How to Change Absolutely Anything: Practical Techniques to Make Real and Lasting Changes

By Damian Hughes and Bill Piggins

Everyone wants to change something about their life. These changes can be as simple as finding a way to eliminate some of life’s little annoyances from the day-to-day or as profound as finally taking action towards achieving a lifelong ambition. Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, if you’re serious about changing your life, you need to answer these fundamental questions: What change do you want to make? How are you going to do it?

In this book you will learn all you need to make real and lasting changes to just about anything in your life—no matter the problem and no matter your goal. Uncover life-changing secrets, mindsets, and practical techniques, such as:

Making first impressions
Crafting how others perceive you
The power of emotions
Controlling your feelings
Reacting to change
Being flexible
Promoting change through your core beliefs
Avoiding mistakes that impede positive change
Understanding influences
Taking action

You can read it cover to cover or just peruse its wealth of tips and tricks if ever you’re facing a challenge and need some sharp advice or keen inspiration to spur change forward. Whichever approach you take, you’ll feel empowered, emboldened, energized, and ready to steamroll any obstacles, overcome even the harshest objections, and learn how to affect change in whatever you set your mind to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allworth
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626363366

Damian Hughes

Professor Damian Hughes combines his practical and academic background within sport, organization and change psychology to work as a trusted adviser to business, education and sporting elite, specializing in the creation of high-performance cultures. He has written several successful business texts, including Liquid Thinking and How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson.

Book preview

Introduction

This is a book to help you change things

Maybe you want your team to do things differently at work. Perhaps you have an idea that you’re struggling to get others to back. You could want to persuade your boss to agree to a proposal. Maybe you want to get your family to improve their health or communicate better. It could be that you want to change something about your child’s school or the local community. Maybe it’s closer to home and you want to change something very personal to you – such as get promoted or lose weight. In short, this is about any change you want to see happen.

Usually these topics are treated separately – there is ‘change management’ advice for businesses, ‘self-help’ advice for individuals and ‘change the world’ advice for activists. This is a shame because all change has something fundamental in common: for anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: can you start behaving in a new way and influence others to do the same?

I know what you’re thinking – it’s so difficult, and people resist change. But that’s not always true. In our lives, we actively choose to make lots of big changes: we have babies, start new relationships, get married, move home, get a new gadget or adopt new technology, and seek out new job roles. Meanwhile, other behaviours are maddeningly resistant. Smokers keep smoking, kids grow fatter and men still forget to put the toilet seat down.

So why do we actively choose some fairly major changes, but actively resist others? And what about those special people who change everything they touch – like magic? Those who can turn something around without breaking sweat? How do they do it?

There’s a story about the great artist Pablo Picasso. One day a woman spotted him in the market and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘Mr Picasso,’ she said excitedly, ‘I’m a big fan. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?’ Picasso happily complied and quickly made a sketch for her on the paper. As he handed it back, he smiled and told her to ‘take care of it. That will be worth a million dollars one day.’ The woman looked flustered and said, ‘But it only took you 30 seconds to do it.’ Picasso laughed, ‘But it has taken me 30 years to be able to do it in 30 seconds.’

Like Picasso, the people who seem to be able effortlessly to change their careers, lives, workplaces, change minds, change the status quo, are people who have spent years learning how to do it. And the aim of this book is to deliver to you a fasttrack guide to how they do it, so you can too.

I have researched and interviewed hundreds of the most productive people and teams in the world, who all have a carefully trained capacity for creating change, both in themselves and others. What I learned is distilled here.

The great news is that this ability to make things happen is a skill that you can develop, and the even better news is that, unlike Picasso, it will not take you 30 years to get there (unless you are a really slow reader). In this book, I will show you the practical techniques of the change catalysts: those who know how to make change happen. Start using your new-found change powers and you’ll discover the thrill of being able to change anything you like, however entrenched or seemingly impossible.

The principles are the same whether you want to change your life, change your workplace, improve your relationships, drop a bad habit, boost your confidence, get rid of blocks to progress or become a one-man (or one-woman) powerhouse at work. So whatever it is that you want to change, it all starts right here.

What follows may surprise you. It certainly will if you expect successful change to be all about plans and processes, schedules and logistics. Because it isn’t. The root of all successful change is that which tackles the very essence of being human – our drives, our beliefs, our thought processes; ours and those of others. Understand why you do what you’ve always done, and why others have done what they’ve always done, and immediately you start down the road to successful change.

The curse of knowledge

"It is not when you hit the drum. It’s when you don’t that really makes the difference."

Ringo Starr

I know that you can learn to change absolutely anything you want to. Whether it’s your mood, a difficult situation, other people’s opinions, bad relationships, an unsatisfying career – whatever it is, you can change it. I know you can. The tricky bit is showing you how in a way that will make it as quick, as simple and as entertaining to grasp as is humanly possible. It’s tricky because I’m the tapper and you’re the listener.

Let me explain.

Psychology graduates at Stanford University studied a simple game in which people were assigned to one of two roles: ‘tappers’ or ‘listeners’. Tappers received a list of 25 well-known songs, such as Happy Birthday To You and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to the listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (Try this same experiment at home.)

The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 per cent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

But here’s what makes the result worthy of your attention. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, the tappers were asked to predict the percentage of songs that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50 per cent.

The tappers actually got the song across just one time in forty, but they thought they were getting it across one time in two. Why?

When a tapper taps, they hear the song in their head. Go ahead and try it for yourself – tap out Happy Birthday To You. It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune – all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a bizarre Morse code.

In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listener seems to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tapper’s expressions, when a listener guesses Yankee Doodle Dandy instead of Happy Birthday To You, are priceless. The phrase, ‘How could you be so stupid?’ is written across their face.

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily recreate our listener’s state of mind.

This is important for making change happen as it shows very clearly that what you think you are communicating can be a far stretch from what others are actually taking on board. But it’s also important here because the tapper/listener experiment is re-enacted every time anyone picks up a book. This time, I am the tapper and you are the listener. As above, we both suffer from an enormous information imbalance. So how can we overcome this?

It’s a problem that’s hard to avoid. Reversing the process is as impossible as un-ringing a bell. You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the curse of knowledge reliably. The first way is down to you and the second way is my responsibility.

Your job as a listener is to read this book with an open mind. If you are going to gain the most value from it and understand how to create change, you need that open mind. Try not to prejudge. Don’t dismiss anything without trying it first – and by trying I mean giving it your absolute best shot.

My job is to take what I know about the art and science of creating change and present it to you in a clear way. So, let’s start tapping…

Let’s start at the very beginning

First, you need to decide what it is that you want to change. It needs to be as specific as possible. Even if you think you know what it is, don’t skip this section as it’s crucially important that you are as clear as you can be on exactly what you want to change and have clarified in your mind exactly the point you’re starting from.

So, think about the area of your life where you know things aren’t what they could be and change is needed. This could be your health, family, career, hobbies, friends or finances. It’s your choice. If you have several areas that qualify as ‘in need of attention’, pick one to start on. When you have chosen, write it down.

Now give yourself an honest mark out of ten for that area, in terms of how satisfied you are with that part of your life.

Why do we need to do this? It is a crucial part of making change happen.

Too often, when we set off to make things better, we can be beset by what psychologists call change blindness. There is a 30-second film made by Harvard psychologists which emphasises this point. The film features six basketball players; three of them are wearing white T-shirts while the other three are wearing black T-shirts. The people in white shirts have a basketball and, during the film, pass it between one another. Halfway through, a man dressed as a gorilla slowly walks on to the court, saunters through the players, beats his chest in front of the camera and then walks off.

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