Environmental Reinforcement

Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals
By Steve Pavlina

Daily affirmations are something you’ll commonly see recommended in pop-psychology books. Each day you verbally affirm your goals as if they’re already accomplished. However, you usually won’t get any results at all with this approach — in most cases it’s an utter waste of time.

Why is this? Because every thought is an affirmation. If you spend 5 minutes a day saying to yourself, “I am a nonsmoker,” but 100 other minutes include thoughts that re-affirm your identity as a smoker, such as periodically lighting up and seeing the smoke rise in front of your face, you just won’t make a dent.

The basic idea of trying to condition yourself to think in new ways is sound, but verbal affirmations for a few minutes each day are a lousy way to accomplish that.

If you want to make some big changes in your life, you’ll need to shift your identity and your habitual way of thinking. In previous posts I discussed behavioral conditioning, which focused on shifting your behavior, assuming your thoughts will follow. Now I’ll tackle a different approach, which is that changing your habitual thoughts can lead to a change in your behavior.

Chances are if you’ve been stuck in your current situation and have been unsuccessful in your attempts to grow into a new role that you really want to achieve, your daily thoughts are continuing to reinforce your old role. Many people who want to take this leap can’t seem to do it, and one reason is that they spend too many hours per week reinforcing their old identity while investing much less time thinking about their new identity. So if you want to start your own business, but your full-time job causes you to spend 40+ hours per week thinking of yourself as an employee, it will be tough to make the shift.

Let’s bring this concept down to earth with a real-life example. One of my goals for this year was to shift my career from game publishing to writing and speaking. But of course I have an existing business which reinforces my old identity in the games business. In order to successfully make this shift, I have to change my thoughts and my behaviors. I have to stop thinking about selling games and put more thought and energy into writing and speaking. Duh.

But what happened when I tried to make this shift initially? I started out my day as usual and got caught up in the mindset of game publishing. I worked in the same office, communicated with the same people, visited the same forums, had to deal with the same kinds of emails, and so on, and after several weeks I was still on the old track. My environment was reinforcing my old identity, my old thoughts, and my old behaviors. For a few hours here and there I’d work on the new path, but very quickly I’d get sucked back into game publishing work.