S2E11: 6 steps to hit your life & career goals: the science behind changing your habits | Dr Grace Lordan
Do you ever look back and think where did the time go? It’s a horrible feeling, life passing you by, but it’s natural because we have to spend most of our lives operating in subconscious mode. To learn how to get what we want from life, particularly how to change career, we’re speaking with Dr Grace Lordan, author of Think Big and an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics. How do you decide what you really want, and how do you get it?
Things to remember from this episode
Life is short so examine if what you’re doing right now is giving you satisfaction.
If you want to make a career change, first imagine what you’d do if there weren’t any constraints like money, training or time. What would you do if you knew it would work out?
It’s also important to consider the tasks you enjoy doing - not the job title you’d like. What do you actually like doing? Then think about what job would allow you to do that.
Grace says your dream job means i) you should be excited about the tasks of the role, and ii) it should make you financially secure.
Check out the book Thinking Fast and Slow (although it’s a really big, academic book). The premise is we have two modes of thinking - fast (System 1) and slow (System 2) - the former is unconscious and the latter is deliberate.
80% - 90% of the time we’re thinking unconsciously, just acting through habits.
We need to pull ourselves out of this ‘habit mode’ to think about our future selves - rather than just going through the motions of life.
Grace describes an exercise in the book where she asks people to look at the changes they’ve made in the last 5 years and then the changes they’re going to make in the next 5 years. Most people talk a lot about their past changes but not their future ones. This suggests life happens to us on an unplanned basis - we get ‘dragged’ through life as Grace describes it. We’re not planning enough which means we don’t put in the habits that will get us where we want to be.
The moral of this story is be more deliberate about where you want to be in 5 years.
We can’t be in System 2 too often, it’s too draining, but when you’re thinking about your career you need to be.
Once you’ve considered the big goal you have, using System 2 thinking, figure out what habits you need to put in place to get there. Then you show up for X period of time implementing those habits. Eventually they’ll become real habits - and become part of your System 1 thinking (and forget about them).
If you decide you want a career change, don’t quit your job at the start - you should’ve forged your path and have some conviction/security that it’s going to work out before you quit.
She advises dedicating at least 90 minutes a week to get you towards your goal, in this pre-quitting phase.
Get out there and speak to people and give rather than take - don’t ask for stuff (if you can).
Don’t just invest in financial products like stocks, invest in yourself.
You don’t need to be Elon Musk, you just need to be marginally better than the people next to you.
Consider your lazy or worst self when setting habits (which will make it easier to stick to them) e.g. choosing a gym which is very close by.
Just making a start, i.e. getting over that initial hurdle, is often all you need. This means if you’re putting off what seems like a big task, think about just starting it, or doing 10 minutes of it… normally it will flow from there.
You just need to be slightly better than what everyone else is doing. But a lot of people don’t show up consistently. So be consistent and you’re likely to win.
Recognise that to succeed in life, not every moment in life is going to be enjoyable.
She says aim to be happy on an 80:20 basis - 80% of the time you’re happy whilst the other 20% you’re not miserable, you’re just not happy, if that makes sense.
It’s best to order your week and fill it with the most enjoyable, productive stuff, of course, so Grace says you should look back on your previous week(s) and look at what you did:
Did you get enjoyment from stuff you were doing? What were they?
Were you showing up for your future self? What was that stuff?
Was there stuff you didn’t enjoy doing at all?
This exercise^ reveals stuff you need to get rid of in your life, or things you need to have more of.
The planning fallacy is rife - this means you (like most people) under-estimate how long things will take so adjust your estimations. On average people should multiply how long they think something will take by 1.5x, but Grace doubles the time she originally thinks stuff will take.
When planning the time something will take, break down big tasks into smaller tasks because we’re better at estimating smaller tasks, e.g. don’t estimate writing a book, estimate how long it’ll take you to write a chapter - or even better a chunk, a page or a para.
Here are the 6 steps to making a big life change:
Set the goal
Consider the key steps to get there (break it down into chunks)
Consider what will stand in your way (e.g. time sinkers, spending time on stuff that won’t benefit you in the future)
Consider biases that will hold you back (check our episode on biases btw). There’s all sorts of biases that can work for or against you, e.g. don’t ask for a pay rise on Friday because it’s very easy to say no on a Friday. A big mistake we make as humans is not asking for something again, once we’ve been rejected. You can tip the odds and biases in your favour.
Consider your environment, e.g. colours, air flow, lighting, people etc.
Work on your resilience, obvi.
All of us have a certain level of resilience, you can find ways to ‘top up your resilience cup’, e.g. comparing yourself to your past self and the progress you’ve made.
To figure out how resilient you are, you can look back on bad stuff that happened last week, and see if/how you got over it.
There’s a lot of evidence that perfectionism is worse for productivity than more obvious problems like showing up late because people get stuck.
We need to recondition our brains if we dwell on mistakes too long. We all make mistakes. Think about all the times you’ve done well - otherwise known as disconfirming evidence - evidence which shows your monkey brain (telling you you’re rubbish) is incorrect.
This also works for imposter syndrome. It’s normal to feel like an imposter in particular situations, e.g. you’re surrounded by people who know a lot more about a topic than you. It’s justified to feel like an imposter - but these are also normally growth opportunities.
If you’re suffering from imposter syndrome, look for disconfirming evidence and write those things down. Grace has a buddy system instead - she asks a mate who’ll give her disconfirming evidence showing that she is actually great and her self doubts are unfounded. It’s often easier to believe it from a friend than yourself.
She has a rule of 3 to get real signal on feedback - talk to a few people to get multiple inputs (be wary of just believing one person’s view of you).
She likes the phrase “this too shall pass” - a legendary Rumi quote, which I love as well. Don’t hold onto something negative too long, it will pass.
Going to sleep can help when you’re obsessing over something that’s happened (it refills your cup of resilience).
How do you know if you’ve hit your goals? Write down your goals and acknowledge it when you get there. Pause to celebrate.
Here’s a factoid about Olympic medalists I bet you’ll remember - bronze and gold medal winners are equally happy but silver medal winners are less happy because they look at the gold winner and think they could’ve got that (they just missed out) whereas the bronze winner are happy they got something and were still a meaningful way from winning.
