Socrates, the ancient Greek scholar considered one of the founders of Western philosophy, believed reason was essential for the good life. He left behind no writings of his own, so his words were given to us through others, mostly through his most famous student, Plato, who quotes Socrates: “To know the good is to do the good.” In other words, once a person knows the right thing to do, the right action will follow.

Maybe Socrates's statement, as it was passed down to us, was missing some important context. Maybe he never said it at all—but if he did, we think he was utterly wrong. After working for many years with thousands of people who want to make changes they know will benefit them and their organizations, we join with the many philosophers, including Aristotle and Confucius, who reject this idea.

The people we've known are simply far more complicated than Socrates's ideal. Donal Skehan certainly knew that he should consume healthy foods as he traveled from one beautiful location to another and presented gorgeous, painstaking dishes to his viewers. And yet, he was making himself sick on gas station sandwiches. It's hard to imagine any of the millions of people who don't exercise are unaware that an active lifestyle is good for them. Many people, given the choice between broccoli and a donut, will falter. Many people understand fully that they'll die one day and that it's important to be grateful for everything they have, rather than take it all for granted—but they don't express gratitude regularly, if at all.

Knowing what's good for you doesn't necessarily mean you'll do it. It's only a first step. In Parts One and Two of this book we made the case for why the world needs more and better leaders, and we explained the importance of the qualities and abilities we've observed among the best leaders we've seen. In Chapter 10, we established that behavioral change, because it requires you to venture out of your comfort zone, is difficult—but eminently doable, with results that can be measured in both your brain and body.

If you've read this far, the knowing has been accomplished. But it's not enough. It's time to prepare you for action. In 1947, the German‐American psychologist Kurt Lewin introduced a model for managing organizational change in which he used the analogy of a block of ice: To change its shape, three steps were necessary. First, you needed to melt it into its liquid form, a form ready to accept change (unfreezing); second, you needed to remold the water into the shape you wanted (change); and third, you needed to solidify the new shape (refreezing).²

Our Potentialife program is, in a sense, an adaptation of Lewin's model on an individual scale. Though we often engage with clients at the organizational level, our blocks of ice are people, and as we're introducing those people to the SHARP components, we're orienting them to the ways in which they can break old habits, form new pathways, and discover the joy of leadership. What follows is a rundown of how this works.

Unfreezing: Discovering and Experimenting with Alternative Thoughts and Behaviors

To unfreeze, in the personal sense, is to challenge the status quo—one's tendencies toward unhealthy, mediocre, or otherwise disappointing ways of thinking and acting—with new possibilities. To use an example from our work, Kevin Glynn (see Chapter 6) found his interactions with clients to be less than satisfying, both in terms of his own enjoyment of sales calls and in terms of their results. So he began to consider ways of becoming more engaged and focused on the needs of clients.

This is the earliest stage of lasting change for people trying to develop the strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) performance multipliers: considering and playing around with your options. One of the unfreezing tactics we teach at Potentialife is an approach called Appreciative Inquiry, or AI, developed by David Cooperrider, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Case Western University.

Cooperrider developed the concept of AI when he was a doctoral student in the 1980s, interviewing local physicians on the topic of leadership. His interview questions included the following:

1. Tell me about your biggest failure.
2. What did you learn from it?
3. Tell me about your biggest success.
4. What did you learn from it?

The physicians' answers to the first two questions were unsurprising; most were familiar with the concept of learning from failure, and their answers tended to be less than inspiring.

The stories of success, however—of positive cooperation, innovation, and the egalitarian ethic—were grippingly vivid, and Cooperrider and his doctoral adviser, Suresh Srivastva, developed a process for systematically and deliberately appreciating valuable and successful experiences, and then using that positive analysis to speculate on possibilities for the future.³ In summary, AI draws on the best of the past to inspire the present and create a better future.

You might have noticed that, throughout Part Two of this book, we began each SHARPening Moment with a prompt to recall past successes. We encourage people to recall vivid, inspiring memories of what's worked in the past—we also try to widen the array of alternatives by introducing people to the concepts discussed in this book.

Kevin, for example, practiced a form of AI when he reflected on what had worked best for him during interactions with customers: He was, by nature, a social person, gifted in engaging others and eliciting meaningful conversation. His successes had come from learning and responding to the unique circumstances, thoughts, and feelings of customers, engaging them on a human level.

By Kevin's own admission, he wasn't fully aware of the ways in which his sales calls were coming up short until he began working through the Potentialife module on absorption and learned about other behaviors that might work to encourage flow, reduce distractions, and engage more deeply with people: the relaxation response, e‐mail–free periods, scheduled downtime, goal setting, deep listening, “getting into the other person's movie,” and other techniques and practices.⁴

Combined with your own history of success, the methods we introduce for developing SHARP performance multipliers—both in this book and in our program—will give you a world of ideas you can begin to experiment with and adapt to your own ways of working and living.

Change: Picking and Leading with Your New Approaches to SHARP Living

We call this middle stage of behavioral change the picking and leading phase, in which people decide on the new behaviors or approaches they're going to use and begin to practice them. One of the reasons we introduce such a variety of tactics and techniques for developing SHARP components is that we reject the one‐size‐fits‐all approach. Some of our participants, for example, tell us bluntly that they're never going to practice meditation—though we often find out they've begun to set aside periods of quiet time for gathering their thoughts and focusing themselves on the coming tasks. Which is fine. They don't have to call it meditation if they don't want to.

Though meditation wouldn't seem to have a direct connection to the outcomes of sales calls, Kevin found it a useful tactic for getting himself together at the beginning of every day. For him, meditation wasn't a mind‐emptying focus on a meaningless symbol but a chance to preview and orient himself to the day ahead. Along with the conversational tactics he adopted in his sales calls, he began to set aside some time—even as little as 10 minutes—at the beginning of each day for quiet reflection.

Appreciative Inquiry and experimentation can help us decide which tools and tactics work best for us—but they can't make us do anything. We have to inspire ourselves and discover the impetus, either on our own or with the support of others.

One of the concepts we use to get people on track during this critical middle phase of change is the As If principle. Toward the end of The Verdict, the 1982 screen adaptation of the David Mamet play, the lawyer Frank Galvin, played by Paul Newman, makes a passionate appeal in his closing argument to the jury. “In my religion,” he said, “they say: ‘Act as if ye have faith. Faith will be given to you.’ If we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves and act with justice.”⁵

We love this quote, but we can't figure out where Mamet found it; it doesn't appear anywhere else we can find. But Aaron Sorkin, creator of the television series The West Wing, liked it too—enough to borrow it for one of the early episodes, in 2000, when Leo McGarry (John Spencer) is trying to convince Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) to run for president. When Jed tells Leo he has too much faith him—faith he doesn't share—Leo responds: “‘Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to you.’ Put it another way: Fake it 'til you make it.”⁶

There is some science, actually, behind “fake it 'til you make it.” In the late nineteenth century, the great American psychologist and philosopher William James began to explore the relationship between emotion and behavior. In particular, he began to challenge the conventional wisdom that the two were locked in a one‐way causal relationship, that emotions were the root cause of behaviors: If you're happy, you smile; if you're sad, you frown. James proposed a new theory: Maybe it was a two‐way street. Maybe smiling can make you happy. Maybe frowning can make you sad.

In his book The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life, Richard Wiseman points out that for decades, the emerging genre of self‐help books ignored this idea, and directed people toward changing the way they thought, rather than the way they acted. But then researchers began to put James's idea to the test: In the 1970s, psychologist James Laird measured differences in subjective reports of happiness among subjects who were asked to adopt different facial expressions.⁷

Wiseman cites subsequent research demonstrating that this same effect applies to other aspects of our lives. “By acting as if you are a certain person,” he has written, “you become that person—what I call the ‘As If’ principle.”⁸ In a 1979 study of a group of men in their 70s, Ellen Langer framed a five‐day reunion as a “week of reminiscence” in which the men would act as if it were 20 years earlier—they were even told not to mention anything to each other that happened after 1959, and to speak in the present tense. Langer and her team also subtly removed many of the environmental aids and supports these men had relied on for the last 20 years.

Over the five days, Langer took various physical and psychological evaluations of the participants and discovered improvements in dexterity, blood pressure, eyesight, hearing, and speed of movement. Acting as if they were 20 years younger had apparently reversed or alleviated some of the effects of aging on their bodies and minds. Langer has shared this story in several publications, including her own book Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.⁹

Wiseman cites other studies that have demonstrated the power of certain behaviors to influence our thoughts and feelings: to make us more persistent,¹⁰ be tougher negotiators,¹¹ feel less guilty,¹² become more persuasive¹³—and fall in love¹⁴.

Change is hard—but the As If principle gives us a nudge away from the rationalizations we typically use to justify inaction or procrastination: I'll do it later, when I have more time. I need to think about it some more. I'm not feeling it. We don't need to get our thoughts and feelings sorted out first. That's a lie we tell ourselves to avoid discomfort. The way to start feeling it, says the As If principle, is to act as if ye are feeling it.

Dan Millman, the Stanford University gymnastics coach turned best‐selling author and lecturer, is among the contemporary thinkers who believe many of today's self‐help gurus don't focus enough on the practical world—on doing things, instead of sorting out our jangled insides. In his 1980 book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Millman writes:

To change the course of your life, choose one of two basic methods:

1. You can direct your energy and attention toward trying to fix your mind, find your focus, affirm your power, free your emotions and visualize positive outcomes so that you can finally develop the confidence to display the courage to discover the determination to make the commitment to feel sufficiently motivated to do what it is you need to do.
2. Or you can just do it.¹⁵

Or as Leo McGarry would put another way: Fake it 'til you make it.

Refreezing: Rituals and Reminders for Strengthening New Pathways

It might seem, once the picking and leading phase is complete, that the hard part is over: You've discarded the old, unsatisfying ways of doing things and adopted new ways of thinking and acting. You're happier, healthier, more effective, and more influential than before. Why would you ever go back?

We don't know why you would; probably nobody knows why. Why would someone take up cigarettes after several smoke‐free years? Why do people struggle, after losing weight and getting fit, to keep the weight off? All we know, from our years of experience, is that a remarkable number of us go back. This third phase of change is the most difficult, simply because it never ends. It involves overcoming the mysterious predilection toward reverting to the old ways, and ritualizing healthier, more joyful ways of living and interacting with others.

In his 2012 book, Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton draws on the work of revered philosophers and theologians to argue that there is much everyone—religious or not—can learn from religion to live healthier, happier lives. De Botton, an atheist himself, suggests that religious ethics sprang from pragmatic needs that were key to our survival and therefore considered divinely inspired. One of the ways in which all religious practitioners adhere to these ethics is through rituals and ceremonies that celebrate and illustrate them repeatedly.

We strongly encourage you to identify the kind of change you would like to introduce in your life and then to establish rituals around that change. We use a secular definition of the word ritual—an established or prescribed procedure or routine—and use it to emphasize the importance of introducing and maintaining behavioral change. Your objective should be for your desired leadership behaviors to become ritualized in the same way that brushing your teeth is.

Again, this is about changing entrenched neural pathways, and the best way we know to modify those pathways—to strengthen those that benefit us and to weaken those that harm us or hold us back—is to fake it 'til we make it, to persistently behave in ways that reflect our desired change.

One of our favorite illustrations of the way ritualizing behavior leads to permanent change is the work of Harvard neurology professor Alvaro Pascual‐Leone, a pioneer in using brain imaging technology to establish the relationship between behavior and brain activity. Probably his most famous research is the series of experiments he began in the early 1990s, in which he mapped connections in the sensorimotor cortexes of blind students who were beginning to learn Braille, a skill that requires a high level of sensitivity and takes considerable time to develop.

The students studied intensely during the week, and were given the weekend off. For nearly six months the cortical maps recorded on Fridays, immediately after the week of study, revealed dramatic changes in the part of the brain associated with finger sensitivity, whereas the Monday scans revealed a significant drop‐off. But after about six months had passed, the Friday changes became less dramatic, and Monday's neural maps started to grow.

Follow‐up scans and studies led Pascual‐Leone to conclude the Monday changes provided the measure of whether students were remaining Braille learners or were becoming Braille experts. He believed, further, that the rapid but temporary Friday changes strengthened existing neural pathways, whereas the more deliberately formed and more permanent Monday changes signified brand‐new structures, maybe the sprouting of new neuronal connections and synapses.¹⁶

Later studies by Pascual‐Leone revealed a similar pattern in the motor cortexes of piano learners—and further revealed that these changes, in the part of the brain responsible for finger movement, occurred not only when the subjects played the piano, but also when they imagined playing.¹⁷

It doesn't seem a stretch to imagine the concept of Monday and Friday changes could be applied to almost any kind of learning. We all remember cramming for a big test—but no matter how well we might have done on that test, we probably don't remember what we studied, unless we continued to study that subject for months or years afterward. In cramming, we were shooting for the Friday changes. The knowledge came and it went, because the pathways we created were temporary. What Pascual‐Leone demonstrates in his work is that long‐term change requires time, effort, and persistence. The things that are now second nature to us—reading or riding a bicycle—became permanently embedded over time. They're Monday changes.

This is part of the reason why our 10X leadership program unfolds over nine to 12 months, roughly the same time frame as Pascual‐Leone's Braille study—and why we encourage anyone who wants to achieve lasting behavioral change to take the long view and set up his or her own program of sustained practice. To establish permanent pathways and make lasting change, you need to study and practice again and again, continuing to make mistakes and continuing to learn from those mistakes. It's not enough to remind yourself to listen more carefully when you find yourself on the phone with clients, for example; if this is a behavior you want to adopt, it should be something that's programmed, planned, and executed regularly—ideally, every day—for months. Kevin, who made careful listening part of his daily routine, has become a master of mindful engagement—but he doesn't consider himself out of the woods yet. He maintains this mastery by continuing to practice and refine it.

The rituals we help people establish aren't just new ways of doing things. They also involve not doing things: not opening e‐mail, or checking in with the folks at BuzzFeed, first thing in the morning; not having a chat window open while working; not slowing down as we approach that box of pastries in the lobby; not staying at work past 6 every evening. For some reason these simple things feel uncomfortable, almost painful, as we do them, but almost always, they become less so over time. The key is to take small steps—and to keep taking them—until we've established the Monday changes and feel we're in a new comfort zone.

Reminders: Just Keep Doing It

Millman's Just do it is a motto memorable enough that we'd always assumed the organizational leaders at Nike, the company that launched its Just do it ad campaign in 1988, were admirers of Millman's work. As it turns out, there was no connection between the two,¹⁸ but this doesn't change our opinion of Millman's Just do it: It's terse, inspirational, and a mantra that allows you to picture yourself as a decisive and flourishing leader of others.

But making the changes necessary to become an effective leader isn't about just doing one thing once; it's about doing a lot of things over an extended period, incrementally transforming your outlook and your performance. Just keep doing it, obviously, lacks some of the sparkle of Just do it; it doesn't capture the moment you decide to do it but drags on over the span in which you continue to do it. If it sounds a little murkier to you—maybe less like an exhilarating call to action and more like a veiled warning, a reminder that you could fall off the wagon any moment—then we'd like to offer further reassurance: Just as making a difficult change is doable, so also is sustaining that change over time.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explored this idea, and more of the science behind the ways in which people create and change patterns of behavior, in his 2012 book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Among Duhigg's discoveries, offered up by an army major: “There's nothing you can't do if you get the habits right.”¹⁹

Yet old habits die hard, and some habits, once established, can atrophy during a long layoff—if you've ever tried to ride a bike after years out of the saddle, you'll know you can get rusty, that it can take a few rides to feel balanced and confident again.

We emphasize the use of repetition and rituals, of constant reminders of what our path should be, as the key to lasting change. As de Botton points out, religion does this through prayer—every day, sometimes several times a day, along with special holy days that remind us regularly, and repeatedly, of something important, and with icons, hymns, and other symbols that pervade both daily life and spiritual observances.

Of course, you don't need to be religious to have reminders—and many of those kinds of reminders aren't applicable to or appropriate for the workplace, anyway; you'll need something analogous to the rite and the icon. In their 2007 book, Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change, Sara Orem, Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann Clancy tell the story of Rory, a young man with a passion for yoga and massage who'd been raised to value job security: Work was work, and your life happened outside of work. Rory made his living as a medical secretary—but his heart wasn't in it. He wanted to do something that fed his spirit, so he decided to leave his job and open his own yoga and massage studio.

Months before he'd made the leap, Rory began to feel intense anxiety. Instead of looking forward to the future with hope, he began to think about times in the past when he'd failed, when projects or ideas hadn't panned out. When he did think about the future, it wasn't pretty: “A seemingly endless list of ‘what ifs’ kept him awake: What if nobody came to his studio? What if nobody liked him? What if no one was interested? He felt discouragement from the past and uncertainty about the future. What was happening to his hopes and dreams?”

Clearly, Rory's own habit of thinking—the very habit that had led him to take a job that meant nothing to him—was dragging him down. But he had an idea:

To pull himself out of the mental and emotional vicious cycle of being stuck in the past and lost in the future, he chose to focus on the present. He took his watch and painted the word NOW in large letters on the clock face. He wore the watch every day as the construction on his building was coming to a close. He relates how that really helped him to accept the present moment as a gift to be taken advantage of—isn't that why they call it the present? He began to see the “now” as the only time he had for achieving change—whether in his mind, business, or body.

By the time Orem, Binkert, and Clancy had published Appreciative Coaching, Rory had enjoyed three years of success at his new business. The NOW watch, he said, had been his anchor: He couldn't change the past, and the future wasn't here yet. But the watch reminded him that he could change the present.²⁰

We've adapted Rory's idea as part of our 10X leadership program, working with participants to comb through their own personal iconography to find reminders that will keep them on track to permanently change their habits. These reminders sometimes take the form of simple images—a picture of Florence Nightingale, for example, to remind someone to be empathetic and kind—or favorite quotes, programmed as screen savers on computer or phones.

While working through our program, Di Blackburn of Sainsbury's embraced the concept of reminders with gusto. She now uses several to keep her on track, one of which is a set of dice. As you remember from Chapter 6, Di wanted to become a better communicator, taking the time to listen to people before jumping in with her own ideas. “I was chatting with my line manager,” she said, “and we were talking about how I was doing with that. And he said, ‘You could still slow down a bit more, Di. Try counting to 10 before jumping in.’”

Now, when she attends a meeting, she sits down and places one of the dice on top of her things, six dots facing upward. “I count to six,” she said. “It's not quite the same as counting to 10—but if I'm going into a meeting where we're talking about something I'm really passionate about, or where I know there are going to be people with whom it's hard to get a word in edgewise, I take it. It reminds me that it's okay to stop and slow down and listen, and that it's not always about putting my view in first.” Di shared the purpose of the dice with the members of her team: “I asked them for feedback, too. I told them: ‘Help me. When you see me jumping in, remind me.’”

Many people find their most useful reminders to be not objects or the words of others, but their own words, written and repeated to themselves every day. As a reader, this may seem a particularly useful approach. But remember, reminders are not a final step in this carefully designed process. It's never safe to stop reminding yourself of the importance of the changes you've made.

To replicate the behavioral change that happens among people who engage with our ideas and techniques, which we've introduced here in written form, we strongly recommend you set up your own disciplined regimen for doing the following:

1. Begin by revisiting your responses to the prompts in our SHARPening Moments in Chapters 4 through 8 of this book. Review and write down the ideas and approaches that mean the most to you—the methods and tactics you want to use to develop each of the SHARP performance multipliers.
2. For each SHARP component, map out your own plan for unfreezing—using Appreciative Inquiry and drawing from this book's recommendations to develop alternatives for thinking and acting.
3. Change. Pick and lead with the options that work best for you. If it seems difficult, awkward, or forced, remember the As If principle: Fake it 'til you make it. Also, make sure each option is more than a vague vow to change: Schedule regular practice and engagement for each of the new behaviors.
4. Refreeze your new outlook and behavior by ritualizing and by using reminders to regularly reorient yourself. If you can't come up with a clever device, such as Di's dice, go back to Step 1 and remind yourself, in your own words, why this change is important to you and how you plan to maintain it—why, for example, it's important for you to focus on developing positive relationships at work and at home and how you're working to do that every day. This can serve as your reminder.

The key is to read, and reread, these reminders each day as if for the first time—slowly, deliberately, mindfully. Again, taking our lesson in ritual from religion, we encourage you to create the equivalent of a daily prayer, minus the religious component, that will help the most important ideas you've learned from the book take hold and allow them to create new, permanent pathways toward a happier and healthier life.