Why is it so hard to change your behavior, even when you know the right thing to do?
Because your brain isn’t in control. The wiring of your nervous system determines your actions.
One of the biggest misconceptions about behavior change is that information or knowledge is the key to change. If I only knew the right thing to do, then I would do it.
But when things get heated, when we are feeling stressed by urgency (and who doesn’t feel stressed these days in a world where the AI and tech landscape is shifting every week?), we react based on our previously installed defaults, not by carefully considering our options and consciously choosing what to do.
Maybe you’ve spent your whole career being the one who runs towards the fire and dives into the details to fix it yourself, and you’ve been rewarded for it. That behavior has been trained into your nervous system, and reinforced with promotions and recognition. So now it’s an automatic reaction: see a problem, run towards it, dive into the details.
But now you’re an executive. And when you dive into the details, your team is wondering why you don’t trust them to handle it. You see it as sharing your expertise; they see you telling them what to do and micromanaging their responses. And the trust you need to be effective as an executive starts to erode.
Even knowing about the pattern doesn’t help, because when you feel the stress and anxiety, you fall into the same behaviors before your conscious brain gets involved. You say yes to the new ask, you start fixing the problem, you start telling people what to do. Or at home, you eat the sugary snack, have the late-night drink, or scroll through Tiktok.
Changing behavior requires retraining the nervous system. It means noticing the circumstances that lead to the behaviors we don’t want, learning to pause when those triggers appear, and building a new set of reaction patterns for those situations. This is slow, painstaking work that can take weeks or months, and requires constant attention (and celebration) to reinforce the new patterns. But it’s the only way to consistently respond in the new way.
If you depend on your brain overriding your nervous system wiring, you’re going to constantly fail. Your brain is slow and will go offline when emotions rise.
This is why reading an article or watching a video doesn’t lead to behavior change, only putting in the slow hard work of practicing new patterns to rewire your nervous system.
What has worked for you to change your behavior?