Change Is Hard – How Shifting Mindsets Is Like Having A Broken Foot

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📝 usncan Note: Change Is Hard – How Shifting Mindsets Is Like Having A Broken Foot

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or years, I have advocated that “with a few simple mindset shifts, you can change your experience of work and dramatically improve how you invest your time and energy.” I still believe that claim except for the “simple” part. There is nothing simple about shifting your mindset. Just ask my broken foot.

Recently, a slip and fall resulted in a broken 5^th metatarsal in my left foot. It’s a fairly minor injury, but the consequences have been significant. Anyone who has ever been on crutches knows that they undermine your self-sufficiency. Carrying a cup of coffee is no longer possible. That was annoyance enough. But the real challenge came with showering, the most routine of all behaviors.

Normally, I leap out of bed at the first sound of the alarm. But suddenly, I was hitting the snooze button repeatedly and dreading the idea of getting up. At first, I was confused as to why. And then I realized my brain was having a tantrum.

Our brains are very efficient. At every opportunity, they are looking to ingrain behaviors into habits so that they can function on auto-pilot. For example, I fly so frequently that I am often sitting at the gate without being conscious of what it took to get there. The same, of course, is true of showering. It takes no conscious effort.

Until, that is, you have to do it differently – sitting down, instead of standing, for example. Being cautious and moving slowly to prevent further injury. It’s exhausting.

This is a great example of what our brains are capable of thanks to neuroplasticity. I am capable of building a new process and pathway for showering that is different that the one I have been following for the bulk of my life. The cost of doing so is moving much more slowly and intentionally, and thinking about every single step.

That’s what it’s like to change how you work. You have patterns. We all do. Yours most likely include passing the time in bad meetings by multitasking, letting your calendar drive your day, and being perpetually pulled into unexpected mini emergencies. Almost everyone has accepted the idea that drudgery is par for the course at work.

But what if it weren’t? What if you could take more control of your experience at work by making conscious choices about which meetings to attend and which to decline or delegate? What if you controlled your calendar rather than letting it control you? What if you accepted that multitasking is not physically possible and that rapidly task switching (what you are actually doing) is a cognitively high-cost activity?

The mindset that reinforces these changes is the belief that you have a responsibility to use organizational time with diligence. You are being compensated for your time, of course, but it’s not just your time that matters. It’s everyone’s. So if you show up at a meeting unprepared or host one without thinking through the purpose, you are wasting everyone else’s time. This shouldn’t be a radical idea. But for many, it is.

Changing habits isn’t easy. But if you enroll others around you in the value of doing so, you can reinforce one another’s commitment to using your time with intention. It will feel hard at first – like me in the shower – but gets easier over time. And the payoff is worth it.