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One of the hardest things when working with clients who want to make a change is getting them to start today.
They always agree on some changes they want to make and also agree it would be good to start. Just not today.
Many people who hate their job exhibit this strange disconnection of worrying about tomorrow and not doing anything about it today. I hate the idea of doing this forever but I’ll keep doing it because it pays the bills.
One explanation is the phenomena of Hyperbolic Discounting — given two rewards most of the time we will prefer the one which arrives sooner rather than later.
We even have a proverb for it A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. When asked Would you prefer £50 today or £100 in a year?, significant numbers will take the immediate reward. We discount the value of the future reward to justify the present decision. In a year though your present-self may well be wishing they’d held out for the £100. In a year you’ll wish you had started a job hunt a year ago.
Individuals using hyperbolic discounting reveal a strong tendency to make choices that are inconsistent over time — they make choices today that their future self would prefer not to make, despite using the same reasoning.
We see this in our lives too. We know we want to eat more healthily, firmly convinced we will do this at some point in the future. Today, though, the doughnut delivers an instant fix. We assume our future-self behaves better and makes smarter choices, somehow forgetting when we get to the future it will be our present-self making the decisions.
Your future-self will eat mainly vegetables. Your future-self will jog every day. Your future-self will start a job hunt, save for a pension, remodel the garden.
We are unhappy in our work and see ourselves striding through the job market looking for something new. One day.
We join a gym confident our future-self will go regularly even if we don’t.
In every case we put great store in a future-self who is stronger and more focused with better self-control than we have. It’s touching really.
Instant gratification pleases the present self while delayed rewards benefit the future self. If time-dependent decisions are viewed as competition between the present self and a future self, many apparent paradoxical decisions make much more sense.
The answer? Find the smallest possible change you can make today (no, smaller than that) and make it.
Because a fantasy about tomorrow stops you acting today. You only really have today. With luck you have the next 10 mins. What will you do with them?
Either eat salad today or choose doughnuts but do not assume tomorrow will bring you the self-control you lack today. It’s still going to be you when you get there.
The most helpful way I’ve used this is in managing new technology. I did not buy the first iPhone or the first iPad. For once I was smart enough to hold off a year or so until the second model and got a better reward as a result. Now all I have to do is translate this behaviour to the rest of my life because I find it quite hard to fool myself this way. I know it is good advice, find a small change and do it today but I also know full well I’ll get another chance tomorrow so it’s not really urgent to swap to salad today.
The fallacy is obvious. Eventually it catches up with you. How dim to have a hip replacement when you could have lost the weight. How dumb to contract lung cancer when you could have stopped smoking. How daft to waste £5 a week on the lottery when you could have saved £260 a year.
When we fall short of a standard we set for our future-self it’s very tempting to administer a dose of radical change as the cure. Raising the bar on yourself rarely works unless you are one of the tiny minority motivated this way.
What works is starting the change today, preferably in the next 10 mins.
Pulling your attention back to today brings a couple of benefits…
First, it helps you sort out whether you really want this change. And if it turns out you don’t, that’s fine. Now you can stop torturing yourself with a future-self who is always going to be two dress sizes smaller. Relax and change something you really do want to change.
Relaxing is the second benefit. Postulating a pretend future self, a better version of yourself, creates tension because you are always falling short of a mythical standard. Let go of this nonsense and you’ll feel more positive.
The greatest revolutions start with small but incremental changes. What tiny change would you be willing to make today?
What tiny change in how you eat?
What tiny change in your work?
What tiny change in your house?
What tiny change in the way you are with your family?
Sack your future-self, she doesn’t exist, and YOU make a tiny change instead. Today.
