Full text of cognitive psychologist Amanda Crowell’s talk: 3 Reasons You Aren’t Doing What You Say You Will Do at TEDxHarrisburg conference. In this talk, she explains how to move beyond mindset-driven defensive failure and into productive failure to succeed at the problems you struggle with the most.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Amanda Crowell – Cognitive psychologist
When I was growing up, I never, ever exercised. I didn’t have any active hobbies. I didn’t play any sports. Nothing.
I was very well-known for saying, “I will run when a bear is chasing me and never before then.”
This went on for about 34 years until I woke up one day with an infant, a two-and-a-half-year-old, and a back that hurt all the time. And I realized in that moment that if something didn’t change, if I didn’t become stronger and more flexible, I was not going to be the kind of mother I wanted to be — the kind of mother who can chase around her kids at the park or pick her kids up and swing them around or sit on the floor for five minutes to play Legos.
Now, the only option to get stronger and more flexible is exercise. But it just wasn’t who I was.
And we all have something like this, don’t we? Something that we know if we’re going to become the person we want to be, the innovator that we want to be, this thing has to change.
But even though we think about it all the time, we never make any progress. This phenomenon is what I call “defensive failure,” and it goes a little something like this:
It’s Sunday. You say to your husband or wife, “This week, I’m going to go to the gym three times.”
Then it’s Friday, and you haven’t been to the gym at all. It’s so mysterious, right? You’re like, “I meant to go to the gym. I intended to go to the gym. Why am I not going to the gym?”
Now, I am a cognitive psychologist, so I did what we do best. I spent the next three years obsessively researching the answer to that question: “Why am I not going to the gym?”
And what I discovered is that so much of the reason you’re not doing what you say you want to do is in your mind. In fact, I found that there are three powerful mindset blocks that are keeping you locked in a cycle of defensive failure. And if any one of these is in play, your brain defends you against real failure — which is where you do it but you do it really bad — by redirecting you and distracting you, and you never make any progress.
So let’s talk about each one.
The first reason that you’re locked in a cycle of defensive failure is that you think, somewhere in your heart, that you can’t do it. You think that some people have the talent or the genetics to do this thing and, specifically, you don’t.
Let’s talk about exercise for this one because I have a lot of experience with that. When I first started exercising, I decided that I would become a runner.
Now, the very first time that I went out for a run, I went out in really baggy yoga pants. And I don’t know if any of you are runners, but there’s a real reason why runners wear so much spandex. Because I was only about two minutes into my run before I was holding up my pants while I was running.
But I also didn’t have any gear, and I really needed my phone because I had the Couch to 5K app on it. I didn’t have anywhere to put it. So I’m running, holding my pants with one hand and my phone in the other, and my pants are falling off in this direction now, and I am like I’ve got to grab it, so I grab it, and the phone falls off — “ah!” – grabbing my phone … It’s a mess.
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And the worst part of the whole thing — this whole thing went down on a high school track. This, my friends, is failure! I tried to do something for the first time, and I did it wrong. Right?
What happens in this moment is at the heart of this mindset block. If you believe that at the core of success is talent and genetics, then this rookie mistake matters a lot. It’s the proof you needed that you didn’t have what it takes, right?
But if you can, instead, develop what Carol Dweck would refer to as a “growth mindset” about it, then these rookie mistakes lose their significance. They are no longer proof that you never should have tried; they’re opportunities to learn.
Because you know that at the heart of success is not talent; it’s effort. It’s effort over time that produces accomplishment; it’s effort that creates innovation.
And if you’re able to shift your mindset from this belief that some people have it and you don’t and into one where you recognize that your rookie mistakes are just signposts on the pathway to success, then you will be able to walk away from this cycle of defensive failure.
Now, that’s the first reason you’re locked in this cycle of defensive failure.
The second reason that you’re locked in this cycle of defensive failure is that you think people like you don’t do things like this. And this one comes down to your identity. And we care a lot about our identities, don’t we? And part of the reason you care so much about your identity is because it was hard-won.
So let’s talk about how you form an identity. Now, looking around this room, it looks like everybody has successfully made it out of adolescence. Is that true? This guy back here is like, “Uh … define successfully.”
So here’s what happens in adolescence. You had an identity before adolescence, but you basically absorbed it from the people around you, right?
Like, “Mom says I’m creative.” All right. “Dad says that I’m an athletic person.” Yeah, okay. That sounds right. But that switches in adolescence.
You begin to start asking really hard questions about who you are, and you do it socially. So you ask yourself, “Am I like this person? Am I like you? Am I like you? Am I like you?” And you take on a little piece of their identity, and you see how it feels. So you might take on, like, lying to your parents and skipping school, or you might try on some really thick black eyeliner and dye your hair jet-black, shut your door, and play the emo music on repeat in your room.
You take on bits and pieces of the people around you, and in so doing, you do what Erik Erikson refers to as “identity fracturing.” It’s really uncomfortable. It creates a lot of friction in your mind because you don’t know who you are.
But the good news is that eventually — sometime around your junior or senior year in high school — you begin to release the pieces of your identity that are not serving you. Maybe you stop hanging out with the kids who are skipping school. Maybe you decide, “I don’t like football, and I’m not going to hang out with the football team anymore.”
Each piece of that identity that you let go of comes at a loss to you. Those friends you were hanging out with and skipping school, that may have mattered a lot to you — you might feel like a real traitor. The football team that you stopped hanging out with — that might lose credibility for you at your high school.
And that process of what Erik Erikson refers to as “identity cohesion” is very difficult. But it does result in an identity, a belief about who you really are. And that matters to you a lot, and you will do nothing that threatens that identity.
Now, I see some of you saying, “This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with following through on my goals?” Well, when I first became a coach, I struggled a lot to get clients because I consider myself to be a heart-centered helper type and I’ll be promoting myself and selling my services — it felt really inauthentic and pushy. Am I going to do something that feels inauthentic and pushy? No! Never.
And that’s how you get locked in a cycle of defensive failure. So you say, “I’m going to go to a networking event — one each week this month.” Then the day comes for the networking event, and your brain’s like, “Yeah, no. We’re not going do that. That threatens our identity. And anyways, Amanda, you’re so tired. You’ve been so busy. You should really take care of you.”
And before you know it, the networking event is happening somewhere, but you’re not there. You’re at home on the couch in your stretchy pants, knee-deep into the 13th episode of the first season of Friends. Again. Now, no judgment — we have all been there. But it does explain why you’re not making any progress.
So if this sounds like you, if this might be a mindset block that you’re struggling with, what you have to do is find people like you doing things like this, and you have to share your concerns with them. For me, I had to find a heart-centered helper type who was great at promoting her business and learn from her how I could bring these things in line.
And if you can find a way to bring the thing you want to do in line with your identity, you’ll find going to the networking event much, much easier. And that’s the second reason you’re locked in a cycle of defensive failure.
The third reason that you’re locked in a cycle of defensive failure is that secretly you don’t want to do it. You just think you should want to do it. Basically, you value it for the wrong reasons.
Now, there are two ways that you can value things. On the one hand, you can value them for what we refer to as “intrinsic reasons” — reasons that come from inside of you: interest, curiosity, or you’ve drawn a straight, bright line from the thing you want to do up to your long-term hopes and dreams.
But you can also value things for reasons that are outside of you. Extrinsic reasons like “All the cool people do it,” or “My mom would be proud,” or “Boy, would I like to be admired.”
Now, let’s just say for a second, for the sake of an example, that you have said, “I’ve really got to stick to a budget. And you know, the thing I do the most that’s costing me the most money is I buy my lunch every single day at work.”
So you decide, “I’m not doing that anymore; I’m taking my lunch.”
So one day, you’re halfway through your commute, and you realize that your lunch is sitting on the kitchen counter right next to your cell phone. Now, that is a hard day. You’ve got nothing to eat and no Candy Crush. What are you going to do?
So you’re talking to your coworker, like, “I’m having a hard day.” And she says, “Don’t even worry about it. We’re going to take it as a sign from the universe; we’re going to go out and have a real lunch. It’s going to be awesome.”
So you have two options. You can go with your friend and have a “real lunch,” spend $25 on a sandwich, or you can go to the vending machine and get a crappy two-dollar power bar. What are you going to do?
Well, it depends on why you’re trying to stick to a budget. If you’re trying to stick to a budget because you’ve just got engaged and you’re trying to buy a house and you have these dreams of your children sitting next to a crackling fire on Christmas Eve, then you will go to the vending machine.
But if you’re trying to save money because wealthy people are admired, and, yeah, it would be cool to be admired — that’s not enough. It’s not enough to counterbalance the urge, the desire in the moment, to go to a restaurant with your friend. And this works for anything that you’re struggling with.
If the work you want to do is hard, there will be urges in the moment to quit. And it is intrinsic interest that keeps you focused on the steps you need to take and not those urges of the moment to go with your friend to the restaurant.
So if this sounds like you, if this sounds like something you might be struggling with, you have to build out the intrinsic interest. You have to find a way to be interested or curious about what it is you want to do. You have to read the blogs; you have to look at the magazines.
And if you cannot, if there is nothing of interest to you — for example, about taxes — then you must draw the bright line between the thing you want to do and your long-term hopes and dreams. When the moment comes that you want to get out, give up, you take that piece of paper out of your pocket and read it to yourself so that you ground back into your intrinsic interest.
And that, my friends, is how you would break out of the third cycle of defensive failure.
Now, if you have even one of these in place, you will struggle to make progress on your goal. If you’ve struggled with something your whole life, it’s likely that all three are at play, like it was for me with exercise.
But as I was able to accept those rookie mistakes as part of the process of getting better and recognize that there are non-competitive people like me who also exercise and accept — you know, I got really, really interested in the science of exercise; it’s very fascinating — I was able, amazingly, to begin to make progress.
Now, I do not want you to think that I’m up here saying, “Get your mindsets in order, and you’ll be a raging overnight success,” because that’s not how it works.
But what you do get to do is trade that cycle of defensive failure for action-driven, insight-filled, productive failure. Failure where you do it wrong, but then you get a little better. And then you do it better over time until suddenly, you’re doing what you never thought was possible.
For me, what that looked like is over the course of about three years, I taught myself how to run — got the gear. I taught myself how to bike. I taught myself how to swim.
And one crazy August day, I strung those three together, and I did a triathlon. I know, I was surprised too.
And about two months later, I did a half-marathon. Most importantly, my son who’s now six and heavy and wiggly I can pick him up. And I’m not telling you this because I want you to think I am some kind of athlete, because, clearly, that’s not what’s happening here.
I’m telling you this because that day that I did that triathlon was the most exciting day of my life. Because it should never have been my story; it should not have been possible.
And what it helped me to realize that day was that I, that you, all of us, we can be anything we want. We get our head clear, and we begin to take steps. And if you’re doing those two things, nothing can stop you.
