The Thrive Methodology: H - History of Successful Change

History of Success: You've Already Done the Hard Part Once

Most people start a change project by focusing on what's wrong. I have learned from my time studying with the NeuroLeadership Institute that there is a real brain-based advantage to starting by focusing on what's right. You put your brain into a reward state when you ask what's already worked, and I've learned to insist on this even when clients think it's a waste of time, because it has never yet been.

Here's why: Somewhere in your life, you've already done something that looked impossible from the outside and worked anyway. Maybe it was small, like you learned an instrument as an adult and stuck with it past the point where most people quit. Maybe it was enormous, like you rebuilt a life after a divorce nobody saw coming, especially you. Either way, you did it using a specific set of traits and characteristics that belong to you. Most people never go back and study how they actually did it, though. They just remember that they did, vaguely, the way you remember a movie you liked without being able to describe the plot.

Learning the Lessons of your History of Success

I ask clients to go back decade by decade and pull out real wins - and not just the resume bullet points - all the moments where something clicked even if they were only momentous to them. Then I ask what was true about them, or their circumstances? What did they accomplish that they wouldn't have thought possible beforehand, and what did they gain in the process? What they were willing to risk, and what did it really take to get it done?

Reliving these memories can start out a bit tedious because looking backward feels like the opposite of progress. But it ends up being quite rewarding, not only because you get to relive a victorious moment, big or small, but also because you will recognize different aspects of the win from this new vantage point. And, organizations do this constantly. Nobody launches a major initiative without first asking what's worked before and why, and treating that as real data rather than nostalgia. There's no good reason individuals should skip that step just because the data lives in memory instead of a spreadsheet.

The unhelpful tendency can be thinking your past success doesn't count because the circumstances were different. You might tell yourself the job market was easier then, or you were younger, or you had less to lose. Sometimes that's true, but regardless, it's not the whole story, and it's not more consequential than the traits and characteristics you still carry today. The belief in yourself that got you there, the you that took a risk or asked for help or refused to quit at the exact moment you really wanted to, this all lives within with you. They're not tied to your twenties or to a market that no longer exists. They're yours, and they're available to you right now, which is usually the last thing people believe about themselves when they're stuck.

So, take a trip down memory lane, and give your brain a big shot of reward state! You'll thank yourself for the increased creativity and confidence, and you can use it to mine specific examples of how you have already navigated circumstances like these successfully before!