Week 4 outline

[MUSIC] In Weeks 1 to 3, you focused on the self-understanding phase, which is all about understanding your
leadership style, what you do well and what you could improve on. However, just having this insight is not
enough, you have to do something with that knowledge. This week you'll begin to explore the second phase of
the self-development model related to the process of self-change. Here you take the knowledge of your
development needs and put it into action to make changes. Psychologists use terms such as self-regulation,
self-determination, and self-directedness when referring to the control you have of your behavior in order to
reach valued goals and outcomes. This process of self-change is not easy to do. I'm sure that many of you have
set yourself personal improvement goals, such as reducing weight, increasing exercise, better time
management, etc. But I found the process of change to be a challenging one. Just because you know what you
should be doing and might have every intention to make changes, it doesn't mean you'll do so. The actual
process of change is fraught with many problems. This week, you'll examine the self-change process to support
habits to make personal change a reality. The nature of personal change and why it is hard to change. The
impact of habits on your behavior. The role of willpower in the process of development. And how to enhance
your willpower.

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By the end of this week, you'll have a number of practices that you can apply to increase the likelihood of
successful change to help you improve yourself always. [MUSIC]

4.1 The problem of volition

[MUSIC] Improving yourself always requires you to be continually thinking about your behavior and about your
performance. And to engage in continuous learning to develop yourself. Development implies a change,
evolution or growth from a current level of performance to a capacity for more complex and sophisticated
performance. So far in the course you focused on understanding the needs you have for development and the
processes that are involved in determining those needs. In the remainder of the course, you will shift focus to
doing something about making change. But first I want to address the issue of why making personal change is
so difficult. [MUSIC]

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The point here is not to make you feel that you can't change, but to recognize that the process is difficult and
requires you to understand and apply many of the insights available to you from research on psychology to
support your efforts to make change. First, the good news. Making substantial behavioral change is possible.
I'm sure you are familiar with the TV show The Biggest Loser where contestants seek to lose weight, and they
end up losing enormous amounts of weight and fat. If you look at the picture before and after, of the same
person, you can see that it is possible to make substantial change to behavior and outcomes. Research shows
that the brain is remarkably responsive to experiences. Up to the 1960s researchers believed that
neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, could only take place during infancy and childhood. By early
adulthood it was believed that the brain's physical structure was permanent. Modern research has
demonstrated that the brain continues to create new neural pathways and alter existing ones in order to adapt
to new experiences, to learn new information, and to create new memories. For example, people who are
jugglers have different brains to the rest of us because they have developed those parts of the brain linked to
movement and tracking objects. Even people who have had parts of their brain damaged through accident or
illness are often able to learn to continue to operate normally, because other parts of the brain take over for
the damaged area. These types of changes to the brain are often referred to as brain plasticity, which refers to
the brain's ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. When you have new experiences, when you
learn new information and skills, and you develop new habits and routines of behavior, this corresponds to
new synaptic connections in your brain, changes in the biology of your brain. [MUSIC] Unfortunately, the
capacity of the brain to establish connections and pathways of neural activity that correspond to your existing
behaviors also makes it difficult to make changes. It's like walking through bush land. It's much easier to follow
existing pathways, making changes like developing a new pathway through the bush. It takes time to flatten the
bush land and to feel comfortable walking the new trail. But the old pathway that corresponds to old behavior
is still available. So when you do things differently to adopt new behaviors or eliminate undesired behaviors,
you have to make deliberate conscious efforts to do things differently. It's much easier to follow the
established neural pathways, to follow the habits and routines you have established. Going back to The Biggest
Loser contestants, they tended to replace most of the weight they lost. Other research about less dramatic
behavior changes also shows the difficulty of adopting and sustaining these efforts. A large national survey of
heart attack survivors in Australia showed that while they believe that lifestyle changes such as eating a healthy
diet, regular physical exercise, and following GP instructions about prescribed medicines were all very
important. A majority of the survivors were not able to adopt or did not sustain their new diets and exercises.
40% did not even follow their GP's advice. No doubt you have made resolutions to make changes in your
behavior, whether health related or dealing with how you operate at work, and have found it to be a very
difficult thing to sustain. This reminds me of a quote from Oscar Wilde in his book, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
that good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their
result is absolutely nil. What Oscar Wilde is doing is humorously exaggerating the well-recognized point that
people often resolve to do something, but don't seem to be able to do it. Psychologists refer to this situation
where people have a goal but somehow don't manage to continue their behavior until the goal is reached, as
self-regulatory failure. This is also known as the problem of volition. [MUSIC] Volition refers to your control
over your behavior. So the problem of volition refers to the inability to resist temptation and to do as you say
you're going to do. The problem of volition stems from the fact that in order to make changes, you have to
work against established habits and routines of behavior that have become entrenched in the biology of the
brain. To do something that is already established in your behavior is easy. You feel that this is your
comfortable way of operating. But to do something new, which requires a new pattern of behavior, such as to
become more organized, to listen rather than always speaking conversations with subordinates. To not
respond to frustration with anger, to carry out more reflection, etc. This is hard. Of course, you can do it in a
very short term, a day or two when you are consciously making the effort and feel the motivation to engage in
the new behavior. But you often want these new behaviors to be part of your long-term leadership style. You
need to establish these desired behaviors as new habits which are ultimately related to changes in the neural
structure of the brain. And to do this, you need to engage with the behavior over a long period of time. For
many people, this problem of not persevering with new behaviors relates to a lack of willpower or self-control.
Willpower is the ability to set yourself a goal and a plan of action, and to execute it, no matter the impulses not
to carry out the action or obstacles confronted. In other words, it's the ability to resist short-term temptations
to achieve long-term goals. In the next lesson you will explore the nature of willpower, its role in personal
change, and what we can do to enhance our willpower. [MUSIC]