The simplest way to change something important
That which you measure gets managed. Want to increase the number of sales leads your team produces? Start tracking them regularly. Want more website traffic? Monitor organic visitors and average time on site every week in your marketing meetings. In the world of business, the act of measurement catalyzes the behavior change required to shift it.
Sure, you might need an elaborate plan or a detailed incentive structure to make changes. Maybe you even need new technology. But you’d never invest in more complex and expensive levers without first tracking the number you’re trying to move.
And yet, that’s exactly what we do when we want to make changes in our personal lives. We swing into action, jump right to the tips and tricks, and skip the most basic, powerful lever we have.
Our awareness.
Measurement causes awareness
Take, for example, the common desire “to spend more time with my family.” That’s one I hear a lot. The secret to spending more time with your family is, wait for it, to track the time you spend with your family.
When I’ve done this work myself I’ve taken it a step further. In my morning journal I would grade myself on how present I was with my family the day before, on a scale of 1-5. The simple act of taking 30-60 seconds to consciously measure my performance in the morning consistently helps me to be more present from 5-8pm every night, when it’s really important.
When I’m measuring my presence, I don’t have to create artificial rules around my behavior or punish myself if I flip my phone over when it dings or my mind wanders when I’m reading a book to the boys. Instead, the daily morning measurement makes me aware of the way my attention ebbs and flows during those sacred three hours in the evening, and without effort, I find that my habits and mental patterns naturally shift so that I’m present for and attuned to my family in the way I say I want to be.
Most people work like this. And yet most people still resist tracking thoughts and behaviors they want to change. It’s uncomfortable. A pain in the ass. We want to spend time with our families, sure. But we don’t want to track all that stuff. We can’t live that way, we say.
And then we schedule a work meeting at 6pm without thinking twice or disappear into the bathroom for 20-minutes of Tiktoks when we could be throwing a ball with our son who will only be six years old once. When we finally realize the cost of those choices, it’s too late to do anything different. And we wonder why nothing changes.
Measurement causes change
By its very nature, measuring something causes it to change, because measuring creates pressure. It’s uncomfortable, having a goal that you haven’t achieved yet. That’s what creative tension is all about.
We intentionally introduce that tension into our businesses every day, to cause change. We identify our KPIs, and we measure the hell out of them. Some part of us might not want to look,, but we do it anyway because we know that without awareness, the number won't budge. As uncomfortable as it can be, the pressure is the point.
We can do the same for changes we want to make in our personal lives. We can track how much sugar we eat. Or what time we go to bed and wake up. We can track how much of our evening time is spent with our family, and we can monitor how much time we spend on our phones. We can track those things, and then we can look at the results (even/especially when we don’t want to).
If that sounds awful, living the examined life to that degree, know that you’re not alone. It sounds uncomfortable to me, too.
But change requires discomfort. So the question is really are you more interested in making a change, or in being comfortable.
When I’m ready to make a change, I start by tracking exactly where I am right now. I don’t immediately take action. I don’t do anything at all. Instead I introduce the pressure of awareness into my life, and I intentionally cause myself to feel the discomfort of it every day. And everything downstream just seems to work.
How to use this
When a client wants to make a change, before taking any action whatsoever, we start with awareness. We start by building up tension, because it’s that tension that will catalyze the eventual change.
Here’s the process I use with clients every day:
Distill the change you want to make in your life to a single number.
It could be as easy as using an app to keep track of the hours you sleep or weighing yourself every morning, or it could be something more complicated. But for every behavior change, you can find a way to measure it. For example, if you’re hoping to delegate more of your work, you might start by listing all of your activities, and tracking the percentage of those activities you do vs delegate each week.
Track that number regularly over a set period of time.
This can be as easy as creating a simple table in Excel or in your journal. Or for something more complex like delegating, it can be a daily process of categorizing each of your activities into either “did” or “delegated.”
That’s it. That’s the process.
Sometimes leaders will ask for step three. Something they can do, for goodness sake, that will start to make the change. But I ask them to try just focusing on awareness for a few weeks.
What happens, more often than not, is that the tension of awareness itself is sufficient. Without any complex strategies or techniques, simply paying attention to what they want to change causes them to take the actions needed to delegate more, or get healthy, or spend more time with their kids. As if we’d come up with the perfect plan ahead of time.
There is a step three, because of course there is. But for most people, step three only takes when sufficient tension has been developed via steps one and two.
Change requires tension. And creating that tension can be as simple as paying attention to reality.
Things I read this week
One: Expanding Awareness (expandingawareness.org)
I've been studying this for the past month, and for the right person I can highly recommend (namely, someone working actively on the development of their consciousness). Think of Ashcroft's version of the Alexander Technique as "embodied Zen."
LINK >>
Two: The Divine Union (Deep Fix)
I love honest stories about folks who started out hustling and then woke up. There is a resonance, a rhythm to the stories, even though the details are all different. Mine changed my life. And I liked this one, too.
LINK >>
Three: 70k person study says that valuing extrinsic things makes you less happy (APA)
This shouldn't surprise anyone who's done the work to know the difference between things that are intrinsically and extrinsically valuable, but it's good to finally have a comprehensive study validating the fact that chasing money/fame/titles/prestige makes you sad.
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