Op/Ed: If I Don’t Think, Then I am Naught
Over 400 years ago, “first philosophy” was borne from the consciousness awakening “cogito ergo sum” via Rene Descartes. “I think, therefore I am” is a cornerstone in our hyper-individual culture. From this, we have built tall, immovable self-perceptions; If I think the thing, it is the truth to me and that’s that with that :)
Our minds are an amalgamation of interpretations of sense perception, narratives, and pattern recognition. Because we survive through efficient categorization and forging the “path of least resistance”, our thinking selves receive and process these inputs and move on to the next categorization. This is a perpetual motion process that, in a culture of “go-go-go” and “do-do-do” more and more, doesn’t have the space for “stop and reflect” in the same way that our parents and their parents had.
In Buddhism, the ultimate emptiness of all things is the foundation upon which all thought and reflection is built on. In a moment when “mindfulness” and “meditation” have become nebulous (big thanks to capitalism), returning to the roots has to be the first step to initiating real and sustaining personal change and strength.
For narrators that have written their stories in pen, returning to the true empty nature of things can feel like a loss that initiates a cascade of self-protecting fail-safes. If we are to challenge our categorizations, especially the ones we’ve held close or are deeply entrenched, what does that mean about our “selves”? If we don’t think, what are we? And if we don’t think the way we’ve always thought, are we “me”?
The answer, just like the “chicken v egg”, lies in an acceptance of both. Before and without chickens, eggs exist. Before you were a thinking thing, things were things to other things. The stories existed, exist, and will continue to exist. When your story exists painfully (as is inevitable for all of us), expanding your view- killing your ego- breaks patterns and deprograms the perpetual-motion narrative. Meditation on “thinkinglessness” quite literally uninstalls your pain-points, creating drive space for new opportunities.
5 Simple Strategies to Elevate Your Approach to Behavior Change
Key Takeaways
Sustainable behavior change isn't about forcing yourself into perfection — it's about building systems that honor your humanity. This means having a clear vision, embracing flexibility, staying discerning, and making room for joy along the way. The journey isn't linear, but with the right mindset and tools, it can be deeply rewarding.
Set your intention clearly, but don't treat it like a straight line to success. Change is uncomfortable and often unpredictable.
Curate Your Inputs Like Your Life Depends On It (Because It Does). The internet offers limitless information — and misinformation. Be intentional about what you absorb and who benefits from your attention.
Growth doesn't have to be rigid or miserable. True transformation happens in the gray area , where curiosity meets discipline and joy meets structure. Fun isn't optional. It's what makes change sustainable.
Start With the End In Mind (And Have Exit Ramps)
“Beginning with the end in mind” is a central pillar in any behavior change process. You cannot begin fruitfully without first pulling at (and sequencing out) the threads of the finished product. That said, behavior change is uncomfortable and uncertain enough to make the process feel daunting and exhausting. Begin with the end in mind, but give yourself space and grace with exit ramps. The process of change will never be linear, and holding a gun to your own head won’t necessarily meet the expectations with true and sustainable change.
Exit ramps, on the highway of life, are relief stations. Hungry? Tired? Really have to pee? There is nothing like a rest stop to refuel and recharge on a long journey. As you begin with the end in mind, where are you incorporating exit ramps- planned or spontaneous- in order to keep the things the things and resist the inevitable fatigue of going nonstop?
Invest in Your Library
In this modern age of hyper-connectivity, you can get any information about anything to validate any belief. Anything (in excess) can be a toxin and anything (in moderation) can reduce harm. The internet provides a wealth of knowledge with low-to-no barriers to access. This is a good thing. The internet also provides an abundance of un-moderated content, heavily influenced and driven by earnings.
Use discretion when engaging in educational content, keep a critical eye on sources and the beneficiaries of your attention. Reading (and critical thought) are skills that can be developed just like any other. Develop those skills as if your life depend on it, because it does. Question everything, including yourself- your aims, your intentions, and your end-game goals- to ensure that the processes that you’re implementing are, in fact, set with your best outcomes in mind.
Embrace the Spectrum (Distinction Instead of Contradiction)
Cartesian duality assumes that opposites imply conflict. Like the great prophecy between Harry and Voldemort, neither can live while the other survives. If something is hot, than it must not be cold. There is nuance between the two and all-or-nothing thought processes tend to fail in some regard because they neglect that truth. While this-or-that can be exclusionary, this-and-that approaches are nurturing.
There will be moments along your behavior change journey that ask of you something slightly off to the left of what you’d set out to do. Diversions and accommodations are an inevitability of this process, use them as opposed to avoiding them. Find the space where “contradiction” and “distinction” meet to suit your needs best.
Gamify It
Fun is scientifically proven in improve outcomes, particularly in learning. Behavior change is a learning process, it is a process of skills development specified for behaviors. That’s it. As kids, we are cultivated in fun, playful environments. We get recess and activities that stoke curiosity, empower innovation, and lead to long lasting life lessons. Somewhere in life, we end up carrying the expectation of meeting standards, consumed otherwise by preparing to meet those standards. This is the byproduct of civilization, particularly on that is built on quantifiable validation. Big data aggregates, reduced into buckets of “either or”.
You are the master of your life. As such, fun cannot be fully taken from you. You look at your intended outcomes and explore creative ways to embark on that journey. You can do this by
Just Do It- For You (But What Does That Mean)
Lastly, and bigly, just do the thing. Every moment is a decision made whether we like it or not. You can either let the decisions happen, sans involvement, or you can actively engage where opportunity arises. There are the things we can and cannot control- as such, we should retain our power over the things we can control. The thing you can control is yourself. Your thoughts will happen, and mindfulness is the practice of engaging the response you have to the thoughts. Your words get spoken, and you can either speak without listening or you can hear yourself and speak impeccably. Actions require motivation, and you can have conscious awareness of those motivations through introspection and curiosity.
Your legacy is the result of your decisions made. Decisions should be made for your highest and best self given the tools and resources available to you at any given time. This approach can feel like one big platitude, but the bottom line is the simplest line. Start there. Take inventory of the choices you make that you know do not serve you. Take inventory of the choices you make intending to reduce harm and induce self care. Be honest with yourself, you cannot run from the mirror- at least not very far.
Op/Ed: Make a Choice- On Purpose
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make the horse drink. You can give your dog some cheese, point right to it, and they’ll still go sniffing in all the wrong places. Change psychology, particularly in this ultra-informed population, has begun to feel outdated at best, jaded at worst. These musings come from my years of struggling through (and eventually recovering from) these same afflictions.
Each day I am presented with various forms of “I saw a TikTok that said X, so I thought I would give it a try”, “I know what I need to do to make meaningful change, I just haven’t yet”, and the famous “I can change at anytime, I’d just prefer that the variables be perfectly aligned with my expectations before doing that”. It feels a lot like talking to a wall.
How do we reconcile that pursuing our dreams feels at odds with caring for ourselves in the present? Have we lost touch completely with our intuition, or whatever it is that guides us towards our goals? Or, is it that our ego has commandeered our inner compass, insatiable unless met with unbound success? As always, more questions than answers.
I recently sat with a line from the book “Inner Excellence” by Jim Murphy that read “The Ego is obsessed with outcomes” and, man, did that hit. As I’ve sought to unravel these blockages in my life decisions, this sentiment is echoed through the hallways of my past. Ego as a concept has historically been tough for me to understand.
At it’s base, Ego is the internalization of the performance that we put on daily. That performance is determined by the lives that we’ve lived, the interactions we’ve had. The narratives we’ve curated about our past unfold in the present and influence the outcomes of our future. We are the cruise directors on our life’s journey, and the Ego infiltrates our passage through protective mechanisms based on our past. At some point, the ego hijacks our inner guide and we lose the creative power of multitudes in pursuit of the singular endgame.
All this to say that we can lead ourselves to water, we can take ourselves right to the door of satisfaction and, instead, turn just to the left, choosing to look out the window and get so lost in the view that we neglect to actually get outside. Knowledge is power, and turning into the shadows can elucidate more tools for the fight- so, while answers may not fully materialize, contemplation is a gift! Keep searching, experimenting, and adjusting to meet the moment. That, I think, is the greatest joy of life.
Self-Efficacy and Other “Best Kept Secrets” to Success
How often do you steel a quick glance around of your peers to pass a judgment on their progress in relation to yours? While there is no way that we can know what other folks have going on, inevitably we measure ourselves to our perception of their accomplishments. To imply otherwise is, in my opinion, a lie. The intention can be there, right? “Don’t look at what others are doing”. “Just focus on your path”. The energy sent out to “read the room” could have been used to keep progressing your journey. Yes, comparison is the thief of joy. It also happens to be a very normal, human thing to do nonetheless.
When we pop our head up during an exam to note the temperature of the room at large (is everyone else sweating profusely, too?) it either affirms or upset our current progress. In the real world, though, we’re surrounded by a bunch of folks masking their real experience as a way of maintaining social norms. It’s all cool and great, but somewhere along the way we might feel further behind because the masks that we see mute the internal screams of panic that everyone else is also screaming.
Through these same masks, coaches tout their methods- affirming the value of buying into their particular program. Let them tell you how to live and you’ll certainly end up looking just like them*.
With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, the coaching industry’s exponential growth moment has not come with regulation. As a result, we’ve ended up with harm done and poorly researched information disseminated. The coaching industry can be highly toxic at it’s worst. Because we don’t make money when you don’t spend money on us, coaches are likely to retain you through disempowering practices that keep y’all feeling incapable of “going at it on your own”.
Below, you’ll find a quick list of real, results driving practices that are free to explore and readily a part of your self-preservation toolbox already :)
Self Efficacy
Self efficacy is a belief that you can persevere. We are able to adapt through the constant process of learning, failing, recounting, and realigning to attempt better outcomes. When we are inundated with imagery that reflects the oxymoron that everyone else is okay and succeeding alongside the impossibility of making ends meet in this current capitalist culture, the essence of self efficacy is harder to adopt.
Us believing that we can persist, regardless of past failures, is a manifestation of “the american dream”. As an institution, America was founded on the backs of othering, subversion, and abuse. The American dream was established for the folks who reaped the rewards of the systematic subjugation and abuse of anyone else who didn’t fit that mold. Due to the deep seated fractures in our current state of things, self efficacy became a privilege only affirmed for the few that were given the advantage of believing that they could.
The brain constructs its reality based on continually confirmed behaviors by the folks who rear you and the community that you’re brought up in. These realities create a unique system of optimization for resources that the command center needs to survive each day. At this point in late-stage capitalism, we are all targeted by strategic marketing boosted by research that has proven the mechanisms for human behavior. Us believing that we can persevere is something that disrupts the system enough- not all can, otherwise the system will collapse. It wasn’t built for one-for-all.
When your systems optimization methods don’t quite mesh well with practices that will yield positive results, it takes an extra effort to unlearn and relearn in a new way. Humans who are categorically kept from equal access are immediately at a disadvantage from believing that they can. It’s exhausting. Now that megacorporations have the research and the tools to keep us looking away from the “man behind the curtain”, our global sense of self-efficacy feels at-risk.
To recenter yourself and your outcomes, consider all of the trials you’ve overcome so far. When you find yourself in a rut, return to examples of times that you’ve felt the same and ended up with a positive outcome. Persistence doesn’t have to be grandiose, it can be simply getting up and completing the intentions for the day when you were particularly dark, ya know? Wins are wins, you’ve made it this far, and you can keep making it onward as a result.
Agency
A sense of agency, I believe, is our easy act of revolution. Agency is our sense of self-determination. When we feel “agency”, we see ourselves in the driver’s seat. We are the director, the performer, and the audience determining the success of the performance. Our agency is taken from us when we’re constantly inundated with messaging that leaves us feeling helpless. Whether it’s content that we directly engage with or the sounds, sites, and sensations that surround us regularly, it’s easy to have taken when we’re most vulnerable.
Us reclaiming our sense of agency is us returning to our roots, serving our needs, and standing in our power. We aren’t ideal consumers when we are in our skin, on our feet, and thriving. We are sold on dreams that we’re told to have, and encouraged to match and outdo our peers in the rat race for attention. Not only do we need to carry the burden of the daily stress of showing up right, we also end up exhausted in our pursuit of some ideal that we believe we need to experience.
We can begin to reclaim our sense of agency from within. Our thoughts become our words which are spoken into action which persist as habits and we leave this earthly form by way of the legacy that those actions have left. When I’m feeling particularly disempowered, I’ll imagine my perfect day. “Your Perfect Day” exercise is meant to inspire the steps necessary to get you from the moment you’re in and to motivate you towards just where you can go. Imagine your perfect day, take note of the sounds, the locations, the feelings, and (most importantly) the actions that you take to make that day most perfect. How do you get there? What can you do this month, this week, this day to realize that dream? That’s action, that’s agency. Uncontrollables aside, knowing just how much you can influence your outcomes is addictive.
Simplicity
Finally, and one of my hardest pills to swallow: Simplicity. The quality of being easy to understand or to do except as it pertains to personal growth. Everyone has an opinion and, if you open yourself up to those opinions, you may be at risk of having your own opinions elbowed out. For those of us who can’t quite accept things at face value and who worry that the simplest solution might, in fact, be the most negligent, accepting simplicity is scary.
For a broader system that gives all voices something like a platform, elevating the most clickable and provocative voices, simplicity isn’t sexy so it’s unworthy of amplification. Other than the clickbait-devoid-ness of simplicity, the hyper-productivity driven information economy relegates simplicity to the margins, unworthy of a second glace. That’s it, that’s the post. Simplicity doesn’t play into the narratives that want confusion in order to facilitate buy-in for the solution.
When we’re just setting out on a fresh day, there may be a million things we want to do, there may be a handful of things we need to do, and there may be the grey area tasks that we neither want to nor need to do (but that we might be more than happy to use to procrastinate). It’s useful to map out this brain clutter into a handful of buckets: high priority, low priority, exciting, distracting. Categorizing the mish-mash in our brains is a helpful way to simplify, to clarify the intentions of our actions, and make the choices that will most efficiently get us where we need to go so that we can exist how we want.
All in all, and if you’ve gotten this far, remember that you are the driver of your life. You have all of the tools, they just may take a bit more practice than you expect. Believe in you, advocate for your best interests, and watch your energies shift :)
Learning Behavior Change
Being healthy and cultivating a long, full life can feel like a Sisyphean feat in the world that we’re living in. The world in which we’ve readily become “Human Resources” for a productivity driven, output hungry, insatiable machine. Not only is our work-life harmony more like a cacophony- what little free time we do have is consumed with advertisements and low-hanging, low-quality gratification. Everyone is trying to sell you something and, even if they don’t make the sale, they’re profited off of monopolizing your limited attention resources.
Key Takeaways
Our brains categorize and connect experiences, filtering only a few into long-term memory. Skills improve through repetition, making habit change most effective with a simple, specific approach.
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) prevent aimlessness and resource waste. Breaking goals into smaller, manageable steps increases success while filtering out distractions.
Behavior change follows stages from awareness to action, requiring consistency and resilience. Planning for setbacks and reframing failure as discovery strengthens long-term growth.
Background
Each year, we’re provided a small handful of “change moments”- holidays or key moments to get excited about “beginning again”. The New Year, a birthday, a new semester, Mondays- all examples of the “start” that we crave when we’ve decided that we’re ready to make a change (just not ready enough to do it right then). Inevitably, if we do step up to the “start”, we do so ready to capitalize on the collective enthusiasm to carry us through the perceived “finish line”.
So often, though, the wave fizzles out and we’re left to paddle onward. Without some form of planning and preparation, our compass malfunctions. If we haven’t charted the course, we’re left to paddle aimlessly, hoping to catch the next wave going in the “right direction”. The energy lost in the confusion could have been a valuable resource on the path to achievement. All of that to say this: behavior change is a series of skills practices until they become automated.
We perform best at tasks that we don’t have to think so hard about. We love a “path of least resistance”, especially in our society. That’s why we’re so easily sold on quick-fixes which, in turn, leave us jaded about the whole journey anyway. So let’s, for a moment, reframe the behavior change process as a skills practice.
How Memories are Made
When experience events, our senses perceive a handful of tidbits about the environment. From that initial encounter, we retain a smaller handful of tidbits that we then either synthesize or toss away. From short-term memory, the elite few get to stick around in the long-term memory, ready for recall at a moment’s notice.
Our brains can store so much information the way that it does because it categorizes elements of experience and connects them through relationships. The more we feed any given category, the better established it’s complexities become in our understanding. We build new skills that are considered procedural memory- we get better at them the more we do them. Though it might feel defeating to practice the habit at it’s outset, the demonstrated process of “learning until expertise” is undeniable. As a result, changing behaviors requires the simplest and most specific approach possible so as to leave no margin for error.
Getting SMART
This is why SMART goals are such a pervasive part of organizational development. Goals need to have specificity, there needs to be some sort of measure of success. They need to be achievable, relevant to the big picture, and set to be timely with deadline. The whole of my twenties was saturated with nonspecific goals that left me adrift over and over again. Setting goals without SMART-support is a resource-drain- it’s the well-intentioned friend offering to help without really intending to help, ya know? It’s that well-intentioned friend that’ll reach out while your floundering to offer support- “just let me know what I can do”.
We can set ourselves up for better success by taking big goals and making them small and by taking the small goals and making them smaller. When we get granular on our goals and values-in-action, we provide ourselves an exponentially larger toolbox of small steps to pull from. Getting miniscule means that, within the grains, you’ll be better prepared for challenges before they’ve come up, as well.
The practice of getting SMART, though, takes focus, patience, and resilience. The noise of commercials and gurus, along with the typical drags of the workday, distract and numb us from turning in. So getting SMART also involves finding and filtering out the noise that keeps you from accomplishing what you set out to do.
Learning to Love Learning
Most coaching certifying bodies that I’ve seen leverage the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change (TTM) framework. TTM is a model of behavior change that follows stages of change from “pre-contemplation” (no awareness or intention to change) all the way through “action” and involves both “maintenance” and “relapse” phases of making change.
We don’t know what we don’t know until we do. Once we’re irrevocably aware of the circumstances that need a shift, our inertia (precontemplation) is enlivened with potential energy (contemplation). The vigor of what comes next is big and daunting. Preparation is fun! But when you’re unsure where to start, seeking resources to inform and educate your path is your strength. While the internet may be bad for many things, it’s certainly a great way to access any bit of known knowledge at super speed. This is where coaches come in- they assist with the planning process if your process isn’t cutting it for you. Once you’ve got your prepped list, you’re ready to take action.
Practice makes permanence and those actions need to happen regularly and with fluidity to adjust as necessary in order for a behavior to really stick. If not, we lose steam quickly and revert to our former pathways. This consistency is a learned skill all the same. As such, it’s important to plan for relapse with grace and purpose instead of letting it snag you. Reframing “loss of direction” or “falling off the wagon” as “discovering doesn’t work” is one way to begin to break the cycle.
Learning can reliably be disappointing- that’s what makes the successes so sweet. Taking steps to facilitate growth and change in your life is the highest form of self-regard. You’ve got to look out for your future self, even just a little bit, in order to realize the vision of who that future self is to you, ya know?