The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant
The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant
James Fell
From internationally syndicated fitness columnist and author, James Fell, comes a no-nonsense guide on how to get in shape, fix your finances, alleviate depression and change your life for good.We’ve all been there. Wanting to change your life forever, but only doing it in fits and starts. Feeling inspired to be disciplined one day, then falling back into old habits on the next. Or changing for a few weeks or even months, but then slipping back into familiar behaviours. Bad habits are hard to break for a reason. But you still try because the goal is worth it: slowly and painfully forming new habits to the point where you are able to adhere to a new lifestyle, long-term.Not only do we struggle with all of it but the failure rates of these models are staggering.What if there was a different way? What if sudden moment, which happens to be a surprisingly common occurrence among those who succeed would allow you to skip the struggle of behaviour change and just become a different person in a moment? What if all the motivation they would ever need to change could arrive unbidden because of a life-altering flash of insight? It is the power of epiphany – a triggering event when drive and clarity of purpose for changing one’s life is instantly attained. James Fell’s THE HOLY SHIT MOMENT is about that who have sustained change. The stories outlined in this book examine an abrupt awakening, where a person’s purpose switches course in the space of a few seconds; their life is partitioned into the time before that moment occurred, and what comes after. In an instant, the gradual steps of behavior change are bypassed and life transformation takes hold for good. But is an epiphany something that can be generated?Yes. THE HOLY SHIT MOMENT is a self-help book written in a brash, audacious and informal, your-good-friend-giving-you-the-scoop style, but with the knowledge, research, wisdom and personal anecdotes to back up James’ words in the vein of Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass.
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Source ISBN: 9780008288686
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008288693
Version 2018-12-07
DEDICATION (#ulink_7b11c628-26b8-5d79-9664-71e7e0785e76)
Hi, Mom
CONTENTS
Cover (#u792bf4e7-a04f-5756-b055-c2fda7374b0e)
Title Page (#ufee62e3e-0931-5f8c-8e67-2a0807899513)
Copyright (#ulink_c75161f5-0186-5095-95e3-e6d831c57f63)
Dedication (#ulink_3c30004b-c797-5adf-b1e2-fae35c3ec0a7)
Preface (#ulink_283360af-3603-51db-b81f-476924e931ca)
Introduction: The Librarian Who Put Down the Cigarettes and Picked Up a Sword (#ulink_ff61b994-97b5-5c45-bd61-ac9cee22ffe6)
PART ONE: EPIPHANY AND COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR CHANGE (#ulink_ed8b1730-f071-5ec4-a6d0-917bb7ba7207)
1 The Antidote to Despair: The Euphoria of the Life-Changing Moment (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71)
2 Embracing Chaos: Quantum vs. Linear Behavior Change in the Role of Epiphany (#ulink_92135222-507b-5553-8518-1eb98fb99034)
3 You, Part 2: Finding Purpose via Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO: EPIPHANY AND THE EMOTIONAL SELF (#litres_trial_promo)
4 What’s Going On in There?: The Brain Science of the Holy Shit Moment (#litres_trial_promo)
5 The Rock-Bottom Hypothesis: The Power of Epiphany to Battle Addiction (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The Hand of God: Exploring Religious Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Power of Love: How Passion for Life and Love Inspires Sudden Change (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE: HACKING EPIPHANY (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Dreamers Aren’t Doers: Making Positive Fantasies Work for You Instead of Against You (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Nudging Toward the Leap: Battling the Status Quo and Preparing Your Mind for Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Shamans, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: External Assistance in the Reevaluation of Reality (#litres_trial_promo)
Conclusion: The Love We Found (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Resources (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_eda7535b-2ab5-5169-93a2-891798ebdcf5)
Psychology is not an exact science.
It is a field that Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory would deride for its lack of mathematical verifiability, and he’d be right. After all, when Sigmund Freud was pulling stuff out of a lower orifice to describe the “anal stage” of psychosexual development, Albert Einstein was creating theories of the universe that remain valid to this day.
Humanity’s understanding of physics allows humans to build rockets that only sometimes explode. Our understanding of psychology allows us to … uh … wait.
It’s not as bad as I allude to, but it is a discipline in flux. Homo sapiens’ neurological processing unit is complex and beyond our current understanding of mathematical formulae to neatly explain.
When I first approached the life-changing epiphany as an idea for a book, I expected it would be a water-cooler “Hey, check out this interesting information” variety of tome. Like a Malcolm Gladwell book, but with swearing and the occasional mention of poop.
I never imagined it could be a “how-to.”
But the more I researched, the more realistic the idea became. I gathered studies and spoke to smart people. I tried it on myself and my clients. I wrote articles and received enlightening responses.
There are no guarantees in life, but there is often good advice based on data and experience. We may not know all regarding the complexities of the mind, but human motivation has been studied for millennia. We do understand some interesting things, and through trial and error, people have transformed their lives for the better using myriad methods for change.
It turns out, the hare can kick the tortoise’s ass when properly inspired.
Sometimes the slow-and-steady approach doesn’t take you nowhere fast, it takes you nowhere at all. Conversely, the rascally rabbit has the finish line in its sights and is dashing toward it, invigorated, undeterred, unstoppable.
Finding true meaning, uncovering your real self, revealing your life’s purpose—such things rarely happen via baby steps. These are transformations unleashed, suddenly, to great effect. Often, there is a “Holy shit!” thrown in to celebrate the momentous realization. The epiphany drives you forward, passionately pursuing the newfound aim. And great thinkers across the ages have interesting ideas about how to make such an experience happen.
Read on, and perhaps it will happen for you.
Introduction (#ulink_884ebc5d-8c6b-5761-9c6d-88803576845b)
THE LIBRARIAN WHO PUT DOWN THE CIGARETTES AND PICKED UP A SWORD (#ulink_884ebc5d-8c6b-5761-9c6d-88803576845b)
One cannot leap a chasm in two jumps.
—SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
I saw Jaws when I was seven.
Children were free-range in the 1970s. Parents did their own weird thing that decade, so my sister and I got dumped at the local theater with regularity. It was a small town with one screen. In the summer of ’75, it was a movie about a megatoothed murder fish or nothing.
I wish I’d sat outside and watched dandelions push through the pavement. To this day, I can’t snorkel without hearing the music.
Despite living in the middle of a forest, after seeing the film I had nightmares that a great white was out to get me. A year later, the low-budget land-based knockoff, Grizzly, made my sleep even more of a horror show. My young brain could rationalize that hundreds of miles of spruce trees between me and the nearest ocean was even better than having “a bigger boat,” but what about a bear?
He could be outside my window. He might be pissed about the bear my dad stalked, shot, and skinned, now a rug lying in the living room of our house. The grizzly might be seeking revenge on the only son of the sonofabitch who slaughtered his sibling!
“MOOOOMMMMM!!!”
I came within fifteen feet of a bear while out for a run a few years back and managed to not pee myself. Statistically speaking, I’m far more likely to die on the toilet, and I love my toilet.
I love bears too. I grew out of the fear and realized what amazing creatures they are, so long as you’re not watching one rip Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-winning face off. You don’t need to pack up your shit and head off to the great outdoors and have your own face-to-bear experience. I like imagining them because, as a metaphor, they represent that which is fierce and powerful. A grizzly is something with claws and teeth. When they are of a mind to do a thing, they are unstoppable. Also, like me after a long run, they don’t smell too good.
When I imagine something kicking a lot of ass, I imagine a giant bear. And so when I have a lofty goal in need of chasing, I awaken my inner grizzly.
There is a grizzly bear hibernating within you, waiting for a key to unlock it from its cage. I want to help you find that key.
You have seen such an unleashed beast manifest in others; they become inspired about achieving their dreams and are relentless in the pursuit. My dad worked outside year-round and had the Grizzly Adams beard, but Mom was the one who let the huge furry quadruped loose. After the divorce, she moved us to the city and went all Revenant on glass ceilings.
Are there ceilings in your life you wish to burst through? Let’s rattle that cage and see what we can stir from its slumber.
How you direct this powerful creature is up to you. As a health-and-fitness columnist whose work has been read by millions, and as a weight-loss coach, I first became aware of the phenomenon of sudden and dramatic life change regarding people’s desire to change their bodies. But this is not a weight-loss book.
Okay, it’s a little bit of a weight-loss book.
If you want it to be, it is. Because such accomplishments have cascade effects. Improving one’s body is challenging, and those who attain the drive to do so rarely stop there. I’ve witnessed them go on to enhance their careers, improve relationships, conquer addiction, or undertake a complete life overhaul. Once the grizzly is free, there is no telling what adventures it will take you on.
That’s enough about bears for now. Let’s talk flying reindeer.
The Gift of Sudden Inspiration
“Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.”
My father says this often, as an explanation for his lovable goofiness. One day, I heard some motivational douche on the radio say those exact words, but as an imperative. His tone negative, the speaker proclaimed you must work to grow up, so you can be a big success or some shit. I don’t know. He was trying to suck the fun out of life. Anyway, he totally came across like “I will death murder the shit out of your inner child!” and then I was like “Yeah, go screw yourself; my dad is cool and you’re not,” and I changed the station.
That inner child. Remember when you were a kid and believed stuff?
The Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny are stupid, but Santa Claus? He kicks ass. There is a reason we let go of the Tooth Bunny earlier than the red-suited flying-reindeer wrangler: Santa is too cool to not exist.
I want to tap into your inner child, so you can believe some stuff. I want to tell you something so Christmas-Day awesome, you might have difficulty believing this present under the tree is real.
Except it’s real as puppy breath. I’m going to science this baby up with a heap of evidence to show you. I’ll share both far-out stories and studies about unlocking overarching awesomeness that takes life to a new, this-is-who-you-were-meant-to-be level.
You want big change? You want to be a badass at life? I’ll tell you something about what it means to be Evil Gluteus Maximus. Or … no. I won’t. Self-improvement is something that happens on your terms. You decide what is and is not the “Person You Were Meant to Be Registered Trademark.”
Who is this person? Start imagining now. Take a moment and reflect on life experiences; couple them with your inner child. Dream big. Realistically big, because not everyone gets to be an astronaut. But imagine what you could do if you were suddenly inspired to strive for it. If you had the passion and drive to go on an ambitious quest, what would that new life look like? Not just the body, but the whole life: career, relationships, finances, happiness, self-worth, personal identity … Take a moment; take three moments. Invest some mental energy. Think!
You’ve heard it’s about the journey and not the destination, right? Whatever. Despite what I just wrote, I’m not going to talk journeys too much in this book. Instead, we are zeroing in on the moment your passion to take that journey is unleashed.
Does this word “unleash” make you think of a process that happens slowly, step-by-step, through careful deliberation? Hell, no. It’s a big-ass rott-weiler straining to get off the chain and go fang-first into Nickelback.
It’s when suddenly life—or the universe, or whatever—sends you a powerful message for which you cannot help but proclaim, “Holy shit!” at the revelation. (Profanity optional.)
I don’t care if you believe in Santa or Satan, a golem or Gollum, an Indian elephant or Indiana Jones. Activate your imagination, and do some scientific discernment while you’re at it, because we’re about to take a voyage into explaining why you’ve been taking the approach to life change all wrong.
It may seem wishful thinking, what I’m about to tell you, but it’s not.
We’re about to unleash some shit.
Eye of the Tiger
I awoke at ass o’clock, guzzled some weapons-grade dark roast, and headed out for a six-mile run in temperatures hovering around hideous below zero.
As the sun rose, I did not lament the lack of sunglasses. They fog in under a minute at −20 degrees. Rather, my eyes were protected by a thick coating of frost collected on my lashes. Upon returning home, I snapped a selfie of my snowy visage and posted it to Facebook. The comments collectively proclaimed, “Dude, you are an entire cave full of batshit.”
My pre-epiphany self would agree.
In a previous life, I abhorred physical activity, guzzled English brown ales, and stuffed McDonald’s into my maw as though the apocalypse were imminent. Additionally, I was in debt, flunking out of college, and feeling like an unmotivated and out-of-shape bag of poo. But one day, the ground shifted beneath my feet. There was a transformative moment: a sudden strike of awakening in which my existence was split in twain; it became the instant that divided my life into “before” and “after.”
Everything changed that day. Not that day—that minute. Those few seconds.
I have often said someone won’t change their life in an instant unless they believe God threatened to shove a lightning bolt up their ass if they didn’t alter their path. Divinely inspired or not, what I didn’t realize at the time was how common the phenomenon of electricity in a posterior orifice can be for motivating rapid transformation. While coaching countless readers on the merits of the slow-and-steady path to change, I’d forgotten that wasn’t how I’d done it. When I asked for similar stories of people who, in a single instant, found an overflowing fountain of desire to change their lives, I was amazed at the response. As I will show, research reveals that sudden and overwhelming motivation to change is more common than not in those most successful at it. This book contains many such stories.
Stories like that of Lesley Chapman, who picked up a sword, and her life changed.
Eleven years later, Lesley felt no pain. There was no dripping sweat, no aching muscles, no heart ready to burst out of her chest, and no lungs rasping like an asthmatic Darth Vader after a road trip with Cheech and Chong. No fear, either. There was only this moment: the fencing match of her life, fueled by adrenaline and a competitive spirit her old self wouldn’t recognize.
The depressed, booze-chugging, overweight cigarette aficionado was no longer there; a lean and energized forty-four-year-old athlete questing for gold replaced the woman she had been. The new Lesley was a force to be reckoned with.
But her opponent was so fast; she struck like an arrow.
It was the last day of May 2015 in the city of Markham, Ontario, a multicultural community, part of the Greater Toronto area. The newly constructed Vango Toronto Fencing Center, located twelve miles north of the iconic CN Tower, was hosting the Canadian-American Veterans Cup, featuring the best fencers over the age of forty from across North America.
Lesley traveled from her home in the small town of Madison, New York, to take off to the Great White North for the first time, to prove her mettle after more than a decade of dedication to her bladework.
“I’d had a really good day,” Lesley said. “I went to the tournament without a lot of expectations.” As Lesley won match after match, her confidence in her sword-wielding abilities grew, and so did her enjoyment of competition. She beat someone she didn’t expect she would to get to the gold-medal round and was elated at the opportunity for a championship bout.
The match took place on the raised platform at Vango, the fencing strip reserved for the final pairings. Long and narrow, the strip runs along a white wall that is painted with a large Canadian flag. Lesley and the woman she would challenge, Jennette Starks-Faulkner, were the highlight as they battled for overall gold in women’s foil. Chapman took no notice of the crowd. All her attention focused on her opponent. She was in a state of flow.
Cue Rocky III music. It was “Eye of the Tiger” time.
“She is built like a teenager,” she said of Starks-Faulkner, speaking respectfully of her opponent’s physical build and skill; Lesley was honored to have this chance to compete against the world champion. But there was also a desire to prove herself. Six months previous, the two paired off in Reno, Nevada, and Starks-Faulkner throttled Chapman 5–0 in under a minute. Such a crushing defeat can be hard for a warrior such as Lesley to swallow.
Chapman explained she would be happy just to get a couple of points on her opponent. But because Starks-Faulkner was so small and fast, Lesley would have to outthink her to stand any chance of not repeating their match the previous December.
“When she attacks, she’s like an arrow,” Lesley said of Jennette. “I knew when she came at me I had no choice but to get out the way.” Back and forth they danced across the raised strip, blades ablur in an ancient test of skill that used to be scored with blood rather than buzzer. Lesley’s mind raced on how to outwit her opponent’s superior speed. The tactics she devised used the advantage of her reach, following up a retreat from her opponent’s lunge with a counterattack using her longer arm.
Lesley watched Starks-Faulkner carefully, fencing defensively, waiting for her opponent to lunge. When the strike came, she beat a hasty retreat, just out of range of her opponent’s foil, then countered the smaller woman’s lunging blade and scored her first-ever point against the champion.
“‘Holy shit!’ I remember saying,” Lesley recalled. She knew she was still not at her opponent’s level but she wanted to give her a good fight.
In such a match, it is often said you don’t win silver but rather lose gold. After a long-fought battle, the final score was 10–6.
Lesley Chapman won silver.
Clicking into Place
The seed of Lesley’s silver-medal win was sown in 2004 in a single, life-defining moment.
“I had been sedentary my entire life,” Lesley said. “I was a good student and had it in my head that you were either a brain or a jock and ne’er the twain would meet.” This attitude had a negative effect on Lesley as she reached her third decade of life.
Lesley explained that she smoked and drank and would often eat an entire pizza for lunch by herself. Significantly overweight, she believed this was what life had in store. She’d become fatalistic.
Life sucked. She wasn’t happy but wasn’t seeking change, either. Life was a slow, downward spiral she felt powerless to prevent.
“When you’re drinking too much and smoking and eating crap all the time, it’s going to chip away at your happiness,” she said. She became depressed because she wasn’t doing anything with her life. Her routine was work, drink, smoke, watch movies, repeat.
But fencing changed all that. Quickly.
Lesley’s story is one of finding a passion for a specific sport that challenged not only her body but also her mind. She was living in Lexington, Kentucky, and an Olympic-fencing coach began offering classes at the local Y. Lesley heard an announcement about it at the university where she worked, and thought, Why not? Fencing was the one sport that held even a modicum of interest for the librarian, as it seemed sophisticated to her. “Grace Kelly fenced,” she said.
She found the sport intellectually engaging. “You’re concentrating so hard that you don’t realize you’re winded.” In addition to the Olympic-level coach and the mental stimulation, there was another instance, a seemingly minor event, Lesley remembers with clarity, that defined the next stage of her life.
Many embark on a path of lifestyle change and suffer through for a while, only to quit, but not Lesley. What made her experience different? Why was her journey of personal transformation successful when so many others fail?
The answer can be found in a single moment, when a new sense of purpose clicks into place.
Lesley had been fencing just a couple of months. The fencing area at the Kentucky YMCA is an intimate space atop three flights of stairs; climbing them was a workout all by itself. She’d be gasping and sweating by the time she reached the top, wondering, Why the hell am I here?
Her commitment to continue was tenuous. Then a switch flipped.
On that day, early in her fencing career, Lesley noticed a group of child fencers had stopped their practice to watch the adults engaging in partner drills. Knowing she was being observed by these impressionable youths, she doubled her efforts at parries and lunges, trying her best to make a good show. “Suddenly, I felt like I belonged there,” she said, “and that I wanted to get really good at this.” There was a powerful awakening in both heart and mind that this is what she was meant to do. “In that emotional moment, I knew I would keep coming back to learn everything I could.” It was an overwhelming sensation that made her feel as though she could weep with joy at what she had discovered: she would not quit. She would do whatever it took to become the best she could be. She would not quit.
Sacred excrement!
Suddenly and with surety of purpose, Lesley changed. It was not the step-by-step process like many behavior-change theories focus on. It was both instantaneous and total. A new part of her mind opened; a new Lesley was born, one that would never have to struggle to be motivated again.
She saw progress in her skill in increments, and it led to quitting cancer sticks so she didn’t cough up alveoli during matches, giving up booze so the hangover didn’t feel like she had a brain aneurysm during practice, and eating healthier to fuel performance and lose forty pounds so she could move faster and present a smaller target for her opponents.
“The changes are substantial,” said William Miller, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and cocreator of the popular behavior-change technique called motivational interviewing. Miller is also the coauthor of Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives. He is a leader among the handful of researchers examining the topic of sudden and massive psychological change.
For the book, Professor Miller and his coauthor interviewed fifty-five people who had experienced life-changing epiphanies to create a structure around the phenomenon. He explained there can be focal changes, such as ceasing an addictive behavior, adopting a physical activity, or even a massive shift in mood, such as dramatic alleviation from depression. But such sudden change can also be broad-sweeping—a total shift in identity with far-reaching impact through a person’s life. What’s more, his coauthor did a ten-year follow-up and found something incredible: “No one had gone back to their state before the event happened. To the contrary, everyone spoke of moving ahead.”
Maintenance of the new behaviors, Miller explained, was high because it wasn’t a struggle to do so. “People didn’t talk about it using motivational language,” he said. They changed at a fundamental level. They became a new person for whom the new behaviors were the norm. It’s not a decision, it’s a sudden transformation.
I remember my holy-shit moment, when everything became clear. It’s when your inner grizzly is released from its cage as a roaring beast ready to achieve your utmost potential. It can manifest in various ways and for a multitude of reasons, but the reality is, it happens! It happens all the time—Professor Miller asserts as many as one-third of people experience such life-changing events—and yet we ignore the possibility of it happening for us. Accepting the verifiable reality of this phenomenon is the first step in making it happen for you.
It happened for Lesley that day, years ago. She was still overweight, still smoked and drank, and she was still a rookie fencer possessing negligible skill, but in that instant of self-reevaluation, her true personality awakened and ultimately led her to the silver-medal win. Along the way to a much healthier body, this new sense of purpose alleviated her despair.
“I decided in that moment that I was serious about becoming an athlete,” she said.
The pounds fell off.
Escaping Quiet Desperation
Think of all the people throughout history who never had the chance to reveal their genius. Across the eons, most of humanity remained uneducated, toiling at physical labor to survive.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Women too. Women especially.
But times are a-changin’. Bob Dylan doesn’t want you to sink; he is telling you to start swimming. To quote from the Pixar film Up: “Adventure is out there!”
You have one shot at life, and it’s not over yet. Many will continue to log the days, months, and years until they begin the long, slow slide into a dirt nap, heart songs remaining unsung.
For this to work, you must desire more. You must thirst for adventure. You must be ready to rattle the cage of the inner grizzly bear and yell, “Wake up! It’s time to kick ass!”
Adventure can take myriad forms. Think of Lesley. Fat, drunk, inhaling cancer sticks, depressed, and going nowhere except continuing an unexceptional life, few if any marks made upon the world, no quests undertaken, no major life missions accomplished.
And picking up a sword changed all that.
As you read this book, I want you to continue to remind yourself that adventure is out there. Never in the history of bipeds walking the earth has there been greater opportunity to seize the day and kick its ass.
Start imagining now. The adventure begins in the synapses. Awaken the part of your brain telling you the path you’re on isn’t enough. Endeavor to find out who you truly are and the stuff you’re made of. Embrace creativity in this mission. No one imagined the old Lesley as a champion fencer. Just because the astronaut spaceship has sailed doesn’t mean there aren’t out-of-this-world opportunities for you to chase.
Think of all the days since you came into the world as part 1 of your life. Your job is to imagine a lofty, exciting, purposeful path of You, Part 2. And just like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the sequel is going to blow away the original. As we move together through the chapters of this book, that’s a big part of your job: creating a basic outline of this exciting sequel to the first part of your life.
My job is to awaken the power that inspires you to live it.
Daydream Believing
You may want to write this down.
Or … maybe … you don’t.
I can’t remember phone numbers worth shit anymore. That’s because I don’t have to. Used to be, I could glance at a number in the phone book, walk over to the phone, and dial it in. Not tap or punch. Dial. I’m that old.
Unless you’re a troglodyte, you know that’s not how we do it anymore. Now I can’t remember seven digits without repeating them a few times; I’m out of practice.
A 2011 study published in Science reveals Google has a negative effect on memory, and as we’ll learn, information gathering—cramming a bunch of stuff into memory—is an important part of inducing a life-changing moment. The study reports: “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself.” For these purposes, that’s not good, because your brain needs to ponder things, twist them around a bit, and reorganize them in a way that makes sense. If your deep thoughts are consigned only to a notebook, your unconscious won’t be examining them.
“Having a notebook is fine, as long as these ideas also stay in your head,” said Mark Beeman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and coauthor of The Eureka Factor. Beeman, who specializes in the neurology of creative thinking, explained that for generating a sudden insight, problems need to be turned over in your mind. And if a notebook takes these thoughts out of your brain and onto paper, it’s counterproductive. Conversely, if the act of writing imprints them upon your synapses, or you are meticulous about revisiting your notes to examine such musings, then perhaps it’s worthwhile. But a 2014 study published in Memory & Cognition says it might not help. Comparing two separate groups playing the card-matching game Concentration, the study found those who focused on memorizing did far better than those who made notes and then had the notes taken away.
For the course of the activities recommended in this book, I advise forgoing writing down every little thing in favor of pondering it, looking at new ideas from different angles using only your brain, and committing them to your gray matter for integration into solving of the problem What do I do with the rest of my life?
This isn’t about achieving the answer via steady, linear analysis, but about having massive insight suddenly pop into existence.
I don’t jot down such thoughts unless it’s to log a specific idea I wish to write about. For examining your life and what the future must hold, however, specificity isn’t usually the way. Beeman explained that for life-changing insight to strike, you need to have all the pieces of the puzzle floating in your brain at once.
It may take a while to gather enough information to achieve epiphany, and that’s okay. There is time: time to daydream, time to imagine the new course. Whenever you’re feeling pensive or have a few moments to envision the future stages of your life, engage in some free association and contemplate what possible paths you could take.
You don’t have to go it alone.
Talk it over with friends. Surf the internet. Log on to social media and see what other people are doing. Wheels need not be reinvented. Seek inspiration from others who have been where you are.
Perhaps consider fencing. It’s fun.
Take it all in, move it from the front of your brain to the back, then to the middle; put it on cerebral spin cycle for a bit, return it to the front, and see what gets spit out.
Sometimes a walk in the sunshine or an evening lying under the stars helps with the process.
Carved in Stone
You want to be like Lesley? Patience, grasshopper. Sudden change in one’s motivational level may happen in a moment, but the stage must first be set. Evidence reveals that you can stack the deck in your favor and make epiphany happen.
As a test, I made a significant one happen for myself while researching this book. There is an important aspect of my life I have tried to change many times, over years and years, always to no avail. But then I used some of the methods outlined in this book, and that was it. The desired change happened. I made the ground shift, and a major life change took place just like that. And it was easy!
That story is in chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo). This was not a small thing like making my bed every day or flossing my teeth. It was much bigger, and I have reaped tremendous benefits from the experience.
I want to help you get there, to reach the point where a new sense of purpose awakens and your unstoppable will is unleashed. To do that, you need to understand the phenomenon of sudden transformation, so you can open yourself to possibility.
For Lesley, in that single moment of fencing practice, when she felt her sense of belonging and purpose awaken, her life altered course and gave her the power to keep altering it. This is the secret so many who change their bodies, break addiction, and achieve success and happiness often miss: To change their lives, they first must change their sense of who they are. The concept of shifting one’s identity is a recurring theme in The Holy Sh!t Moment, because that’s what epiphany does: it doesn’t change behaviors, it changes you.
The traditional methods of behavior change preach the tortoise approach over that of the hare, but there is a problem with that story: The hare in Aesop’s fable was an idiot. If he’d been smart, he would have kicked that reptile’s ass.
When it comes to changing who you are, sometimes it’s better to be a hare. It is an amazing thing to experience a potent, emotional event that shocks you into clarity of purpose. Besides, baby steps are lame. Why slowly build a bridge across that chasm when you have the power to leap to the other side?
This instant transformation of will seems magical. But sometimes you must meet the magic moment partway.
I had a life-changing epiphany that arrived out of nowhere, and it spurred me to action, to go from flunking my courses to acing them, as well as to getting out of debt. That accomplished, I tackled my physique next, and that part was, shall we say, less inspired for a time.
I had to do the traditional baby steps. I had to be the tortoise. I had to slog.
But not for long. My mind had learned to recognize epiphany. Over the course of two months, my attitude shifted from “This sucks” to “This isn’t completely horrible.” And realizing that regular exercise no longer felt like a soul-destroying endeavor initiated a massive and rapid transformation of mind-set. I put in some hours and met the magic moment along the way.
As did Lesley. Remember, her life-changing epiphany didn’t happen the first time she held a blade. It took a couple of months of parries and ripostes to awaken a sudden and total transformation into who she was meant to be.
You will read of others in this book who did not have to meet epiphany partway. Lightning struck out of nowhere, and they were inspired from day one. That totally happens, and I hope it happens for you. But if it doesn’t, you’re going to have to be ready to do some uninspired work while keeping your brain attuned to receiving inspiration. In coming chapters, I’ll offer advice on using traditional methods of step-by-step behavior change to help generate a sudden leap forward.
There are myriad methods of rapid and significant life change, but all such roads share one undeniable characteristic: a deep emotional sensation that carves a new sense of purpose into a person’s being, like a chisel working on stone. Conversely, the traditional (read: boring) models of gradual, step-by-step cognitive behavior change seem to be lacking in their ability to create passionate adherence. Resultantly, such laborious methods of struggling to develop new habits may not be the most effective way of achieving change.
Sometimes dramatic lifestyle change “just happens” because of reaching enlightenment that arrives beyond cognition. Again, this is not a decision; it is an awakening. Such an awakening inspires one’s determination and dedication to succeed.
Sometimes Santa Claus does exist, and he brings you a gift of overwhelming passion to kick ass at life.
And such sudden change is a scientifically explainable phenomenon one can pursue with purpose, leaving less to random chance, to create a better life. This book is about providing you with actionable tasks that help set the stage for a specific moment: that space in time when something so vital and important takes place inside the mind that your life is divided into “old you” and “new, righteous, unstoppable you.”
It’s the moment the grizzly is released from its cage. Suddenly free, the massive beast looks you in the eye, tilts its head back toward its massively muscled back, and says, “Hop aboard, kid. You and I are going places.”
What Is an Epiphany?
I have a couple of master’s degrees and am a stickler for the science. This book includes references to reams of peer-reviewed journals alongside exclusive interviews with some of the most renowned experts in behavior change on the planet.
That’s why it pains me to use Wikipedia as a reference.
From the ancient Greek epiphaneia, meaning “manifestation, striking appearance,” an epiphany is often described as a scientific breakthrough, or religious or philosophical enlightenment. However, it can represent myriad situations in which deeper understanding is suddenly attained.
The apocryphal story of an alleged apple falling and allegedly hitting Sir Isaac Newton on the head describes when he allegedly had an epiphany about the nature of gravity. Alas, this is not how innovation and technological advancement work.
In his book The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun’s first chapter is titled “The Myth of Epiphany.” In it, he describes the story of Newton and the apple to debunk the popular understanding of epiphany. The author then quotes the primary inventor of the laser, Gordon Gould, to provide an example of how scientific advancement usually works.
In the middle of one Saturday night … the whole thing … suddenly popped into my head and I saw how to build the laser … but that flash of insight required the 20 years of work I had done in physics and optics to put all the bricks of that invention in there.
A pot-smoking teenager watching SpongeBob SquarePants in his parent’s basement isn’t likely to have a stroke of brilliance regarding the nature of light amplification. Gould, a renowned physicist who had worked on the development of the first atomic bomb, spent twenty years of toil working to resolve an enigma, and when enlightenment was finally achieved, some would refer to that as an epiphany. But it is no such thing. It is simply that last piece of the puzzle—a puzzle he’d been working on for decades—being put into place.
Human behavior can work in similar ways. One may have been debating, mulling over, and gathering information about a new path for years, and a life-changing event—that triggering moment—is the final illumination before they are ready to make that sudden switch from unconsciously “thinking about it,” to an instant and wholehearted This is happening!
Conversely, it truly can strike out of nowhere, because decisive behavioral change is not often the same as building a laser or theorizing gravity. It can be as simple as hearing an old song on the radio. You may be driving along, listening to the classic rock station, and Van Halen’s 1992 hit “Right Now” comes on and you feel it; you realize it is indeed your tomorrow, and you decide to catch the magic moment. Such a phenomenon can reshape your sense of being and purpose in life in a near instantaneous wave of emotion that provides you with new insight and motivation regarding the way forward.
Lesley Chapman didn’t dwell on what was wrong with her life or how to change it until that singular moment when she discovered what it was like to feel something right.
For some, they need to hit rock bottom before they’re ready to leap toward the light. You don’t need to be that desperate, but you’re reading this because you know that change—be it moderate or massive—is something you desire. If you feel dramatic change is something you must achieve, then you also need to seek out a transformative moment to initiate such change.
Much of the pre-work involves information gathering and embracing new ways of thinking, but it also requires not letting sudden insight pass you by.
It involves opening your mind, asking the question Is this it?
It’s about looking at the world with an investigative mind-set, in which what you seek is opportunity to change. Inspiration can arrive from anywhere and at any time. Be prepared.
Is. This. It?
Ask yourself that question when you experience something that might be a catalyst for change. Most of the time, the answer to the question is going to be “No, it really isn’t.” But it’s all practice.
It can be because of this practice, the opening of yourself, the attunement, that allows epiphany to strike. Speaking of practice, getting stuck is good.
“When you tackle a problem, and fail to solve it, it sticks in your craw—and your brain.” This is from Professor Beeman’s book The Eureka Factor, coauthored with John Kounios, a professor of psychology in cognitive and brain sciences at Drexel University. The authors explain that ideas can require an “incubation period.” The work you do thinking now doesn’t mean you have your epiphany right now too. You work until you “get stuck.” Then the unconscious takes over while you’re busy doing other things.
In most stories of major life transformation, an epiphany is almost a constant. Many who have experienced massive change can identify a specific instance when their outlook got on track in a much more positive way. Changing one’s body is a powerful manifestation of the moment of change, because a healthy body often equates to a healthy mind, and overcoming the challenges associated with physical improvement also imparts valuable life skills. I mean, unless it’s weight loss resulting from unhealthy methods such as popping unregulated diet pills like they’re Skittles or going on some batshit crazy fad diet some celebrity is flogging. The latest dietary dumbassery I heard about was an Oscar winner proudly proclaiming the completion of her eight-day-long, goat-milk-only cleanse. I’m happy I don’t have the job of cleaning her bathroom.
The Snowball Effect
There is a switch inside many people set at “I can’t.”
When it flips over to “I can” for one thing, it doesn’t stop there. Research shows life-changing epiphanies are rarely “one and done.” Often the catalyst for initial change is a massive mental shift, but smaller epiphanies can arise at random during people’s life journeys, to bump them further along their quests to be the best humans they can. Professor Miller explained that people who have such experiences often have further, clarifying epiphanies later in life. “There appears to be an opening to having that experience,” he said.
Take a moment and think back: Has this happened before?
Have you experienced a life-changing moment in the past? What was it like? How did it manifest? Can you relive it? Can you imagine something like that happening again? Did you learn something important from the experience you can bring toward future life change?
If the answer is yes, it’s called a “past performance accomplishment.” It’s a parameter of self-efficacy theory, created by Stanford University psychology professor Albert Bandura in 1977. It’s about how you form perceptions regarding your ability to perform specific behaviors. Past success = confidence, which makes people more determined to persevere, even in the face of adversity.
If you’ve had an important insight in the past, it makes it more likely you can have one again in the future. Cue Jimi Hendrix: Are you experienced?
Positive life change can assume myriad forms; don’t fret if you’re not interested in pushing your body. But I do encourage contemplating some form of activity as part of the new you. I say this because you were not meant to sit idly and watch Earth spin on her axis. You were meant to rise and join the fray that is the human condition. Movement empowers from top to toenails; it can even come to define you, should you find the right exercise.
Whichever activity a person chooses, if they enjoy it, is the right one. The path ahead has more choices than there are beers in a Munich autumn. Finding which flavor suits best requires taking a few taste tests.
The Holy Sh!t Moment is about achieving the clarity of purpose to carve your own path to success.
Switching Tracks
Consider this word carefully: “momentous.”
The topic of this book is not about merely deciding the future path your life will take. It is about a momentous event in which you suddenly become aware of the answer and change at a fundamental level from the experience. It’s not only a spark of insight, it’s an awakening of passion.
Such an “answer” is rarely well-defined or black-and-white, and effort is required to find your way along the appropriate path.
Do you remember The Karate Kid? Not the worst film ever, but the message is dogshit.
Perhaps you’re too young, or maybe you were there, in that theater, and you disagree. That’s because it was the eighties, the decade of bad decisions, even though we didn’t realize it at the time. So many pastels …
Go ahead and watch it again—the original with Ralph Macchio—and see if you realize why the message it relays is canine feces.
My wife is a second-degree black belt in karate. Both our children are black belts, and my daughter competes at the international level. I can attest that you don’t get good at karate by spending a few weeks waxing cars and painting fences. You get good at it because it’s your lifelong passion. And because it is your passion, you are motivated to do the damn work, hours of work, day after day and year after year!
The Karate Kid disrespects the work by advocating an extreme shortcut to success. It disrespects the fact that my daughter has been in karate since she was five years old, and trained her ass off, sometimes twenty or more hours a week, to win that gold medal at the USA Open ten years later.
Work is glorious, and inspired work transforms. It transforms your body, your mind, your spirit. Someone who kicks ass at life is not a sofa-sitter. Such people can be efficient, but they’re not the type always questing for a quick fix. They don’t believe—using weight loss as an example—that some miracle macronutrient ratio is going to open a rift in the space-time-insulin continuum and magically transport their belly fat to a parallel universe. They know effort is required, but they don’t mind, because they’ve become inspired.
Work equals accomplishment, the forms of which can be innumerable, and such accomplishments are habit-forming. Again, this is far from being just about diet and exercise. For someone who feels their life lacks purpose, it can be an amazing thing to suddenly find more drive than you know what to do with.
Here is a quick task. It should only take a few seconds, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. You ready?
Make a promise to yourself that you’re done with believing in bullshit quick fixes and unrealistic shortcuts to major accomplishment, be they accomplishments with your body, your brain, your career, your finances, or your relationships. Accept reality: it is work creating your desired outcome. Do it now. Integrate this fundamental truth. Then move forward.
The overarching goal is to change the way you feel about the work so it doesn’t seem like work. That is an attitude adjustment that can happen in just a few seconds. There can be a rapid change in mind-set. You can’t become a karate master quickly, but you can become inspired to do it in an instant. It’s this accelerated mental shift that has the power to change your life.
As British historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” Your passion to achieve can be triggered in that single defining moment when you realize, Enough of this bullshit. Motivation is no longer a scarce resource after such a momentous event. It comes built in.
Being active is hard. Eating healthy is hard. Conquering addiction is hard. Relationships are hard. Making money and advancing your career is hard. Life is hard, whether you choose to work at improving it or not. A life-changing moment can make everything much less of a challenge. Sometimes, if the epiphany is powerful enough, it makes the changes not just easier but mandatory, because every new step feels as though it was meant to be. The recipient of the epiphany is compelled to walk this new path, perhaps even race down it.
Speaking of racing and things that are hard, recall the words of President John F. Kennedy regarding the space race and putting a man on the moon. He said we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
You should aspire to do more with your life.
Because it is hard.
Act Now!
Dream (realistically) big and imagine the new person you want to be.
Think of an ambitious quest you could undertake.
Develop a thirst for adventure. Remember the librarian who traded cigarettes for swords.
Consider not using a notebook, but instead committing ideas to memory for regular rumination to achieve later enlightenment.
Ponder until you “get stuck.” Then engage in a diversion to let your unconscious continue working at it.
Endeavor to meet the magic moment partway. Realize you may have to engage in some uninspired work prior to the lightning strike.
Become attuned for lightning to strike. Ask yourself, “Is this it?”
Ask if a life-changing moment has happened to you before. Examine if this is something you have experience with—determine if you have a past performance accomplishment—so you can use that knowledge to make it happen again.
Accept that work is not only necessary but glorious in its ability to inspire passion and transform you. Try to find work that will feel like play.
Remember the words of JFK and embrace change: because it is hard.
PART ONE (#ulink_75e395e2-f868-5ee7-bbbc-a5b6b3260209)
Epiphany and Cognitive Behavior Change (#ulink_75e395e2-f868-5ee7-bbbc-a5b6b3260209)
1 (#ulink_bfe839a0-406a-5015-9ee5-a5a3bee07787)
THE ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR: THE EUPHORIA OF THE LIFE-CHANGING MOMENT (#ulink_bfe839a0-406a-5015-9ee5-a5a3bee07787)
There are opportunities even in the most difficult moments.
—WANGARI MAATHAI
On the schoolyard field of battle known as gym class, I made the geeks look good. I was such a klutz, I was always picked last when teams were selected. I often came out of dodgeball with head trauma.
In college, I got the “freshman fifteen”—those pounds one tends to put on during their first year—factored by three. I was twenty-two and felt my life was circling the drain. As mentioned before, my health, finances, and scholastic situations were a mess. There was no fall from grace; my life had always been blah, and it was my fault.
I wasn’t just a bad athlete growing up, but a bad student. I was smart but lazy. I squeaked my way into an easy postsecondary program with half a percentage point to spare, then promptly began failing. I went to the campus pub instead of class. The credit-card companies were calling. Things were bad and looking worse; I was about to be kicked out of school because of my poor grades.
I was in a hole of my own digging; Joan Baez pulled me out.
The folk singer’s words appeared in the school newspaper, and my life changed in a moment.
“Action is the antidote to despair,” the quote read.
I sat in the food court at my alma mater, reading the comedic highlights of the paper’s section referred to as “Three Lines Free.” It’s a place for students to publish quotes and witticisms and proclamations of undying love or temporary lust. Partway through reading, Joan smacked me in the face. It was so simple to realize that, as bad as things seemed, they could be fixed via concerted effort.
In that instant, my life switched tracks.
Because, you see, there was a woman.
Her name was Heidi. I loved her like no other. You know stories of finding “The One”? This is such a story.
She was a straight-A student destined for medical school; I knew flunking out spelled the beginning of the end. I say this not to ever speak ill of her. But you must know that she, an amazing woman, deserved a good man; a man I had yet to become.
I was in a state of despair, and taking action—working hard for something for the first time in my life—was the antidote.
And suddenly I felt so much better. Even though no effort had yet been expended, the anticipation of having these problems and this beer belly no longer weighing on me was euphoric. It’s like when you hear your parole has been approved and you’re getting out of prison but you’re still in prison. I’ve never been to prison. I got some speeding tickets when I was younger, but I paid them. Anyway, euphoria and stuff …
Instead of hitting the pub as I’d planned for a few barley-based beverages to wash down a plate overflowing with fries and gravy, I got up and booked an appointment with the appeals committee to beg my way out of my failing report card, allowing me to continue as a student. It was the first step of many, and it felt right.
When it comes to experiencing a life-changing epiphany, the way things feel is critical. It involves, as mentioned earlier, unleashing one’s inner quadruped.
The concept began with the classical Greek philosopher Plato. In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote a “dialogue” titled Phaedrus, which contains an allegory about the charioteer. In it, the driver of the chariot represents a person’s more rational self, the guiding force based on intellect and reason. (Because those guys doing the death race in Ben-Hur were totally reasonable.) Conversely, the horses pulling the chariot represent a person’s emotions; they are what provide the power to move forward. And if they want to run wild, the driver of the chariot can do little to control them.
Let’s ignore the part about Plato’s horses having wings, so as not to confuse the issue.
It is important to note that the horses are not like-minded. According to Plato’s tale, one is more virtuous in its passion; the other has a dark side driven by baser appetites. One wants to train for a marathon; the other wants to down tequila shots then go in search of a chili cheese dog to later throw up.
The goal of the charioteer is to obtain the help of the noble horse to overcome the desires of the troublesome one. Otherwise, you’re blowing your groceries in the gutter. I’ve done that. It’s not fun.
The allegory was adapted some millennia later, in 2006, with the publication of The Happiness Hypothesis by New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who referred to the rational, conscious mind as the “rider” and increased the size of the emotion-driven, unconscious-mind quadrupeds to a solitary elephant. Part of the upgrade involved increasing the intelligence of the beast, asserting elephants are smarter than horses. As we’ll see when we examine the neuroscience of attaining sudden insight, Haidt is right. In most cases, the unconscious driver is the correct one; the conscious needs to learn to listen.
A short time later, the rider-vs.-elephant analogy became a core component of the 2010 book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Chip is a professor of business at Stanford, and Dan is a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at Duke.
A determined elephant will go where it pleases, regardless of the urgings of a more rational rider. To achieve a desired destination, one must appeal to both rider and elephant.
The elephant is the passion and the drive. Whereas the rider may prevaricate and overanalyze, the elephant is the part of the human spirit that can change directions in a flash, and with powerful determination, because it is driven to get shit done. Rather than needing to ponder, it is compelled to act.
Let’s try an experiment in which you talk to your four-legged friend.
How do you feel about changing?
In the introduction, I asked you to awaken your thirst for adventure. I expect you generated some ideas of songs unsung, mountains unclimbed, finish lines uncrossed. And now you’re faced with the opportunity to sing your way across that finish mountain, or something. Have you got it? It doesn’t have to be concrete. Big picture is fine for now. Is it in your brain? Are you thinking about it?
Good. Now stop.
Stop thinking.
Instead, start feeling.
Don’t rationalize this change. Don’t try to think about all the reasons why you should stop doing a thing (like sitting all day, drinking too much, smoking, being angry, overeating treat foods, doing drugs, staying in a dead-end job or relationship, wasting money on stupid crap) or start doing a thing (going back to school, exercising, eating healthier, being kinder, working at your career, spending more quality time with loved ones).
I want you to stop thinking, because of paralysis via analysis. If these goals you imagine—things to stop and things to start—have been around in your brain for a while, you’ve already thought them to death. And yet here you are. Still struggling. You rationalized your way out of change. Well, crud.
Time for a dramatic change of tack.
Ask yourself: How do I feel about this change? You don’t completely cut thinking, but alter the focus. Instead of thinking about this new path, you’re examining your emotions. It’s not about making a list of reasons why and why not. It’s opening your mind to what your heart is saying, metaphorically. I know the heart doesn’t literally control this. It’s still in the brain, just a different part. Enough semantic blather. Let the feelings flow and listen to what they tell you.
Why are you reading this sentence?
You’re supposed to be examining your feelings. Examine your change! You go feel it now. I’ll wait. I’ll even put an extra space between paragraphs to make it easier to pick up again.
Welcome back. How did it go?
Was there a twinge? Did you have a moment? Was there a positive rush of emotion? Did you gain some special insight or wave of motivation to change because you quested to understand your emotional drivers rather than rational ones?
Was the grizzly released from its cage?
Don’t fret if it didn’t happen. We just began and will work through exercises like this at appropriate times throughout the book. And hopefully lightning will strike.
Hopefully.
There are no guarantees. But the harder you work at these exercises, the more you strive and the more you believe epiphany can happen, the greater the likelihood it will.
It’s like that song by Journey, the one about the mythical place called South Detroit we’ve all heard way too many times: “Don’t stop believin’.”
It’s in your head now, isn’t it? My bad. But take something good from it.
Believe. Believe it’s possible to unleash your beast. In The Eureka Factor, Kounios and Beeman write, “Insights are like cats. They can be coaxed but don’t usually come when called.” You must learn to coax your elephant. Or grizzly. Or a really determined kangaroo, if that’s your thing.
Conscious thought rarely incites life-changing epiphanies. Instead, the snap revelations to change in a moment are based on what is often an overwhelming feeling that it is right, arriving from the unconscious. As Plato and subsequent authors revealed, it is such an emotion that gives epiphany its power. I was in fear of losing a beautiful and brilliant woman who let me see her naked, and I felt quite emotional over the impending loss of love. She was not threatening me in any way, but I knew deep down that such a driven woman (she had a perfect GPA and completed medical school at the top of her class) wouldn’t stay for long with a drunken dropout who was letting his health go to hell.
I got my shit together, and we made babies. Told you she was The One.
Beyond ancient philosophy and its modern interpretations, we have the scientific insights of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Known as the Father of Behavioral Economics (which we learn more about in coming chapters), Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, is the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. The “fast” way of thinking is the elephant. It happens when an unconscious idea pops into consciousness. It can also be that emotional driver one needs to effortlessly change. Kahneman refers to this as “System 1,” writing that it “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” Conversely, “System 2” is the rider. It “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”
Kahneman explains that System 2 is where we make our rational choices, our conscious decisions. His description is telling: “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.”
You’re damn right it is. System 2 is the supporting character, and an inherently lazy one at that. Kahneman writes that System 2 engages in the “law of least effort.” But that doesn’t mean it’s useless in this regard. Far from it. As the Heath brothers explain in Switch, you have to appeal to both elephant and rider. Kahneman says System 1 constructs the story, and System 2 believes it. System 1 “is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments.” It is a “mental shotgun” allowing us to answer, in an instant, those tough questions about our lives.
Time for a wee task.
I thought about calling these tasks “Action Items,” but I didn’t want you to have a full MBA Bingo card by the end of the book (being that I have an MBA, the risk is real). Implement these Action Items to proactively synergize an optimized epiphanic paradigm! Just, no.
Give us a kiss. Except all caps: KISS. I’ve interviewed both Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. Paul is nice….
Man, my System 2 is all over the place right now. KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid. A 2011 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review looked at “feelings as information.” The study asserts feelings are a “sensible judgment strategy,” but don’t overthink it, especially in terms of the advantages of change. That’s because when you create a comprehensive list of all the benefits of something, the study showed, it becomes less appealing. This is System 2 overanalyzing what System 1 came up with. Your task is to not let that happen.
When System 1, the fast-acting hero of your life, says, “This is it!” the supporting character of System 2 will come up with a couple of confirming rationalizations as to why, yes, we can agree that this is likely the thing. Then STOP! Once you have that confirmation, just go with it. You don’t need to keep drilling down into the benefits, or it actually becomes less compelling. This doesn’t apply to using System 2 for enacting the vision. Being detail oriented in that regard is important.
The Gap between Thinking and Doing
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
William Shakespeare wrote of the stage and players and how life is one big performance in a monologue from As You Like It. But the speech also refers to seven stages of a person’s life.
I only know of this play because it was quoted in the 1981 hit song “Limelight” by my favorite band. Beyond that, I possess mere high school knowledge of Montagues, Capulets, Macbeths, and whatever the last name of that Danish lad was, the one who pondered if he should be or not.
Speaking of Hamlet’s act 3, scene 1, soliloquy, crossing the gap between thinking and doing is making the decision to “take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.”
You may be facing a sea of troubles, but what could your life look like if you took up arms and charged fearlessly ahead, fierce and furious in your determination to take not a single prisoner but emerge victorious?
Hamlet’s oft-quoted scene begins with, “To be, or not to be?” At the darkest period of his life—dad dead due to the dastardly deeds of his dick uncle—the young Danish prince ponders his future actions, struggling with the decision that lay before him. Should he accept his outrageous fortune, or get in its face?
Oh, wait. It’s Shakespeare. Everyone dies. Bad example. Let us move back a space to the moment before the decision to take arms was made. Some centuries after Shakespeare laid down his mighty pen, James Prochaska, a psychology professor and director of the Cancer Prevention Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, developed a different model for the stages a person goes through when experiencing life change.
Along with his colleagues, Professor Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model (TTM) of behavior change, which is one of the most studied lifestyle transformation models ever created. Since its initial development in the 1970s, more than $80 million and 150,000 study participants have contributed to its peer review. It’s no longer used much for designing psychological interventions, but it’s still useful as an examination tool.
There are five stages to TTM:
1 Precontemplation—People in this stage are not even thinking about altering their behaviors, as they do not see their current lifestyles as problematic. This couch is ever so comfy. Never shall I remove my bottom from its padded glory and proximity to the rectangle of glowing time waste.
2 Contemplation—This is when a person is thinking about changing their behavior, but not quite ready to act. Hmmm. Is there such a thing as a “couch sore”? Perhaps if I repositioned a little. Dammit, I emptied the DVR of all the good stuff. Is there anything new on Netflix? I suppose I could go outside….
3 Preparation—In which the person is focused around planning for acting toward behavior change, which is intended to be imminent. Outside it is! I just need to wiggle myself out of this massive ass groove I’ve created in the couch first….
4 Action—When a person is engaged in behavior change. It is a challenging time, when fragile habits are formed. Later, couch! Fresh air, bitches!
5 Maintenance—In which habits from undergoing the action stage are more ingrained and the new behavior becomes sticky as the person gains self-confidence in their abilities. What’s a couch?
Under the TTM model, where is the lightning strike? Where does the critical moment that divides a person’s life into before and after take place? We can see it in the gap between thinking and doing, between stage 2 and stage 3. It happens after contemplation and before preparation. Although the stage that follows is called “Action,” preparation is still a form of doing, a form of action. It is a giant leap forward toward a new life, which happens in an instant. It requires bravery and force to leap this chasm; hence the need to ensure that the emotional grizzly-elephant-horses are shocked into wakefulness and pointed in the right direction. They have taken up arms, roared defiantly, and the sea of troubles trembled at the might of such a battle cry.
Sometimes the movement from contemplation is a mere step, but that’s not what you’re after. What you seek is a giant leap. Because if this moment that prompts the advancement to stage 3 is a powerful one, if it is a true epiphany that enlightens and inspires, you’ll have little fear of relapse.
The new behaviors stick.
The Decisional Balance Sheet
“Reaching a tipping point to move toward action involves a change of focus,” James Prochaska told me. “One goes from the balance favoring the ‘cons’ of adopting a new behavior to giving more weight to the ‘pros.’”
Unfortunately, people tend to slide back into old habits, which is why it is important to ensure the decisional balance sheet is well stacked in favor of acting.
“A person is going to be a lot better prepared to stick with the new behavior if the pros significantly outweigh the cons,” Prochaska said. If the pros only slightly tip the balance when you start down the path to changing your life, you will still be experiencing those cons. If you just barely decide to change—if, exasperated, you throw your hands in the air and say, “Fine! I guess I’ll do it”—you’re going to feel the suck of that change; it can overpower any benefits. The balance teeters around ambivalence; you are more inclined to give up and slide back into old behavior.
In 2010, Jennifer Di Noia, a professor of sociology at William Patterson University in New Jersey, worked with Prochaska on a meta-analysis of twenty-seven different studies of how TTM was used to evaluate decisional balance; they were specifically looking at dietary changes to affect weight loss. Published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, they came to some fascinating conclusions.
During the precontemplation stage, cons rule the synapses, but something interesting happens during contemplation: The balance begins to shift. And it shifts in a way that explains why so many fail in their efforts to change their lives.
In the contemplation stage, the reduction in thinking about cons is small; the balance shifts because the value of the pros increases by a significant margin. The cons are still there, still powerful. The fear of pain or boredom from exercise, the financial worries over pursuing a different career, or “You can peel my wine glass from my cold, dead hand!” remain palpable. And to overshadow such fear, the pros need to “Hulk Smash!” them into insignificance. The ratio revealed in Di Noia and Prochaska’s research of pros to cons is enlightening. They discovered the pros must outweigh the cons by almost a 2 to 1 ratio to be truly effective!
It stresses the importance of the great leap forward achieved via some form of epiphany; it’s not a simple tipping of the balance sheet to 51–49 in favor of the pros. Again, it’s not a small step forward toward successful and sustainable change; it works better if you take a giant leap.
“Pros and cons of decision making is not a conscious, rational, empirical process,” Professor Prochaska said. “It is very emotionally based.”
What can make someone passionate about a new direction? What gives them the drive to charge ahead with an unstoppable “no-prisoners” attitude? Prochaska explained that a dramatic event could cause someone to reevaluate pros and cons.
Such a dramatic event found its initial spark for Chuck Gross in January 2008. He sat in an Irish pub in New Orleans, called Boondock Saint, having a quiet beer or five. The bar was named to pay homage to a cult-action film of a similar name.
“My brothers-in-law are twins. My wife and I took them barhopping on Bourbon Street for their twenty-first birthdays,” Chuck, a computer programmer in Pittsburgh, told me. The Irish-style pub was dark and somewhat gloomy. A mirror advertising Guinness hung on an aging brick wall. Being it was a twenty-first birthday event in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Chuck was in no shape to walk a straight line.
That night, Chuck had a chance meeting that would be the first step on a journey that would change his life.
“Back then I was not a social person, being as fat as I was,” Chuck said. He described two seats at the far end of the bar, and how he ended up sitting next to an average-looking man who practically forced Chuck to speak with him.
The man was in his fifties, clean-shaven, plain-faced, and wearing glasses, Chuck recalled. His hair was gray-white, he had an outgoing personality, and it seemed like he couldn’t help but engage in conversation. Because Chuck had consumed a few drinks, he began to loosen up.
The two men talked for a time of things inconsequential, and then the man informed Chuck of his profession as a photographer, which he proclaimed gave him the ability to read people. “I see the fear in your eyes,” the man told him.
Chuck admits that his memory was hazy due to alcohol consumption, but insists the stranger never brought up Chuck’s weight. Rather, the man told him he could see there was something Chuck wanted to do, and that the fear he felt soon wouldn’t be a problem in this quest.
Chuck Gross was taken aback that a random stranger would speak to him in such a way. I advocate against poking one’s nose into the body weight of others; people should mind their own business. Even though Chuck’s obesity was not mentioned, it was obvious what the man was talking about. The conversation ended abruptly but still had a profound effect.
Two months later, Chuck Gross was dead.
Lightning Strikes
The life-changing epiphany seems rare because people aren’t forthcoming about it.
William Miller and his coauthor write in Quantum Change: “people who experience such events are often reluctant to discuss them openly.” In their research, they uncovered that many had told only one or two people, and some never told anyone. I’m kind of a big deal on Facebook, so when I asked, people came forward.
Bragging over one’s social-media following is the epitome of pathetic, but if you want to “Like” my page, it’s facebook.com/bodyforwife.
During the interviews, Miller and C’de Baca write, “the words came tumbling out like a great unburdening.” Yep. That’s what happened with my interviews, too. It’s because such an event changes how people feel, what they think, how they experience the world. It is a Big Deal. Life will never be the same.
Freaked out a little right now? I mean, Chuck Gross died, right?
It’s a good kind of lightning strike, however, like when Luke learned he was to become a Jedi, except without having your aunt and uncle burned to a crisp by Imperial Stormtroopers.
Of the fifty-five people interviewed for Quantum Change, the authors explained that for 80 percent of them, it “took them completely by surprise.” And for half, nothing special was happening leading up to it. This reinforces Beeman and Kounios, who say lightning strikes during diversion after getting stuck.
To repeat: keep working at it, follow the steps in this book, then take a break and let the unconscious do its thing.
Let’s get back to Chuck.
As forward as the stranger’s words were, it nudged him from the precontemplation stage to the edges of contemplation. Cons of change became slightly minimized, and pros garnered more investigation and emphasis.
“During those two months, the conversation was eating away at me both subconsciously and consciously,” Chuck said, explaining that many of the things one experiences when they are that heavy are buried because they’re constant: back pain, aching feet, always being out of breath. Before, they were facts of life, but after the meeting, he became more aware of them. Chuck’s brain was becoming primed for lightning to strike.
It was March 11, and the Pittsburgh winter edged toward spring, a time of rebirth. Rather than forget his chance meeting at Boondock Saint the previous January, Chuck dwelled on it.
Then it happened.
“My wife Denise came out of the bathroom with a positive pregnancy test,” Chuck said. He explained this was not something planned for. They’d talked about having children, but it was always for the future, when he was healthier and had lost weight.
“The lightning bolt was instantaneous,” he said. It first hit him with overwhelming joy that he was going to be a father, but he also knew with absolute clarity he had to do something about his condition. He described it as though someone hit him in the back of the head with a baseball bat, full swing.
The bat to Chuck’s skull was what ended his life, metaphorically speaking. “I tell people I died that day. The old Chuck is dead. I killed him.”
Chuck’s realization that he had to change happened in an instant, when he knew he had to become not just the father his child needed, but the husband his wife deserved. Yet Chuck didn’t stop thinking there. The powerful “Aha!” moment brought additional clarity to who he was and how he needed to change.
“I realized that a big part of my identity was wrapped up in me being fat,” he said. The emotion of the moment was clear; years later he struggled to tell the tale. Voice thick, Chuck explained he was always the fat kid growing up; people made fun of him for it. His identity was as the funny fat guy; the guy girls wanted as a friend, but never to date. People knew him for being able to eat and drink a lot, and that was all. With the pregnancy announcement, Chuck had a new identity thrust upon him, that of a father, making his values pivot hard in a new direction.
In 2016, researchers from the University of Oregon published a study in Psychological Inquiry about the “identity-value model” of self-regulation. The authors theorize that “behaviors that are connected to identity are more likely to be enacted because they hold greater subjective value.” They examined the dieter’s dilemma, investigating how people struggle with eating healthfully, and how self-control is about two opposing processes: impulsively eat the doughnut, for example, because it’s yummy, or strive to regulate that behavior and resist the treat in favor of vegetables?
When someone’s identity is one that places high value on healthy eating, there isn’t much struggle. It’s not a matter of exerting willpower; it’s acting in a way that is in direct relevance to who they are. At the beginning of this book, I mentioned awakening the grizzly, but it’s more about becoming the grizzly.
The final part of Chuck’s process to destroy that old identity and create a new one involved stepping on the scale. Technology lent him a hand.
“The scale was only rated up to 400 pounds and always gave me an error message, but this time it worked and read 410.” That’s what made it real; it reinforced for Chuck what he had to do. He needed to embrace the identity shift.
Chuck described hating exercise; he hated watching what he ate, hated trying to lose weight only to fail again and again. “Before, I never felt like I’d be able to change.” But this time was different. This time, it was not the rational thought prompting him forward, but a new sense of being filling him with emotion. That lightning strike / baseball bat to the head doesn’t come from a considered weighing of the pros and cons; it’s an overwhelming sensation in which an internal spirit awakens and proclaims: This will happen!
Chuck’s transformation was so total that I had no idea of his amazing story when I first met him in 2015. It was at a fitness conference in Kansas City, in a hotel room after-party. I assumed he was another fitness aficionado and was surprised when he replied to my call for stories. We met again in 2017 and 2018 and shared a big hug each time.
I told Chuck’s story to Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a longtime critic of the idea that willpower is some depleting resource we need to ration in order to change behavior.
“Chuck sounds like he had this experience that didn’t change his self-control,” Inzlicht said. “He changed his identity.” Being a good dad was something Chuck would hold in high value, and this was the identity push he needed because of his concerns about his ability to be active with his children and even live long enough to see them grow. As a result, “The value of losing weight dramatically increased.”
Chuck described his old identity as an anchor that needed to die for him to move forward. This was the defining moment that divided his life into before and after. “The person I am now was born that day,” he said.
From ashes gray, a phoenix arose.
But what does this all mean? How did this one moment help Chuck lose over two hundred pounds and keep them off? The first part to understand is that insight, driven by emotion, unlike rational analysis, is something possessing the power to crush doubt.
“There was an overwhelming sense of joy and relief,” he said. “I didn’t need to struggle with my motivation; it came built in.” Chuck described a sense of inner peace; there was no question he would do it. There were still struggles to overcome, but he had momentum that began that day; it pushed him forward.
I want to repeat something Chuck said, because it’s damn important. Let’s bold, italicize, and center it to draw attention:
“I didn’t need to struggle with my motivation; it came built in.”
This is what we’re going for, dear reader. Right there is the reason I’m writing this book. Dropping over two hundred pounds and keeping them off takes tremendous effort, but having it feel like destiny, that you have an endless fountain of desire to achieve, after years of trying and failing, can only be attained by a sudden, transformative experience. I’m not saying amazing accomplishment can’t be attained by way of baby steps, but that way sucks, and the failure rate is high.
Rapid transformation of desire to succeed is so much cooler! Wouldn’t you rather do it that way?
Maybe not. Maybe that identity-shift stuff freaked you out.
But I want to alleviate that fear, because you’re going to change anyway. We are, all of us, changing all the time. I’m quite a bit different from the man I was ten years ago, and way different than the one from twenty-five years ago. While a life-changing epiphany is something that feels like it is something that happens to you, the preparatory work, along with your life experiences and deepest desires and understanding of your true self, help ensure it was something coming from you. This isn’t an outside agency acting upon your brain; this is your brain.
Yes, if this happens, you’re going to change. A lot. Quickly. Sounds scary, but it comes with an overwhelming feeling of rightness. And that’s why it drives you. We’ll examine the neuroscience behind this shift in coming chapters, but for now I ask you to trust in the power of your unconscious and conscious processing systems to find the correct path.
Time for another mental activity.
Think of what happened to Chuck, and why it happened. The overwhelming epiphany seemingly came out of the blue—but did it? The seed was sown back in that New Orleans bar. He became more aware of the negative consequences of his current path. He also talked with his wife about how children were for “later,” when he got healthy.
And then it all came crashing down in an instant with a pregnancy announcement. Chuck received an overwhelming vision of the man he must become, for his wife, and for his unborn child.
Chuck was suddenly “pro” focused.
The cons of changing didn’t matter; all that mattered was becoming.
Your next task is to maximize the pros. Imagine one or three of the things you’d like to do. Create a basic vision of the You, Part 2, that I spoke of earlier.
Now imagine what it’s like to be that person.
Focus on just a few of the major benefits you will receive from this change. As I showed earlier, don’t overanalyze, but ponder some of what will be awesome about that new career, new body, new location, or new life. What are the big things that make it so desirable?
Are these good things not just good, but amazing? Are they inspiring? Do they make you desire this change so much that you must achieve them? If not, perhaps the problem is you’re not being ambitious enough in your vision. But don’t be so ambitious that you choose an objective which is unachievable.
This is called the “expectancy-value approach,” a behavior-change theory dating back to 1967. It dictates that we engage in those behaviors we both expect to be successful at and have high value to us.
Think on this: What kind of benefits would it take to inspire you to action? Merge this with consideration of the feasibility of the goal. You can still dream big, because implausible does not mean impossible.
Create another vision. Think of a new you so incredible it becomes irresistible. Push the boundaries of realism. No one gets to be Batman except Batman, but you can still achieve awesome. There’s only one Wonder Woman, yet you can become a wondrous woman.
What does the limit of your potential look like? More important, how does it feel to imagine the benefits of standing in those shoes?
Don’t expect this will cause lightning to strike now. It’s information for percolation. But it might happen soon, so be ready, just in case. A transformative moment might happen in chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71), or it might happen in chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo). It might happen three months after you finish this book. Work the problem until you’re stuck, engage in diversion, and you could have a transformation like Chuck did.
Chuck went from despair to joyous determination in an instant. Joyous determination. This sense of elation Chuck described is a parameter of the transtheoretical model called “dramatic relief.” It can take place when one moves from the contemplation stage and into the preparation stage, from thinking to doing. It is because the anticipation of resolving one’s weighty problems generates a sense of euphoria. You’re like, Hell, yes! I see light at the end of the tunnel now, and I will run toward it. Nothing will stop me.
How does the feeling last? What keeps you on the new course, besides the shift in values and identity? The secret is in the synapses.
James Prochaska explained that such dramatic relief could involve either negative or positive arousal. Positive arousal involves being inspired to chase something good. But negative arousal, unlike the name might imply, is not a bad thing: it’s about removing a negative feeling, such as conquering an addiction.
I was in a state of despair, and taking real action, working hard for something for the first time in my life, was the antidote. In that moment, I understood that solid effort could change everything. The enlightenment, the realization that I was about to take action, cured my despair that day, and step-by-step, progress was made toward a new and better life.
The emotional arousal from a momentous epiphany is like a hit of a powerful drug, and it is because pleasurable neuromodulators are activated. A new path is created in the mind, and each step forward in that better direction provides a little rush of positive reinforcement that whispers, This is right.
At a simple level, how these neuromodulators work for ongoing motivation can be described via operant conditioning, as outlined by psychologist B. F. Skinner early in the twentieth century. It’s stimulus-response; the epiphany is such a positive experience that every additional step taken (the stimulus) that stays true to the vision allows the recipient of the vision to continue to feel that sense of rightness from its pursuit (the response). More details are in chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo), but it’s this neurochemical boost that makes you take the next step, and the next one.
The quest comes to rule the synapses.
Self-Compassion vs. Self-Loathing
If you hate your body, you’ll be less inspired to change it. Because passion for health rarely comes from a place of self-loathing. Same goes for hating your life.
There are those who lose weight because they were filled with disgust over their bodies. It can work for some, but research indicates shaming and self-loathing over obesity leads to comfort eating and immobility far more often than generating action.
In a 2013 study, researchers at Florida State University assert that not only does stigmatizing obesity lead to poorer mental-health outcomes, but the authors state, “Rather than motivating individuals to lose weight, weight discrimination increases risk for obesity.”
And a 2003 study by University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Kristin Neff revealed the importance of self-compassion in boosting one’s psychological function. It “involves being touched by and open to one’s own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it, generating the desire to alleviate one’s suffering and to heal oneself with kindness.”
It contrasts with efforts to boost self-esteem, which have come under criticism. Self-esteem often means judgments and comparisons, evaluating personal performances in comparison to a set of standards, as well as examining how others view you. And while low self-esteem can have negative psychological outcomes, boosting it is not a panacea for the psyche. The first issue is that it’s hard to raise, and the second is that targeting self-esteem can lead to self-absorption and even narcissism.
Part of the benefit of focusing on self-compassion is that it’s not just about you. It “represents a balanced integration between concern with oneself and concern with others, a state that researchers are increasingly recognizing as essential to optimal psychological functioning,” Professor Neff wrote. Winning at life need not involve competition. You may have a sudden insight that the best thing for your future is to dedicate yourself to helping others. Look at Chuck. He wasn’t thinking about looking in a mirror or strutting on a beach. He wanted to be a good dad.
We will examine self-compassion meditation techniques in chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo).
The body is often a source of one’s self-loathing, so I’ll share the words of Taryn Brumfitt, a body-acceptance advocate and director of the documentary film Embrace. She told me of the need to not descend into negativity: “I have never met a single human being that has made lifelong, meaningful change that came from shame or guilt.” Conversely, she has seen much positive change resulting from self-care, self-love, and self-respect. “I’m asking people to embrace their positive qualities.”
I gained a lot of weight in my early 20s and I hated myself, but the harder I tried, the less possible it seemed to lose weight. Finally gave up in my 40s. But then something clicked. I decided I needed to be kinder to myself, love the body I had, and love what it could do. Before I knew it, I had the confidence to get a trainer…. I feel the best I’ve felt and looked in years!
—Victoria
I bring this up because all this talk of unstoppable desire to succeed and motivation and willpower can send the wrong message.
Sticking to weight loss as the example, we live in an environment that manufactures body fat. With over two-thirds of Americans being classified as having excess weight or obesity, and the fact it happened in a few decades, it’s clear there has been a major societal shift contributing to it.
Obesity is not a personal failing. It’s not a choice people make. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Just because this book is about exploring the mystery of generating a massive leap in motivation does not mean those who don’t experience it are somehow lesser.
Losing weight or changing your life in other ways is complex. That’s because human motivation is equally complicated. A big problem with the weight-loss industry is a lot of the strategies are built on suffering, which are not effective for the long term. People feel the failure is their own rather than due to a corrupt industry that failed them.
I spent years unhappy with my weight…. I would hide food and opt out of gym whenever possible because I had been told so many times at that point that my body was flawed, I didn’t believe it was capable of anything…. In my late 20s, joining the body-positivity movement helped me see value and worth in my body and what it’s capable of … and I will be completing my 4th half marathon next month. —Amanda
You may have an epiphany that you’re done with worrying about your weight and decide to focus your energies on things more important to you, and I am 100 percent cool with that. It’s your life; you have the power to choose your own road.
If you’re guilty of beating yourself up, it’s time to ditch the self-loathing and accept yourself for your faults and your capabilities. Use your newfound self-respect as part of the process to energize your desire to find the best way forward for you.
Accept your humanity and that all humans are flawed. Being a perfectionist gets in the way of self-compassion. There will be detailed steps later, but for now, endeavor to ditch shame and guilt, and, in so doing, try to better understand yourself. Take some time to analyze what makes you unique. What are your strengths? Where do your capabilities lie? What could you accomplish if you were truly determined? Why would you be able to accomplish these goals? What is it that you bring to the equation that makes these goals attainable? Focusing on your qualities and your potential, imagine what your post-epiphany journey might look like.
You need to know yourself better, because there is no cookie-cutter approach to creating an optimal life outcome. It is unique to you.
I like cookies.
Exceeding Expectations
There are people for whom life has been criminally unfair. The cards they’ve been dealt are a puddle of cat puke.
It is possible, dear reader, you are one such unlucky feline-vomit recipient.
When it comes to body weight, myriad factors can add fat to your frame: genetics, environment, finances, abuse, mental illness, medical conditions, medication…. Regardless of a dream of getting in shape and/or bettering one’s life, there can be preexisting problems that will hamstring efforts.
People who proclaim anyone can achieve anything if they just work hard enough need to shut up and go far away, then shut up some more.
Life isn’t fair, and because it isn’t fair you must not feel shame or a need for comparison. Some have immense privilege. Others, their lives suck, and it is not of their own making.
And yet they are told to “Just do it.” They are shamed for their weight and shown photoshopped models on magazine covers as the “ideal” they should aspire to. Beyond that, there are the societal expectations to have fancier cars, nicer houses, bigger paychecks, better-looking spouses, and smarter children.
I’m calling bullshit on all that.
This is about you and bettering your life by playing the hand you’ve been dealt to the best of your ability. Yes, you can achieve a great deal by being passionate and inspired to succeed; you can exceed all expectations not just with your body, but with your career, happiness, relationships, and more. But it is still worth comprehending the reality of your situation.
There is merit in aiming high, because if you only make it three-quarters of the way to your goal, you’re still overjoyed at how much you’ve accomplished. But do not aim so high—do not quest for the unattainable—if failure to become Batwoman or Wonder Man would crush your will to continue.
Seek greatness on your own terms.
Fulfilling Life’s Purpose
Lee Holland had a “sit-down job,” something her family envied.
Living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she came from poverty and was one of the few to finish high school and the first to go to college. She worked in a small cubicle as a customer-service representative for a major health-insurance company, which was seen as a big step up from working in fast food or doing manual labor. But her life felt unfulfilled, like she was going through the motions. Lee felt destined for more. All that was missing was the drive to figure out her purpose in life and then to chase it.
The drive arrived in fall 2007.
She took a call from a man who worked at a carpet mill in rural south-eastern United States. He was calling because his young son had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. The man was so relieved because he had just been recalled to work after a layoff and had medical insurance again.
Unfortunately, Lee had to tell the man his policy had a “preexisting-condition clause,” and any new diagnosis in the first year was not covered. This was prior to the Affordable Care Act, when the law changed, requiring policies to not have such restrictions for children.
Lee wanted to help. She had previous experience working for a state Medicaid contractor and saw a chance to get the boy coverage. She called the Medicaid office and was told they would cover the child, but only after they received a denial explanation from the insurance company Lee worked for. Prior to her company being able to issue such a denial they needed to send the boy to a pediatric oncologist. The problem was, the only such specialist within one hundred miles of the client refused to see the boy unless they knew they’d receive payment. Her company wouldn’t cover them. Medicaid wouldn’t guarantee payment until they received a denial explanation from her company. It was a catch-22: her company couldn’t provide denial until the boy saw a pediatric oncologist, but the oncologist wouldn’t see the boy unless payment was guaranteed.
But she’d done her job. In fact, she’d already gone above and beyond. Company policy was to end the call and move on to the next customer.
“At that moment, something in me broke,” Lee Holland told me.
Not caring that it was against the rules, she blocked calls on her phone and walked into her manager’s office. “I told him he could fire me at the end of the day, but I was going to get that child on Medicaid and in to see a pediatric oncologist.” Her manager replied with, “Do what you have to do.”
It required several phone calls, a discussion with her company’s legal department, and signing of privacy release forms, but she got the boy approved for Medicaid and scheduled to see an oncologist by the end of the day.
It was all buildup. After her shift, Lee’s life-changing moment came in the parking lot as she walked to her car.
It was a gray November day; a light drizzle fell. Then a question popped into her head: What are you doing working in customer service when you can help people like this? There was a sudden snap decision to change careers. It came so fast, she didn’t even break stride as she closed the final steps to her car. “I didn’t know what it was yet. It was just between me and the universe that I was going to do something. I felt I had potential to help people through the chaotic mass of the American health-care system.” The realization, Lee said, was like a dislocated bone suddenly popping back into its joint.
“I had instant drive to do it,” she told me.
The moment she got home she logged on to her computer to look at what education programs she would need. Thirty-six years old and possessing a degree in cultural anthropology, she began by upgrading her science and math courses at a community college. There were many challenges over the next decade, but for Holland, there was never any doubt she was going to make a difference in the world. She recently graduated with a doctorate in pharmacology and a master’s degree in public health, and has accepted a research fellowship in D.C. that ensures pharmaceutical quality for Medicare and Medicaid recipients. She has won prestigious grants, awards, and scholarships, conducted important research, delivered numerous presentations, and mentored other students.
At first, Lee was leery of pursuing a doctorate as part of this new path in life, because it was a four-year commitment and she was already in her forties at that point. But a friend explained the time would pass anyway, and in four years she’d be four years older either with or without the degree, and her mind was made up. “There were a lot of challenges in between,” Lee said. If one path didn’t work out, she had to find another. “Even though I had suddenly become singular in my determination, I had to be flexible about the way I did it.”
And it all changed in that parking lot in 2007. “Since then I’ve met so many amazing people. My social life exploded. I got to travel the world.” She also met her husband and has been married for eight years.
“Now I feel like I’m really fulfilling my life’s purpose.”
Tuning In to Being Turned On
In the introduction, I discussed the “magic moment” and how you might need to meet it partway by engaging in traditional methods of behavior change for a while and hoping epiphany strikes somewhere along the way. It’s also important to not let the magic moment pass you by. This is your final task for chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71): I want you to envision what it’s like to seek the magic moment.
Lee Holland might have missed hers. It wasn’t anything jarring like a sudden pregnancy announcement. She had done her job and could have ended the call, but in her mind, there was an opportunity to really help, to make a difference on that one day. She was somehow attuned to that opportunity, and it primed her brain for that epiphany in the parking lot.
Imagine what it’s like to be attuned.
Now that you know a life-changing epiphany can come from anywhere, it’s important to be able to recognize it. Yes, it is powerful; usually so much so that there is no denying the experience. But perhaps it needs a nudge. Perhaps it doesn’t take place in a microsecond, but over several seconds. So instead of squashing down the beginnings of overwhelming emotion because you’re too cool for that, imagine what it’s like to embrace the feeling, explore it, and let it flow.
Because in the first second or two you could lose it by ignoring the sensation or even crushing it. Society conditions us to not show too much emotion, but screw that. You must feel this experience and feel it deeply. This book is about learning how to experience something so powerful it changes you down to the bone marrow. I want you to experiment with breaking with your conditioning and seek.
Seek meaning from your sudden insight.
Too often we tune out, seeking constant entertainment to distract from what our unconscious is trying to tell us. Break from that and examine these moments when the brain goes off on a tangent and, rather than try to snap out of it, explore it. Feed that sensation some fuel.
What kind of fuel? The kind that understands that, as humans, we seek experiences that allow us to be comfortable, and by attuning yourself to a life-changing insight, you must be willing to get uncomfortable. Lee had that comfortable sit-down job her family envied, and she knew that rejecting it to chase opportunity would involve struggle.
“One does not become fully human painlessly.”
These are the words of twentieth-century psychologist Rollo May. In his 1950 book The Meaning of Anxiety, he wrote of how such negative emotions can be a good teacher, because while we can avoid the reality of certain problems, the feeling of disturbance is something we carry with us: it gnaws. Suffering, said May, is an integral part of growth. Take that pain, pull it like a sword from its scabbard, and wield it!
That being written, please don’t go off your prescribed anxiety medication. This is just about using your negative emotions to spark personal evolution. Mark Beeman explained that anxiety triggers analysis, and analysis is the opposite of insight. But it’s still part of the process. Remember: Work until you get stuck. Analyze, then engage in diversion. As we will learn later, it is during a positive mood when epiphany is most likely to strike.
This book is not all “Think positive and you can live your dreams!” ad nauseam.
There is an adage in motivational speaking and internet memes: “Dream it. Wish it. Do it.” And it is bullshit, because this is not an easy road of endless happy thoughts in which if you keep your eye on the prize and always think positive, you’ll miraculously attract what you desire.
You must rethink positive thinking.
Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of social and developmental psychology at New York University and the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking. She explained to me it’s beneficial to have these lofty goals you wish to pursue, but not to daydream about your achievement, because it creates complacency. If you fantasize about how wonderful life will be after you’ve attained your goal, it fakes a sensation of already achieving it, so you no longer strive. Instead, focus on overcoming obstacles to achieving the goal. (Details on how are in chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo).)
Changing who you are can be frightening. As a concept, it may fill you with dread. But it’s not some scary Jekyll and Hyde personality shift. You’re still you, just an improved version. It’s about change for the better, not worse.
When you learn to control fear of change, you open yourself to becoming more.
Priming Directives and Quantum Leaps
“Mount St. Helens blew up in a single moment.”
Sherry Pagoto told me this as an analogy of a life-changing epiphany. She’s a full professor at the University of Connecticut and a clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral counseling for obesity. “But the explosion was years in the making.”
We may not even see the pressure building, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, simmering away, ready to explode like a Diet Coke with a dozen Mentos dropped in.
Thinking about the future is but one action helping prime a brain for change, Pagoto explained. Often, for people to be able to make a massive leap of behavior change, they must have been pondering it in some way. It can involve a feeling of malaise, depression, or dissatisfaction. Conversely, such thinking can revolve around a desire to improve, to transform from good to great. Such thoughts may reside in the back of our minds for years before we’re ready to act upon them.
Contemplation can be subtle. It can build and build, but still, there is resistance to change because it is both fearful and challenging. And yet one day a time may come to pass when one cannot hold it in any longer and the emotional volcano erupts. A specific life event can bring it about. But what control do we have over these dramatic, triggering events?
That is not an easy question to answer, because life, and our approach to it, is often chaotic in nature.
Chaos theory can help us understand the dilemma better. A branch of mathematics examining complex systems sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, chaos theory has been referred to as the “butterfly effect,” a metaphor that lets us imagine the minor air disruption of a butterfly’s wings culminating in tornado formation weeks later. Slight alterations at an earlier juncture can end up yielding widely different results farther down the line in a person’s life.
I first learned of chaos theory from actor Jeff Goldblum in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. While seductively placing droplets of water on costar Laura Dern’s hand to show how minor alterations in initial conditions would affect which way the drop would roll, Goldblum explained that the theory “deals with unpredictability in complex systems.”
The human brain is a complex system. Life is a complex system.
About those “minor alterations” in initial conditions: Subtle changes in where the droplet was placed or how Laura held her hand or even the way the breeze was blowing could cause the droplet to go in a different direction. Such is the case with life as well. What if Lesley never picked up a sword? What if Chuck and his family had chosen a different bar? What if Lee hadn’t gotten that call? What if the person who decided to quote Joan Baez in the school paper picked Judas Priest lyrics instead? How would all our lives have turned out?
Such questions are difficult to answer because behavior change is not always a rational, linear process.
Sometimes it’s a quantum leap.
Act Now!
Take a break from rationalizing change and instead examine your feelings. Get emotional and listen to what it tells you.
Remember that song by Journey and “don’t stop believin’.”
Let the fast, intuitive System 1 be the hero, and make the slower, rational System 2 the supporting character. Don’t let System 2 overanalyze the benefits of the story System 1 constructs. Get the confirmation, then stop.
Forget worrying about the “cons” of change and instead imagine how powerful the “pros” will be. Endeavor to become pro focused.
Again: Work till you get stuck, then divert and let the unconscious do its thing.
Accept that this is about change both in identity and values, rather than a change in behavior. The altered identity-value construct makes new behavior adoption automatic. Lose the fear of becoming a new person, because this is a critical component.
Aim high, but realistically so. Choose goals that have a high value to you but are deemed achievable via concerted effort.
Embrace self-compassion. Don’t hate yourself or what you see in the mirror. Realize positivity is the path.
Don’t daydream overmuch. Keep your fantasizing of achievement to a minimum so as not to sap energy. Rather, consider the primary obstacle to success and how to overcome it.
2 (#ulink_a13514f3-8cf4-5416-a58f-0fa4106678c5)
EMBRACING CHAOS: QUANTUM VS. LINEAR BEHAVIOR CHANGE IN THE ROLE OF EPIPHANY (#ulink_a13514f3-8cf4-5416-a58f-0fa4106678c5)
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
My grandmother was an evil and bugshit bonkers hell-beast of a woman who hated everyone and everything. A while back, we were having a family get-together, and my sister asked which kid had possession of grandma’s engagement ring.
“Isn’t that one of her Horcruxes?” my son said.
The joke slayed; 10 points to Gryffindor.
Speaking of crazy grandmothers and things that slay, there was blood everywhere, and I was screaming. The blood was pouring out of my left knee. Childhood trauma provides vivid recollection despite more than four decades having past.
We were visiting my grandmother in Victoria. A friend named Brent was chasing me through the house in a game of tag, and the sliding glass door that led to the back deck was sparkling clean.
In other words, I thought it was open. I was only five.
Fortunately, I did not go through the glass. I hit it with my knee and it shattered, then I fell backward, away from the shards. Blood poured forth from my knee as screams ripped from my throat in equal measure. This, followed by Uncle Jim driving me to the hospital through the rolling coastal hills at a speed that punished the suspension of the pre-1970s-model four-door car while my mother had a minor meltdown in the back seat as she attempted to hold my knee together with six squares of toilet paper.
I still hadn’t stopped screaming. I remember the screaming, not the pain.
Thirty stitches plus an annoyed doctor and nurse later, we went back to Grandma’s house, and she proceeded to chew me out about her shattered door.
That was my first inkling she wasn’t such a nice person.
I achieved a fuller realization she was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” a few years after destroying her window. My parents had split, and we had no choice but to live with her for six painful months. I was getting an apple and she told me to give her half. I got a knife and cut, and being a young lad, it was a haphazard job. I was left with one piece substantially larger than the other.
It seemed wise to give my grandmother the larger half, so I did. Then she proceeded to berate me for being a “greedy little bugger.” She told me I should have given her the bigger half. I was looking at my half, which was about one-third of an apple, then looked at her two-thirds of an apple and said to myself You really are a nutbag.
I won’t repeat any of the racist slurs she often spewed.
For three decades, I watched my grandmother torment my mother. My mother told me horror stories about her childhood, and I believe them. Mom had one of the shittiest, most abusive childhoods you can imagine. So, yes, she’s a little neurotic as an adult.
But she is not at all abusive, quite the opposite.
I have never wanted for love. Mom showered my sister and me with love to the point it was almost annoying. “Yeah, I get it, Mom. You love me, but now you’re embarrassing me.” I always knew from my earliest days that, no matter what, Mom had my back.
And yet, when she became pregnant for the first time with my older sister, there was panic. My mom dreaded she would be like her own mother and perpetuate a cycle of abuse. She spoke of this to her doctor, who gave her some simple yet poignant advice: “The suffering you’ve endured can be undone by loving your children with all your heart. Think of what your own mother would have done, and do the opposite.”
The advice sounded good but did not resonate. The fear remained.
Later, at home, she felt my sister kick. My mother told me of feeling the growing child inside her. She believed the kick was a message saying, I am here, and I need you. Even though my sister was not yet born, my mother realized in that instant she loved her in a way she had never loved another person before.
Her heart soared.
In a moment, she knew she would never be like her own mother. Down to her core, she was certain she would be the most loving and caring mom she could be. And she has been.
I’m not crying. You’re crying. Shut up.
Such a sensation, in which you achieve total clarity of purpose in an instant, qualifies for the word “epiphany.”
No matter which way epiphany manifests, you must listen. It’s the path to a better life.
Speaking of a better life, my mom didn’t let her upbringing hold her back. She earned her corner office in a male-dominated industry, becoming a business juggernaut celebrated in the community. What’s more, she took a near-impossible high road with her own mother, continuing to look after her rather than write her off. She even forked out for a nice nursing home when the old bat lost the last of her marbles.
The lesson is this: The circumstances of the first part of your life don’t have to define the second part. No matter what transpired yesterday or the days preceding it, this does not determine what happens on neither this day nor the days yet to come.
No one makes it through life without scars. Some are visible, like the one on my knee; others reside below the surface. Sometimes change happens fast via epiphany. Sometimes it takes years and baby steps. Change is inevitable, but you’re the one who influences the direction such change will take.
If you’re tired of the path you’re on, you can switch to a new one. They’re your feet, and you have the freedom to place them where you choose. A quantum leap of inspiration to change your path does not mean you lack liberty. Just because your new way forward has become irresistible does not mean you have sacrificed self-determination. Rather, your heart and mind being united in what feels right is what gives epiphany its power to push you.
When you feel such power, it means you are about to fulfill your destiny.
Off the Quantum Deep End
The word “quantum” is being increasingly used in health circles to the point that it is almost considered to be pseudoscience.
What I am about to write is not pseudoscience. It’s Einsteinian science. And other kinds of real science. Quantum has been a real science thing for a long time and it’s still a real science thing.
Ironically, I chose a science-fiction author to explain it to me.
Digital Decision-Making
The first time I met Rob Sawyer, I was worried he was about to die. Being we were not yet friends and that I am sometimes selfish, my initial concern was how this affected me.
Rob is a Hugo Award–winning science-fiction author. Early in 2005, I registered for a weeklong science-fiction writer’s workshop at the Banff Center in the Rocky Mountains, to be led by Rob and taking place in September of that year. I’d read Rob’s work and seen his photo on book jackets, and when I met him at a book signing four months prior to the workshop, he looked nothing like I expected.
He’d lost a lot of weight. So much so I was concerned he had a terminal disease. My baser self worried that if he died, there would be no workshop.
But Rob was happy and energized, and the workshop was a great experience that led to us becoming friends. The first book of his I read was titled Factoring Humanity. I recall the main character created a “quantum computer” that could process infinite calculations per second because it operated in multiple dimensions, or parallel universes, or something.
Now you know why I wasn’t cut out to be a science-fiction author.
In addition to being a best-selling author (one of his novels, Flash-Forward, became a TV series on ABC), Rob is a sought-after speaker and futurist because of his ability to communicate complex scientific phenomena in lay terms. At the time of our conversation on the nature of quantum leaps, Rob was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-third novel, serendipitously titled Quantum Night. The fact that Rob had his own epiphany, which led to dropping a third of his body weight, a loss he has sustained for over a decade, makes his insight even more relevant. But before discussing his personal story, we spoke of the true, scientific meaning of the word “quantum.”
“Most things in life go along in an analog wave; they go up and they go down and they change gradually and continuously,” Sawyer said. He explained, when it comes to losing weight, the motivation for most is like that analog wave: sometimes it peaks, such as when the high school reunion is coming up, and other times it bottoms out, and the only desire is to braid one’s ass into the couch and shove Doritos down one’s neck.
With quantum cognition, however, there is no wave. “Quantum is not analog,” Sawyer said. “It’s not wavelike. It’s digital. It’s either on or off. It’s either this or that.”
This or that … these are the same words I heard from Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, who we’ll hear more from later, when he spoke to me of battling his addiction. After a struggle with alcohol, Collen suddenly quit drinking at the age of twenty-nine. “It was very black or white,” Phil said of quitting. “I knew I had to go this way or that way.” (Note: It can be dangerous and even deadly to suddenly quit substances such as alcohol as well as benzodiazepines, more commonly known under names such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan. Consult a physician.)
To reveal the science of the quantum leap, Sawyer went down to the atomic level. “We talk about the quantum leap of an electron, going from a lower energy state to a higher state.” Sawyer explained that this doesn’t mean an electron travels to that higher state the way a mountaineer ascends Everest. It’s not step-by-step. It means the electron has gone instantaneously from the base of the mountain to the peak, bypassing all the intermediate steps.
Quantum leaps can also take place with human motivation. The base of the mountain represents having no desire to work toward a change of behavior, and the peak indicates a strong and ongoing drive to do all the things being a new person entails.
The traditional models of behavior change, as already discussed, involve climbing the mountain one step at a time. But a quantum leap takes a person’s motivation right to the top. You are facing a mountain. You stand at the bottom. Peak motivation—your ultimate ability to do the work with inspired vigor—resides at the top. You can climb to that peak one step at a time (where there is risk of slipping and sliding back to the bottom anywhere along the route, but especially at the beginning), or you can step inside a Star Trek–style transporter device and materialize at the summit.
If you can locate such a transporter and figure out how to make it work, is it not worth giving it a shot if it means you get to bypass all those steps?
This does not mean the traditional model of slow-and-steady behavior change isn’t sometimes worthwhile. This isn’t one of those books filled with the Truth that “they” don’t want you to know about. The reality is that millions have changed their lives via psychological baby steps, whereas many others achieve sudden change. And some people have experienced both types.
My friend Paul Ingraham, a health writer in Vancouver, has gone through three major behavioral changes in his life. Two of them were in the traditional linear fashion he called “forced marches across a tipping point; one desperate, determined step at a time.” The other was via epiphany, which he described as “Way easier, completely irresistible. To have it was to change, no work required. Just *Poof!* I’m different now.”
“Forced marches across a tipping point.” This is an apt description for what most cognitive-behavior-change models are built around. But it doesn’t always work that way.
I do not wish to dismiss decades of work by respected psychologists in the baby-steps approach to change, because it’s a valuable tool that can be used to lead to epiphany. As I mentioned previously, look at the case of Lesley the fencer. She forced herself to struggle along for a couple of months, then came the poof Paul referred to. Same with my own physical transformation; I did not enjoy the first two months of battling to adopt an exercise regimen.
I struggled to develop the habit, and I almost quit. But when a staff member at the gym asked me if I’d had a good workout, and I realized that it had been pretty good, I had another epiphany: it was starting to not suck. And if it could not suck, then one day it could be enjoyable. In that moment, I promised myself I would keep exercising until I died. I met the poof partway, and over the next nine months, I lost fifty pounds of fat and gained twenty pounds of muscle. I’ve become a lifelong exerciser, going so far as to qualify for the Boston Marathon after seeing the horrific bombing in 2013, so I could run it the following year and be part of taking back the finish line from the terror of that day.
Time for another task.
Start thinking about what baby steps you can engage in to meet the poof partway. What is your desired outcome in terms of ultimate motivation? What is the peak of inspired Mount Everest in terms of what you could achieve for your life situation? Visualize that peak and what it would look like to be transported there, bypassing all intervening steps.
Now imagine the transporter device is broken and you need to hike a step at a time. Maybe not all the steps, but at least some. You can’t stand around and wait for someone to fix the transporter. You need to start climbing.
What does the hike look like?
What is the first step?
Visualize your primary wish of this new person you’d like to be, whether it involves changes in activity level, diet, attitude, career, budgeting, education, a combination of any of these things, or some other things. Now forget that the transporter device exists.
What is the logical slow-and-steady path to achieve the goal? What is the first baby step? What is the second? The third? Start to map it out. Create the beginnings of a plan to just get started. It’s okay to seek help from a professional or otherwise knowledgeable person in formulating this plan.
Because the reality is, you may need to walk that path for a time. You may need to hike a while. But if you’re attuned to the possibility of epiphany on that journey of many baby steps, the transporter may one day pick you up and materialize you at the peak. Or not quite at the peak, but a lot closer to the top, at least.
Sometimes the process is passive. It’s something that happens to you, arriving unbidden. Other times, you must act.
Lace up those boots, because the poof is worth climbing toward.
The sudden-leap formula, which Ingraham described both as “way easier” and “completely irresistible,” warrants further investigation so you can understand why it’s worth the striving. Forced marches of motivation have a high failure rate, with not many people achieving lasting behavior change via such methods. This raises the question: What is the success rate of the quantum leap?
To uncover that, it is first important to gain deeper understanding of the mechanics of quantum change.
A Void in Need of Filling
“It’s like a switch has been thrown and you’ve gone from where you used to be to somewhere else, and the intervening steps didn’t occur,” Rob Sawyer said. “That’s a quantum change.”
Sawyer’s own change causing dramatic weight loss was quantum in nature. He spoke of twenty years at his sedentary job of being a writer leading to gaining significant weight, but he stayed affixed to that office chair because he had a mission.
“It was only when I won the Hugo Award for best novel [for Hominids] in 2003 when I had a void in my ambition that needed to be filled,” he said. It was the top professional achievement he could attain in his field. Afterward, this other goal of losing weight that had been hovering in the background went through a quantum change. A return to discussing electrons explains how it happened.
“The lowest level of an atom holds two electrons, and the next highest level can hold eight,” Sawyer said, explaining that you cannot push one of those lower-level electrons up to a higher state if all of those spots are occupied. But if one spot is vacated, there is an opportunity for a lower-level electron to complete a quantum leap to that higher level. It is promoted instantaneously. This is what happened for Sawyer. When he achieved ultimate career success, space was made for something else to become a top priority.
“It’s no coincidence the year after winning the Hugo I lost a third of my body weight,” Sawyer said. And true to the descriptions of it being a digital process and not analog, this or that, on or off, Rob was committed. “There was no wavering,” he said. “It was going to happen.”
Sawyer has kept the weight off more than a decade.
Make Room for Change
I have a big task for you now. So big, in fact, it needs its own header and section.
Reflect on what Sawyer said about winning the Hugo. Recall the description of how an electron at a higher level must vacate the premises prior to a lower-level electron being able to make that quantum leap to the higher energy level.
This is all about achieving a higher energy level.
And if your higher level is full, something needs to vacate it and make room for your inspiration to be instantaneously promoted, the way Rob’s desire to lose weight was.
It’s a fancy way of describing prioritization.
If your highest energy level is maxed out with “life stuff,” you must reevaluate that stuff, because something needs to be deprioritized, perhaps even eliminated.
What takes up a lot of your energy?
Some things are critical. There are aspects of work and family that are challenging to deprioritize, but everyone wastes time, even those who think they don’t. You say you need your downtime to watch TV or surf the net, but how much time? A 2016 Nielsen report determined that the average adult American spends over 4.5 hours each day watching TV shows and movies. This doesn’t even consider surfing on your laptop or phone. Surely there is room to make room.
MAKE IT HAPPEN!
I have a few of these special exercises in the book. Call them “Act Now!” on steroids. I save them to call attention to more critical tasks. This one qualifies, because if a quantum leap of motivation is going to take place, your highest energy level needs an open slot. This is the detailed analysis, rather than sudden insight, for which writing things down may help. Examine your schedule and where your focus lies. Make a list of the stuff you do that sucks up a lot of energy and time. Consider where room can be made. You need this hole, this vacated spot, because then there will be a yearning to fill it. Give this task of making room the extra attention it deserves.
What may happen as a result of completing this first “Make It Happen!” exercise is that, through careful analysis, you determine, “Of course staring at a screen sucks up a lot of my time, so I’ll just cut way back on that.” But you don’t. You keep staring, because it’s paying off for you in some way.
But now you know this is part of the solution, and it sticks and gets unconsciously turned over, and then perhaps the epiphany comes through that uncovers why you have that behavior, how meaningless it is to continue the way you do, and how much more meaningful it would be to your life to spend that time on a passionate pursuit.
One day, you could be watching The Big Bang Theory and say, “Wow, this show has strapped a couple of hydrodynamic boards to its feet and achieved altitude overtop a carnivorous fish,” and you start walking each evening instead.
The Ground Shifts
“This is about exponential change.”
Ken Resnicow is a professor of health behavior at the University of Michigan and has published several papers on the phenomenon of quantum behavior change. He explained how the stages of change—the transtheoretical model discussed in chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71)—“is a very linear progression that is also quite proportional. They even talk about standard deviations of change.” This means studies of TTM show groups of people based along a bell curve changing a specific amount at a specific rate.
Conversely, Rob Sawyer explained that quantum leaps of change are not linear, not proportional, and not in stages. “Exponential” means going from baby steps to Olympic-caliber long jump in a single stride.
“Using their terms [from Prochaska’s TTM],” Resnicow said, “one can jump from precontemplator into action at a moment’s notice.” And this is not just action but dedicated action, aka “maintenance.” In TTM, the “action” stage is tenuous. One is struggling to adopt the new behavior to achieve maintenance. But with a powerful epiphany there is no struggle; it is not a half-assed adoption. It’s full-assed.
Lee Holland did not slowly slide over into laborious action because of her epiphany. Rather, she became dedicated to taking “action” regarding her career and into “maintenance” in an instant after the realization in the parking lot that she was destined to do much more with her life.
“Epiphany can be primed for,” Resnicow said. “The raw materials for the perfect storm are something that can be provided.” Priming can give people the information and skills that make it happen.
“Don’t pressure yourself worrying that your light bulb hasn’t gone off yet,” Resnicow said. Doing so creates a state of anxiety. As we’ll examine further, it’s positive mood states that set the stage for sudden insight. Besides, “Sometimes things have to marinate for a while before epiphany happens.”
It’s a struggle to escape struggle.
Post-epiphany, the changes in behavior won’t feel like work. It doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do first. I’m going to kick your ass a bit in coming chapters, and then, suddenly, perhaps …
“It isn’t about struggling,” said Professor Miller, who has been treating addictions for forty years. “With overcoming addiction, some people are often white-knuckle holding on to not go back to their previous situation.” But he explained it is different for others, the ones who experience an epiphany, because they suddenly realize they’ve had enough.
“The typical epiphanies are, ‘Oh, shit! I don’t want to be this person anymore!’” said Resnicow. “If you’re religious, it can be, ‘This is not what God put me on Earth for.’ It’s an overwhelming sense the ground has shifted beneath you.” Resnicow explained quantum change as a tectonic-plate movement in how you view your identity and your behavior, and how the two no longer are compatible.
An example of how well sudden change in behavior works comes from a 2009 study of seventeen hundred smokers and ex-smokers published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The authors found that those who spontaneously quit smoking are almost twice as likely to still not be smoking after six months than those who chose a carefully planned quitting attempt. It’s also interesting that spontaneous quitters were less reliant upon pharmacotherapy to quit. They didn’t need that nicotine patch. They were just done.
My best friend Craig woke up one day and promptly decided to quit when he realized how much money he’d wasted over the years. This cessation of smelling like an ashtray was done much to my and my wife’s approval. After more than a quarter century, he’s never wavered.
Battling addiction or weight or finding purpose are not the only things a quantum leap can assist with. A 2005 study published in Behaviour Research and Therapy looked at “sudden gains” in cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression. The research found not only did 42 percent of patients experience a great leap of improvement in a short time, but those who did were more likely to sustain such gains and had a higher rate of recovery.
I want to repeat something regarding epiphanies: It’s not calculated. Professor Resnicow refers to it as a “metacognitive event.” This means the solution to the problem often arrives while you’re not actively trying to solve the problem.
For now, this is not helpful for those looking to achieve epiphany in order to change their lives. But I did the research and created a guaranteed* method for making it happen.
*JK. Not a guarantee.
Unlimited Drive
Until recently, the phenomenon of quantum change bestowing unlimited drive didn’t mesh with research into “ego depletion,” in which willpower is considered limited. Regular exertions of will to complete tasks or resist certain foods were thought to fatigue the mind; people run out of mental energy to adhere to their new lifestyle.
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James Fell
From internationally syndicated fitness columnist and author, James Fell, comes a no-nonsense guide on how to get in shape, fix your finances, alleviate depression and change your life for good.We’ve all been there. Wanting to change your life forever, but only doing it in fits and starts. Feeling inspired to be disciplined one day, then falling back into old habits on the next. Or changing for a few weeks or even months, but then slipping back into familiar behaviours. Bad habits are hard to break for a reason. But you still try because the goal is worth it: slowly and painfully forming new habits to the point where you are able to adhere to a new lifestyle, long-term.Not only do we struggle with all of it but the failure rates of these models are staggering.What if there was a different way? What if sudden moment, which happens to be a surprisingly common occurrence among those who succeed would allow you to skip the struggle of behaviour change and just become a different person in a moment? What if all the motivation they would ever need to change could arrive unbidden because of a life-altering flash of insight? It is the power of epiphany – a triggering event when drive and clarity of purpose for changing one’s life is instantly attained. James Fell’s THE HOLY SHIT MOMENT is about that who have sustained change. The stories outlined in this book examine an abrupt awakening, where a person’s purpose switches course in the space of a few seconds; their life is partitioned into the time before that moment occurred, and what comes after. In an instant, the gradual steps of behavior change are bypassed and life transformation takes hold for good. But is an epiphany something that can be generated?Yes. THE HOLY SHIT MOMENT is a self-help book written in a brash, audacious and informal, your-good-friend-giving-you-the-scoop style, but with the knowledge, research, wisdom and personal anecdotes to back up James’ words in the vein of Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass.
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Source ISBN: 9780008288686
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008288693
Version 2018-12-07
DEDICATION (#ulink_7b11c628-26b8-5d79-9664-71e7e0785e76)
Hi, Mom
CONTENTS
Cover (#u792bf4e7-a04f-5756-b055-c2fda7374b0e)
Title Page (#ufee62e3e-0931-5f8c-8e67-2a0807899513)
Copyright (#ulink_c75161f5-0186-5095-95e3-e6d831c57f63)
Dedication (#ulink_3c30004b-c797-5adf-b1e2-fae35c3ec0a7)
Preface (#ulink_283360af-3603-51db-b81f-476924e931ca)
Introduction: The Librarian Who Put Down the Cigarettes and Picked Up a Sword (#ulink_ff61b994-97b5-5c45-bd61-ac9cee22ffe6)
PART ONE: EPIPHANY AND COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR CHANGE (#ulink_ed8b1730-f071-5ec4-a6d0-917bb7ba7207)
1 The Antidote to Despair: The Euphoria of the Life-Changing Moment (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71)
2 Embracing Chaos: Quantum vs. Linear Behavior Change in the Role of Epiphany (#ulink_92135222-507b-5553-8518-1eb98fb99034)
3 You, Part 2: Finding Purpose via Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO: EPIPHANY AND THE EMOTIONAL SELF (#litres_trial_promo)
4 What’s Going On in There?: The Brain Science of the Holy Shit Moment (#litres_trial_promo)
5 The Rock-Bottom Hypothesis: The Power of Epiphany to Battle Addiction (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The Hand of God: Exploring Religious Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Power of Love: How Passion for Life and Love Inspires Sudden Change (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE: HACKING EPIPHANY (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Dreamers Aren’t Doers: Making Positive Fantasies Work for You Instead of Against You (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Nudging Toward the Leap: Battling the Status Quo and Preparing Your Mind for Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Shamans, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: External Assistance in the Reevaluation of Reality (#litres_trial_promo)
Conclusion: The Love We Found (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Resources (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_eda7535b-2ab5-5169-93a2-891798ebdcf5)
Psychology is not an exact science.
It is a field that Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory would deride for its lack of mathematical verifiability, and he’d be right. After all, when Sigmund Freud was pulling stuff out of a lower orifice to describe the “anal stage” of psychosexual development, Albert Einstein was creating theories of the universe that remain valid to this day.
Humanity’s understanding of physics allows humans to build rockets that only sometimes explode. Our understanding of psychology allows us to … uh … wait.
It’s not as bad as I allude to, but it is a discipline in flux. Homo sapiens’ neurological processing unit is complex and beyond our current understanding of mathematical formulae to neatly explain.
When I first approached the life-changing epiphany as an idea for a book, I expected it would be a water-cooler “Hey, check out this interesting information” variety of tome. Like a Malcolm Gladwell book, but with swearing and the occasional mention of poop.
I never imagined it could be a “how-to.”
But the more I researched, the more realistic the idea became. I gathered studies and spoke to smart people. I tried it on myself and my clients. I wrote articles and received enlightening responses.
There are no guarantees in life, but there is often good advice based on data and experience. We may not know all regarding the complexities of the mind, but human motivation has been studied for millennia. We do understand some interesting things, and through trial and error, people have transformed their lives for the better using myriad methods for change.
It turns out, the hare can kick the tortoise’s ass when properly inspired.
Sometimes the slow-and-steady approach doesn’t take you nowhere fast, it takes you nowhere at all. Conversely, the rascally rabbit has the finish line in its sights and is dashing toward it, invigorated, undeterred, unstoppable.
Finding true meaning, uncovering your real self, revealing your life’s purpose—such things rarely happen via baby steps. These are transformations unleashed, suddenly, to great effect. Often, there is a “Holy shit!” thrown in to celebrate the momentous realization. The epiphany drives you forward, passionately pursuing the newfound aim. And great thinkers across the ages have interesting ideas about how to make such an experience happen.
Read on, and perhaps it will happen for you.
Introduction (#ulink_884ebc5d-8c6b-5761-9c6d-88803576845b)
THE LIBRARIAN WHO PUT DOWN THE CIGARETTES AND PICKED UP A SWORD (#ulink_884ebc5d-8c6b-5761-9c6d-88803576845b)
One cannot leap a chasm in two jumps.
—SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
I saw Jaws when I was seven.
Children were free-range in the 1970s. Parents did their own weird thing that decade, so my sister and I got dumped at the local theater with regularity. It was a small town with one screen. In the summer of ’75, it was a movie about a megatoothed murder fish or nothing.
I wish I’d sat outside and watched dandelions push through the pavement. To this day, I can’t snorkel without hearing the music.
Despite living in the middle of a forest, after seeing the film I had nightmares that a great white was out to get me. A year later, the low-budget land-based knockoff, Grizzly, made my sleep even more of a horror show. My young brain could rationalize that hundreds of miles of spruce trees between me and the nearest ocean was even better than having “a bigger boat,” but what about a bear?
He could be outside my window. He might be pissed about the bear my dad stalked, shot, and skinned, now a rug lying in the living room of our house. The grizzly might be seeking revenge on the only son of the sonofabitch who slaughtered his sibling!
“MOOOOMMMMM!!!”
I came within fifteen feet of a bear while out for a run a few years back and managed to not pee myself. Statistically speaking, I’m far more likely to die on the toilet, and I love my toilet.
I love bears too. I grew out of the fear and realized what amazing creatures they are, so long as you’re not watching one rip Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-winning face off. You don’t need to pack up your shit and head off to the great outdoors and have your own face-to-bear experience. I like imagining them because, as a metaphor, they represent that which is fierce and powerful. A grizzly is something with claws and teeth. When they are of a mind to do a thing, they are unstoppable. Also, like me after a long run, they don’t smell too good.
When I imagine something kicking a lot of ass, I imagine a giant bear. And so when I have a lofty goal in need of chasing, I awaken my inner grizzly.
There is a grizzly bear hibernating within you, waiting for a key to unlock it from its cage. I want to help you find that key.
You have seen such an unleashed beast manifest in others; they become inspired about achieving their dreams and are relentless in the pursuit. My dad worked outside year-round and had the Grizzly Adams beard, but Mom was the one who let the huge furry quadruped loose. After the divorce, she moved us to the city and went all Revenant on glass ceilings.
Are there ceilings in your life you wish to burst through? Let’s rattle that cage and see what we can stir from its slumber.
How you direct this powerful creature is up to you. As a health-and-fitness columnist whose work has been read by millions, and as a weight-loss coach, I first became aware of the phenomenon of sudden and dramatic life change regarding people’s desire to change their bodies. But this is not a weight-loss book.
Okay, it’s a little bit of a weight-loss book.
If you want it to be, it is. Because such accomplishments have cascade effects. Improving one’s body is challenging, and those who attain the drive to do so rarely stop there. I’ve witnessed them go on to enhance their careers, improve relationships, conquer addiction, or undertake a complete life overhaul. Once the grizzly is free, there is no telling what adventures it will take you on.
That’s enough about bears for now. Let’s talk flying reindeer.
The Gift of Sudden Inspiration
“Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.”
My father says this often, as an explanation for his lovable goofiness. One day, I heard some motivational douche on the radio say those exact words, but as an imperative. His tone negative, the speaker proclaimed you must work to grow up, so you can be a big success or some shit. I don’t know. He was trying to suck the fun out of life. Anyway, he totally came across like “I will death murder the shit out of your inner child!” and then I was like “Yeah, go screw yourself; my dad is cool and you’re not,” and I changed the station.
That inner child. Remember when you were a kid and believed stuff?
The Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny are stupid, but Santa Claus? He kicks ass. There is a reason we let go of the Tooth Bunny earlier than the red-suited flying-reindeer wrangler: Santa is too cool to not exist.
I want to tap into your inner child, so you can believe some stuff. I want to tell you something so Christmas-Day awesome, you might have difficulty believing this present under the tree is real.
Except it’s real as puppy breath. I’m going to science this baby up with a heap of evidence to show you. I’ll share both far-out stories and studies about unlocking overarching awesomeness that takes life to a new, this-is-who-you-were-meant-to-be level.
You want big change? You want to be a badass at life? I’ll tell you something about what it means to be Evil Gluteus Maximus. Or … no. I won’t. Self-improvement is something that happens on your terms. You decide what is and is not the “Person You Were Meant to Be Registered Trademark.”
Who is this person? Start imagining now. Take a moment and reflect on life experiences; couple them with your inner child. Dream big. Realistically big, because not everyone gets to be an astronaut. But imagine what you could do if you were suddenly inspired to strive for it. If you had the passion and drive to go on an ambitious quest, what would that new life look like? Not just the body, but the whole life: career, relationships, finances, happiness, self-worth, personal identity … Take a moment; take three moments. Invest some mental energy. Think!
You’ve heard it’s about the journey and not the destination, right? Whatever. Despite what I just wrote, I’m not going to talk journeys too much in this book. Instead, we are zeroing in on the moment your passion to take that journey is unleashed.
Does this word “unleash” make you think of a process that happens slowly, step-by-step, through careful deliberation? Hell, no. It’s a big-ass rott-weiler straining to get off the chain and go fang-first into Nickelback.
It’s when suddenly life—or the universe, or whatever—sends you a powerful message for which you cannot help but proclaim, “Holy shit!” at the revelation. (Profanity optional.)
I don’t care if you believe in Santa or Satan, a golem or Gollum, an Indian elephant or Indiana Jones. Activate your imagination, and do some scientific discernment while you’re at it, because we’re about to take a voyage into explaining why you’ve been taking the approach to life change all wrong.
It may seem wishful thinking, what I’m about to tell you, but it’s not.
We’re about to unleash some shit.
Eye of the Tiger
I awoke at ass o’clock, guzzled some weapons-grade dark roast, and headed out for a six-mile run in temperatures hovering around hideous below zero.
As the sun rose, I did not lament the lack of sunglasses. They fog in under a minute at −20 degrees. Rather, my eyes were protected by a thick coating of frost collected on my lashes. Upon returning home, I snapped a selfie of my snowy visage and posted it to Facebook. The comments collectively proclaimed, “Dude, you are an entire cave full of batshit.”
My pre-epiphany self would agree.
In a previous life, I abhorred physical activity, guzzled English brown ales, and stuffed McDonald’s into my maw as though the apocalypse were imminent. Additionally, I was in debt, flunking out of college, and feeling like an unmotivated and out-of-shape bag of poo. But one day, the ground shifted beneath my feet. There was a transformative moment: a sudden strike of awakening in which my existence was split in twain; it became the instant that divided my life into “before” and “after.”
Everything changed that day. Not that day—that minute. Those few seconds.
I have often said someone won’t change their life in an instant unless they believe God threatened to shove a lightning bolt up their ass if they didn’t alter their path. Divinely inspired or not, what I didn’t realize at the time was how common the phenomenon of electricity in a posterior orifice can be for motivating rapid transformation. While coaching countless readers on the merits of the slow-and-steady path to change, I’d forgotten that wasn’t how I’d done it. When I asked for similar stories of people who, in a single instant, found an overflowing fountain of desire to change their lives, I was amazed at the response. As I will show, research reveals that sudden and overwhelming motivation to change is more common than not in those most successful at it. This book contains many such stories.
Stories like that of Lesley Chapman, who picked up a sword, and her life changed.
Eleven years later, Lesley felt no pain. There was no dripping sweat, no aching muscles, no heart ready to burst out of her chest, and no lungs rasping like an asthmatic Darth Vader after a road trip with Cheech and Chong. No fear, either. There was only this moment: the fencing match of her life, fueled by adrenaline and a competitive spirit her old self wouldn’t recognize.
The depressed, booze-chugging, overweight cigarette aficionado was no longer there; a lean and energized forty-four-year-old athlete questing for gold replaced the woman she had been. The new Lesley was a force to be reckoned with.
But her opponent was so fast; she struck like an arrow.
It was the last day of May 2015 in the city of Markham, Ontario, a multicultural community, part of the Greater Toronto area. The newly constructed Vango Toronto Fencing Center, located twelve miles north of the iconic CN Tower, was hosting the Canadian-American Veterans Cup, featuring the best fencers over the age of forty from across North America.
Lesley traveled from her home in the small town of Madison, New York, to take off to the Great White North for the first time, to prove her mettle after more than a decade of dedication to her bladework.
“I’d had a really good day,” Lesley said. “I went to the tournament without a lot of expectations.” As Lesley won match after match, her confidence in her sword-wielding abilities grew, and so did her enjoyment of competition. She beat someone she didn’t expect she would to get to the gold-medal round and was elated at the opportunity for a championship bout.
The match took place on the raised platform at Vango, the fencing strip reserved for the final pairings. Long and narrow, the strip runs along a white wall that is painted with a large Canadian flag. Lesley and the woman she would challenge, Jennette Starks-Faulkner, were the highlight as they battled for overall gold in women’s foil. Chapman took no notice of the crowd. All her attention focused on her opponent. She was in a state of flow.
Cue Rocky III music. It was “Eye of the Tiger” time.
“She is built like a teenager,” she said of Starks-Faulkner, speaking respectfully of her opponent’s physical build and skill; Lesley was honored to have this chance to compete against the world champion. But there was also a desire to prove herself. Six months previous, the two paired off in Reno, Nevada, and Starks-Faulkner throttled Chapman 5–0 in under a minute. Such a crushing defeat can be hard for a warrior such as Lesley to swallow.
Chapman explained she would be happy just to get a couple of points on her opponent. But because Starks-Faulkner was so small and fast, Lesley would have to outthink her to stand any chance of not repeating their match the previous December.
“When she attacks, she’s like an arrow,” Lesley said of Jennette. “I knew when she came at me I had no choice but to get out the way.” Back and forth they danced across the raised strip, blades ablur in an ancient test of skill that used to be scored with blood rather than buzzer. Lesley’s mind raced on how to outwit her opponent’s superior speed. The tactics she devised used the advantage of her reach, following up a retreat from her opponent’s lunge with a counterattack using her longer arm.
Lesley watched Starks-Faulkner carefully, fencing defensively, waiting for her opponent to lunge. When the strike came, she beat a hasty retreat, just out of range of her opponent’s foil, then countered the smaller woman’s lunging blade and scored her first-ever point against the champion.
“‘Holy shit!’ I remember saying,” Lesley recalled. She knew she was still not at her opponent’s level but she wanted to give her a good fight.
In such a match, it is often said you don’t win silver but rather lose gold. After a long-fought battle, the final score was 10–6.
Lesley Chapman won silver.
Clicking into Place
The seed of Lesley’s silver-medal win was sown in 2004 in a single, life-defining moment.
“I had been sedentary my entire life,” Lesley said. “I was a good student and had it in my head that you were either a brain or a jock and ne’er the twain would meet.” This attitude had a negative effect on Lesley as she reached her third decade of life.
Lesley explained that she smoked and drank and would often eat an entire pizza for lunch by herself. Significantly overweight, she believed this was what life had in store. She’d become fatalistic.
Life sucked. She wasn’t happy but wasn’t seeking change, either. Life was a slow, downward spiral she felt powerless to prevent.
“When you’re drinking too much and smoking and eating crap all the time, it’s going to chip away at your happiness,” she said. She became depressed because she wasn’t doing anything with her life. Her routine was work, drink, smoke, watch movies, repeat.
But fencing changed all that. Quickly.
Lesley’s story is one of finding a passion for a specific sport that challenged not only her body but also her mind. She was living in Lexington, Kentucky, and an Olympic-fencing coach began offering classes at the local Y. Lesley heard an announcement about it at the university where she worked, and thought, Why not? Fencing was the one sport that held even a modicum of interest for the librarian, as it seemed sophisticated to her. “Grace Kelly fenced,” she said.
She found the sport intellectually engaging. “You’re concentrating so hard that you don’t realize you’re winded.” In addition to the Olympic-level coach and the mental stimulation, there was another instance, a seemingly minor event, Lesley remembers with clarity, that defined the next stage of her life.
Many embark on a path of lifestyle change and suffer through for a while, only to quit, but not Lesley. What made her experience different? Why was her journey of personal transformation successful when so many others fail?
The answer can be found in a single moment, when a new sense of purpose clicks into place.
Lesley had been fencing just a couple of months. The fencing area at the Kentucky YMCA is an intimate space atop three flights of stairs; climbing them was a workout all by itself. She’d be gasping and sweating by the time she reached the top, wondering, Why the hell am I here?
Her commitment to continue was tenuous. Then a switch flipped.
On that day, early in her fencing career, Lesley noticed a group of child fencers had stopped their practice to watch the adults engaging in partner drills. Knowing she was being observed by these impressionable youths, she doubled her efforts at parries and lunges, trying her best to make a good show. “Suddenly, I felt like I belonged there,” she said, “and that I wanted to get really good at this.” There was a powerful awakening in both heart and mind that this is what she was meant to do. “In that emotional moment, I knew I would keep coming back to learn everything I could.” It was an overwhelming sensation that made her feel as though she could weep with joy at what she had discovered: she would not quit. She would do whatever it took to become the best she could be. She would not quit.
Sacred excrement!
Suddenly and with surety of purpose, Lesley changed. It was not the step-by-step process like many behavior-change theories focus on. It was both instantaneous and total. A new part of her mind opened; a new Lesley was born, one that would never have to struggle to be motivated again.
She saw progress in her skill in increments, and it led to quitting cancer sticks so she didn’t cough up alveoli during matches, giving up booze so the hangover didn’t feel like she had a brain aneurysm during practice, and eating healthier to fuel performance and lose forty pounds so she could move faster and present a smaller target for her opponents.
“The changes are substantial,” said William Miller, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and cocreator of the popular behavior-change technique called motivational interviewing. Miller is also the coauthor of Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives. He is a leader among the handful of researchers examining the topic of sudden and massive psychological change.
For the book, Professor Miller and his coauthor interviewed fifty-five people who had experienced life-changing epiphanies to create a structure around the phenomenon. He explained there can be focal changes, such as ceasing an addictive behavior, adopting a physical activity, or even a massive shift in mood, such as dramatic alleviation from depression. But such sudden change can also be broad-sweeping—a total shift in identity with far-reaching impact through a person’s life. What’s more, his coauthor did a ten-year follow-up and found something incredible: “No one had gone back to their state before the event happened. To the contrary, everyone spoke of moving ahead.”
Maintenance of the new behaviors, Miller explained, was high because it wasn’t a struggle to do so. “People didn’t talk about it using motivational language,” he said. They changed at a fundamental level. They became a new person for whom the new behaviors were the norm. It’s not a decision, it’s a sudden transformation.
I remember my holy-shit moment, when everything became clear. It’s when your inner grizzly is released from its cage as a roaring beast ready to achieve your utmost potential. It can manifest in various ways and for a multitude of reasons, but the reality is, it happens! It happens all the time—Professor Miller asserts as many as one-third of people experience such life-changing events—and yet we ignore the possibility of it happening for us. Accepting the verifiable reality of this phenomenon is the first step in making it happen for you.
It happened for Lesley that day, years ago. She was still overweight, still smoked and drank, and she was still a rookie fencer possessing negligible skill, but in that instant of self-reevaluation, her true personality awakened and ultimately led her to the silver-medal win. Along the way to a much healthier body, this new sense of purpose alleviated her despair.
“I decided in that moment that I was serious about becoming an athlete,” she said.
The pounds fell off.
Escaping Quiet Desperation
Think of all the people throughout history who never had the chance to reveal their genius. Across the eons, most of humanity remained uneducated, toiling at physical labor to survive.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Women too. Women especially.
But times are a-changin’. Bob Dylan doesn’t want you to sink; he is telling you to start swimming. To quote from the Pixar film Up: “Adventure is out there!”
You have one shot at life, and it’s not over yet. Many will continue to log the days, months, and years until they begin the long, slow slide into a dirt nap, heart songs remaining unsung.
For this to work, you must desire more. You must thirst for adventure. You must be ready to rattle the cage of the inner grizzly bear and yell, “Wake up! It’s time to kick ass!”
Adventure can take myriad forms. Think of Lesley. Fat, drunk, inhaling cancer sticks, depressed, and going nowhere except continuing an unexceptional life, few if any marks made upon the world, no quests undertaken, no major life missions accomplished.
And picking up a sword changed all that.
As you read this book, I want you to continue to remind yourself that adventure is out there. Never in the history of bipeds walking the earth has there been greater opportunity to seize the day and kick its ass.
Start imagining now. The adventure begins in the synapses. Awaken the part of your brain telling you the path you’re on isn’t enough. Endeavor to find out who you truly are and the stuff you’re made of. Embrace creativity in this mission. No one imagined the old Lesley as a champion fencer. Just because the astronaut spaceship has sailed doesn’t mean there aren’t out-of-this-world opportunities for you to chase.
Think of all the days since you came into the world as part 1 of your life. Your job is to imagine a lofty, exciting, purposeful path of You, Part 2. And just like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the sequel is going to blow away the original. As we move together through the chapters of this book, that’s a big part of your job: creating a basic outline of this exciting sequel to the first part of your life.
My job is to awaken the power that inspires you to live it.
Daydream Believing
You may want to write this down.
Or … maybe … you don’t.
I can’t remember phone numbers worth shit anymore. That’s because I don’t have to. Used to be, I could glance at a number in the phone book, walk over to the phone, and dial it in. Not tap or punch. Dial. I’m that old.
Unless you’re a troglodyte, you know that’s not how we do it anymore. Now I can’t remember seven digits without repeating them a few times; I’m out of practice.
A 2011 study published in Science reveals Google has a negative effect on memory, and as we’ll learn, information gathering—cramming a bunch of stuff into memory—is an important part of inducing a life-changing moment. The study reports: “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself.” For these purposes, that’s not good, because your brain needs to ponder things, twist them around a bit, and reorganize them in a way that makes sense. If your deep thoughts are consigned only to a notebook, your unconscious won’t be examining them.
“Having a notebook is fine, as long as these ideas also stay in your head,” said Mark Beeman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and coauthor of The Eureka Factor. Beeman, who specializes in the neurology of creative thinking, explained that for generating a sudden insight, problems need to be turned over in your mind. And if a notebook takes these thoughts out of your brain and onto paper, it’s counterproductive. Conversely, if the act of writing imprints them upon your synapses, or you are meticulous about revisiting your notes to examine such musings, then perhaps it’s worthwhile. But a 2014 study published in Memory & Cognition says it might not help. Comparing two separate groups playing the card-matching game Concentration, the study found those who focused on memorizing did far better than those who made notes and then had the notes taken away.
For the course of the activities recommended in this book, I advise forgoing writing down every little thing in favor of pondering it, looking at new ideas from different angles using only your brain, and committing them to your gray matter for integration into solving of the problem What do I do with the rest of my life?
This isn’t about achieving the answer via steady, linear analysis, but about having massive insight suddenly pop into existence.
I don’t jot down such thoughts unless it’s to log a specific idea I wish to write about. For examining your life and what the future must hold, however, specificity isn’t usually the way. Beeman explained that for life-changing insight to strike, you need to have all the pieces of the puzzle floating in your brain at once.
It may take a while to gather enough information to achieve epiphany, and that’s okay. There is time: time to daydream, time to imagine the new course. Whenever you’re feeling pensive or have a few moments to envision the future stages of your life, engage in some free association and contemplate what possible paths you could take.
You don’t have to go it alone.
Talk it over with friends. Surf the internet. Log on to social media and see what other people are doing. Wheels need not be reinvented. Seek inspiration from others who have been where you are.
Perhaps consider fencing. It’s fun.
Take it all in, move it from the front of your brain to the back, then to the middle; put it on cerebral spin cycle for a bit, return it to the front, and see what gets spit out.
Sometimes a walk in the sunshine or an evening lying under the stars helps with the process.
Carved in Stone
You want to be like Lesley? Patience, grasshopper. Sudden change in one’s motivational level may happen in a moment, but the stage must first be set. Evidence reveals that you can stack the deck in your favor and make epiphany happen.
As a test, I made a significant one happen for myself while researching this book. There is an important aspect of my life I have tried to change many times, over years and years, always to no avail. But then I used some of the methods outlined in this book, and that was it. The desired change happened. I made the ground shift, and a major life change took place just like that. And it was easy!
That story is in chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo). This was not a small thing like making my bed every day or flossing my teeth. It was much bigger, and I have reaped tremendous benefits from the experience.
I want to help you get there, to reach the point where a new sense of purpose awakens and your unstoppable will is unleashed. To do that, you need to understand the phenomenon of sudden transformation, so you can open yourself to possibility.
For Lesley, in that single moment of fencing practice, when she felt her sense of belonging and purpose awaken, her life altered course and gave her the power to keep altering it. This is the secret so many who change their bodies, break addiction, and achieve success and happiness often miss: To change their lives, they first must change their sense of who they are. The concept of shifting one’s identity is a recurring theme in The Holy Sh!t Moment, because that’s what epiphany does: it doesn’t change behaviors, it changes you.
The traditional methods of behavior change preach the tortoise approach over that of the hare, but there is a problem with that story: The hare in Aesop’s fable was an idiot. If he’d been smart, he would have kicked that reptile’s ass.
When it comes to changing who you are, sometimes it’s better to be a hare. It is an amazing thing to experience a potent, emotional event that shocks you into clarity of purpose. Besides, baby steps are lame. Why slowly build a bridge across that chasm when you have the power to leap to the other side?
This instant transformation of will seems magical. But sometimes you must meet the magic moment partway.
I had a life-changing epiphany that arrived out of nowhere, and it spurred me to action, to go from flunking my courses to acing them, as well as to getting out of debt. That accomplished, I tackled my physique next, and that part was, shall we say, less inspired for a time.
I had to do the traditional baby steps. I had to be the tortoise. I had to slog.
But not for long. My mind had learned to recognize epiphany. Over the course of two months, my attitude shifted from “This sucks” to “This isn’t completely horrible.” And realizing that regular exercise no longer felt like a soul-destroying endeavor initiated a massive and rapid transformation of mind-set. I put in some hours and met the magic moment along the way.
As did Lesley. Remember, her life-changing epiphany didn’t happen the first time she held a blade. It took a couple of months of parries and ripostes to awaken a sudden and total transformation into who she was meant to be.
You will read of others in this book who did not have to meet epiphany partway. Lightning struck out of nowhere, and they were inspired from day one. That totally happens, and I hope it happens for you. But if it doesn’t, you’re going to have to be ready to do some uninspired work while keeping your brain attuned to receiving inspiration. In coming chapters, I’ll offer advice on using traditional methods of step-by-step behavior change to help generate a sudden leap forward.
There are myriad methods of rapid and significant life change, but all such roads share one undeniable characteristic: a deep emotional sensation that carves a new sense of purpose into a person’s being, like a chisel working on stone. Conversely, the traditional (read: boring) models of gradual, step-by-step cognitive behavior change seem to be lacking in their ability to create passionate adherence. Resultantly, such laborious methods of struggling to develop new habits may not be the most effective way of achieving change.
Sometimes dramatic lifestyle change “just happens” because of reaching enlightenment that arrives beyond cognition. Again, this is not a decision; it is an awakening. Such an awakening inspires one’s determination and dedication to succeed.
Sometimes Santa Claus does exist, and he brings you a gift of overwhelming passion to kick ass at life.
And such sudden change is a scientifically explainable phenomenon one can pursue with purpose, leaving less to random chance, to create a better life. This book is about providing you with actionable tasks that help set the stage for a specific moment: that space in time when something so vital and important takes place inside the mind that your life is divided into “old you” and “new, righteous, unstoppable you.”
It’s the moment the grizzly is released from its cage. Suddenly free, the massive beast looks you in the eye, tilts its head back toward its massively muscled back, and says, “Hop aboard, kid. You and I are going places.”
What Is an Epiphany?
I have a couple of master’s degrees and am a stickler for the science. This book includes references to reams of peer-reviewed journals alongside exclusive interviews with some of the most renowned experts in behavior change on the planet.
That’s why it pains me to use Wikipedia as a reference.
From the ancient Greek epiphaneia, meaning “manifestation, striking appearance,” an epiphany is often described as a scientific breakthrough, or religious or philosophical enlightenment. However, it can represent myriad situations in which deeper understanding is suddenly attained.
The apocryphal story of an alleged apple falling and allegedly hitting Sir Isaac Newton on the head describes when he allegedly had an epiphany about the nature of gravity. Alas, this is not how innovation and technological advancement work.
In his book The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun’s first chapter is titled “The Myth of Epiphany.” In it, he describes the story of Newton and the apple to debunk the popular understanding of epiphany. The author then quotes the primary inventor of the laser, Gordon Gould, to provide an example of how scientific advancement usually works.
In the middle of one Saturday night … the whole thing … suddenly popped into my head and I saw how to build the laser … but that flash of insight required the 20 years of work I had done in physics and optics to put all the bricks of that invention in there.
A pot-smoking teenager watching SpongeBob SquarePants in his parent’s basement isn’t likely to have a stroke of brilliance regarding the nature of light amplification. Gould, a renowned physicist who had worked on the development of the first atomic bomb, spent twenty years of toil working to resolve an enigma, and when enlightenment was finally achieved, some would refer to that as an epiphany. But it is no such thing. It is simply that last piece of the puzzle—a puzzle he’d been working on for decades—being put into place.
Human behavior can work in similar ways. One may have been debating, mulling over, and gathering information about a new path for years, and a life-changing event—that triggering moment—is the final illumination before they are ready to make that sudden switch from unconsciously “thinking about it,” to an instant and wholehearted This is happening!
Conversely, it truly can strike out of nowhere, because decisive behavioral change is not often the same as building a laser or theorizing gravity. It can be as simple as hearing an old song on the radio. You may be driving along, listening to the classic rock station, and Van Halen’s 1992 hit “Right Now” comes on and you feel it; you realize it is indeed your tomorrow, and you decide to catch the magic moment. Such a phenomenon can reshape your sense of being and purpose in life in a near instantaneous wave of emotion that provides you with new insight and motivation regarding the way forward.
Lesley Chapman didn’t dwell on what was wrong with her life or how to change it until that singular moment when she discovered what it was like to feel something right.
For some, they need to hit rock bottom before they’re ready to leap toward the light. You don’t need to be that desperate, but you’re reading this because you know that change—be it moderate or massive—is something you desire. If you feel dramatic change is something you must achieve, then you also need to seek out a transformative moment to initiate such change.
Much of the pre-work involves information gathering and embracing new ways of thinking, but it also requires not letting sudden insight pass you by.
It involves opening your mind, asking the question Is this it?
It’s about looking at the world with an investigative mind-set, in which what you seek is opportunity to change. Inspiration can arrive from anywhere and at any time. Be prepared.
Is. This. It?
Ask yourself that question when you experience something that might be a catalyst for change. Most of the time, the answer to the question is going to be “No, it really isn’t.” But it’s all practice.
It can be because of this practice, the opening of yourself, the attunement, that allows epiphany to strike. Speaking of practice, getting stuck is good.
“When you tackle a problem, and fail to solve it, it sticks in your craw—and your brain.” This is from Professor Beeman’s book The Eureka Factor, coauthored with John Kounios, a professor of psychology in cognitive and brain sciences at Drexel University. The authors explain that ideas can require an “incubation period.” The work you do thinking now doesn’t mean you have your epiphany right now too. You work until you “get stuck.” Then the unconscious takes over while you’re busy doing other things.
In most stories of major life transformation, an epiphany is almost a constant. Many who have experienced massive change can identify a specific instance when their outlook got on track in a much more positive way. Changing one’s body is a powerful manifestation of the moment of change, because a healthy body often equates to a healthy mind, and overcoming the challenges associated with physical improvement also imparts valuable life skills. I mean, unless it’s weight loss resulting from unhealthy methods such as popping unregulated diet pills like they’re Skittles or going on some batshit crazy fad diet some celebrity is flogging. The latest dietary dumbassery I heard about was an Oscar winner proudly proclaiming the completion of her eight-day-long, goat-milk-only cleanse. I’m happy I don’t have the job of cleaning her bathroom.
The Snowball Effect
There is a switch inside many people set at “I can’t.”
When it flips over to “I can” for one thing, it doesn’t stop there. Research shows life-changing epiphanies are rarely “one and done.” Often the catalyst for initial change is a massive mental shift, but smaller epiphanies can arise at random during people’s life journeys, to bump them further along their quests to be the best humans they can. Professor Miller explained that people who have such experiences often have further, clarifying epiphanies later in life. “There appears to be an opening to having that experience,” he said.
Take a moment and think back: Has this happened before?
Have you experienced a life-changing moment in the past? What was it like? How did it manifest? Can you relive it? Can you imagine something like that happening again? Did you learn something important from the experience you can bring toward future life change?
If the answer is yes, it’s called a “past performance accomplishment.” It’s a parameter of self-efficacy theory, created by Stanford University psychology professor Albert Bandura in 1977. It’s about how you form perceptions regarding your ability to perform specific behaviors. Past success = confidence, which makes people more determined to persevere, even in the face of adversity.
If you’ve had an important insight in the past, it makes it more likely you can have one again in the future. Cue Jimi Hendrix: Are you experienced?
Positive life change can assume myriad forms; don’t fret if you’re not interested in pushing your body. But I do encourage contemplating some form of activity as part of the new you. I say this because you were not meant to sit idly and watch Earth spin on her axis. You were meant to rise and join the fray that is the human condition. Movement empowers from top to toenails; it can even come to define you, should you find the right exercise.
Whichever activity a person chooses, if they enjoy it, is the right one. The path ahead has more choices than there are beers in a Munich autumn. Finding which flavor suits best requires taking a few taste tests.
The Holy Sh!t Moment is about achieving the clarity of purpose to carve your own path to success.
Switching Tracks
Consider this word carefully: “momentous.”
The topic of this book is not about merely deciding the future path your life will take. It is about a momentous event in which you suddenly become aware of the answer and change at a fundamental level from the experience. It’s not only a spark of insight, it’s an awakening of passion.
Such an “answer” is rarely well-defined or black-and-white, and effort is required to find your way along the appropriate path.
Do you remember The Karate Kid? Not the worst film ever, but the message is dogshit.
Perhaps you’re too young, or maybe you were there, in that theater, and you disagree. That’s because it was the eighties, the decade of bad decisions, even though we didn’t realize it at the time. So many pastels …
Go ahead and watch it again—the original with Ralph Macchio—and see if you realize why the message it relays is canine feces.
My wife is a second-degree black belt in karate. Both our children are black belts, and my daughter competes at the international level. I can attest that you don’t get good at karate by spending a few weeks waxing cars and painting fences. You get good at it because it’s your lifelong passion. And because it is your passion, you are motivated to do the damn work, hours of work, day after day and year after year!
The Karate Kid disrespects the work by advocating an extreme shortcut to success. It disrespects the fact that my daughter has been in karate since she was five years old, and trained her ass off, sometimes twenty or more hours a week, to win that gold medal at the USA Open ten years later.
Work is glorious, and inspired work transforms. It transforms your body, your mind, your spirit. Someone who kicks ass at life is not a sofa-sitter. Such people can be efficient, but they’re not the type always questing for a quick fix. They don’t believe—using weight loss as an example—that some miracle macronutrient ratio is going to open a rift in the space-time-insulin continuum and magically transport their belly fat to a parallel universe. They know effort is required, but they don’t mind, because they’ve become inspired.
Work equals accomplishment, the forms of which can be innumerable, and such accomplishments are habit-forming. Again, this is far from being just about diet and exercise. For someone who feels their life lacks purpose, it can be an amazing thing to suddenly find more drive than you know what to do with.
Here is a quick task. It should only take a few seconds, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. You ready?
Make a promise to yourself that you’re done with believing in bullshit quick fixes and unrealistic shortcuts to major accomplishment, be they accomplishments with your body, your brain, your career, your finances, or your relationships. Accept reality: it is work creating your desired outcome. Do it now. Integrate this fundamental truth. Then move forward.
The overarching goal is to change the way you feel about the work so it doesn’t seem like work. That is an attitude adjustment that can happen in just a few seconds. There can be a rapid change in mind-set. You can’t become a karate master quickly, but you can become inspired to do it in an instant. It’s this accelerated mental shift that has the power to change your life.
As British historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” Your passion to achieve can be triggered in that single defining moment when you realize, Enough of this bullshit. Motivation is no longer a scarce resource after such a momentous event. It comes built in.
Being active is hard. Eating healthy is hard. Conquering addiction is hard. Relationships are hard. Making money and advancing your career is hard. Life is hard, whether you choose to work at improving it or not. A life-changing moment can make everything much less of a challenge. Sometimes, if the epiphany is powerful enough, it makes the changes not just easier but mandatory, because every new step feels as though it was meant to be. The recipient of the epiphany is compelled to walk this new path, perhaps even race down it.
Speaking of racing and things that are hard, recall the words of President John F. Kennedy regarding the space race and putting a man on the moon. He said we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
You should aspire to do more with your life.
Because it is hard.
Act Now!
Dream (realistically) big and imagine the new person you want to be.
Think of an ambitious quest you could undertake.
Develop a thirst for adventure. Remember the librarian who traded cigarettes for swords.
Consider not using a notebook, but instead committing ideas to memory for regular rumination to achieve later enlightenment.
Ponder until you “get stuck.” Then engage in a diversion to let your unconscious continue working at it.
Endeavor to meet the magic moment partway. Realize you may have to engage in some uninspired work prior to the lightning strike.
Become attuned for lightning to strike. Ask yourself, “Is this it?”
Ask if a life-changing moment has happened to you before. Examine if this is something you have experience with—determine if you have a past performance accomplishment—so you can use that knowledge to make it happen again.
Accept that work is not only necessary but glorious in its ability to inspire passion and transform you. Try to find work that will feel like play.
Remember the words of JFK and embrace change: because it is hard.
PART ONE (#ulink_75e395e2-f868-5ee7-bbbc-a5b6b3260209)
Epiphany and Cognitive Behavior Change (#ulink_75e395e2-f868-5ee7-bbbc-a5b6b3260209)
1 (#ulink_bfe839a0-406a-5015-9ee5-a5a3bee07787)
THE ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR: THE EUPHORIA OF THE LIFE-CHANGING MOMENT (#ulink_bfe839a0-406a-5015-9ee5-a5a3bee07787)
There are opportunities even in the most difficult moments.
—WANGARI MAATHAI
On the schoolyard field of battle known as gym class, I made the geeks look good. I was such a klutz, I was always picked last when teams were selected. I often came out of dodgeball with head trauma.
In college, I got the “freshman fifteen”—those pounds one tends to put on during their first year—factored by three. I was twenty-two and felt my life was circling the drain. As mentioned before, my health, finances, and scholastic situations were a mess. There was no fall from grace; my life had always been blah, and it was my fault.
I wasn’t just a bad athlete growing up, but a bad student. I was smart but lazy. I squeaked my way into an easy postsecondary program with half a percentage point to spare, then promptly began failing. I went to the campus pub instead of class. The credit-card companies were calling. Things were bad and looking worse; I was about to be kicked out of school because of my poor grades.
I was in a hole of my own digging; Joan Baez pulled me out.
The folk singer’s words appeared in the school newspaper, and my life changed in a moment.
“Action is the antidote to despair,” the quote read.
I sat in the food court at my alma mater, reading the comedic highlights of the paper’s section referred to as “Three Lines Free.” It’s a place for students to publish quotes and witticisms and proclamations of undying love or temporary lust. Partway through reading, Joan smacked me in the face. It was so simple to realize that, as bad as things seemed, they could be fixed via concerted effort.
In that instant, my life switched tracks.
Because, you see, there was a woman.
Her name was Heidi. I loved her like no other. You know stories of finding “The One”? This is such a story.
She was a straight-A student destined for medical school; I knew flunking out spelled the beginning of the end. I say this not to ever speak ill of her. But you must know that she, an amazing woman, deserved a good man; a man I had yet to become.
I was in a state of despair, and taking action—working hard for something for the first time in my life—was the antidote.
And suddenly I felt so much better. Even though no effort had yet been expended, the anticipation of having these problems and this beer belly no longer weighing on me was euphoric. It’s like when you hear your parole has been approved and you’re getting out of prison but you’re still in prison. I’ve never been to prison. I got some speeding tickets when I was younger, but I paid them. Anyway, euphoria and stuff …
Instead of hitting the pub as I’d planned for a few barley-based beverages to wash down a plate overflowing with fries and gravy, I got up and booked an appointment with the appeals committee to beg my way out of my failing report card, allowing me to continue as a student. It was the first step of many, and it felt right.
When it comes to experiencing a life-changing epiphany, the way things feel is critical. It involves, as mentioned earlier, unleashing one’s inner quadruped.
The concept began with the classical Greek philosopher Plato. In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote a “dialogue” titled Phaedrus, which contains an allegory about the charioteer. In it, the driver of the chariot represents a person’s more rational self, the guiding force based on intellect and reason. (Because those guys doing the death race in Ben-Hur were totally reasonable.) Conversely, the horses pulling the chariot represent a person’s emotions; they are what provide the power to move forward. And if they want to run wild, the driver of the chariot can do little to control them.
Let’s ignore the part about Plato’s horses having wings, so as not to confuse the issue.
It is important to note that the horses are not like-minded. According to Plato’s tale, one is more virtuous in its passion; the other has a dark side driven by baser appetites. One wants to train for a marathon; the other wants to down tequila shots then go in search of a chili cheese dog to later throw up.
The goal of the charioteer is to obtain the help of the noble horse to overcome the desires of the troublesome one. Otherwise, you’re blowing your groceries in the gutter. I’ve done that. It’s not fun.
The allegory was adapted some millennia later, in 2006, with the publication of The Happiness Hypothesis by New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who referred to the rational, conscious mind as the “rider” and increased the size of the emotion-driven, unconscious-mind quadrupeds to a solitary elephant. Part of the upgrade involved increasing the intelligence of the beast, asserting elephants are smarter than horses. As we’ll see when we examine the neuroscience of attaining sudden insight, Haidt is right. In most cases, the unconscious driver is the correct one; the conscious needs to learn to listen.
A short time later, the rider-vs.-elephant analogy became a core component of the 2010 book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Chip is a professor of business at Stanford, and Dan is a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at Duke.
A determined elephant will go where it pleases, regardless of the urgings of a more rational rider. To achieve a desired destination, one must appeal to both rider and elephant.
The elephant is the passion and the drive. Whereas the rider may prevaricate and overanalyze, the elephant is the part of the human spirit that can change directions in a flash, and with powerful determination, because it is driven to get shit done. Rather than needing to ponder, it is compelled to act.
Let’s try an experiment in which you talk to your four-legged friend.
How do you feel about changing?
In the introduction, I asked you to awaken your thirst for adventure. I expect you generated some ideas of songs unsung, mountains unclimbed, finish lines uncrossed. And now you’re faced with the opportunity to sing your way across that finish mountain, or something. Have you got it? It doesn’t have to be concrete. Big picture is fine for now. Is it in your brain? Are you thinking about it?
Good. Now stop.
Stop thinking.
Instead, start feeling.
Don’t rationalize this change. Don’t try to think about all the reasons why you should stop doing a thing (like sitting all day, drinking too much, smoking, being angry, overeating treat foods, doing drugs, staying in a dead-end job or relationship, wasting money on stupid crap) or start doing a thing (going back to school, exercising, eating healthier, being kinder, working at your career, spending more quality time with loved ones).
I want you to stop thinking, because of paralysis via analysis. If these goals you imagine—things to stop and things to start—have been around in your brain for a while, you’ve already thought them to death. And yet here you are. Still struggling. You rationalized your way out of change. Well, crud.
Time for a dramatic change of tack.
Ask yourself: How do I feel about this change? You don’t completely cut thinking, but alter the focus. Instead of thinking about this new path, you’re examining your emotions. It’s not about making a list of reasons why and why not. It’s opening your mind to what your heart is saying, metaphorically. I know the heart doesn’t literally control this. It’s still in the brain, just a different part. Enough semantic blather. Let the feelings flow and listen to what they tell you.
Why are you reading this sentence?
You’re supposed to be examining your feelings. Examine your change! You go feel it now. I’ll wait. I’ll even put an extra space between paragraphs to make it easier to pick up again.
Welcome back. How did it go?
Was there a twinge? Did you have a moment? Was there a positive rush of emotion? Did you gain some special insight or wave of motivation to change because you quested to understand your emotional drivers rather than rational ones?
Was the grizzly released from its cage?
Don’t fret if it didn’t happen. We just began and will work through exercises like this at appropriate times throughout the book. And hopefully lightning will strike.
Hopefully.
There are no guarantees. But the harder you work at these exercises, the more you strive and the more you believe epiphany can happen, the greater the likelihood it will.
It’s like that song by Journey, the one about the mythical place called South Detroit we’ve all heard way too many times: “Don’t stop believin’.”
It’s in your head now, isn’t it? My bad. But take something good from it.
Believe. Believe it’s possible to unleash your beast. In The Eureka Factor, Kounios and Beeman write, “Insights are like cats. They can be coaxed but don’t usually come when called.” You must learn to coax your elephant. Or grizzly. Or a really determined kangaroo, if that’s your thing.
Conscious thought rarely incites life-changing epiphanies. Instead, the snap revelations to change in a moment are based on what is often an overwhelming feeling that it is right, arriving from the unconscious. As Plato and subsequent authors revealed, it is such an emotion that gives epiphany its power. I was in fear of losing a beautiful and brilliant woman who let me see her naked, and I felt quite emotional over the impending loss of love. She was not threatening me in any way, but I knew deep down that such a driven woman (she had a perfect GPA and completed medical school at the top of her class) wouldn’t stay for long with a drunken dropout who was letting his health go to hell.
I got my shit together, and we made babies. Told you she was The One.
Beyond ancient philosophy and its modern interpretations, we have the scientific insights of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Known as the Father of Behavioral Economics (which we learn more about in coming chapters), Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, is the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. The “fast” way of thinking is the elephant. It happens when an unconscious idea pops into consciousness. It can also be that emotional driver one needs to effortlessly change. Kahneman refers to this as “System 1,” writing that it “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” Conversely, “System 2” is the rider. It “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”
Kahneman explains that System 2 is where we make our rational choices, our conscious decisions. His description is telling: “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.”
You’re damn right it is. System 2 is the supporting character, and an inherently lazy one at that. Kahneman writes that System 2 engages in the “law of least effort.” But that doesn’t mean it’s useless in this regard. Far from it. As the Heath brothers explain in Switch, you have to appeal to both elephant and rider. Kahneman says System 1 constructs the story, and System 2 believes it. System 1 “is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments.” It is a “mental shotgun” allowing us to answer, in an instant, those tough questions about our lives.
Time for a wee task.
I thought about calling these tasks “Action Items,” but I didn’t want you to have a full MBA Bingo card by the end of the book (being that I have an MBA, the risk is real). Implement these Action Items to proactively synergize an optimized epiphanic paradigm! Just, no.
Give us a kiss. Except all caps: KISS. I’ve interviewed both Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. Paul is nice….
Man, my System 2 is all over the place right now. KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid. A 2011 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review looked at “feelings as information.” The study asserts feelings are a “sensible judgment strategy,” but don’t overthink it, especially in terms of the advantages of change. That’s because when you create a comprehensive list of all the benefits of something, the study showed, it becomes less appealing. This is System 2 overanalyzing what System 1 came up with. Your task is to not let that happen.
When System 1, the fast-acting hero of your life, says, “This is it!” the supporting character of System 2 will come up with a couple of confirming rationalizations as to why, yes, we can agree that this is likely the thing. Then STOP! Once you have that confirmation, just go with it. You don’t need to keep drilling down into the benefits, or it actually becomes less compelling. This doesn’t apply to using System 2 for enacting the vision. Being detail oriented in that regard is important.
The Gap between Thinking and Doing
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
William Shakespeare wrote of the stage and players and how life is one big performance in a monologue from As You Like It. But the speech also refers to seven stages of a person’s life.
I only know of this play because it was quoted in the 1981 hit song “Limelight” by my favorite band. Beyond that, I possess mere high school knowledge of Montagues, Capulets, Macbeths, and whatever the last name of that Danish lad was, the one who pondered if he should be or not.
Speaking of Hamlet’s act 3, scene 1, soliloquy, crossing the gap between thinking and doing is making the decision to “take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.”
You may be facing a sea of troubles, but what could your life look like if you took up arms and charged fearlessly ahead, fierce and furious in your determination to take not a single prisoner but emerge victorious?
Hamlet’s oft-quoted scene begins with, “To be, or not to be?” At the darkest period of his life—dad dead due to the dastardly deeds of his dick uncle—the young Danish prince ponders his future actions, struggling with the decision that lay before him. Should he accept his outrageous fortune, or get in its face?
Oh, wait. It’s Shakespeare. Everyone dies. Bad example. Let us move back a space to the moment before the decision to take arms was made. Some centuries after Shakespeare laid down his mighty pen, James Prochaska, a psychology professor and director of the Cancer Prevention Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, developed a different model for the stages a person goes through when experiencing life change.
Along with his colleagues, Professor Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model (TTM) of behavior change, which is one of the most studied lifestyle transformation models ever created. Since its initial development in the 1970s, more than $80 million and 150,000 study participants have contributed to its peer review. It’s no longer used much for designing psychological interventions, but it’s still useful as an examination tool.
There are five stages to TTM:
1 Precontemplation—People in this stage are not even thinking about altering their behaviors, as they do not see their current lifestyles as problematic. This couch is ever so comfy. Never shall I remove my bottom from its padded glory and proximity to the rectangle of glowing time waste.
2 Contemplation—This is when a person is thinking about changing their behavior, but not quite ready to act. Hmmm. Is there such a thing as a “couch sore”? Perhaps if I repositioned a little. Dammit, I emptied the DVR of all the good stuff. Is there anything new on Netflix? I suppose I could go outside….
3 Preparation—In which the person is focused around planning for acting toward behavior change, which is intended to be imminent. Outside it is! I just need to wiggle myself out of this massive ass groove I’ve created in the couch first….
4 Action—When a person is engaged in behavior change. It is a challenging time, when fragile habits are formed. Later, couch! Fresh air, bitches!
5 Maintenance—In which habits from undergoing the action stage are more ingrained and the new behavior becomes sticky as the person gains self-confidence in their abilities. What’s a couch?
Under the TTM model, where is the lightning strike? Where does the critical moment that divides a person’s life into before and after take place? We can see it in the gap between thinking and doing, between stage 2 and stage 3. It happens after contemplation and before preparation. Although the stage that follows is called “Action,” preparation is still a form of doing, a form of action. It is a giant leap forward toward a new life, which happens in an instant. It requires bravery and force to leap this chasm; hence the need to ensure that the emotional grizzly-elephant-horses are shocked into wakefulness and pointed in the right direction. They have taken up arms, roared defiantly, and the sea of troubles trembled at the might of such a battle cry.
Sometimes the movement from contemplation is a mere step, but that’s not what you’re after. What you seek is a giant leap. Because if this moment that prompts the advancement to stage 3 is a powerful one, if it is a true epiphany that enlightens and inspires, you’ll have little fear of relapse.
The new behaviors stick.
The Decisional Balance Sheet
“Reaching a tipping point to move toward action involves a change of focus,” James Prochaska told me. “One goes from the balance favoring the ‘cons’ of adopting a new behavior to giving more weight to the ‘pros.’”
Unfortunately, people tend to slide back into old habits, which is why it is important to ensure the decisional balance sheet is well stacked in favor of acting.
“A person is going to be a lot better prepared to stick with the new behavior if the pros significantly outweigh the cons,” Prochaska said. If the pros only slightly tip the balance when you start down the path to changing your life, you will still be experiencing those cons. If you just barely decide to change—if, exasperated, you throw your hands in the air and say, “Fine! I guess I’ll do it”—you’re going to feel the suck of that change; it can overpower any benefits. The balance teeters around ambivalence; you are more inclined to give up and slide back into old behavior.
In 2010, Jennifer Di Noia, a professor of sociology at William Patterson University in New Jersey, worked with Prochaska on a meta-analysis of twenty-seven different studies of how TTM was used to evaluate decisional balance; they were specifically looking at dietary changes to affect weight loss. Published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, they came to some fascinating conclusions.
During the precontemplation stage, cons rule the synapses, but something interesting happens during contemplation: The balance begins to shift. And it shifts in a way that explains why so many fail in their efforts to change their lives.
In the contemplation stage, the reduction in thinking about cons is small; the balance shifts because the value of the pros increases by a significant margin. The cons are still there, still powerful. The fear of pain or boredom from exercise, the financial worries over pursuing a different career, or “You can peel my wine glass from my cold, dead hand!” remain palpable. And to overshadow such fear, the pros need to “Hulk Smash!” them into insignificance. The ratio revealed in Di Noia and Prochaska’s research of pros to cons is enlightening. They discovered the pros must outweigh the cons by almost a 2 to 1 ratio to be truly effective!
It stresses the importance of the great leap forward achieved via some form of epiphany; it’s not a simple tipping of the balance sheet to 51–49 in favor of the pros. Again, it’s not a small step forward toward successful and sustainable change; it works better if you take a giant leap.
“Pros and cons of decision making is not a conscious, rational, empirical process,” Professor Prochaska said. “It is very emotionally based.”
What can make someone passionate about a new direction? What gives them the drive to charge ahead with an unstoppable “no-prisoners” attitude? Prochaska explained that a dramatic event could cause someone to reevaluate pros and cons.
Such a dramatic event found its initial spark for Chuck Gross in January 2008. He sat in an Irish pub in New Orleans, called Boondock Saint, having a quiet beer or five. The bar was named to pay homage to a cult-action film of a similar name.
“My brothers-in-law are twins. My wife and I took them barhopping on Bourbon Street for their twenty-first birthdays,” Chuck, a computer programmer in Pittsburgh, told me. The Irish-style pub was dark and somewhat gloomy. A mirror advertising Guinness hung on an aging brick wall. Being it was a twenty-first birthday event in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Chuck was in no shape to walk a straight line.
That night, Chuck had a chance meeting that would be the first step on a journey that would change his life.
“Back then I was not a social person, being as fat as I was,” Chuck said. He described two seats at the far end of the bar, and how he ended up sitting next to an average-looking man who practically forced Chuck to speak with him.
The man was in his fifties, clean-shaven, plain-faced, and wearing glasses, Chuck recalled. His hair was gray-white, he had an outgoing personality, and it seemed like he couldn’t help but engage in conversation. Because Chuck had consumed a few drinks, he began to loosen up.
The two men talked for a time of things inconsequential, and then the man informed Chuck of his profession as a photographer, which he proclaimed gave him the ability to read people. “I see the fear in your eyes,” the man told him.
Chuck admits that his memory was hazy due to alcohol consumption, but insists the stranger never brought up Chuck’s weight. Rather, the man told him he could see there was something Chuck wanted to do, and that the fear he felt soon wouldn’t be a problem in this quest.
Chuck Gross was taken aback that a random stranger would speak to him in such a way. I advocate against poking one’s nose into the body weight of others; people should mind their own business. Even though Chuck’s obesity was not mentioned, it was obvious what the man was talking about. The conversation ended abruptly but still had a profound effect.
Two months later, Chuck Gross was dead.
Lightning Strikes
The life-changing epiphany seems rare because people aren’t forthcoming about it.
William Miller and his coauthor write in Quantum Change: “people who experience such events are often reluctant to discuss them openly.” In their research, they uncovered that many had told only one or two people, and some never told anyone. I’m kind of a big deal on Facebook, so when I asked, people came forward.
Bragging over one’s social-media following is the epitome of pathetic, but if you want to “Like” my page, it’s facebook.com/bodyforwife.
During the interviews, Miller and C’de Baca write, “the words came tumbling out like a great unburdening.” Yep. That’s what happened with my interviews, too. It’s because such an event changes how people feel, what they think, how they experience the world. It is a Big Deal. Life will never be the same.
Freaked out a little right now? I mean, Chuck Gross died, right?
It’s a good kind of lightning strike, however, like when Luke learned he was to become a Jedi, except without having your aunt and uncle burned to a crisp by Imperial Stormtroopers.
Of the fifty-five people interviewed for Quantum Change, the authors explained that for 80 percent of them, it “took them completely by surprise.” And for half, nothing special was happening leading up to it. This reinforces Beeman and Kounios, who say lightning strikes during diversion after getting stuck.
To repeat: keep working at it, follow the steps in this book, then take a break and let the unconscious do its thing.
Let’s get back to Chuck.
As forward as the stranger’s words were, it nudged him from the precontemplation stage to the edges of contemplation. Cons of change became slightly minimized, and pros garnered more investigation and emphasis.
“During those two months, the conversation was eating away at me both subconsciously and consciously,” Chuck said, explaining that many of the things one experiences when they are that heavy are buried because they’re constant: back pain, aching feet, always being out of breath. Before, they were facts of life, but after the meeting, he became more aware of them. Chuck’s brain was becoming primed for lightning to strike.
It was March 11, and the Pittsburgh winter edged toward spring, a time of rebirth. Rather than forget his chance meeting at Boondock Saint the previous January, Chuck dwelled on it.
Then it happened.
“My wife Denise came out of the bathroom with a positive pregnancy test,” Chuck said. He explained this was not something planned for. They’d talked about having children, but it was always for the future, when he was healthier and had lost weight.
“The lightning bolt was instantaneous,” he said. It first hit him with overwhelming joy that he was going to be a father, but he also knew with absolute clarity he had to do something about his condition. He described it as though someone hit him in the back of the head with a baseball bat, full swing.
The bat to Chuck’s skull was what ended his life, metaphorically speaking. “I tell people I died that day. The old Chuck is dead. I killed him.”
Chuck’s realization that he had to change happened in an instant, when he knew he had to become not just the father his child needed, but the husband his wife deserved. Yet Chuck didn’t stop thinking there. The powerful “Aha!” moment brought additional clarity to who he was and how he needed to change.
“I realized that a big part of my identity was wrapped up in me being fat,” he said. The emotion of the moment was clear; years later he struggled to tell the tale. Voice thick, Chuck explained he was always the fat kid growing up; people made fun of him for it. His identity was as the funny fat guy; the guy girls wanted as a friend, but never to date. People knew him for being able to eat and drink a lot, and that was all. With the pregnancy announcement, Chuck had a new identity thrust upon him, that of a father, making his values pivot hard in a new direction.
In 2016, researchers from the University of Oregon published a study in Psychological Inquiry about the “identity-value model” of self-regulation. The authors theorize that “behaviors that are connected to identity are more likely to be enacted because they hold greater subjective value.” They examined the dieter’s dilemma, investigating how people struggle with eating healthfully, and how self-control is about two opposing processes: impulsively eat the doughnut, for example, because it’s yummy, or strive to regulate that behavior and resist the treat in favor of vegetables?
When someone’s identity is one that places high value on healthy eating, there isn’t much struggle. It’s not a matter of exerting willpower; it’s acting in a way that is in direct relevance to who they are. At the beginning of this book, I mentioned awakening the grizzly, but it’s more about becoming the grizzly.
The final part of Chuck’s process to destroy that old identity and create a new one involved stepping on the scale. Technology lent him a hand.
“The scale was only rated up to 400 pounds and always gave me an error message, but this time it worked and read 410.” That’s what made it real; it reinforced for Chuck what he had to do. He needed to embrace the identity shift.
Chuck described hating exercise; he hated watching what he ate, hated trying to lose weight only to fail again and again. “Before, I never felt like I’d be able to change.” But this time was different. This time, it was not the rational thought prompting him forward, but a new sense of being filling him with emotion. That lightning strike / baseball bat to the head doesn’t come from a considered weighing of the pros and cons; it’s an overwhelming sensation in which an internal spirit awakens and proclaims: This will happen!
Chuck’s transformation was so total that I had no idea of his amazing story when I first met him in 2015. It was at a fitness conference in Kansas City, in a hotel room after-party. I assumed he was another fitness aficionado and was surprised when he replied to my call for stories. We met again in 2017 and 2018 and shared a big hug each time.
I told Chuck’s story to Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a longtime critic of the idea that willpower is some depleting resource we need to ration in order to change behavior.
“Chuck sounds like he had this experience that didn’t change his self-control,” Inzlicht said. “He changed his identity.” Being a good dad was something Chuck would hold in high value, and this was the identity push he needed because of his concerns about his ability to be active with his children and even live long enough to see them grow. As a result, “The value of losing weight dramatically increased.”
Chuck described his old identity as an anchor that needed to die for him to move forward. This was the defining moment that divided his life into before and after. “The person I am now was born that day,” he said.
From ashes gray, a phoenix arose.
But what does this all mean? How did this one moment help Chuck lose over two hundred pounds and keep them off? The first part to understand is that insight, driven by emotion, unlike rational analysis, is something possessing the power to crush doubt.
“There was an overwhelming sense of joy and relief,” he said. “I didn’t need to struggle with my motivation; it came built in.” Chuck described a sense of inner peace; there was no question he would do it. There were still struggles to overcome, but he had momentum that began that day; it pushed him forward.
I want to repeat something Chuck said, because it’s damn important. Let’s bold, italicize, and center it to draw attention:
“I didn’t need to struggle with my motivation; it came built in.”
This is what we’re going for, dear reader. Right there is the reason I’m writing this book. Dropping over two hundred pounds and keeping them off takes tremendous effort, but having it feel like destiny, that you have an endless fountain of desire to achieve, after years of trying and failing, can only be attained by a sudden, transformative experience. I’m not saying amazing accomplishment can’t be attained by way of baby steps, but that way sucks, and the failure rate is high.
Rapid transformation of desire to succeed is so much cooler! Wouldn’t you rather do it that way?
Maybe not. Maybe that identity-shift stuff freaked you out.
But I want to alleviate that fear, because you’re going to change anyway. We are, all of us, changing all the time. I’m quite a bit different from the man I was ten years ago, and way different than the one from twenty-five years ago. While a life-changing epiphany is something that feels like it is something that happens to you, the preparatory work, along with your life experiences and deepest desires and understanding of your true self, help ensure it was something coming from you. This isn’t an outside agency acting upon your brain; this is your brain.
Yes, if this happens, you’re going to change. A lot. Quickly. Sounds scary, but it comes with an overwhelming feeling of rightness. And that’s why it drives you. We’ll examine the neuroscience behind this shift in coming chapters, but for now I ask you to trust in the power of your unconscious and conscious processing systems to find the correct path.
Time for another mental activity.
Think of what happened to Chuck, and why it happened. The overwhelming epiphany seemingly came out of the blue—but did it? The seed was sown back in that New Orleans bar. He became more aware of the negative consequences of his current path. He also talked with his wife about how children were for “later,” when he got healthy.
And then it all came crashing down in an instant with a pregnancy announcement. Chuck received an overwhelming vision of the man he must become, for his wife, and for his unborn child.
Chuck was suddenly “pro” focused.
The cons of changing didn’t matter; all that mattered was becoming.
Your next task is to maximize the pros. Imagine one or three of the things you’d like to do. Create a basic vision of the You, Part 2, that I spoke of earlier.
Now imagine what it’s like to be that person.
Focus on just a few of the major benefits you will receive from this change. As I showed earlier, don’t overanalyze, but ponder some of what will be awesome about that new career, new body, new location, or new life. What are the big things that make it so desirable?
Are these good things not just good, but amazing? Are they inspiring? Do they make you desire this change so much that you must achieve them? If not, perhaps the problem is you’re not being ambitious enough in your vision. But don’t be so ambitious that you choose an objective which is unachievable.
This is called the “expectancy-value approach,” a behavior-change theory dating back to 1967. It dictates that we engage in those behaviors we both expect to be successful at and have high value to us.
Think on this: What kind of benefits would it take to inspire you to action? Merge this with consideration of the feasibility of the goal. You can still dream big, because implausible does not mean impossible.
Create another vision. Think of a new you so incredible it becomes irresistible. Push the boundaries of realism. No one gets to be Batman except Batman, but you can still achieve awesome. There’s only one Wonder Woman, yet you can become a wondrous woman.
What does the limit of your potential look like? More important, how does it feel to imagine the benefits of standing in those shoes?
Don’t expect this will cause lightning to strike now. It’s information for percolation. But it might happen soon, so be ready, just in case. A transformative moment might happen in chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71), or it might happen in chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo). It might happen three months after you finish this book. Work the problem until you’re stuck, engage in diversion, and you could have a transformation like Chuck did.
Chuck went from despair to joyous determination in an instant. Joyous determination. This sense of elation Chuck described is a parameter of the transtheoretical model called “dramatic relief.” It can take place when one moves from the contemplation stage and into the preparation stage, from thinking to doing. It is because the anticipation of resolving one’s weighty problems generates a sense of euphoria. You’re like, Hell, yes! I see light at the end of the tunnel now, and I will run toward it. Nothing will stop me.
How does the feeling last? What keeps you on the new course, besides the shift in values and identity? The secret is in the synapses.
James Prochaska explained that such dramatic relief could involve either negative or positive arousal. Positive arousal involves being inspired to chase something good. But negative arousal, unlike the name might imply, is not a bad thing: it’s about removing a negative feeling, such as conquering an addiction.
I was in a state of despair, and taking real action, working hard for something for the first time in my life, was the antidote. In that moment, I understood that solid effort could change everything. The enlightenment, the realization that I was about to take action, cured my despair that day, and step-by-step, progress was made toward a new and better life.
The emotional arousal from a momentous epiphany is like a hit of a powerful drug, and it is because pleasurable neuromodulators are activated. A new path is created in the mind, and each step forward in that better direction provides a little rush of positive reinforcement that whispers, This is right.
At a simple level, how these neuromodulators work for ongoing motivation can be described via operant conditioning, as outlined by psychologist B. F. Skinner early in the twentieth century. It’s stimulus-response; the epiphany is such a positive experience that every additional step taken (the stimulus) that stays true to the vision allows the recipient of the vision to continue to feel that sense of rightness from its pursuit (the response). More details are in chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo), but it’s this neurochemical boost that makes you take the next step, and the next one.
The quest comes to rule the synapses.
Self-Compassion vs. Self-Loathing
If you hate your body, you’ll be less inspired to change it. Because passion for health rarely comes from a place of self-loathing. Same goes for hating your life.
There are those who lose weight because they were filled with disgust over their bodies. It can work for some, but research indicates shaming and self-loathing over obesity leads to comfort eating and immobility far more often than generating action.
In a 2013 study, researchers at Florida State University assert that not only does stigmatizing obesity lead to poorer mental-health outcomes, but the authors state, “Rather than motivating individuals to lose weight, weight discrimination increases risk for obesity.”
And a 2003 study by University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Kristin Neff revealed the importance of self-compassion in boosting one’s psychological function. It “involves being touched by and open to one’s own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it, generating the desire to alleviate one’s suffering and to heal oneself with kindness.”
It contrasts with efforts to boost self-esteem, which have come under criticism. Self-esteem often means judgments and comparisons, evaluating personal performances in comparison to a set of standards, as well as examining how others view you. And while low self-esteem can have negative psychological outcomes, boosting it is not a panacea for the psyche. The first issue is that it’s hard to raise, and the second is that targeting self-esteem can lead to self-absorption and even narcissism.
Part of the benefit of focusing on self-compassion is that it’s not just about you. It “represents a balanced integration between concern with oneself and concern with others, a state that researchers are increasingly recognizing as essential to optimal psychological functioning,” Professor Neff wrote. Winning at life need not involve competition. You may have a sudden insight that the best thing for your future is to dedicate yourself to helping others. Look at Chuck. He wasn’t thinking about looking in a mirror or strutting on a beach. He wanted to be a good dad.
We will examine self-compassion meditation techniques in chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo).
The body is often a source of one’s self-loathing, so I’ll share the words of Taryn Brumfitt, a body-acceptance advocate and director of the documentary film Embrace. She told me of the need to not descend into negativity: “I have never met a single human being that has made lifelong, meaningful change that came from shame or guilt.” Conversely, she has seen much positive change resulting from self-care, self-love, and self-respect. “I’m asking people to embrace their positive qualities.”
I gained a lot of weight in my early 20s and I hated myself, but the harder I tried, the less possible it seemed to lose weight. Finally gave up in my 40s. But then something clicked. I decided I needed to be kinder to myself, love the body I had, and love what it could do. Before I knew it, I had the confidence to get a trainer…. I feel the best I’ve felt and looked in years!
—Victoria
I bring this up because all this talk of unstoppable desire to succeed and motivation and willpower can send the wrong message.
Sticking to weight loss as the example, we live in an environment that manufactures body fat. With over two-thirds of Americans being classified as having excess weight or obesity, and the fact it happened in a few decades, it’s clear there has been a major societal shift contributing to it.
Obesity is not a personal failing. It’s not a choice people make. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Just because this book is about exploring the mystery of generating a massive leap in motivation does not mean those who don’t experience it are somehow lesser.
Losing weight or changing your life in other ways is complex. That’s because human motivation is equally complicated. A big problem with the weight-loss industry is a lot of the strategies are built on suffering, which are not effective for the long term. People feel the failure is their own rather than due to a corrupt industry that failed them.
I spent years unhappy with my weight…. I would hide food and opt out of gym whenever possible because I had been told so many times at that point that my body was flawed, I didn’t believe it was capable of anything…. In my late 20s, joining the body-positivity movement helped me see value and worth in my body and what it’s capable of … and I will be completing my 4th half marathon next month. —Amanda
You may have an epiphany that you’re done with worrying about your weight and decide to focus your energies on things more important to you, and I am 100 percent cool with that. It’s your life; you have the power to choose your own road.
If you’re guilty of beating yourself up, it’s time to ditch the self-loathing and accept yourself for your faults and your capabilities. Use your newfound self-respect as part of the process to energize your desire to find the best way forward for you.
Accept your humanity and that all humans are flawed. Being a perfectionist gets in the way of self-compassion. There will be detailed steps later, but for now, endeavor to ditch shame and guilt, and, in so doing, try to better understand yourself. Take some time to analyze what makes you unique. What are your strengths? Where do your capabilities lie? What could you accomplish if you were truly determined? Why would you be able to accomplish these goals? What is it that you bring to the equation that makes these goals attainable? Focusing on your qualities and your potential, imagine what your post-epiphany journey might look like.
You need to know yourself better, because there is no cookie-cutter approach to creating an optimal life outcome. It is unique to you.
I like cookies.
Exceeding Expectations
There are people for whom life has been criminally unfair. The cards they’ve been dealt are a puddle of cat puke.
It is possible, dear reader, you are one such unlucky feline-vomit recipient.
When it comes to body weight, myriad factors can add fat to your frame: genetics, environment, finances, abuse, mental illness, medical conditions, medication…. Regardless of a dream of getting in shape and/or bettering one’s life, there can be preexisting problems that will hamstring efforts.
People who proclaim anyone can achieve anything if they just work hard enough need to shut up and go far away, then shut up some more.
Life isn’t fair, and because it isn’t fair you must not feel shame or a need for comparison. Some have immense privilege. Others, their lives suck, and it is not of their own making.
And yet they are told to “Just do it.” They are shamed for their weight and shown photoshopped models on magazine covers as the “ideal” they should aspire to. Beyond that, there are the societal expectations to have fancier cars, nicer houses, bigger paychecks, better-looking spouses, and smarter children.
I’m calling bullshit on all that.
This is about you and bettering your life by playing the hand you’ve been dealt to the best of your ability. Yes, you can achieve a great deal by being passionate and inspired to succeed; you can exceed all expectations not just with your body, but with your career, happiness, relationships, and more. But it is still worth comprehending the reality of your situation.
There is merit in aiming high, because if you only make it three-quarters of the way to your goal, you’re still overjoyed at how much you’ve accomplished. But do not aim so high—do not quest for the unattainable—if failure to become Batwoman or Wonder Man would crush your will to continue.
Seek greatness on your own terms.
Fulfilling Life’s Purpose
Lee Holland had a “sit-down job,” something her family envied.
Living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she came from poverty and was one of the few to finish high school and the first to go to college. She worked in a small cubicle as a customer-service representative for a major health-insurance company, which was seen as a big step up from working in fast food or doing manual labor. But her life felt unfulfilled, like she was going through the motions. Lee felt destined for more. All that was missing was the drive to figure out her purpose in life and then to chase it.
The drive arrived in fall 2007.
She took a call from a man who worked at a carpet mill in rural south-eastern United States. He was calling because his young son had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. The man was so relieved because he had just been recalled to work after a layoff and had medical insurance again.
Unfortunately, Lee had to tell the man his policy had a “preexisting-condition clause,” and any new diagnosis in the first year was not covered. This was prior to the Affordable Care Act, when the law changed, requiring policies to not have such restrictions for children.
Lee wanted to help. She had previous experience working for a state Medicaid contractor and saw a chance to get the boy coverage. She called the Medicaid office and was told they would cover the child, but only after they received a denial explanation from the insurance company Lee worked for. Prior to her company being able to issue such a denial they needed to send the boy to a pediatric oncologist. The problem was, the only such specialist within one hundred miles of the client refused to see the boy unless they knew they’d receive payment. Her company wouldn’t cover them. Medicaid wouldn’t guarantee payment until they received a denial explanation from her company. It was a catch-22: her company couldn’t provide denial until the boy saw a pediatric oncologist, but the oncologist wouldn’t see the boy unless payment was guaranteed.
But she’d done her job. In fact, she’d already gone above and beyond. Company policy was to end the call and move on to the next customer.
“At that moment, something in me broke,” Lee Holland told me.
Not caring that it was against the rules, she blocked calls on her phone and walked into her manager’s office. “I told him he could fire me at the end of the day, but I was going to get that child on Medicaid and in to see a pediatric oncologist.” Her manager replied with, “Do what you have to do.”
It required several phone calls, a discussion with her company’s legal department, and signing of privacy release forms, but she got the boy approved for Medicaid and scheduled to see an oncologist by the end of the day.
It was all buildup. After her shift, Lee’s life-changing moment came in the parking lot as she walked to her car.
It was a gray November day; a light drizzle fell. Then a question popped into her head: What are you doing working in customer service when you can help people like this? There was a sudden snap decision to change careers. It came so fast, she didn’t even break stride as she closed the final steps to her car. “I didn’t know what it was yet. It was just between me and the universe that I was going to do something. I felt I had potential to help people through the chaotic mass of the American health-care system.” The realization, Lee said, was like a dislocated bone suddenly popping back into its joint.
“I had instant drive to do it,” she told me.
The moment she got home she logged on to her computer to look at what education programs she would need. Thirty-six years old and possessing a degree in cultural anthropology, she began by upgrading her science and math courses at a community college. There were many challenges over the next decade, but for Holland, there was never any doubt she was going to make a difference in the world. She recently graduated with a doctorate in pharmacology and a master’s degree in public health, and has accepted a research fellowship in D.C. that ensures pharmaceutical quality for Medicare and Medicaid recipients. She has won prestigious grants, awards, and scholarships, conducted important research, delivered numerous presentations, and mentored other students.
At first, Lee was leery of pursuing a doctorate as part of this new path in life, because it was a four-year commitment and she was already in her forties at that point. But a friend explained the time would pass anyway, and in four years she’d be four years older either with or without the degree, and her mind was made up. “There were a lot of challenges in between,” Lee said. If one path didn’t work out, she had to find another. “Even though I had suddenly become singular in my determination, I had to be flexible about the way I did it.”
And it all changed in that parking lot in 2007. “Since then I’ve met so many amazing people. My social life exploded. I got to travel the world.” She also met her husband and has been married for eight years.
“Now I feel like I’m really fulfilling my life’s purpose.”
Tuning In to Being Turned On
In the introduction, I discussed the “magic moment” and how you might need to meet it partway by engaging in traditional methods of behavior change for a while and hoping epiphany strikes somewhere along the way. It’s also important to not let the magic moment pass you by. This is your final task for chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71): I want you to envision what it’s like to seek the magic moment.
Lee Holland might have missed hers. It wasn’t anything jarring like a sudden pregnancy announcement. She had done her job and could have ended the call, but in her mind, there was an opportunity to really help, to make a difference on that one day. She was somehow attuned to that opportunity, and it primed her brain for that epiphany in the parking lot.
Imagine what it’s like to be attuned.
Now that you know a life-changing epiphany can come from anywhere, it’s important to be able to recognize it. Yes, it is powerful; usually so much so that there is no denying the experience. But perhaps it needs a nudge. Perhaps it doesn’t take place in a microsecond, but over several seconds. So instead of squashing down the beginnings of overwhelming emotion because you’re too cool for that, imagine what it’s like to embrace the feeling, explore it, and let it flow.
Because in the first second or two you could lose it by ignoring the sensation or even crushing it. Society conditions us to not show too much emotion, but screw that. You must feel this experience and feel it deeply. This book is about learning how to experience something so powerful it changes you down to the bone marrow. I want you to experiment with breaking with your conditioning and seek.
Seek meaning from your sudden insight.
Too often we tune out, seeking constant entertainment to distract from what our unconscious is trying to tell us. Break from that and examine these moments when the brain goes off on a tangent and, rather than try to snap out of it, explore it. Feed that sensation some fuel.
What kind of fuel? The kind that understands that, as humans, we seek experiences that allow us to be comfortable, and by attuning yourself to a life-changing insight, you must be willing to get uncomfortable. Lee had that comfortable sit-down job her family envied, and she knew that rejecting it to chase opportunity would involve struggle.
“One does not become fully human painlessly.”
These are the words of twentieth-century psychologist Rollo May. In his 1950 book The Meaning of Anxiety, he wrote of how such negative emotions can be a good teacher, because while we can avoid the reality of certain problems, the feeling of disturbance is something we carry with us: it gnaws. Suffering, said May, is an integral part of growth. Take that pain, pull it like a sword from its scabbard, and wield it!
That being written, please don’t go off your prescribed anxiety medication. This is just about using your negative emotions to spark personal evolution. Mark Beeman explained that anxiety triggers analysis, and analysis is the opposite of insight. But it’s still part of the process. Remember: Work until you get stuck. Analyze, then engage in diversion. As we will learn later, it is during a positive mood when epiphany is most likely to strike.
This book is not all “Think positive and you can live your dreams!” ad nauseam.
There is an adage in motivational speaking and internet memes: “Dream it. Wish it. Do it.” And it is bullshit, because this is not an easy road of endless happy thoughts in which if you keep your eye on the prize and always think positive, you’ll miraculously attract what you desire.
You must rethink positive thinking.
Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of social and developmental psychology at New York University and the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking. She explained to me it’s beneficial to have these lofty goals you wish to pursue, but not to daydream about your achievement, because it creates complacency. If you fantasize about how wonderful life will be after you’ve attained your goal, it fakes a sensation of already achieving it, so you no longer strive. Instead, focus on overcoming obstacles to achieving the goal. (Details on how are in chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo).)
Changing who you are can be frightening. As a concept, it may fill you with dread. But it’s not some scary Jekyll and Hyde personality shift. You’re still you, just an improved version. It’s about change for the better, not worse.
When you learn to control fear of change, you open yourself to becoming more.
Priming Directives and Quantum Leaps
“Mount St. Helens blew up in a single moment.”
Sherry Pagoto told me this as an analogy of a life-changing epiphany. She’s a full professor at the University of Connecticut and a clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral counseling for obesity. “But the explosion was years in the making.”
We may not even see the pressure building, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, simmering away, ready to explode like a Diet Coke with a dozen Mentos dropped in.
Thinking about the future is but one action helping prime a brain for change, Pagoto explained. Often, for people to be able to make a massive leap of behavior change, they must have been pondering it in some way. It can involve a feeling of malaise, depression, or dissatisfaction. Conversely, such thinking can revolve around a desire to improve, to transform from good to great. Such thoughts may reside in the back of our minds for years before we’re ready to act upon them.
Contemplation can be subtle. It can build and build, but still, there is resistance to change because it is both fearful and challenging. And yet one day a time may come to pass when one cannot hold it in any longer and the emotional volcano erupts. A specific life event can bring it about. But what control do we have over these dramatic, triggering events?
That is not an easy question to answer, because life, and our approach to it, is often chaotic in nature.
Chaos theory can help us understand the dilemma better. A branch of mathematics examining complex systems sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, chaos theory has been referred to as the “butterfly effect,” a metaphor that lets us imagine the minor air disruption of a butterfly’s wings culminating in tornado formation weeks later. Slight alterations at an earlier juncture can end up yielding widely different results farther down the line in a person’s life.
I first learned of chaos theory from actor Jeff Goldblum in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. While seductively placing droplets of water on costar Laura Dern’s hand to show how minor alterations in initial conditions would affect which way the drop would roll, Goldblum explained that the theory “deals with unpredictability in complex systems.”
The human brain is a complex system. Life is a complex system.
About those “minor alterations” in initial conditions: Subtle changes in where the droplet was placed or how Laura held her hand or even the way the breeze was blowing could cause the droplet to go in a different direction. Such is the case with life as well. What if Lesley never picked up a sword? What if Chuck and his family had chosen a different bar? What if Lee hadn’t gotten that call? What if the person who decided to quote Joan Baez in the school paper picked Judas Priest lyrics instead? How would all our lives have turned out?
Such questions are difficult to answer because behavior change is not always a rational, linear process.
Sometimes it’s a quantum leap.
Act Now!
Take a break from rationalizing change and instead examine your feelings. Get emotional and listen to what it tells you.
Remember that song by Journey and “don’t stop believin’.”
Let the fast, intuitive System 1 be the hero, and make the slower, rational System 2 the supporting character. Don’t let System 2 overanalyze the benefits of the story System 1 constructs. Get the confirmation, then stop.
Forget worrying about the “cons” of change and instead imagine how powerful the “pros” will be. Endeavor to become pro focused.
Again: Work till you get stuck, then divert and let the unconscious do its thing.
Accept that this is about change both in identity and values, rather than a change in behavior. The altered identity-value construct makes new behavior adoption automatic. Lose the fear of becoming a new person, because this is a critical component.
Aim high, but realistically so. Choose goals that have a high value to you but are deemed achievable via concerted effort.
Embrace self-compassion. Don’t hate yourself or what you see in the mirror. Realize positivity is the path.
Don’t daydream overmuch. Keep your fantasizing of achievement to a minimum so as not to sap energy. Rather, consider the primary obstacle to success and how to overcome it.
2 (#ulink_a13514f3-8cf4-5416-a58f-0fa4106678c5)
EMBRACING CHAOS: QUANTUM VS. LINEAR BEHAVIOR CHANGE IN THE ROLE OF EPIPHANY (#ulink_a13514f3-8cf4-5416-a58f-0fa4106678c5)
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
My grandmother was an evil and bugshit bonkers hell-beast of a woman who hated everyone and everything. A while back, we were having a family get-together, and my sister asked which kid had possession of grandma’s engagement ring.
“Isn’t that one of her Horcruxes?” my son said.
The joke slayed; 10 points to Gryffindor.
Speaking of crazy grandmothers and things that slay, there was blood everywhere, and I was screaming. The blood was pouring out of my left knee. Childhood trauma provides vivid recollection despite more than four decades having past.
We were visiting my grandmother in Victoria. A friend named Brent was chasing me through the house in a game of tag, and the sliding glass door that led to the back deck was sparkling clean.
In other words, I thought it was open. I was only five.
Fortunately, I did not go through the glass. I hit it with my knee and it shattered, then I fell backward, away from the shards. Blood poured forth from my knee as screams ripped from my throat in equal measure. This, followed by Uncle Jim driving me to the hospital through the rolling coastal hills at a speed that punished the suspension of the pre-1970s-model four-door car while my mother had a minor meltdown in the back seat as she attempted to hold my knee together with six squares of toilet paper.
I still hadn’t stopped screaming. I remember the screaming, not the pain.
Thirty stitches plus an annoyed doctor and nurse later, we went back to Grandma’s house, and she proceeded to chew me out about her shattered door.
That was my first inkling she wasn’t such a nice person.
I achieved a fuller realization she was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” a few years after destroying her window. My parents had split, and we had no choice but to live with her for six painful months. I was getting an apple and she told me to give her half. I got a knife and cut, and being a young lad, it was a haphazard job. I was left with one piece substantially larger than the other.
It seemed wise to give my grandmother the larger half, so I did. Then she proceeded to berate me for being a “greedy little bugger.” She told me I should have given her the bigger half. I was looking at my half, which was about one-third of an apple, then looked at her two-thirds of an apple and said to myself You really are a nutbag.
I won’t repeat any of the racist slurs she often spewed.
For three decades, I watched my grandmother torment my mother. My mother told me horror stories about her childhood, and I believe them. Mom had one of the shittiest, most abusive childhoods you can imagine. So, yes, she’s a little neurotic as an adult.
But she is not at all abusive, quite the opposite.
I have never wanted for love. Mom showered my sister and me with love to the point it was almost annoying. “Yeah, I get it, Mom. You love me, but now you’re embarrassing me.” I always knew from my earliest days that, no matter what, Mom had my back.
And yet, when she became pregnant for the first time with my older sister, there was panic. My mom dreaded she would be like her own mother and perpetuate a cycle of abuse. She spoke of this to her doctor, who gave her some simple yet poignant advice: “The suffering you’ve endured can be undone by loving your children with all your heart. Think of what your own mother would have done, and do the opposite.”
The advice sounded good but did not resonate. The fear remained.
Later, at home, she felt my sister kick. My mother told me of feeling the growing child inside her. She believed the kick was a message saying, I am here, and I need you. Even though my sister was not yet born, my mother realized in that instant she loved her in a way she had never loved another person before.
Her heart soared.
In a moment, she knew she would never be like her own mother. Down to her core, she was certain she would be the most loving and caring mom she could be. And she has been.
I’m not crying. You’re crying. Shut up.
Such a sensation, in which you achieve total clarity of purpose in an instant, qualifies for the word “epiphany.”
No matter which way epiphany manifests, you must listen. It’s the path to a better life.
Speaking of a better life, my mom didn’t let her upbringing hold her back. She earned her corner office in a male-dominated industry, becoming a business juggernaut celebrated in the community. What’s more, she took a near-impossible high road with her own mother, continuing to look after her rather than write her off. She even forked out for a nice nursing home when the old bat lost the last of her marbles.
The lesson is this: The circumstances of the first part of your life don’t have to define the second part. No matter what transpired yesterday or the days preceding it, this does not determine what happens on neither this day nor the days yet to come.
No one makes it through life without scars. Some are visible, like the one on my knee; others reside below the surface. Sometimes change happens fast via epiphany. Sometimes it takes years and baby steps. Change is inevitable, but you’re the one who influences the direction such change will take.
If you’re tired of the path you’re on, you can switch to a new one. They’re your feet, and you have the freedom to place them where you choose. A quantum leap of inspiration to change your path does not mean you lack liberty. Just because your new way forward has become irresistible does not mean you have sacrificed self-determination. Rather, your heart and mind being united in what feels right is what gives epiphany its power to push you.
When you feel such power, it means you are about to fulfill your destiny.
Off the Quantum Deep End
The word “quantum” is being increasingly used in health circles to the point that it is almost considered to be pseudoscience.
What I am about to write is not pseudoscience. It’s Einsteinian science. And other kinds of real science. Quantum has been a real science thing for a long time and it’s still a real science thing.
Ironically, I chose a science-fiction author to explain it to me.
Digital Decision-Making
The first time I met Rob Sawyer, I was worried he was about to die. Being we were not yet friends and that I am sometimes selfish, my initial concern was how this affected me.
Rob is a Hugo Award–winning science-fiction author. Early in 2005, I registered for a weeklong science-fiction writer’s workshop at the Banff Center in the Rocky Mountains, to be led by Rob and taking place in September of that year. I’d read Rob’s work and seen his photo on book jackets, and when I met him at a book signing four months prior to the workshop, he looked nothing like I expected.
He’d lost a lot of weight. So much so I was concerned he had a terminal disease. My baser self worried that if he died, there would be no workshop.
But Rob was happy and energized, and the workshop was a great experience that led to us becoming friends. The first book of his I read was titled Factoring Humanity. I recall the main character created a “quantum computer” that could process infinite calculations per second because it operated in multiple dimensions, or parallel universes, or something.
Now you know why I wasn’t cut out to be a science-fiction author.
In addition to being a best-selling author (one of his novels, Flash-Forward, became a TV series on ABC), Rob is a sought-after speaker and futurist because of his ability to communicate complex scientific phenomena in lay terms. At the time of our conversation on the nature of quantum leaps, Rob was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-third novel, serendipitously titled Quantum Night. The fact that Rob had his own epiphany, which led to dropping a third of his body weight, a loss he has sustained for over a decade, makes his insight even more relevant. But before discussing his personal story, we spoke of the true, scientific meaning of the word “quantum.”
“Most things in life go along in an analog wave; they go up and they go down and they change gradually and continuously,” Sawyer said. He explained, when it comes to losing weight, the motivation for most is like that analog wave: sometimes it peaks, such as when the high school reunion is coming up, and other times it bottoms out, and the only desire is to braid one’s ass into the couch and shove Doritos down one’s neck.
With quantum cognition, however, there is no wave. “Quantum is not analog,” Sawyer said. “It’s not wavelike. It’s digital. It’s either on or off. It’s either this or that.”
This or that … these are the same words I heard from Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, who we’ll hear more from later, when he spoke to me of battling his addiction. After a struggle with alcohol, Collen suddenly quit drinking at the age of twenty-nine. “It was very black or white,” Phil said of quitting. “I knew I had to go this way or that way.” (Note: It can be dangerous and even deadly to suddenly quit substances such as alcohol as well as benzodiazepines, more commonly known under names such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan. Consult a physician.)
To reveal the science of the quantum leap, Sawyer went down to the atomic level. “We talk about the quantum leap of an electron, going from a lower energy state to a higher state.” Sawyer explained that this doesn’t mean an electron travels to that higher state the way a mountaineer ascends Everest. It’s not step-by-step. It means the electron has gone instantaneously from the base of the mountain to the peak, bypassing all the intermediate steps.
Quantum leaps can also take place with human motivation. The base of the mountain represents having no desire to work toward a change of behavior, and the peak indicates a strong and ongoing drive to do all the things being a new person entails.
The traditional models of behavior change, as already discussed, involve climbing the mountain one step at a time. But a quantum leap takes a person’s motivation right to the top. You are facing a mountain. You stand at the bottom. Peak motivation—your ultimate ability to do the work with inspired vigor—resides at the top. You can climb to that peak one step at a time (where there is risk of slipping and sliding back to the bottom anywhere along the route, but especially at the beginning), or you can step inside a Star Trek–style transporter device and materialize at the summit.
If you can locate such a transporter and figure out how to make it work, is it not worth giving it a shot if it means you get to bypass all those steps?
This does not mean the traditional model of slow-and-steady behavior change isn’t sometimes worthwhile. This isn’t one of those books filled with the Truth that “they” don’t want you to know about. The reality is that millions have changed their lives via psychological baby steps, whereas many others achieve sudden change. And some people have experienced both types.
My friend Paul Ingraham, a health writer in Vancouver, has gone through three major behavioral changes in his life. Two of them were in the traditional linear fashion he called “forced marches across a tipping point; one desperate, determined step at a time.” The other was via epiphany, which he described as “Way easier, completely irresistible. To have it was to change, no work required. Just *Poof!* I’m different now.”
“Forced marches across a tipping point.” This is an apt description for what most cognitive-behavior-change models are built around. But it doesn’t always work that way.
I do not wish to dismiss decades of work by respected psychologists in the baby-steps approach to change, because it’s a valuable tool that can be used to lead to epiphany. As I mentioned previously, look at the case of Lesley the fencer. She forced herself to struggle along for a couple of months, then came the poof Paul referred to. Same with my own physical transformation; I did not enjoy the first two months of battling to adopt an exercise regimen.
I struggled to develop the habit, and I almost quit. But when a staff member at the gym asked me if I’d had a good workout, and I realized that it had been pretty good, I had another epiphany: it was starting to not suck. And if it could not suck, then one day it could be enjoyable. In that moment, I promised myself I would keep exercising until I died. I met the poof partway, and over the next nine months, I lost fifty pounds of fat and gained twenty pounds of muscle. I’ve become a lifelong exerciser, going so far as to qualify for the Boston Marathon after seeing the horrific bombing in 2013, so I could run it the following year and be part of taking back the finish line from the terror of that day.
Time for another task.
Start thinking about what baby steps you can engage in to meet the poof partway. What is your desired outcome in terms of ultimate motivation? What is the peak of inspired Mount Everest in terms of what you could achieve for your life situation? Visualize that peak and what it would look like to be transported there, bypassing all intervening steps.
Now imagine the transporter device is broken and you need to hike a step at a time. Maybe not all the steps, but at least some. You can’t stand around and wait for someone to fix the transporter. You need to start climbing.
What does the hike look like?
What is the first step?
Visualize your primary wish of this new person you’d like to be, whether it involves changes in activity level, diet, attitude, career, budgeting, education, a combination of any of these things, or some other things. Now forget that the transporter device exists.
What is the logical slow-and-steady path to achieve the goal? What is the first baby step? What is the second? The third? Start to map it out. Create the beginnings of a plan to just get started. It’s okay to seek help from a professional or otherwise knowledgeable person in formulating this plan.
Because the reality is, you may need to walk that path for a time. You may need to hike a while. But if you’re attuned to the possibility of epiphany on that journey of many baby steps, the transporter may one day pick you up and materialize you at the peak. Or not quite at the peak, but a lot closer to the top, at least.
Sometimes the process is passive. It’s something that happens to you, arriving unbidden. Other times, you must act.
Lace up those boots, because the poof is worth climbing toward.
The sudden-leap formula, which Ingraham described both as “way easier” and “completely irresistible,” warrants further investigation so you can understand why it’s worth the striving. Forced marches of motivation have a high failure rate, with not many people achieving lasting behavior change via such methods. This raises the question: What is the success rate of the quantum leap?
To uncover that, it is first important to gain deeper understanding of the mechanics of quantum change.
A Void in Need of Filling
“It’s like a switch has been thrown and you’ve gone from where you used to be to somewhere else, and the intervening steps didn’t occur,” Rob Sawyer said. “That’s a quantum change.”
Sawyer’s own change causing dramatic weight loss was quantum in nature. He spoke of twenty years at his sedentary job of being a writer leading to gaining significant weight, but he stayed affixed to that office chair because he had a mission.
“It was only when I won the Hugo Award for best novel [for Hominids] in 2003 when I had a void in my ambition that needed to be filled,” he said. It was the top professional achievement he could attain in his field. Afterward, this other goal of losing weight that had been hovering in the background went through a quantum change. A return to discussing electrons explains how it happened.
“The lowest level of an atom holds two electrons, and the next highest level can hold eight,” Sawyer said, explaining that you cannot push one of those lower-level electrons up to a higher state if all of those spots are occupied. But if one spot is vacated, there is an opportunity for a lower-level electron to complete a quantum leap to that higher level. It is promoted instantaneously. This is what happened for Sawyer. When he achieved ultimate career success, space was made for something else to become a top priority.
“It’s no coincidence the year after winning the Hugo I lost a third of my body weight,” Sawyer said. And true to the descriptions of it being a digital process and not analog, this or that, on or off, Rob was committed. “There was no wavering,” he said. “It was going to happen.”
Sawyer has kept the weight off more than a decade.
Make Room for Change
I have a big task for you now. So big, in fact, it needs its own header and section.
Reflect on what Sawyer said about winning the Hugo. Recall the description of how an electron at a higher level must vacate the premises prior to a lower-level electron being able to make that quantum leap to the higher energy level.
This is all about achieving a higher energy level.
And if your higher level is full, something needs to vacate it and make room for your inspiration to be instantaneously promoted, the way Rob’s desire to lose weight was.
It’s a fancy way of describing prioritization.
If your highest energy level is maxed out with “life stuff,” you must reevaluate that stuff, because something needs to be deprioritized, perhaps even eliminated.
What takes up a lot of your energy?
Some things are critical. There are aspects of work and family that are challenging to deprioritize, but everyone wastes time, even those who think they don’t. You say you need your downtime to watch TV or surf the net, but how much time? A 2016 Nielsen report determined that the average adult American spends over 4.5 hours each day watching TV shows and movies. This doesn’t even consider surfing on your laptop or phone. Surely there is room to make room.
MAKE IT HAPPEN!
I have a few of these special exercises in the book. Call them “Act Now!” on steroids. I save them to call attention to more critical tasks. This one qualifies, because if a quantum leap of motivation is going to take place, your highest energy level needs an open slot. This is the detailed analysis, rather than sudden insight, for which writing things down may help. Examine your schedule and where your focus lies. Make a list of the stuff you do that sucks up a lot of energy and time. Consider where room can be made. You need this hole, this vacated spot, because then there will be a yearning to fill it. Give this task of making room the extra attention it deserves.
What may happen as a result of completing this first “Make It Happen!” exercise is that, through careful analysis, you determine, “Of course staring at a screen sucks up a lot of my time, so I’ll just cut way back on that.” But you don’t. You keep staring, because it’s paying off for you in some way.
But now you know this is part of the solution, and it sticks and gets unconsciously turned over, and then perhaps the epiphany comes through that uncovers why you have that behavior, how meaningless it is to continue the way you do, and how much more meaningful it would be to your life to spend that time on a passionate pursuit.
One day, you could be watching The Big Bang Theory and say, “Wow, this show has strapped a couple of hydrodynamic boards to its feet and achieved altitude overtop a carnivorous fish,” and you start walking each evening instead.
The Ground Shifts
“This is about exponential change.”
Ken Resnicow is a professor of health behavior at the University of Michigan and has published several papers on the phenomenon of quantum behavior change. He explained how the stages of change—the transtheoretical model discussed in chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71)—“is a very linear progression that is also quite proportional. They even talk about standard deviations of change.” This means studies of TTM show groups of people based along a bell curve changing a specific amount at a specific rate.
Conversely, Rob Sawyer explained that quantum leaps of change are not linear, not proportional, and not in stages. “Exponential” means going from baby steps to Olympic-caliber long jump in a single stride.
“Using their terms [from Prochaska’s TTM],” Resnicow said, “one can jump from precontemplator into action at a moment’s notice.” And this is not just action but dedicated action, aka “maintenance.” In TTM, the “action” stage is tenuous. One is struggling to adopt the new behavior to achieve maintenance. But with a powerful epiphany there is no struggle; it is not a half-assed adoption. It’s full-assed.
Lee Holland did not slowly slide over into laborious action because of her epiphany. Rather, she became dedicated to taking “action” regarding her career and into “maintenance” in an instant after the realization in the parking lot that she was destined to do much more with her life.
“Epiphany can be primed for,” Resnicow said. “The raw materials for the perfect storm are something that can be provided.” Priming can give people the information and skills that make it happen.
“Don’t pressure yourself worrying that your light bulb hasn’t gone off yet,” Resnicow said. Doing so creates a state of anxiety. As we’ll examine further, it’s positive mood states that set the stage for sudden insight. Besides, “Sometimes things have to marinate for a while before epiphany happens.”
It’s a struggle to escape struggle.
Post-epiphany, the changes in behavior won’t feel like work. It doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do first. I’m going to kick your ass a bit in coming chapters, and then, suddenly, perhaps …
“It isn’t about struggling,” said Professor Miller, who has been treating addictions for forty years. “With overcoming addiction, some people are often white-knuckle holding on to not go back to their previous situation.” But he explained it is different for others, the ones who experience an epiphany, because they suddenly realize they’ve had enough.
“The typical epiphanies are, ‘Oh, shit! I don’t want to be this person anymore!’” said Resnicow. “If you’re religious, it can be, ‘This is not what God put me on Earth for.’ It’s an overwhelming sense the ground has shifted beneath you.” Resnicow explained quantum change as a tectonic-plate movement in how you view your identity and your behavior, and how the two no longer are compatible.
An example of how well sudden change in behavior works comes from a 2009 study of seventeen hundred smokers and ex-smokers published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The authors found that those who spontaneously quit smoking are almost twice as likely to still not be smoking after six months than those who chose a carefully planned quitting attempt. It’s also interesting that spontaneous quitters were less reliant upon pharmacotherapy to quit. They didn’t need that nicotine patch. They were just done.
My best friend Craig woke up one day and promptly decided to quit when he realized how much money he’d wasted over the years. This cessation of smelling like an ashtray was done much to my and my wife’s approval. After more than a quarter century, he’s never wavered.
Battling addiction or weight or finding purpose are not the only things a quantum leap can assist with. A 2005 study published in Behaviour Research and Therapy looked at “sudden gains” in cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression. The research found not only did 42 percent of patients experience a great leap of improvement in a short time, but those who did were more likely to sustain such gains and had a higher rate of recovery.
I want to repeat something regarding epiphanies: It’s not calculated. Professor Resnicow refers to it as a “metacognitive event.” This means the solution to the problem often arrives while you’re not actively trying to solve the problem.
For now, this is not helpful for those looking to achieve epiphany in order to change their lives. But I did the research and created a guaranteed* method for making it happen.
*JK. Not a guarantee.
Unlimited Drive
Until recently, the phenomenon of quantum change bestowing unlimited drive didn’t mesh with research into “ego depletion,” in which willpower is considered limited. Regular exertions of will to complete tasks or resist certain foods were thought to fatigue the mind; people run out of mental energy to adhere to their new lifestyle.
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James Fell
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Спорт, фитнес
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From internationally syndicated fitness columnist and author, James Fell, comes a no-nonsense guide on how to get in shape, fix your finances, alleviate depression and change your life for good.We’ve all been there. Wanting to change your life forever, but only doing it in fits and starts. Feeling inspired to be disciplined one day, then falling back into old habits on the next. Or changing for a few weeks or even months, but then slipping back into familiar behaviours. Bad habits are hard to break for a reason. But you still try because the goal is worth it: slowly and painfully forming new habits to the point where you are able to adhere to a new lifestyle, long-term.Not only do we struggle with all of it but the failure rates of these models are staggering.What if there was a different way? What if sudden moment, which happens to be a surprisingly common occurrence among those who succeed would allow you to skip the struggle of behaviour change and just become a different person in a moment? What if all the motivation they would ever need to change could arrive unbidden because of a life-altering flash of insight? It is the power of epiphany – a triggering event when drive and clarity of purpose for changing one’s life is instantly attained. James Fell’s THE HOLY SHIT MOMENT is about that who have sustained change. The stories outlined in this book examine an abrupt awakening, where a person’s purpose switches course in the space of a few seconds; their life is partitioned into the time before that moment occurred, and what comes after. In an instant, the gradual steps of behavior change are bypassed and life transformation takes hold for good. But is an epiphany something that can be generated?Yes. THE HOLY SHIT MOMENT is a self-help book written in a brash, audacious and informal, your-good-friend-giving-you-the-scoop style, but with the knowledge, research, wisdom and personal anecdotes to back up James’ words in the vein of Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass.