Let's face it, change is EASY.

It REALLY is!

Tell people to do something, they do it... even if only once, and change has occurred.

Simple!

Trouble is, that kind of change is temporary, transient and often regressive.

It's the old 'two-steps-forward-one-step-back' dance, right?

Or worse, it's the 'one-step-forward-two-steps-back' dance.

Or worse still it's the... well, you get the message 🙂

Change is, by its very definition, 'changeable'. 

It's transient. 

It's temporary.

Not so good when as a coach you're trying to help your clients achieve LASTING results, is it?

See, clients don't just want CHANGE, they want TRANSFORMATION.

That is, they want permanence of result.

Or, at least, they want results that don't regress and backslide but rather, that keep on PROGRESSING.

Sounds like a tall order, right?

Constant progress without regression?

But it's NOT.

That is, if you understand what's going on inside their skulls that keeps them in the cycle of change rather than transformation.

Here's what I mean...

You see that blue section there on the image below?

It's the part of the brain that houses both the creative, future-based thinking required to create, identify and become inspired by a a future-based goal or objective that doesn't yet exist (right PFC) as well as the ability to plan and execute the strategy to achieving it so that it does (left PFC).

In every way that matters, the PFC is the only part of the brain that could be called the 'mind'. 

It's the bit that makes us human.

Without this, we're essentially animals in human bodies.

That means that when we're not engaging the PFC we become reactive, impulsive and more concerned with IMMEDIATE concerns rather than remembering our 'big why' and all the reasons why we're delaying gratification in favour of the better future that we most HOPE will come to pass.

Simply put, when we're out of our PFC, in every way that matters, we're out of our minds and when we're out of our minds, our goals, our visions, our dreams become irrelevant... meaningless.

And guess what?

That means that all those conversations, all that goal setting, all those instructions that you so carefully planned and explicitly communicated and that your client AGREED on wholeheartedly just this morning can be completely and utterly forgotten about and discarded this afternoon.

And it's NOT their fault.

It bears no reflection on how committed they are to achieving their goals or 'how badly they want it', rather, it's simply a matter of not having the 'equipment' to do the job.

It's kind of like DESIRING and COMMITTING to picking up your best friend from the airport and finding that your car is out of gas, 3 of the wheels have been stolen and someone has slapped a wheel-clamp on the 4th.

It's not your fault, your ability is hampered and picking up your friend is no longer a priority in your life, right?

It's not awesome, it leaves your friend stranded and you don't feel great about it but hey, sometimes 'shit happens', right?

Likewise, when your clients are out of their minds. 

It's not awesome but it IS reality.

It's called the Basal Ganglia or BG for short... it's within that pink area in the picture.

And it's the home of habit.

Which means, by extension, it's the home of ALL transformation.

In fact, you could say that transformation is a 'basal ganglia event'.

In other words, you haven't transformed ANYTHING but merely CHANGED it until responsibility for doing it is taken over by the BG.

"And HOW do you get behaviours taken up by the Basal Ganglia so that they become habit?" you ask?

It's easier to tell you how you DON'T!

The problem with MOST coaching approaches is that they are based on RATIONAL and LOGICAL approaches to holding long term goals in mind, making them important and taking constant and committed action for extended periods of time using instruction, accountability, willpower and action in the hope that by 'just doing it' some new habit will be formed that will override the old 'bad' habits and make taking future action faster and easier.

Habituation into the Basal Ganglia only happens when you create the environment that it needs to prioritise a new set of behaviours over the old ones.

That means creating behaviours that the BG sees as demanding LESS energy, LESS effort and LESS resources than the current ones and (ideally) providing MORE reward as a result. (Often the very opposite of what most 'habit forming' coaching looks like).

Ultimately, the BG acts like an accountant weighing up the cost of abandoning the old behaviour in favour of the new and the likely benefits of doing so.

And it doesn't care how long you spend on doing something, how much effort you've put in or how much you REALLY want a certain result.

It cares about budget over and above everything else.

And that's why you need to communicate with the BG in language it understands.

"And how do you do that?"

By learning to speak brain.

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