The Battle of Changing Your Behavior: Eric Zimmer (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Eric Zimmer’s talk titled “The Battle of Changing Your Behavior” at TEDxColumbus conference.

In this TEDx talk, Eric Zimmer insightfully addresses the profound challenge of altering personal habits and behaviors, a task that statistics suggest is daunting, with a high failure rate in diets and New Year’s resolutions. Drawing on over two decades of experience in behavior change and insights from his podcast featuring thought leaders, Zimmer dismantles the common belief that willpower and discipline are the sole keys to change.

He proposes that changing behavior is a learnable skill, emphasizing the importance of starting with small, manageable steps to avoid feeling overwhelmed. By using analogies from the board game Risk, Zimmer outlines strategies such as “taking small continents first,” focusing efforts (“concentrating your armies”), and the significance of support networks (“making treaties and alliances”).

His personal journey from a homeless heroin addict to transforming his life underscores the talk’s message about the power of focused effort and the importance of support. Zimmer’s strategies are not just theoretical but are grounded in real-life applications, demonstrated through both personal anecdotes and those of the people he’s worked with. The talk concludes on an empowering note, suggesting that anyone can change their behavior by applying these strategic principles, thereby fundamentally changing their life.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Challenge of Making Lasting Changes

So, making lasting changes in our behavior is hard. The statistics are depressing. Some studies show that 95% of all diets fail and only 8% of people keep their New Year’s resolution. Making lasting changes in our behavior is a battle. It’s difficult and most of us don’t succeed at it for very long.

I’ve been helping people to change their behavior for over 20 years and I host a podcast where I’ve talked to over 150 thought leaders, authors, psychologists, and spiritual teachers. People like Andrew Solomon, Carol Dweck, Simon Sinek, and Don Miguel Ruiz. We talk about what it means to live a good life and right at the heart of living a good life is being able to choose how we want to behave and actually follow through on that.

Most of us think when it comes to creating new habits that it’s a matter of willpower or discipline and that we don’t have enough of either. We might suspect inwardly that maybe we’re just the kind of person who can’t follow through on things. We think that making lasting change is something that only other people can do. One of the key ideas I’d like you to get today is that changing behavior is a skill.

Learning to Change

It’s something that you can learn to do. You can get better at creating new habits. Recently, I was playing the board game Risk, and it occurred to me that the same strategies that we use in that game can also be applied to changing behavior. So you may have played the game before or at least seen it. The goal is to take over the entire world, to achieve world domination.

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So the first strategy that I’d like to talk about is called “take small continents first.” Most of us start off too big. We decide it’s time to exercise and we try to go from not working out at all to being at the gym for an hour every day. We know what happens. We may start off okay but we run out of gas. Or maybe we never get off the ground at all.

Maybe we decide to start a two-week juice cleanse and by dinnertime, we’re eating a Domino’s pizza like a guest on our show talked about. An example of this is a writer that I worked with in my coaching practice. Imagine this: You are a successful author. You’ve been published. You’ve received literary awards and prestigious fellowships and you sit down to start writing your new novel and nothing happens.

Starting Small

You sit there for two hours and four hours and that turns into a day, which turns into a week, and then a month, and finally into over a year of not being able to write at all. The way that we solved this was to start incredibly small. We started with writing for five minutes a day.

Now your reaction might be like hers, which is, “That is absurd. I am never going to get a novel done if I only write for five minutes a day.” You’re probably right unless you’ve got a very long lifespan. What she was able to do was that we procrastinate and avoid things that either feel overwhelming or that feel ambiguous. Writing a novel is both of those things.

So by starting very small at five minutes, we were able to get going. One of the counterintuitive things about motivation is that it often follows action. We always think it’s the other way around. We think that we get motivated and then we take an action, but this works in reverse as well.

There are times that we can’t think our way into right action. We have to act our way into right thinking. By starting at five minutes a day, she was able to create some momentum. She was able to increase her motivation and her consistency, and now she’s writing again every day. That’s an example of “take small continents first.” Start smaller than you think you should and do it every day. Focus on consistency. You’ll be amazed at what a series of small steps taken every day can accomplish.

Concentrating Efforts

The next strategy is to concentrate your armies. In the game of Risk, as you go on and if you’re successful, you start taking over more and more countries. The challenge you can get into, though, is that you spread your armies too thin and you start to lose territory. The Roman Empire is a great example of this.

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As the empire grew, they had more and more territory to defend, which meant less and less men at each area of the border.

And the empire grew weaker and weaker. Most of us tend to go on what I’ll call a self-improvement binge. We decide it’s time to start exercising, eating right, we’re going to write in our journal, we’re not spending enough time with the kids, so let’s do that for an hour every night after dinner. We might as well throw in that creative project that we’ve been putting off, and we’re going to do it all today and every day for the rest of our lives.

By your laughs, I can tell that you know what happens. Concentrating your armies is a way to avoid this. My kids are here, so I’m a little nervous about this next part, but here we go.

When I was 20 years old, I was a homeless heroin addict. I weighed 50 pounds less than I weigh today. I had hepatitis C and I was dying. One cold rainy night, I was working in a restaurant as a cook, and I watched two policemen enter the front door, shake the rain off their cap, and enter the dining room, except they didn’t sit down at any of the tables. They kept walking towards the kitchen and walking towards the kitchen, still coming towards the kitchen.

And they walked in and they said, “Are you Eric Zimmer?” I don’t know, maybe. I was handcuffed and arrested that night. I decided to use that opportunity as a chance to change my life. I went into treatment the next day, mainly as a way to stay out of jail, but while I was there, I had one of those, they call them a moment of clarity, where I realized that if I didn’t stop what I was doing, if I didn’t change, I was going to die.

That was over 20 years ago and it was also the last time that I ever put a needle in my arm. Now I had been to treatment before though. I had tried this multiple times before, so what was different? I realized that everything in my life hinged upon my ability to stay sober. And so that’s where I put all my effort. Unlike previous times, I didn’t try and get sober and get a new job and go back to college and create another band and find a girlfriend. I put all of my effort into staying sober.

I did it until it was just what I did, until it was part of me. Then from that solid foundation, I was able to begin building and adding. That’s concentrating your armies. Don’t try to change everything at once. Pick one thing and focus on it. Get it down, and then once you’ve integrated it into your life, you can build from there.

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Building Support Networks

The final strategy is to make treaties and alliances. One of the main things that most of us forget to do when we’re trying to make a change is to ask other people for help. There’s a study by Joseph Grenny and his team that shows if you have six or more people in your corner, you are 40% more likely to be successful in changing your behavior. This does not mean you have to hire six behavior coaches or have a whole team of cheerleaders. It just means that if you’ve got six people who know what you’re doing and are generally supportive, you are far more likely to make the changes that you want.

Several years ago, I watched friends and colleagues start and quit exercise and diet programs over and over again. So I decided to try an experiment. I created a contest called the Body Fat Challenge and I recruited those same people. Everybody put in an entry fee and whoever lost the highest percent of body fat won all of the money.

What astounded me about this was the dramatic strides that everybody was making. These same people I had watched start and stop, start and stop, were suddenly making real changes in their life just because we were doing it together. There was a spirit of camaraderie. I’ll admit, for some people, maybe there was an overdeveloped sense of competition.

Maybe you can relate with that. I can. You, sir, certainly, I think is true of. But all of a sudden, what these people were unable to do individually, they were now able to do because they had other people helping them. So, having the support and encouragement and other people to hold us accountable can be the difference between success and failure when it comes to changing your behavior.

Now, your goal may not be world domination like it is in the game of Risk. It might be something more humble like changing the way that you eat, or exercising more regularly, or spending more time with your children. But these same three principles apply to nearly any type of change.

If you follow the three strategies of “take small continents first,” “concentrate your armies,” and “make treaties and alliances,” you can change the behavior that you want to. And with that, you can change your life. Thank you.