The Three Keys to Change

Frank's breakthrough ideas have spawned a prodigious amount of fascinating scientific research about the importance of inspiring hope and belief, the "common factors," and the therapeutic relationship. Some of this work was collected in the thick 1999 anthology The Heart & Soul of Change: What Works in Therapy, published by the American Psychological Association.

So we know what works in therapy. I wanted to look further and also see what works outside of therapy. Couldn't a troubled person be inspired to change by having a positive relationship with someone other than a psychologist? Having spent nearly two decades as a journalist covering the business world, I wanted to see whether, and how, these ideas could apply to bringing about change in companies and organizations. The best research on this topic had been led by John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, who concluded that changing organizations depends overwhelmingly on changing the emotions of their individual members. This alerted me to the plausibility of a unified theory of how both individuals and groups of people can change, something that the Harvard cognitive scientist Howard Gardner had already worked toward in his research.

In coming up with the "three keys to change," I began with Frank's principles of effective psychotherapy and stripped away the elements that apply only to more formal kinds of therapy, such as the usefulness of "a healing setting"--a special place where the patient feels safe and protected (such as a doctor's office). Then I tried to reduce the essentials of his theory into a more streamlined formulation, and I tested it out against the wide range of real- world case studies I've researched for this book. When I interviewed people like Ornish and Silbert, their explanations fit the theory well. Within this framework I've also tried to incorporate important ideas from the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, and linguistics, which have emerged in the time since Frank's initial study and are providing new and extremely useful tools in psychology.

The result, I hope, is a master theory of change that readers can easily understand and apply in their own lives.

CHANGE OR DIE. Copyright © 2007 by Alan Deutschman.