Do One Thing Different: Ten Simple Ways to Change Your Life

By Bill O'hanlon

“If you do one thing different, read this book! It is filled with practical, creative, effective, down-to-earth solutions to life’s challenging problems.”—Michele Weiner-Davis, author of Divorce Busting

The 20th anniversary edition of a self-help classic, updated with a new preface: Tapping into widespread popular interest in highly effective, short-term therapeutic approaches to personal problems, author Bill O’Hanlon offers 10 Solution Keys to help you free yourself from "analysis paralysis" and quickly get unstuck from aggravating problems.

Tired of feeling stuck all the time when you’re trying to solve a problem or are facing conflict? Do you get easily flustered or angry when a negative confrontation arises? Have you ever wished you could communicate more easily with your spouse, kids, colleagues, or anyone else you have a difference in opinion with? In this newly updated edition of Do One Thing Different, Bill O’Hanlon will arm you with his ten easy Solution Keys so that you can move quickly from "stuck" to "smooth sailing" in all aspects of your life. Humorous, direct, and—most important of all—effective, these keys will help you change how you view and "do" your problems—from difficult relationships to enhancing sexuality and resolving conflicts of all kinds. The next time you have a problem, try one of these Solution Keys:

• Break Problem Patterns: Change any one of what you usually do in the problem situation by doing one thing different! Example: If you usually get angry and defensive, sit quietly and listen.

• Find and Use Solution Patterns: Import solutions from other situations where you felt competent. Examples: What do you know on the golf course that you forget when you get behind the wheel of your car? What do you say to resolve a problem with an angry customer that you don't say to your angry partner?

• Shift Your Attention: Focus on what you would like to have happen rather than on what is happening.

Grounded in therapeutic practice, Do One Thing Different will put you back in control of your emotions and your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062936424

Bill O'hanlon

Bill O'Hanlon is a certified professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist. He is the author of sixteen books, including Stop Blaming, Start Loving (formerly entitled Love Is a Verb), he has appeared on Today, and he reaches thousands through his seminars, audiotapes, and Web site. He and his wife live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Book preview

Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition

Wow. Twenty years.

This book, among the thirty-six I have written to date, is the most popular and has stayed in print for twenty years in a world where most books go out of print in a year or two.

The fact that Oprah caught wind of it and had me on her show to focus for an hour on the book and the idea behind it probably accounts for much of that longevity.

The book arose out of a then-radical idea I had been using in my psychotherapy practice: It’s not necessary to understand why you do the things you do. You don’t need to spend years in therapy analyzing your childhood to be happier or to make changes. Just notice what isn’t working and change the pattern, in some small or dramatic way, to change your life.

Just recently someone who read the book told me she had embarked on a yearlong experiment: Every day, she decided, she would do something different. She treated her life as an experiment and was finding that she was happier and making some nice discoveries.

Another report I got from a reader was more dramatic. Her email came in with this subject line: Your book saved my life.

She told me in that email that she had seen me and the book on Oprah, and something about the approach really spoke to her and made sense.

She asked me if there was anyone in or near the city in which she lived who practiced my approach to change. She was struggling with an addiction issue. She had tried traditional treatment approaches several times and they hadn’t worked.

She added that she also had financial issues, since the addiction had her running up her credit cards and spending all her savings.

As a matter of fact, I knew three people in her area who might be able to help her and sent her their names and contact information. I alerted them that she might be contacting them and that I would appreciate it if they could give her a break on the fees for therapy.

I didn’t hear anything back from her for about a year after I responded to her brief thank-you email.

In that email, she told me more of her story. She had been a teenage runaway from an abusive home and lived on the streets after running away. She lived a tough life, doing anything she needed to do—often illegal, humiliating, and risky things—to survive on the street. She had become hooked on heroin during that time.

One day, she heard a street preacher talking about Jesus and, at that low point, the message moved her so much that she converted to Christianity, became born again.

She also became a supporter and follower of that street-corner preacher, and he helped her get off the streets. When he started a church soon after that, she worked there as the secretary/office manager.

Things had gone well for her for a number of years and she was often called up to the front of the church to testify about the profound change that Jesus had brought into her life.

Then, she developed some persistent back problems. When she finally sought surgery to escape from the chronic pain those back problems brought, she told the doctors and nurses that she had been an addict and couldn’t take anything addictive.

There was a new painkiller that had just been introduced called OxyContin, they told her, and assured her that it was non-addictive.

Of course, most of the world knows by now that those initial ideas about OxyContin were wrong and that the drug is highly addictive.

She became hooked on those pills, and after her legal prescriptions ran out, she began buying them on the street, which is how she had spent all her money and gone into debt. She had maxed out her credit cards and taken a second mortgage on her home.

She had sought out traditional treatment and twelve-step programs, but they didn’t really work or were not a good fit for her, she said.

She had called the therapists I had recommended, and even though they all agreed to give her a break on fees, she realized that she couldn’t even afford the reduced fees they were offering. But she still had a sense that my approach could help her.

She felt ashamed and afraid to tell anyone at the church where she worked, fearing they would see her as untrustworthy (she handled cash there) and as not being strong enough in her Christian faith. Covering up the addiction was a source of even greater stress since she felt alone and without support.

She finally decided that she would read my book again and again and try to apply the principles in it to see if she could resolve her addiction.

She came up with this plan: Every day she would shave a small amount off one of the pills she took—not enough that she would really notice chemically.

The next day she would shave just the tiniest bit more off the final pill she took. Each day a little more. Not too much or she would start to go into withdrawal and craving. The book had recommended making the smallest change possible that might make a difference, and she stayed true to that advice.

It took her about eight months of this unorthodox small-change method to finally give up OxyContin altogether. She had been clean for about four months when she wrote me.

I was moved and stunned when I read her email.

Can you imagine what it is like to get an email from someone you have never met telling you that a book you had written had saved her life?

At that moment, all the hours I had spent writing this book, editing it, revising it, and getting the word out about it was all worth it. It not only made my day, but it also made me feel like I had done something that made my life worthwhile. Helping others and relieving suffering was why I had become a therapist. Helping someone I had never met in such a profound way was an unexpected gift.

I don’t imagine many readers will have such a dramatic change in their lives from this book, but it makes me happy that it is still available to find its way into any reader’s hand who might need its message.

This book did not have the title it came to have until the very last minute. It was initially called Solution-Oriented Living. No one except me liked that title, though, so all through the writing process, we searched for a new and better one.

I can’t remember all of the titles we considered and discarded but I do remember at least one more. I suggested we call it The African Violet Queen (you will see why as you read the book, since a story by that name is included near the beginning). After the book came out, Toni Sciarra Poynter, my editor at William Morrow, said to me: "Aren’t you glad we didn’t call it The African Violet Queen? Some clerk at Borders or Barnes and Noble surely would have placed the book in the horticultural section and no one would have found it."

Yes, Toni, I had never thought of that. Good catch.

In the end, as the book was about to go to press, the editor in chief at HarperCollins said simply: "This book is about doing one thing different to create change. Let’s call it Do One Thing Different." We all looked at one another, and it seemed so clear and obvious, we couldn’t believe none of us had thought of it. Done.

And that title was one of the reasons it got featured on Oprah. When I asked my producer at Harpo, Oprah’s production company, how the book came to be on the show, she told me that Oprah had decided that she wanted each of her shows to give her viewers one thing they could do to change their lives that day. My book, by chance or fate, had arrived at the Harpo facilities just that day, and my producer had brought it to the production meeting when Oprah mentioned her intention. She held up the book with the bold black letters in a field of red that said DO ONE THING DIFFERENT, and reportedly Oprah said: That is exactly what I am talking about. Let’s build one of our shows around that book and idea. Kismet indeed.

One more quick story about the title. When I went on Canada AM to talk abut the book, the host told me I had an ungrammatical title and insisted on calling the book Do One Thing Differently. I didn’t argue (much), but here is what I would say.

First, the title was created by the editor in chief at a book publisher, who knows the English language better than most.

Second, it was meant to be a bit like Apple’s subsequent ad campaign, Think Different, in which the phrase is an illustration of the concept.

Third, what I mean by the phrase is both do one new thing, and do something you are doing in a different way. We thought the title encompassed both of those meanings.

In the month after the book came out, I did more than forty radio interviews, letting people know about the book. After doing those interviews, I wished I could have gone back and rewritten Do One Thing Different because the concept became even more clear and focused than what I had written in the book.

Here, then, from those forty-plus interviews (and the many more I did in the past twenty years), is the shortest summary of this book I can give you:

It’s challenging to make big changes, so make the smallest one you can once you discover a problem area in your life.

Make changes in patterns of doing (actions, interactions, and how you speak about the situation);

Or make changes in the pattern of viewing (what you focus on and how you make sense of the situation);

Or make changes in the context/setting in which the problem occurs (the location, the timing, etc.).

Sometimes the small changes you make work right away. Other times you may have to try other experiments in making small changes until you find one that results in the shift you want.

I have had more than one person tell me over the years that they didn’t even have to read the book to find it helpful. They saw the title and got the point.

But of course the devil is in the details and, even though my summary is simple, making these changes is not always so easy. The book gives you many ways to use this simple idea.

So, thank you for picking up Do One Thing Different. Thank you to my original editor, Toni Sciarra Poynter, who was instrumental in making this book available and so readable; to my agent Lorretta Barrett (and her successor, Nick Mullendore, who suggested this 20th anniversary edition); and to Nick Amphlett and his colleagues at William Morrow for keeping the book alive and giving it another chance to find its intended readers.

Bill O’Hanlon

Santa Fe, New Mexico

June 2018

Chapter 1

Analysis Paralysis

From Liabilities to Possibilities

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the (over)examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I’d rather be living.

—Saul Bellow

There’s an old story about a cop who comes upon a drunk crawling around talking to himself under a streetlight. The cop asks the drunk what he’s doing, and the drunk answers in a slurred voice, I dropped the keys to my house. The cop helps him look around. But after fifteen minutes, when there is still no sign of the keys, the cop suggests, Let’s retrace your steps. Where was the last place you remember having your keys? Oh, that’s easy, replies the drunk, I dropped them across the street. You did! cries the astonished cop, Well, then why are we looking over here? There’s more light here, replies the drunk.

In a similar way, when we have a problem, we often use the light of psychology and psychiatry to look for the key to solving it. Unfortunately, they do not always provide help. Instead, they have us, like the drunk, looking in the wrong place. Explanations often give us an illusion of help by enabling us to understand why we have a problem but not giving us any concrete ways to actually solve it. These systems of explanation can lead to a victim culture, in which people focus on damage done to them in childhood or in their current relationships. This results in a tendency to blame others and look outside ourselves for solutions—to turn to experts or self-help books and groups.

Explanations are a booby prize. When you’ve got a problem, you want a solution. Psychological explanations, so pervasive in our society, steer people away from solving problems by giving them reasons why the problem has come about or why it is not solvable:

Jimmy has low self-esteem; that’s why he is so angry.

I’m so shy that I’ll never meet anyone.

I was sexually abused, so my sex life is bad.

She has dyslexia—that’s why she can’t read or write well.

One of my favorite illustrations of this problem of paralysis from overanalysis is in the movie Annie Hall. Woody Allen plays Alvey Singer, a neurotic (surprise, surprise). Soon after they meet, Alvey tells his girlfriend Annie that he has been in analysis for thirteen years. He is still clearly a mass of problems. When Annie Hall expresses amazement at how long Alvey has been in therapy without getting any better, he tells her that he knows this, that he intends to give it fifteen years, and that if he has not gotten any results by then, he’s going to visit Lourdes.

Psychiatry, too, focuses on explanations, but its explanations are biological or genetic. Psychiatric theory—and theory it is—maintains that people’s problems are based on biochemistry or even determined by biochemistry or genetics. But although we are born with and influenced by genetic and biochemical factors, not everything about us is determined by these factors. It’s more complicated than that. People with biochemical problems can and do have fluctuations in their functioning and sometimes recover altogether from what seems like a neurological or biochemical disorder.

The problem with psychology and psychiatry as strategies for solving problems is that:

They give you explanations instead of solutions.

They orient you toward what can’t be changed: the past or personality characteristics.

They encourage you to view yourself as a victim of your childhood, your biology or genetics, your family, or societal oppression.

They sometimes create new problems you didn’t know you had before you came into contact with a program or a book.

Some people with dyslexia grow up to be successful writers. Some shy people become actors or public speakers. Some abused people have fine sex lives. They haven’t let psychology, or ideas about what is wrong with them, dictate the course of their lives. They’ve taken a solution-oriented approach to life, focusing instead on what they can do to improve the situation.

I came to the solution-oriented approach by a very personal route. In 1971, I decided to kill myself. Now, this may seem like a strange introduction for a book designed to inspire you, but that’s where it all began for me. I was very depressed and lonely at the time. I saw no possibilities for the future, aside from a continuation of the misery of the past. I considered myself a poet and certainly didn’t want to work for a living. I was disillusioned by the hypocrisy I saw in society and in the people I knew. I felt as if I were all exposed nerves, as if I had no skin to protect me from the pain of the world or from contact with others. I was afraid to show my poetry to anyone but my close friends, so it wasn’t likely that I would ever make a living as a poet. After a long, miserable time, I’d finally decided that I’d kill myself.

I was a hippie then, and the few friends I went to say good-bye to (who were generally as weird and depressed as I was) understood and accepted my decision. They would see me in another life, another trip around the wheel. It was too bad that things hadn’t worked out for me in this life.

One of my friends, however, was very upset when she heard my plans for suicide. When I told her that the problem was that I just couldn’t handle dealing with people and earning a living, she told me that she had some maiden aunts who would leave her some farmland in Nebraska when they died. She promised that I could live in a farmhouse on her land rent-free the rest of my life, if I would promise not to kill myself. Now, that seemed like a possibility to me. How old are your aunts? I asked. When I heard that they were in their sixties, I agreed not to kill myself. (I was young enough to assume that anyone in their sixties was bound to die soon. Little did I know that these maiden aunts in Nebraska routinely live to be 100!)

Now I had a future I could live for, but the challenge was figuring out how to live and be less miserable in the meantime.

I began searching for some way to feel better and have more of the things I wanted from life. I started reading psychology and self-help books. To my dismay, the more I

Reviews for Do One Thing Different

[melsmarsh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the same/similar vein was his other solution oriented type books. If you have read others by him, some of the stories will be familiar although there were some new to me stories on there as well. If you aren't familiar with his solution oriented work, this is probably the one to start with.

[whatsmacksaid · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The writing itself was pretty poor in places, but there are some gems to pay attention to. But much of it sounded condescending or self-congratulatory. I don’t think I’d necessarily call the book “gimmicky,” as other reviews have, but it’s definitely somewhere in that vicinity.

[Marj Rodriguez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love how his Solutions-Oriented Therapy breaks the initial stereotypes we have about ourselves and trashes all those "labels" that traditional psychology places on people with certain behaviors. This book proves how anyone has the power to change just by changing their actions and their environment.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like the idea of doing one thing differently. Pick a habit, any habit and you can change it according to Dr. Bill. In the very first chapter his advice is simple: identify a pattern you would like to change. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant the offending routine. Once you have identified the pattern, scrutinize it. Analyze it within an inch of its life. Be observant and get to know every detail of what you do and just how you do it. Then, change one thing. Just one little thing. It could be how you put on your socks or how you hold a toothbrush, if that is part of the offending pattern. Just change one thing related to the pattern and you will have broken the cycle. Seems simple enough, right? Or how about this approach? Connect something negative to the offending action. Say you want to stop picking your nose (note: NOT an actual example of O'Hanlon's). Okay, so back to the nose picking. For every time you pick you nose you must an equally abhorred task, like cleaning the hair out of the shower trap. If you hate dredging up slimy, stringy, soap-scummed hair THAT much, you will stop picking your nose. O'Hanlon's techniques and examples of these techniques actually working are far more interesting than my description. You just have to read the book.

[jpsnow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

O'Hanlon advocates a solution-oriented approach to solving psychological and relationship problems. His approach could be summarized as: figure out the pattern and do something different until it's fixed.

[satyridae · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

How this got in my library queue is a mystery to me. It's an interesting spin on self-help books, but that's still what it is at heart- and as near as I can tell, they are all pretty interchangeable.