Do You Actually Want Change?

Do you verbally say you desire change and then resist what's necessary to achieve it? We've all done it. And in this episode, I discuss why.

•  The Brain Prefers a "Predictable Miserable" over an "Unpredictable Happy" 
•  Cognitive Comfort vs. Executive Fatigue 
•  The "Intention-Behavior Gap" 
•  The Secret Benefit of Staying Stuck 

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Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29th! ✨

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the psychological barriers to change, using her Decoding the Unicorn podcast. She explains why people often prefer predictable misery over potential happiness, citing the brain's preference for familiar routines and the status quo bias. Causey highlights the cognitive disconnect between wanting an outcome and the effort required to achieve it, termed the intention-behavior gap. She also explores the concept of secondary gains, where staying in a bad situation provides hidden benefits. Causey shares personal anecdotes and examples, including her own experiences and those of Dag Hammarskjöld, to illustrate these points.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Change resistance, status quo bias, cognitive comfort, executive fatigue, intention behavior gap, hyperbolic discounting, secondary gains, lifers in denial, intermittent reinforcement, potential vs. reality, manipulation, emotional risk, habit formation, prefrontal cortex.

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com And now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I will be talking about, do you really want change, or are you merely paying lip service to the idea of change? Change, in theory, sounds good, but the minute that you have to actually make changes to whatever you're doing day in and day out, it's suddenly not quite so appealing. I'll be doing this as a crossover episode between my two daytime broadcasts, so if you're here for episode 46 of Decoding the Unicorn, the podcast, welcome, or if you're here through the Causey Consulting podcast, welcome. Whichever door you came through, I'm glad that you're here. If you have found yourself thinking I'd really like to do x, y, and Z, but then when it's time to execute, I falter. Stay tuned.

Just a reminder, Sara's award-winning biography of Dag Hammarskjöld, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now, back to the show.

So, I want to start out by first looking at the why, because we've all done this as human beings, including me. We've all had this moment of I really want x, y, and z to happen, but then when it is time to put the rubber to the road, oh wait a minute. Maybe I don't. Why are we like this? So, to start with, the brain prefers predictable misery over unpredictable or possible happiness. You've probably heard the cliche before. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't1. would think, why don't I get into a situation where there is no devil, but the brain's primary directive is keep the body alive, and to do that it acts like a prediction machine or a big calculator. If A, then B. We've seen this movie before, we've been down this road, or we've been down an awfully similar road, and I'm scared. So, your current routine, it may be unfulfilling, misery making, draining, but you're alive. If you're listening to this broadcast today, you're still here, and your brain knows exactly how much energy it will require to survive a typical day in the life of you right now, but whenever you introduce something new, a new behavior, a new routine, a new strategy, then you also introduce uncertainty, and to our primal brain, uncertainty means danger, it means I don't know what that road looks like, I don't know if C, then D, or what if it's e, what if I think two plus two equals four, and it turns out to be six, and we're all in a bind. Psychologists call this the status quo bias. So we naturally perceive that any disruption to the current state of affairs could be a loss, it could be a threat, you could die, it's big, it's scary, and even if the change is better for us, and we can see objectively that it's better for us. The primal part of the brain is like, I don't know, man, we should probably slow down. A second point is cognitive comfort versus executive fatigue. So, the daily routines that we have are kind of like the grooves in a well-worn record, you know. Some of you young folks might not even remember the old LPs, but after you had played a record album for a while, it was sort of like the needle just found the right groove. It just automatically went in, because you've driven down this particular road 1000s or hundreds of times you've listened to the same record, and the needle automatically knows where to go. Your brain gets a pass card, it gets to just go on autopilot. Think about if you've ever been driving to a familiar location, your best friend's house, your place of work, the grocery store that you always go to, and then you get there and you park, and you're like, I can't even remember getting here. I don't even remember the drive. That's because your brain was on autopilot, and it relies on a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which is a very old part of the human brain responsible for our habits. When you try to break the routine, start a new goal, then you have to shift gears. It's kind of like taking that LP off the turntable and putting a new, fresh one on, and the needle is like, wait a minute, I don't have this automatic path where I know exactly where I'm going. This engages another part called the prefrontal cortex, that part. The brain is responsible for the more conscious or conscientious decision making, planning, and so-called willpower. The prefrontal cortex is like an energy hog, and it gets tired fast. So, as a result, when people say, "I want change, they have to then use their prefrontal cortex to start imagining what the future looks like. If I lose weight, what will happen? If I gain muscle mass, what will happen? If I leave this job that stinks that I don't even really like, and I go somewhere else, what will happen? That gets exhausting. I'm even exhausted just kind of talking about it right now.

So then when it gets to be a cold, snowy morning, and you think, man, going to the gym sounds awful, or it's a rainy Tuesday night, and calling and ordering a pizza, you know, it's the delivery person's job to get out in the elements, not mine. Maybe I should just call and get a pizza brought here instead of cooking something at home. That part of your brain is exhausted, so that basal ganglia defaults back to the old comfortable groove. A third point is the intention behavior gap. There is a cognitive disconnect, even though it may sound like there shouldn't be. There is. There's a massive cognitive disconnect between wanting an outcome versus wanting the process that's required to get it, and in behavioral psychology, this is called the intention behavior gap. So, what we value in theory, or our intentions, could be abstract rewards, long-term distant benefits, like having a better body, getting in shape, switching careers, achieving financial freedom, or financial flexibility. We think about low friction. We imagine when we're just sitting there in the theater of our mind, having our daydream, we imagine the goal requiring not as much physical energy, or not as much emotional risk, even if it's not fair to say we picture it taking no effort at all. It's kind of like when you watch a movie or a TV show, and you see somebody going to work, like I just recently watched that movie, Julie and Julia, and the woman is at work, and she has this difficult job that sometimes emotionally exhausts her, but we're only seeing her at that job for like a couple of minutes here and a couple of minutes there. The movie, for the most part, is focused on what she's doing evenings, mornings, and weekends, before, after, and away from the job with this cooking pursuit that she has, so that's kind of how it is in the theater of our mind. We're picturing moving to another job, but we're only seeing these snippets in our brain. We're not actually there eight hours or nine hours or 10 hours a day trapped in the chair. Now contrast that with what we face in reality, aka behavior. The immediate costs could be short term or maybe even long term discomfort, waking up early, going to bed early, feeling incompetent at a new skill, because you're you're a newbie, you're a novice, getting to know new people at a new job, trying to figure out where I, where do you fit in? What click am I going to run with here? Skipping a favorite snack, because it's like I probably really shouldn't have a candy bar today. That's probably not the healthiest choice for me right now. So then we go from low friction, which is the theater of the mind, to high friction, which is the real world execution, fear, awkwardness, routine disruption, getting up early and feeling sleepy. I myself am not an early bird by nature. I had to be an early bird by force when I was working in corporate America. There just wasn't any other choice, and I can remember being up in the 4o'clock hour trying to exercise before work, and nothing was even warmed up yet. My muscles, my bones, everything was just stiff and rebellious, and I'm like, I deeply, deeply do not want to be out here doing this. That's a high friction situation. Human beings are hardwired for something called hyperbolic discounting, which means we tend to value immediate short-term rewards more than distant pie in the sky long-term rewards. The immediate comfort of staying the same almost always beats out the future promise of changing, not always, but frequently enough that we can say almost always last, but not least, secondary gains. The secret benefit of staying stuck. So, sometimes people resist change because their current bad situation is actually providing them with some hidden unconscious benefit, and this is called a secondary gain. For example, you may know somebody that's all the time complaining about their job, boss from Hades, dead end, no upward mobility tasks are rote and repetitive. I go every day and I just numb out in the mind, it's terrible. Coworker who's a backstabber, etc.

So, why are they complaining all the time, but yet staying remaining in the job gives them the benefit - I'm using air quotes here - the benefit of never having to risk rejection in an interview to try something new and maybe fail at it. It allows them to bond with other people over the shared misery, whether that's bonding with coworkers about it. Oh, our boss is terrible, and let's just all spend our lunch hour talking about what a terrible person he or she is, or hanging out with friends. Oh, work sucks. Yeah, tell me about it. My job too. Let's, let's gripe for two hours at the bar tonight, and it shields them from the terrifying pressure of having to perform at a higher level somewhere else. Let's face it, we get in a job, we get in a rut, we kind of know what our role and what the expectations are supposed to be there, and the idea of stepping away from that and elevating your game, it might look really cool in the theater of your mind, but then we actually have to do it, it becomes terrifying until a person identifies the hidden payout that they are getting from staying stuck, their unconscious mind will actively sabotage any attempt to move forward. So, it's not that human beings are fundamentally lazy, hypocritical liars, etc. That's not the primary driver for resisting change. It can feel like that if somebody is leading you on, but they resist change because of the metabolic expense that forces your brain to fight its own biology, and you cannot beat it by having these big bursts of inspiration that is something that you see in movie movies, not just the theater of your mind, but on the silver screen somebody is like let's start a new business and then we see a montage of them working till all hours of the night in Grandma's basement or in someone's garage and then they create the next billion dollar idea that does not always happen in real life my friends one trick is to make the new behavior really small and low friction, so that your brain doesn't see it as a threat. It's, it's a peanut, it's a little kernel of something, it's not something big, hairy, and scary, it's just something little, it's nothing to even pay much attention to, let alone be afraid of. Now I want to shift into a story. Whenever I was still doing staffing, recruiting, and HR work, particularly when I was working outside the home for other people in the third-party agency milieu, there were people that I would encounter from time to time that I labeled privately as lifers in denial, and they had exactly the things that I've been talking about. They tended to be at a job somewhere in the eight to 12 year range, maybe occasionally 15 years, but typically eight to 12 years seemed to be the primary spot where I would encounter these people, and they would come in, and, oh, they would have a list of grievances, like on Seinfeld, Festivus has the airing of grievances, oh, they had grievances, my boss is terrible, they're thinking about bringing in a CEO from a competitor, and I already don't like the person. My department is changing, and not for the better. Corporate might move to Seattle or to New York, and I don't want to go to the coasts. I don't want to uproot my life in the Midwest. This is all terrible, or I think that they're going to bring a different set of values than what we're used to, and this is all terrible. I look around at people who have been at the company for 30 years. I've been to so many retirement parties, people just get in there and they stay and they never leave, and I look at those people and I think, my God in heaven, that can't be me, on and on and on. Oh, they had complaints, and they love to trap me in an interview room and tell me for 30 or 40 minutes straight all the things that they did not like about this place, but when it was actually time to go, they never did. Even if we look at Dag Hammscholt, he had been with the Swedish government for years, and he was in a place that felt relatively stagnant.

He was not aligned with a political party, and had sort of thought this is going to be a major obstacle to me ever becoming Prime Minister, because that was really the only way for him to move up. He had been through so many different jobs in the Swedish government and had done them incredibly well, always getting promoted every time. Which is no surprise to me. The thought process became I may be able to make it to Prime Minister without aligning with a political party, or I may not, but he had started to feel stagnant in what he was doing. Then he gets nominated to be UN Secretary General, and it's a bit like flying up to the tippity top of a of a long ladder, skipping many rungs in between. It's a bit like pouring absolute rocket fuel on someone's career, and that was scary for him, but he did it anyway. It was very much a field of fear and do it anyway kind of moment. A private introvert catapulted into a massively public and also scrutinized role, we may not think much of the UN Secretary General now. Most people don't even know who he is or care, they don't even know his mandate or anything about him. But back at that time, in the 1950s when Dag took over the position, that role was considered to be the president or the prime minister of the world. So it's like Dag goes from being a Swedish civil servant who maybe might become the Swedish PM if he can somehow maneuver around the political party issue to becoming the president or prime minister of the world. That's quite something. When I would encounter these lifers in denial, it always seemed to go the same way. You get their requirements, you learn what types of roles they were looking for, what kind of salary range that needed to be targeted. You call them up, hey, have an opportunity at Company ABC. Here are the details about it. Are you interested? No. And then they give you a string of excuses. Well, the title bump would actually be pretty significant, as would the pay bump. This is going to give you a 20% raise. Are you sure you don't want to consider it? No, my wife's cousins, aunts, uncles, husbands, brothers, mailman once told me a negative story about somebody who works there, so I don't think I want to go, and you're sitting there like, what, what are you like? Who even are you right now? I just busted my behind to find this opportunity for you. You spent no insignificant length of time telling me how much you hate your current job and the current company. I'm giving you an out, and you're saying no with the flimsiest of excuses. Why? Well, the information that I just gave you is telling us why, and I would add to it something that goes beyond, let's say, this, the scientific or psychological explanation. Some people are just playing games, that's the truth. I know that, that might sound a little harsh, but someone has to say it. Some people are just playing games, they're playing a pantomime, they're play acting, and other people are, in their own weird way, probably even subconsciously trying to get back at their job or trying to get back at their boss, they don't actually want to leave, they just feel like they're doing something naughty, something a little bit cloak and dagger, like I'm going to go to a recruiter and I'm going to tell the recruiter 15 million things that I hate about my boss, and then I hate about my job, and then I hate about the company, I'm not actually going to leave, I just want to go have a super secret gripe session in confidence. So, let's talk for a minute about people who are playing a game, and let's take it out of the realm of they're doing it and they're not even aware of what they're doing or why.

We would categorize that as manipulation, and it can happen across the board, relationships, friendships, careers, there are some modern trendy names like future faking or bread crumbing, and this is where somebody intentionally dangles the promise of a better future to keep you hooked or compliant or invested in the present moment, but they have no intention of ever delivering it, and this is another situation that happens on both sides of the table, employees saying I'm planning to stay or I'm planning to leave, knowing they're not, or bosses saying yes, you're going to be up for that promotion, don't you worry about it, I'm going to make sure, and then you don't get the promotion, and they never had any intention of giving it to you anyway. So, here's why people play that game, what they're getting out of it, and how we can try to spot it. So, number one, why do they play that game? If someone doesn't want to change, if they don't want to make a move, why not just say so? Because honesty would cost them whatever benefits that they're currently getting from you by pretending that change is just around the corner, wink, they can get some gains. This could be access to your resources, your emotional support, your labor, your money, your validation, your time. If they were to walk in and say, I'm never going to change, let's use my lifers in denial. As an example, if they came into my office and said, I just need 30 minutes of your time for free, I'm not going to pay you anything to be here, I just want to take up 30 minutes of your time to gripe about my current situation. Will you take 30 minutes out of your busy day? Now, keep in mind you're working on commission, and if you don't close deals, you don't eat when you take the time out of your day to listen to me gripe, and then I'll disappear, and you'll never see me again. I just want to gripe to a stranger without paying them. You would tell them no, you would tell them to get lost, and somewhere in their brain they know that, so they're not going to come in and say I'm never going to change, because they know you'd walk away and take your resources with you. Another facet is control and compliance. Promising change is an effective way to shut down an argument, to de-escalate tension, to keep somebody from walking out the door. It can buy the other person a few days, weeks, months, maybe even years of peace and compliance, because you're waiting around for whatever upgrade they promised. It also helps them to avoid the bad guy or bad girl label. Some people are too cowardly, they don't want to be perceived as the villain in their own story. So, if they tell you they want to change, but they can't quite get it right, I'm trying, but I'm just not succeeding yet, or I really want to leave this job, but you haven't pitched me anything that's compelling yet. They get to play the tragic struggling figure rather than the person who just doesn't care enough, or the person who's stringing you along. Point number two, the mechanics of the game. This type of game relies on a psychological concept called intermittent reinforcement schedule, and it's a similar mechanism to what makes sitting at a slot machine addictive for some people. If the slot machine never ever paid out, then people would walk away after two or three spins, but most people wouldn't ever even go. There's no chance you'll just sit here and press a button, and press a button, and press a button, or pull a lever over and over, and just waste your money all night. But if a slot machine pays out just enough to keep somebody hoping to keep their attention grasped, then people will sit there for hours pumping money into it, thinking I'm that much closer. Every dollar or every coin that I put into this machine puts me that much closer to the big jackpot, and then it will all be worth it.

In a relationship, the person playing the game will give the victim just enough breadcrumbs, a single deep conversation, a burst of effort for a few days, a tearful apology, a sad, tragic story from childhood that may or may not be true. To reset the internal timer, and then it convinces you that they're capable of it, that they are trying, that everything is genuine. So then you stick around for a while, waiting for that next crumb, so how can we tell the difference between struggle and strategy? If somebody is genuinely struggling to change, the will is there, but maybe there is some legitimate struggle, they might fail, but you can see them taking those messy real-world steps, going to therapy, reading a book, making a plan, seeing a dietitian, showing up early instead of showing up late, etc. They'll be vulnerable and accountable, and they'll admit to you why it's hard. They'll take ownership of setbacks, and they won't blame external factors. Well, yeah, this happened, but it's everybody else's fault but mine. Consistent direction progress may be slow and nonlinear, but the overall trajectory is moving forward over time. Conversely, if somebody is intentionally playing a game and leading you on, they tend to be words-oriented. They can offer you beautiful, elaborate speeches, seemingly heartfelt apologies, and a lot of hot air promises, and then no real world execution. It's like what lawyers say: verbal agreements are worth the paper they're printed on, which is nothing. Talk is cheap, and it's easy. They can be deflective and conditional. Change is always dependent on the perfect time. When things calm down, I'll leave this job. I can't leave them right now. When I get off of this big case, I'll leave this law firm. I'll spend more time at home when, when something calms down after the holidays, we'll do this and this and that, and then it just never seems to happen. You also want to watch out for cyclical patterns, because there tends to be crisis, promise to change, brief honeymoon period, return to baseline, new crisis, and then the whole thing starts over again. So, the ultimate metric here is to believe the baseline. If somebody is playing games, then your empathy. Can become their greatest weapon against you. They rely on your willingness to look at their potential rather than actual reality. This has an application in the business world as well. There was a person I knew, and he had started his own staffing agency with no previous experience whatsoever, and he kept saying, well, I made $100,000 I know there's potential here. I, he said that to me so many times. I know there's potential here. I've seen it, I've seen it, I know there's potential. I made 100 grand, I made six figures. The one thing somebody else had been coaching him before me. The one thing that that man never asked, but should have. It's a very simple question. How much money did you spend in order to make $100,000 When I asked the person that question, he said 90, and I almost fell out of my chair. He spent $90,000 to make 100 Now we're talking about all in. We're not talking about a $100,000 profit. We're talking about he spent $90,000 got back 100,000 for a net result of 10, and I told him there are easier ways in this world to make $10,000 than what you just did, side hustles, all sorts of things that can can lead you to get that amount of money. If anything had gone wrong and you were $90,000 in the hole, this story could have a completely different ending, but one of the problems that I found in his situation was that he was absolutely drunk on potential. He just over and over and over again, their potential, the potential, the potential. I've already seen it, I've already seen it, and it's like I don't know where he is today. I hope he's doing well, and I also hope that he found other ways to make money, because spending, going that far into debt, spending that kind of money to net so little, it just seems scary to me. There is a rule in real estate: never buy a house based on the blueprint if the foundation hasn't even been poured.

If someone has been promising to change a specific behavior for months or years, and their daily baseline actions have remained identical. The game is the reality. They've shown you exactly who they are and what they intend to do. So, the question then shifts from why are they doing this, or why are they like this, to how long am I willing to wait around for a future that's not coming, and you definitely learn this fast, I think, in commission-based jobs, because you just simply don't have the time to wait around on somebody who's well, I don't know, I don't want this, and I don't want that, and I don't want this, and I don't want that. You have to be careful about not allowing yourself to become a free therapist, if you are a therapist, you want to bring somebody in in a clinical setting and be properly paid and compensated for your work, but there are plenty of people out there, all humans at some point or another, who say I want this change, but in reality they don't, so I would just invite you to think about whatever, whatever it is that you've been considering. If there's a place in your life where you feel stuck, just ask yourself these questions: Do I really feel motivated to make the change, even if I have to baby step it, teeny tiny mouse baby steps? Am I willing to do it, or am I just fooling myself? A point to ponder. Stay safe, take good care of yourself. And I will see you in the next episode.

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