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Our life is full of distractions. The book Triggers by Marshall Gold Smith shows you how things in our life affect us without our awareness. It also shows what we can do, so these things won’t prevent us from doing positive changes. Here are 7 Important Lessons that I learned from this book that will help to eliminate unwanted behaviors and put you on the path to achieving your personal goals.
Triggers can prevent us to make positive changes to our lives
Seeing someone eating a cake, or smelling fresh bread from a bakery can be a good enough reason to stop you from your healthy eating plans. A trigger can take many forms. It could be an event, circumstances, or people that manipulate our thoughts and actions. For instance, a place can be associated with an undesired habit and can resurface that habit.
For many years I was trying to give up smoking, but certain places that I associated with smoking always brought undesired thoughts back into my mind. Fortunately, I managed to overcome this in time. Our surroundings can control our behavior in a way that might not be beneficial for us. So we need to control our environment before our environment controls us.
Our internal triggers encourage us to resist the change
We can come up with tons of excuses to avoid major changes in our lives. This is mainly because of our belief triggers, which we create to justify resistance. We also make ourselves believe that we can change whenever we want, so we don’t need to change now.
Unfortunately, we are not as good as we think with self-assessment. On the other hand, we are really good at taking credit for success and blaming others for failures.
Our environment has a huge influence on our behavior
The environment that we live in is full of external triggers and these triggers can have a strong influence over choices and major decisions. Different environments can change our behavior. We need to be aware of these changes, otherwise, this will prevent us from improving and will make us behave in undesirable ways.
Being aware of triggers prevents impulse actions
Once we know what triggers certain undesirable behaviors, we can manage those behaviors and improve them. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it sounds. Most of the time we are not even aware that those triggers prevent us from taking reasonable actions. But, self-reflection and feedback can help us to identify those triggers.
For instance, to identify what triggers prevent you from spending quality time with your family? Is it emails and social media alerts on your phone? Or unfinished work that you keep thinking about? Also, identify the triggers that encourage you to pursue that goal. This could simply be to feel happy and content with your family by spending valuable time.
Once we know the triggers that motivate us to accomplish our goals, it will help us act on impulse. We will gradually develop self-awareness that enables us to identify the counter triggers and act against them. We can start eliminating them and making our environment optimized to accomplish our goals.
Understand your environment and adjust to it
No, this does not mean you let your environment dictate you. Some environments are very difficult to change. But, you can adapt your approach and find ways to thrive in those environments as well. For example, you are having difficulty focusing on your work because the office or the workroom is too noisy. Instead of allowing that environment to stop you from doing your work or trying to make everyone to be quiet, you can use noise-canceling headphones or soft music to help you focus, so you can thrive and do your work in that environment.
Take advantage of active questioning to overcome environmental triggers
We can have the perfect plan for our day, but environmental triggers can influence us and make us behave in unconstructive ways. Active questioning of our actions can help us with that. So instead of focusing on what we couldn’t do, we focus on what did for that day. We identify if we did our best to do the task at hand. This will help you focus on the actions you are taking instead of focusing on what’s being done to you.
For example, if your goal is to eat healthy food, the active question will look like “Did I do my best to eat healthy today?”. We can sit down and think what are the things that happened around us to prevent us to achieve our goal. But blaming others and our environment won’t help us a bit. On the other hand, active questioning will remind us that we are in control of our own sense of fulfillment and our best will not be the same every day. As long as we did our best for that day, that is all it matters.
Power of tracking your progress
It is difficult to keep up with goals that show us instant results. Hence the reason we struggle with long-term goals like weight loss, muscle gain, savings, etc. One of the best ways to stick to long-term goals is keeping track of progress.
One way to keep track of progress is to find a person that can regularly check on you to see how you are doing with your goal. Another way is to keep a scorecard that has a list of active questions about your goals. Then you score from 0 to 10. 0 being “Didn’t Do Anything” and 10 being “Did Your Best”. When you keep seeing zeros on the scorecard, it can motivate you to put more effort into making changes.
For example, your goal is to exercise every day. But something came up and you missed the gym. However, you managed to do 15 minutes of exercise before bed at home. So despite not going to the gym, you did your best for that day to train before you go to bed.
Final Say
Change in your life only happens, when you know what needs to be changed. So you need to develop awareness. Once you have awareness, you will know what needs to change, why it needs to change, when it needs to change, and finally how it needs to change.
Active questioning helps you become more aware of triggers around us. It also helps you become more engaged in creating change in your lives.