achieving the benefits you listed in question 6, but you are also integrating your past and are healing yourself in the present. 

This is why I say the seven questions are powerful and make personal development practical. Their true power is much greater than first meets the eye and is only unlocked through a continual process of contemplating the answers, acting on them, observing the internal and external impacts, meditating on them, and then once again contemplating the next action and doing it. Again and again.

Listen, if you are still with me I know that was a lot to go through. But I’m telling you if you will soak this in and think about your answers to the seven questions in light of what I went through in detail here, your answers may become much more clear. And clarity is power.

The Bottom Line

The point of this article was to help you understand what it takes to bridge insight into action and therefore into reality. If you step back away from all that I have said above, you will see the answer.

To bridge insight into action and therefore reality, you need four conditions:

1. The insight must be made clear. Ambiguity leads to nowhere, usually. Clear means specific, observable, doable. It doesn’t mean perfect or complete. And it doesn’t need to be epic. But, yes, the insight must be made clear.

2. The meta-behavior that will trip us up, the system giving rise to it, and the antidote behavior must be made specific. We must see it, and then drag it out of the shadows into the light of day. Only then can we see that the fire chief (the one who wants to achieve the ONE thing) also happens to be the arsonist (that part of us that persists in the counterproductive behavior).

3. We must intentionally leave our comfort zone and tolerate discomfort. The “easy” button at Staples isn’t going to get us there. We must frequently, consistently, intentionally, even for very short intervals of time, disrupt the old behavior (answer to question 2), and do the new behavior (answer to question 3), even though our amygdala may be screaming “we are going to die” or we experience other forms of uneasiness, anxiety, or discomfort. We do this primarily to start re-coding the underlying system, which in turn enables us to sustainably change our behaviors.

4. We must put support structures in place. This. Is. Hard. Work. We can’t see what we can’t see about ourselves. We need tough love, from others. Fierce compassion from others. We need to continually bring ourselves up against what we say we want and whether we are doing what is required to have it. We must take stock about how it is going. And, left to our old habits and to our own devices… it simply isn’t going to happen.

This is why most people will not sustainably change much of anything in their lifetime. One or more of those four conditions are lacking. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

That’s why I’m here, sharing what I’m sharing. Cheering you on. Telling you where I am with all this in my own journey. Like you, I’m a traveler.

And I have a lot more to say about all of this. So stay tuned. And just wait, for that podcast with Sara on iTunes — Healthy Mind? It is coming.

By April 2019, god-willing. 🙂