hen we review our lives, perhaps on New Year’s Day, and decide that we want to be different, what would help us maximize our chances of making a successful change? If we want to add a good habit, retire a bad habit, explore a new dimension of ourselves or remember to be our best selves, what should we do?

The trick to effective growth and change is to not fight the design of your brain.

Your brain is designed, first and foremost, to keep you alive, meaning that the fail-safe systems are the strongest and fastest. Your brain will default to them before you are even aware that it is thinking. If you try to work against one of these protective default systems, you will not succeed. One of these systems is designed specifically to resist change because change is dangerous to our mammal selves. (To the extent that we have been safely eating the purple berries, it makes no survival sense to willy-nilly try out the perhaps poisonous yellow berries.) Holding the door open for change against the pressure of this default setting takes energy. Lots of energy.

Therefore, at best, change is a slow, lurching process – with progress forward interrupted with slips backward as our brain urges caution and tries to slam the door shut on our risky new efforts.

At worst, our naïveté about how the brain works stops the change process before it even begins. The middle of January tends to be a sobering time for most of us.

What often happens when we try to effect a change in our life is we get seduced by a magical-thinking style of change. Magical thinking goes like this: We picture how we want things to be different and we sincerely long for the new, improved version of us. We wait for an opportunity to engage in the new, desired behavior, expecting to be able to implement it because we have so earnestly wanted it. But when the opportunity to change arrives so does our old, well-learned behavior. And also arriving is that brain designed to be cautious. Most often the old way wins out. We are left believing that there’s something wrong with us, meaning we will never be able to change.

The brain will not change because we wish it would. But it will change if we set things up properly. In fact, change is inevitable if we understand how to work within the design parameters of our neurological system.

Change starts in the past

The brain itself actually starts the process of change. It does so by signaling to you that something about your past is emotionally significant. Deep within your brain, the two amygdalae and the two hippocampi work together to recognize and remember things that you want to be able to do or things that you want to eliminate. When you are sorting through your life on that hypothetical New Year’s Day, you are looking for the emotional clues these brain parts encode for you. What is missing from your life? What keeps causing you to feel lonely or bored or guilty or embarrassed or frustrated? What aspect of other people do you envy enough to work on acquiring for yourself?

Most of us are very familiar with this first step. We all have lists, bucket and otherwise, of things that we want to be different about our lives. This first step we can do. It is the second step that is the doozy and the one that trips most of us up.

The second step of change involves designing the change process. Unfortunately, as I said, most of us believe that this process involves wishing, very hard, that things will change.

Every January for the past 15 years or so, I have resolved to work on improving my diction. I speak very fast and people are always asking me to repeat myself. As can been seen by the fact that this is an annual event, the resolution has never taken. That is because I have been working at cross purposes with the design characteristics of my brain. When I open my mouth to say something, my brain is going to engage the “speak very fast” subroutine not the “try something new” subroutine. My fantasy is that if I believe hard enough in my wish to speak more clearly, my brain will magically substitute the “try something new” subroutine when faced with an old stimulus. THIS NEVER HAPPENS. Remember those fast default systems? They engage at the speed of electricity. They will never be beaten by the speed of the dangerous, and therefore slower, “try something new” subroutine.

What we need to do is create a compelling subroutine that can compete with the speedy default system. In my case, I have to train my brain to see “speak with good diction” as a viable alternative to the default “speak very fast” subroutine.

If the subroutine “try something new” is avoided by the brain, how do we work around this?

Here’s a metaphor I like. Think of growth and change this way: you own a theatre that is running a successful play entitled “Your Life So Far.” If you are getting bored with your play or if there are parts you don’t like, you can’t simply wish for a new play to open up in its place. In order to bring in a new play without having the theatre go dark while you write, cast and rehearse a new one, you must find a rehearsal studio somewhere else. That is how you change. You go somewhere else to rehearse until you are ready for opening night.

Springtime for Hitler

A successful new play, which we’ll call “Adding Some Zest,” needs to be well written, well cast and well rehearsed because it needs to be provocative enough to replace the old play.

Let’s start with the script. To be successful writers, we need to understand our subject. Whether our play deals with being more assertive, learning to play the flute or remembering to stand up straight, we need to expand our grasp of the subject. Read about the subject, talk with others who do it well and study what is missing in your previous work. I did some reading and found out that my poor diction is due to my tendency to avoid consonants. By avoiding the hard sounds, I lose the natural braking and clarification that consonants provide in the English language. Ergo, my play needs to be about the role of consonants in clear speech. (This article is brought to you by the letter “T”!)