Sarah > Recent Status Updates

Shape the Path: Build Habits
1. Identify mission-critical elements
2. Pass control of behavior onto environment
- action triggers (when this happens, do this)
- build a checklist
- build a habit that’s easy to embrace

Shape the Path: Tweak the Environment
- give moderately concrete instructions
- situations are easier to tweak than peoples’ core character
- “what looks like a person problem is often a situation problem”
-“make the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder” (183)
- show data to show solution works (nurses & vests)
- interventions: pre-event, event, post-event

Grow Your People
- “we are the kind of people who… “
- Identity Model: who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?
- we adopt identities - “fiercely loyal to profession of nursing”
- Growth mindset: everything is hard before it’s easy
- Elephant has to believe it’s CAPABLE of conquering change

Miracle scale: if miracle state is 10, where are you? What would it take you to get one step closer?
- moving forward engenders confidence in ABILITY to move forward
- select small wins that a) are meaningful and b) within reach

- motivation is more important than math
- make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory (134)

Motivate the Elephant: Shrink the Change
*Elephant is easily demoralized, needs reassurance

Motivate the Elephant: Find the Feeling
* successful change requires speaking to peoples”’ feelings
* SEE - FEEL - CHANGE : need to see something that hits on an emotional level
*change behavior by changing identity (109)
*dispel positive illusions thru empathy
*”Burning Platform” - radical change is needed or org will die
*positive emotions: creativity, flexibility, ingenuity

Point to the Destination
- give direction to the Rider: follow “bright spots” vs obsess over failures
- Rider is a visionary, willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs, clever & tactical - can follow a plan
- Rider has limited reserves of strength, paralysis in the face of ambiguity, and relentlessly focuses on problems not solutions

Script the Critical Moves
- “ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider, because the Rider is tugging on the reins of the Elephant, trying to direct the Elephant down a new path.” (53)
- what looks like resistance can be lack of clarity

Find the Bright Spots
- “What’s working? How can I do more of it?”

Solutions-focused therapy
- “What’s the first small sign you’d see that the problem is gone?”
- “How could you tell the other person was doing X?”
- “When was the last time you saw a miracle, even for a short time?”
-“Let’s replay a scene that worked. What happened? How did you behave?”

Framework for change:
1. Direct the Rider: “what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.”
2. Motivate the Elephant: engage peoples’ emotions.
3. Shape the Path: “what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem”

Mesmerizing. Watching a woman unspool under societal expectations

“That bearded man? He was the first person to smell the rot of our farm and label it a delicacy. Those homesteading folks over at Yesteryear Ranch, with the tired young mother and the grinning doltish cowboy? They were, as it turned out, not rotten at all, but a perfectly fermented vision of America.”

“The sparkling countertops, the rows of mason jars containing neat little piles of powder, ranging in color from terra cotta brown to cocaine white” (224)

“The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in the power’s self-interest, like desegregating businesses because the air-ins are driving away customers, like increasing wages to restart production, like giving teachers raises to resume schooling, like passing a law to attract a well-organized force of donors or voters.”

“Self-critique allows change. Changing shows flexibility.”

“An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.”

“To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders.”

“Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-capitalist policies”

“The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power”

“Powerless defense: the illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people cant be racist because Black people don’t have power”

Meg is a spitfire - poignantly brought to life

Tell the Truth
-“You need to look deep into the mind of the other person to see how you can tell the truth in such a way that others don’t feel threatened, so they can listen” (54)
-“If words are spoken with compassion and understanding, the pain will heal more quickly” (55)

Four Elements of Right Speech
1. Tell the truth. Don’t lie or turn the truth upside down.
2 Don’t exaggerate.
3. Be consistent. No double-talk: speaking about something in one way to one person and in an opposite way to another for selfish or manipulative reasons.
4. Use peaceful language. Don’t use insulting or violent words, cruel speech, verbal abuse, or condemnation.