We Want to Grow but are Hardwired to Resist.

I have had one complaint about the last chapter in my course, "The Insurance CSR Sales Master Class." The complaint? A personal growth topic had no place in a business course.

So what’s the difference between a growth-oriented intention in your personal life or business life? Nothing, insofar as four habits of mind that will either accelerate or hamper our goal pursuit.

In a prior blog post I unpacked habit four, our negativity bias. Here I want to explore our confounding tendency to say we want growth yet resist. In my course (and companion book) I describe this mental habit as wanting to grow but being hardwired to resist.

We want to improve, achieve, develop but our natural inclination is to resist change when the going gets tough; our hearts are willing but our minds are weak.

Take a hypothetical scenario such as wanting to eat more mindfully (think, less, healthier, slower, not as impulsively). Imagine you’ve identified some unhelpful behavioral loops. You found some useful interventions to help you disrupt the loops. You are eager to go. You promise yourself it will be different this time because your past attempts didn’t go so well.

But before you even start your first day of experimentation, you'll remember that you’ve been down this road before and it didn’t work.

You begin to recall all your past failures of will power. You realize this is going to take more effort than you thought. You start to rationalize why the behavior isn’t that bad. You tell yourself how good you are doing in so many other areas of your life, or how it’s really not that big of a deal.

Or, suppose you succeed that first day, then the second, then the third and you begin to think you are on a roll then, bam! You eat a cupcake in the community kitchen.

That’s not so bad, just one cupcake. The truth is it isn’t so bad. The question is, does this lack of impulse control in a single moment trigger a cascade of rationalizations or negative self-talk about this failure of will power?

Or, do you gently hold it as a momentary lapse that doesn’t define who you are or what you’re capable of? Be careful, our negativity bias, that fourth habit of mind, lurks right behind that question.

I believe that the personal always shows up in the professional, which is why I include an exploration of the four habits of mind and my "Insurance CSR Sales Master Class." You can get an in-depth preview of the entire course for free here.

To the championship coach inside all of us!

Sheldon