How to change your mind
Welcome Entrepreneurs, I'm so glad you're here.
I’m excited to announce a big change for 2022. I've decided to merge my work at SecondMountainStartup.com into my coaching work at Inside-Out Leadership, starting next issue, Jan 21. This means a new email address (ryan@leadinsideout.io), new design, all of it.
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This change is a long time coming. I started writing at SMS simply because I love to write and I care about founders. And then, wonderfully, my passions led me to starting I-O, an executive coaching practice built around the idea that leaders should strive to be the best version of themselves, rather than the person they think others want them to be. My writing is grounded on the same idea, so it's now time to bring all my work with leaders under a single home: Inside-Out Leadership.
But as we bid farewell to Second Mountain Startup, I must give one more plug for a book that played a huge role in my life, The Second Mountain, by David Brooks.
And with that, let's dive into 2022 with a how-to guide to transforming your subconscious mind.
How to change your mind
Making intentional adjustments to the way we subconsciously respond to patterns (aka who we think we are) is the meat and potatoes of executive coaching. By helping purposely bring conscious attention to processes that have been subconsciously driving their decisions, a good coach can help leaders drive efficacy and fulfillment in their lives and Work.
But for all the reams of data and case studies out there about the latest 10-step process to scaling, there’s very little in the way of practical advice on how to consciously change the way your subconscious mind works. So today I want to walk through one of the specific processes I use to help leaders intentionally shift their thought patterns and evolve themselves into the people they want to be.
The foundation of human behavior: Attachments and Aversions
Spend any meaningful time in meditation or therapy, and you’ll discover that most of your thoughts and, as a result, most of your behaviors are the result of a complex yet predictable pattern of cause and effect (I’ve written before about the giant Rube Goldberg machine that is most of human behavior, and it’s not far off).
This isn’t always the case – human beings can bring conscious attention at any moment and disrupt that pattern of cause and effect with conscious choice – but it’s more difficult than it seems to do that, and in my experience most leaders spend about 90% of their time being operated by their subconscious patterns.
This sounds like a bad thing, but without this ability to internalize complex processes and run them subconsciously, we wouldn’t be able to talk and drive at the same time. Our highly patterned subconscious mind is a feature, not a bug. It only feels like a bug when we’re running a pattern that’s out of date.
The idea that understandable, predictable patterns underlie your complex thinking and behavior is actually quite useful. It means that the key to changing your results without having to white-knuckle every situation is simply figuring out which pattern is at play, and then working consciously with it until it no longer has a hold on you. Easier said than done, but still very doable.
How subconscious patterns work
The subconscious patterns that control us operate around two key factors: attachments (things we find pleasant) and aversions (things we find unpleasant). Said simply, 90% of the time, humans follow predictable patterns to get us more of what we want and less of what we don’t. All the agonizing, internal debating, etc. is just for show.
Each pattern looks something like this:
A trigger (like seeing a competitor’s hype tweet) sets the process in motion
An attachment or aversion (a powerful sequence of thoughts/emotions/sensations) either attracts or repels us, like the sensory cocktail that some people call “imposter syndrome”
We take a predictable, highly patterned action, one that we’ve learned will satisfy the feelings of attachment/aversion (like working on a ton of not-very-important tasks to make yourself feel competent again)
It’s tempting to spend all our time focused on the action (or sometimes the trigger), but it’s the attachments and aversions that are really running the show. Becoming familiar with these powerful sensory cocktails is the key to unlearning subconscious thought and behavior patterns, and transforming yourself into the person who naturally gets the results you want.
Identifying your patterns
Like contact lenses, the thing about mental patterns is that because we look at the world through them, it’s quite difficult to actually look at them. However, a good coach can often see your thought patterns as if they were bright orange contact lenses, and can help you to see them for yourself.
But you can also learn to see your patterns by yourself, with practice.
Through meditation (and/or other contemplative practices, although in my experience meditation is the easiest, so it’s what I typically suggest to clients), you learn very quickly just how little control you actually have over your thoughts and feelings. You quickly begin to witness your attachments and aversions in real time, seeing them as simply thoughts and feelings, rather than identifying with them. Once you develop the practice of watching your thoughts and emotions in this way, you can begin to pick up on your own thought-patterns, and do the unpacking yourself.
For more on how to start your own meditative practice, see my previous work: How to Meditate.
Spotting your patterns in the moment
Thought patterns are by their nature subconscious, so even if you know the pattern you want to shift, if you can’t spot it immediately (and under duress, but we’ll come to that), you won’t see it until well after you’ve taken action. To shift a pattern, you first have to be able to reliably bring a subconscious pattern into conscious awareness.
The simplest way to do this is to become so familiar with the pattern that it jumps out at you, in the same way that the moment you buy a new Passat, you see that same damn Volkswagen everywhere. You don’t have to remember to look for other Passats, they find you.
Subconscious patterns work the same way. Once you know exactly what your own patterns are, particularly the details of the attachment/aversion sensations, you can’t help but see yourself acting them out in all sorts of situations. To help breed that level of intimacy, when working with clients, I ask them to chart out their pattern in great detail, using the prompts below.
What is the behavior?
What external stimuli trigger (precede) this behavior?
Describe the attachment/aversion after the trigger (thoughts, emotions, physical sensations – the more detail the better)?
What action does the attachment/aversion make you really want to take?
To do this at home, the next time you take the undesirable action, take a moment to look back at what happened just beforehand (that’s when the pattern ran), and complete the four questions above. Then iterate your answers with increasing detail upon each subsequent experience.
Over time (give or take a week or two in my experience) you’ll find that your pattern is easier to spot. Not only that, feeling the attachment or aversion also becomes a conscious reminder that you’re on the road to producing the same old, undesirable results, and an invitation to do something different.
Working skillfully with attachments & aversions
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson
To create the space to change, you must learn to experience all the powerful sensations of attachment/aversion without immediately jumping into action.
Simple enough, but difficult because the attachment or aversion is powerful enough to have compelled you into action, sometimes for years or decades. Experiencing something like imposter syndrome without doing something to feel productive, just sitting with the sensations and experiencing the texture of feeling like an imposter – the rush of blood to your face and tightness in your chest, the shame, the loud inner critic telling you how worthless you are – it’s all miserable. Everything in your body may ask you to check a box, fire off an email, take out the trash, just do something to feel worth a damn.
To get a sense of what this can be like, here’s a quick exercise: Sit still for 20-minutes and don’t swallow. That’s it. Just consciously sit there for 20-minutes, and no matter what you do, don’t swallow. Call it a very specific meditation.
You’ll find that quickly the urge to swallow can become overwhelming. It’s everything you can do to not swallow. You may even reflexively swallow without catching it until afterward. But if you stick with the sensations, not swallowing is awful awful awful and then, all at once, it’s easy. The sensations are the same, but you no longer feel compelled to change them. They’re just sensations, and aren’t they interesting? Sitting with attachments like imposter syndrome is like that.
Sitting with those unpleasant (or, paradoxically, at times pleasant) sensations without reacting takes practice, but it’s well worth it. That slight, conscious pause–what I’ve heard referred to as the “sacred pause,” the gap between stimulus and response–is what creates the opportunity to intentionally choose a different behavior.
And that’s all we can ask for. The ability to wake up, and choose our actions consciously.
What comes after
Again, subconscious patterns are inevitable and amazing. They’re only a problem when they’re causing you results you don’t want. But through the process above you can reliably bring unhelpful patterns into conscious awareness, disrupt them, and choose different actions consciously.
Instead of compulsively doing busywork when you feel like an imposter, by sitting with the sensations until they dissolve, you can instead choose consciously to work on your top priority. Or reach out to a close friend or mentor. Practicing this consistently for a month or two is usually enough to free yourself from the compulsion entirely. You might still feel the sensations of imposter syndrome, but they incrementally become much less important. Just interesting sensations, no big deal.
And then, because our brains have the amazing feature of being able to move complex processes into our subconscious mind to run them automatically, if you’re still paying close attention to the way your patterns drive your behaviors a month or two after that, you may even notice that you feel the sensations of imposter syndrome, and in response you have the very strong sense that you should work on your top priority.
Why this matters most for leaders
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
Building a company is a responsibility. Most people can run around executing harmful patterns all day long, and they only impact themselves. But every time a leader shuts down at an investor pitch due to feeling like a fraud, or blows up at an employee in frustration, dozens or hundreds of lives are impacted. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve helped founders see that all that dysfunction in their companies, all of it is simply employees mirroring the founder’s patterns. To change your company, you must change yourself.
Strategy matters. Tactics matter. But who we are, the sum total of our actions, both conscious and subconscious, builds the culture of our company. And as Peter Drucker has said, culture eats strategy for lunch.
Work on your inner shit, founders. You can no longer say you don’t know how.
THINGS I READ THIS WEEK
One: DAOs, Absorbing the Internet (The Generalist)
I’m incredibly fascinated by the DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization). I’m a member of two DAOs, and have had a front row seat as we figure out how a truly headless organization runs. As in an organization without any leaders, and without any dedicated staff. I find myself nerding out on what leadership looks like in this environment, and this is the most useful article I’ve found as I do this processing.
Two: Why DAOs are the next evolution of a centuries-long trend (Twitter)
True believers think that DAOs will work so much more effectively than traditional hierarchical orgs that they’ll take everything over. Here’s the bull case, as presented by author David Spinks.
Three: The challenges of scaling a DAO (The Defiant)
On the other hand, these look like some significant hurdles to hop. #4 and #5 are the ones that most interest me, and what I’m trying to figure out myself.
Four: How to go from being a super hot company to lucky to get acquired in less than 24 months (Taking Punches)
Remember Klout? That single score that quantified your influence online from back in the early 2010’s? The founder and CEO dropped some really important knowledge in his blog here. TL/DR: Don’t raise too much money if your core business is not ready to scale.
Five: How to rest well (Psyche)
The idea of managing your energy instead of managing your time has come up more often recently in my conversations with founders. I’m a huge fan of the approach in my own life and with clients. Here’s a great look at what that has looked like for some of the most productive folks throughout history, and how it might work for you.
WANT TO DIVE DEEPER?
If you liked this, check out this list of my top posts, read and shared by thousands of entrepreneurs.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Executive Coaching for Entrepreneurs
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I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency supporting founders to rapidly scale themselves as leaders, so they can thrive professionally and personally as their company changes the world. Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO and a decade of meditation & mindfulness training, I have helped leaders from companies across the world, funded by some of the world’s top venture funds, to design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction. I coach entrepreneurs how I want to be coached:
Focused on the person, not the role.
Focused on results, without the fluff.