Managers have been known to tear their hair out in frustration of why employees can't change behaviors, and discard old habits. Recent brain research gives us more accurate reasons as to why and what managers need to do about it. The bottom line is that you can't force anyone to change. Any kind of pressure will produce more resistance and could end up being counterproductive.

Habits help us do everything, every day. Our unconscious mind eliminates the need for us to think consciously about each small step and action involved in everything from making a latte to operating the photocopier. Our mind wants to make a memory and make the thinking and behavior automatic so our conscious mind can deal with more immediate and complex things. That's the good news. The bad news is that habits can also have a negative grasp on our mind and behavior. Bad habits die hard, are easy to resume, even when we think we've stopped them, as many reformed smokers or alcoholics will attest to.

Brain science research explains why. The human brain processes four hundred billion bits of information every second but you are consciously aware of about two thousand. The unconscious brain stores the rest away. Most of our habitual thinking and behavior is unconscious and automatic. The brain wants it that way, so our conscious mind has to deal with only a few things in the present moment.

We've learned a lot about habit forming from the research on addictive behavior, in areas such as alcohol or drugs. In normal people, the brain drug, dopamine plays a major role in motivation and reward. Domainergic pathways connect the limbic system, responsible for emotion, with the hippocampus, etching rewarding behaviors into the brain by creating strong, salient memories. The problem arises when the memory and the craving to recapture it takes over a person's life. As the dopamine surge repeats, it gains speed, but the brakes, located in the brain's frontal lobes, and responsible for inhibitory control, begin to fail. So ultimately, a war goes on in our brain between the hijacked neural pathways that push a person to addictive behavior and the frontal lobes' attempt to inhibit.

Bad habits operate in much the same way as addictive behavior in that memories of how to think and behave have been well established in the brain and a reward is obtained by repeatedly revisiting those neural pathways.  Breaking the habit then is not only difficult; the brain sets up defense mechanisms to prevent you from changing what is automatic and unconscious. One study of heart patients who were heavy smokers or seriously overweight, showed that even after quadruple bi-pass surgery, a majority of the patients returned to old patterns of lifestyle behavior

The Quantum leap in neuroscience in the past decade can best be summed up in the word neuroplasticity, or simply put, our ability to make new brain cells and new neural connections. And this ability doesn't stop at adolescence, it continues until death. Every time you have a new thought, you are creating new pathways in your brain. And every time you have the same thought, or recall a memory, you make that pathway stronger and more dense A study by MIT's McGovern Institute, published in Nature magazine, described how important neural activity patterns in a specific regions of the brain change when new habits are formed, and change again when habits are broken but quickly re-emerge when something rekindles the memory of the old habit. The activity occurs in the region critical to habits, addiction and learning, the basal ganglia. The researchers concluded that the brain seems to retain a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right cues occur.

No wonder bad habits are hard to break!  So what's the answer for people who want to change their thinking or behavior. Again the answer lies in brain science and new approaches to psychotherapy.

Part of the answer is a matter of perspective. University of California researchers conducted a series of studies that provide the first experimental evidence of the benefits of taking a detached perspective on your problems. Kross says, "reviewing our mistakes over and over, re-experiencing the same negative emotions we felt the first time, tends to keep us stuck in negativity." Their study, published in the July, 2008 issue of Personality and Social Psychology,

The other part of the answer is not focusing on the problematic habitual thinking or behaviors and trying to get rid of them, but rather replacing them with new thinking, creating new neural pathways.

Dr. Steven Hayes, a renowned psychotherapist, and author of Getting Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. Hayes has been setting the world of psychotherapy on its ear by advocating a totally different approach.

 Hayes and researchers Marsha Linehan and Robert Kohlenberg at the University of Washington, and Zindel Segal at the University of Toronto, what we could call "Third Wave Psychologists" are focusing less on how to manipulate the content of our thoughts (a focus on cognitive psychotherapy) and more on how to change their context--to modify the way we see thoughts and feelings so they can't control our behavior. Whereas cognitive therapists speak of "cognitive errors" and "distorted interpretation," Hayes and his colleagues encourage mindfulness, the meditation-inspired practice of observing thoughts without getting entangled by them--imagine the thoughts being a leaf or canoe floating down the stream.

 Joseph Le Doux, in his book, Human Emotions: A Reader, describes new recent brain research that has shown that emotions are the driver for decision-making, which includes aspects of motivation. In a study by Hakwan Lau and Richard Passingham published in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrated that the influences we are not aware of can hold greater sway than those we can consciously reject. We make countless decisions each day without conscious deliberation, a process called "biased competition," in which we decide among many options. The best kinds of biased decisions that are unconscious are habitual choices such as driving a car. Other unconscious influences are generally emotional or motivational, and take place continuously in our unconscious mind. In making complex decisions, legitimate factors sometimes make choices influenced by prejudice, so bias is hard to detect. Recent research by psychologist Eugene Caruso at the University of Chicago shows that people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to fulfill their unconscious biases.

 How long does it take to form a new habit? If you Googled the question, most likely the answer would be 21 days, based on the work of plastic surgeon Dr. Maxwell Matlz in 1960. Recent research shows this is was not accurate.

Research by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at the University College of London and published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, showed that repeated behavior for 66 days converted that day to an automatic or unconscious behavior status; but the range was 18 to 254 days. In other words, it could take you up to 2 months of daily repetition before a behavior becomes a habit.

So what does all this research mean for the practical manager who is trying to change the thinking or behavior, and bad habits of employees? Here are some conclusions that should inform managers about better approaches:

• Habitual thinking and behavior are a result of powerful neural pathways in our brains, and memories that are automatically and unconsciously accessed; we get brain chemistry rewards every time we access those memories;
• Unconscious thought processes can predetermine, without an individual's awareness, decision-making bias and actual decision-making;
• Emotions are the key driver to decision-making, not logical, analytical thought; our logical processes are often only rational justifications for emotional decisions;
• Your brain will put up defensive mechanisms that will try to protect you from change;
• Because the brain operates in a quantum environment, our perceptions and self-talk alters the connections and pathways in our brains. Whatever we focus our "attention" on changes or creates new brain connections;
• Managers should focus on desired new patterns of thinking and behavior to help employees change, not analyzing and trying to fix the old patterns because the latter will only reinforce the problems.

 Managers would do well to become thoroughly acquainted with brain science research as it impacts the performance of their employees.

Ray B. Williams is Co-Founder of Success IQ University and President of Ray Williams Associates, companies located in Phoenix and Vancouver providing leadership training, personal growth and executive coaching services. www.successiqu.com; www.raywilliamsassociates.com 

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