Go hack yourself…

Let’s face it - change is challenging and growth is uncomfortable. Many of us have good intentions to make positive changes in a particular aspect of our business or lives, yet often we get in our own way and revert back to the default behaviours that we were looking to change.

A few years back I wanted to give up coffee. My girlfriend wanted to give up sugar. We both knew ourselves well enough to realise that we needed a different strategy than just decision and discipline. So we hacked ourselves.

For the hack to work, we had to make the pain of not following through with our intentions greater than the pain of resisting our respective addictions. We both hated doing the dishes, so we made a game whereby, if either of us failed to forego our respective vices for a month, that person had to do the dishes for the week.

The hack worked! The disincentive of doing the dishes for a week was enough for me to forgo the pleasure of coffee and suffer the caffeine withdrawal symptoms. Since then, I’ve looked at ways that I can hack myself in other areas of my life.

In my business, I have set up an accountability game that I learnt from implementation guru Peter Cook. Each week I nominate three “Mission Critical” actions that I must get done that week. If I don’t complete any of those tasks, my assistant fines me $100 (which goes to a charity). If I find myself procrastinating on anything important or resisting an activity that’s uncomfortable, I put it on my weekly Mission Criticals list.

In order to hack yourself, I think you need three things:

A disincentive
An accountability partner
A strong purpose

The first two things I have already alluded to. The third helps to make the change permanent. Without a clear purpose, the hack may work in the short term, but you will find yourself reverting back to your old habits over time. This is what happened in my coffee experiment. My real reason for giving up coffee was to please someone else (my girlfriend), so after about three months I was back to three cups a day.

Mark Windust is an influential Thought Leader in the areas of Sales Strategy, Sales Leadership and Sales Performance. Since launching his consulting practice in 2007, Mark has worked with 1000's of business leaders, salespeople and entrepreneurs’ to help them transform their sales results.