How to join the ‘6 per cent club’ of people who make personal change

Psychologist Michelle Rozen calls it “The 6 per cent Club.”
She followed 1,000 people who started out one year in January wanting to make a big change in their life. She checked in every month until June. At that point, 94 per cent had dropped the ball.
So which club do you want to be a part of? The 6 per cent who are effective at changing aspects of their life or the 94 per cent who fail?
To succeed, she says you must understand you are fighting your brain. It fears the unknown. It only has so much energy to handle the many tasks and obligations you face each day. “When you’re thinking about doing anything new, you are forcing your brain to use more energy than it normally does. In other words, your brain hates new things,” she writes in The 6% Club.
So we come up with excuses for not completing – or even starting on – the changes we need to make. She recalls an early morning coffee at Starbucks years ago when she told a friend she hated her job and routine but couldn’t go back to school to change her life because her kids needed her and her husband was working at a startup and never home. The friend told her the kids would always need her and her husband would always be at a startup. Message: Jettison the excuses; change your life now.
She says change requires an accountability mindset to move beyond excuses. You need to take responsibility and make the changes, following her five-point plan:
Change requires focus. Throughout the day, quickly evaluate the options before you on a scale of zero to 10 to decide what to do. Making a healthy meal for your family may be a seven, but ordering takeout and spending half an hour in a crunch period playing with the kids might be a 10, so order in. The system quickly helps you to focus your time, energy and money and get goals done because they will be rated highly.
Set deadlines. Without them, she notes your brain may not take a goal seriously. Deadlines, when they are close, trigger a sense of urgency. That can translate into motivation. Deadlines can help you make progress toward your goal in a structured and efficient way.
She also urges you to adopt what she calls “The Mirroring Rule”: Whatever you want from other people has to start with you. You want them to care about you? Start caring about them. You want them to like you? Do you like them? Prioritize the relationships that will count in implementing the changes you seek and start supporting those individuals.
Join the 6 per cent Club.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.