Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

UNSEEN DEGREES Magical Thinking By Coach Stevo

Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction author, is one of a small handful of people to have a set of laws named after him. Clarke’s Three Laws are simple, profound, and provide an excellent framework for understanding the the very edges of what is possible. !1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is

possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.!

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.!

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.!

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Simple looking enough…

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

!Clarke intended these laws as a way to craft science fiction stories and to give humanity a context for understanding the process of discovery. They appear frequently in his work and even more frequently in the lives of people reaching just past their comfort zone. The third law seems especially appropriate for people setting off onto a journey of behavior change.!!For many people struggling with unwanted nutrition and behavioral habits, people who behave differently (like those of us in the field professionally) might as well be magicians. Some of them watch our behavior with just as must as much awe as we would watch an alien species preparing its meals and training their bodies. We simply “do” things like go to the gym, get stronger, and lose weight that they have struggled to learn for decades. And not only that, we seem to enjoy it! We might even post pictures of ourselves working out and sweating on Facebook, or have whole blogs dedicated to our awesome kale recipes. Not for any nefarious reason; we might just love working out and kale! But just as two alien cultures struggling to find a common vocabulary, communication problems can arise. Some of our clients have never cooked a meal for themselves and we might hand them a shopping list with magic words like, “Dino Kale,” “Free-Range Omega-3 Eggs,” and “Organic, Grass-fed 96/4 Lean Ground Beef.” We might have well handed them a list that said, “Eye of Newt.” Or we might tell them they just need to “eat less and move more” which is about as helpful as telling someone who’s never seen a cellphone they just need to download Google Maps to find out where the party is. The small changes necessary to reach health and fitness goals might seem obvious to us, but the reasons we do them and how we learned them are in murkier territory. Because just as their health and fitness habits mostly happen below their level of awareness, our health and fitness behavior is often just as automatic, unseen, and totally reliant on things we completely take for granted. !!The Little Lies We Tell Ourselves !Neal, Wood, Labrecque, and Lally (2011) asked a very simple question: “When you drag yourself to the gym each morning, is the behavior due to your ardent hope of fitting back into your favorite jeans or to myriad environmental cues that keep you locked into your morning habit?” The answer, according to their research, was that people perform habits because of cues in their environment and independently of their goals, or even that sometimes we write our goals after-the-fact to match our preexisting habits (more on the Habit-Goal interface is in this month’s Habit Research Review). Humans crave a neat, causal explanation for our behavior when often none is there. We tell ourselves we are fat because we do not work hard enough or aren’t disciplined enough to earn it. We tell ourselves we are fit because we make good decisions about our bodies. But the reality is more complex and has more to do with context than will. We are creatures of our environment and after a while the influence of our environment becomes so automatic that it might be the last thing we notice. The actions become automatic too, and before you know it someone’s asking us “what’s your secret?”!!

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Who’s fooling whom?

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

We need to remember how our clients see us. To them, we might be magicians pulling rabbits out of hats but the real question is who is fooling whom? They see a magician, but when they ask how we pulled that rabbit out of the hat, what do we tell them? Do you remember what it was like to go from the couch to that first 5k? What is the story that you tell yourself and your clients about how you did it? Looking back, how much did you tackle at once and how much of that journey was slowly learned? How much easier did it get when you made new friends who were fit? How much easier was it when you moved to a place with better running paths? How did you learn to cook? These are questions we need to be asking ourselves, because as you’ll see in this month’s UNSEEN DEGREES, helping people craft their context is about a powerful a coaching tool as we have to offer, and one that we might be completely blind to ourselves.!!The Empty Vault !Hard work. Sweat. Tears. Sacrifice. Pain. Injury. These are the words in the common narrative about how people get to Point A from Point B in fitness. And yes, all journeys have their struggles and their obstacles, but how much time did Ulysses spend slaying Cyclopes and how much time did he spend just hanging out on a boat with all his other friends who were just as desperate to get home as he was? Most of the journey is showing up and putting one foot in front of the other. It’s the slow accumulation of little changes to one’s environment and the habits that go along with it, performed for and encouraged by the people in our lives that matter to us. When our clients ask about our journey, what’s the story we tell them? And when they ask for our secret, what do we tell them?!!Penn Jillette, the larger, louder half of Penn & Teller, has a wonderful way of describing the profession of being magician. “A magician is just a security officer, guarding an empty vault.” Is our profession so different?

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“One man's ‘magic’ is another man's engineering. ‘Supernatural' is a null word.”

- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

Great Articles !How to Stack the Deck in Your Favor By JC Deen !

JC Deen, also no stranger to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, has a hilarious style and a great system for keeping people on the path to health and fitness. His online coaching is all about “stacking the deck” to make healthy decisions easier to make until they become habit, which is the very foundation of habit-based coaching. This system is easy to replicate with your own clients or just with

friends if you want the stack the deck in your own peer group. His attitude is also much more “values and identity” focused than “goal” focused, which gets props in my book.

http://www.jcdfitness.com/2013/09/how-to-stack-the-deck-in-your-favor-and-thoughts-on-accountability/

Everything You Need to Know, Right Here By Krista Scott-Dixon !

KSD, Program Developer and Coaching Coordinator at Precision Nutrition and Head Mistress of Stumptuous, wrote this article in 2011 and it has stuck with me for 3 years (KSD is also one of the great coaches I email when I have gotten stuck over the last 3 years). This article is an eloquent, profanity-laden screed in the KSD-style advocating for simple process goals instead of the large, external outcome goals that people have come to associate with fitness. So many coaches will

read this and say, “duh” to themselves, but pay special attention to the way that KSD sells consistency and the basics as virtues to be courageously pursued and not just gruel to be settled for. Coaches ask me how I keep clients when I only coach 6 movements and this article is more direct than than any I have composed. The best are the best at the basics, and KSD sells them better than Ron Popeil sells Showtime Rotisserie ovens.

http://www.stumptuous.com/everything-you-need-to-know-right-here

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“Be who you want to be.”

- JC DEEN

“Get as fit as possible while nourishing yourself — truly, deeply nourishing yourself — as well as possible.”

- KSD

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

!Habits One area of debate in the behavior-research community is the interaction between habits and goals. Wood and Neal (2007) proposes an interesting model (above) that depends on three principles that have been fairly well established in prior research: 1) “Habits are cued by context,” 2) “Habit context–response associations are not mediated by goals,” and 3) “habits interface with goals.” The process of learning habits and the motivation to do so are independent and take place through different processes in the brain, but interact when we have cognitive awareness of our habits and how that behavior is interpreted as getting us closer or further from our goals. Since the bulk of our behavior takes place in these automatic contexts, it’s important to tailor any intervention to the context in which habits take place since the goal interaction is more rare and always more effortful. This means coaches should explore the contexts in which people perform desired or undesired habits. This can be done with the simple, “Five W’s and an H” (“Why do you think you make bad food choices late at night? Where are you? Who are you with? When? What do you eat? How do you make these food choices?”). All effort should then be placed on new, simple, short-term, goal-consistent actions that can take place in that context. Alternatively, all effort can be placed on avoiding the contexts, although this might not be possible and has it’s own drawbacks.

Wood, W. & Neal, D.T. (2007). A New Look at Habits and the Habit–Goal Interface. Psychological Review, 114(4). Retrieved from: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/rev-1144843.pdf

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Habit Research Review By Coach Stevo

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

Willpower Neal, Wood, & Drolet (2013) is a collection of 5 studies that demonstrate what happens to habits when willpower runs dry. They found that in willpower-limited conditions, all habits (goal-consistent and inconsistent) get cranked up. This “habit boost” was observed in the lab and in the field as well as in a correlational study. The mechanism for the habit boost is that willpower fuels a different process of the brain that Dolan and Dyan (2013) call “reflective decision making.” However habit loops are “reflexive decision making” that is automatic and does not use up the same resources. So if a client is working on a new habit that is well-crafted to the right context and rewards, they might experience a boost in adherence when the willpower runs out. They will also experience a boost in goal-inconsistent habits, but if you can warn clients ahead of time that this phenomena might take place late in the day when the willpower stores are low, they are more likely to be encouraged by the habit-based approach and more likely to continue pursuing it.

Neal, D. T., Wood, W., & Drolet, A. (2013). How do people adhere to goals when willpower is low? The profits (and pitfalls) of strong habits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(6), 959–975.

Motivation Competition can be a great motivator, but social scientists have long tracked the downside to competition: keeping losers motivated. Vansteenkiste and Deci (2003) conducts a fantastic meta-analysis broken down in the SDT framework which highlights the problem as one of feedback. People enter competition in order to get feedback on their competence, so even the losers must feel that they are increasing their competence in order to feel motivated. Czaja and Cummings (2011) take this analysis to heart and design competitions that maximize motivation across the board by matching ability levels and promoting the competition as a way for all participants to learn.

Czaja, R. J., & Cummings, R. G. (2011). Designing Competitions: How To Maintain Motivation For Losers. American Journal of Business Education (AJBE), 2(9), 91–98.

Vansteenkiste, M., & Deci, E. L. (2003). Competitively contingent rewards and intrinsic motivation: Can losers remain motivated? Motivation and emotion, 27(4), 273–299.

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“If… participants in activities and observers of the activities focused more on good performance than on winning, the results for the participants’ motivation is likely to be far more positive.”

- VANSTEENKISTE AND DECI (2003)

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

This month’s book is another rare gem in pop science reading, which is to say a book written for lay people by a scientist who did most of the research in the book and who is at the forefront of his field. Brian Wansink, Ph.D. directs the Cornell Food and Brand lab and was Executive Director of USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the Federal agency in charge of developing 2010 Dietary Guidelines and promoting the Food Guide Pyramid. Mindless Eating is a “best hits” of some of the hundreds of experiments that have come out of the Cornell Food Lab. From all this groundbreaking work, the resulting guidelines are simple: your clients don’t know how much they’re eating.

One of the first places that most coaches go to help people become aware is a food journal, but I think some of the most powerful insights from Mindless Eating are not just what and how much we eat, but how much context determines both of those. From who we are with to where food is available, but Wansink

shows how powerfully even seemingly mundane things like the shape of the vessel our food is in, can drastically increase the number of calories we eat without ever noticing. As a big advocate for “intuitive” eating, I have spent years running into the problems that come with relying on people’s awareness of their eating. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, “there is nothing so difficult as not fooling oneself.” The great contribution that Mindless Eating makes is not only simple steps to build awareness, but even simpler steps to use the phenomenon of mindless eating to a client’s advantage.

Wansink is a great proponent of crafting one’s own environment to make behavior change so simple that it becomes mindless (Marc Halpern who loaned me this book talks more about how to do just that in the “Concept of the Month” this month). Most of the great takeaways from the book are in this vein. But another great concept is the 20% Rule. According to his research, people do not realize when they are eating in caloric maintenance +/- 20%. Most people are cruising at +20%, slowly gaining weight, but using a few simple tricks properly targeted to your clients’ eating styles, you can push them into the -20% zone where fat loss simply “happens.”

This is a great book for coaches especially to recommend to your own clients. It’s a great example of how unaware we often are of the real problems, and how much time, energy and suffering we can throw at the wrong problems.

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Recommended Reading By Coach Stevo

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

Fitness professionals can be so enthusiastic about getting clients to their goals. We have all sorts of cool tricks, exercises, tips and habits to offer. Yes, eating more protein, drinking water, adding vegetables and getting exercise in are all pretty much indisputable habits to go after. However, sometimes these great ideas have one glaring limitation that we often overlook in our excitement to get our clients what they want. That limitation is a toolbox. I can tell someone to put a nail in, but without a hammer it will be quite difficult. If a client does not have the right tools in their kitchen, it becomes impossible or very difficult to make these healthy habits stick. Worse, too much time wasted because of inefficiency can lead to high dropout rates and it could also cut into exercise time. Before we add in any healthy habits, let’s first take an inventory and make sure that the environment lends itself to success. The very first objective your client may have to hit is a shopping trip. Here is a list of basics, but of course it has to be tweaked to your program and clients lifestyle:

• 4-6 bowls, plates, forks, knives, and spoons per person in the household. I think we are all guilty of making a poor food choice because utensils and plates were dirty and we were in a rush.

• For fat loss clients, have them get salad plates instead of large dinner plates

• 2 Crock Pots, again, one may be still in the dishwasher

• 2-5 pans, 2-5 pots, including a grill pan

• A basic set of cooking tools: 2 spatula, 2 large spoons, mixers, peeler, and brushes etc.

• Cooking spray

• At least 5 Tupperware containers of 3 sizes each or more (including x small for dressings)

• For water, several bottles and a filter that is in a convenient location. Make it hard NOT to drink the water. A few bottles of lemon juice may be handy for those needing some taste

• A large container to be put in a closet for those clients who shop in bulk. Make it difficult for them to graze out of big packages

• Several rolls of foil, plastic coverings, paper towels, and any other small miscellaneous items

In no way is this list a complete guide for kitchen prep. However, I hope it gets you thinking about making the environment work for your clients’ success, as opposed to working against it.

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Concept of the Month By Marc Halpern, MS, RD

Without the Right Tools, It Just Won’t Work

Coach Stevo’s UNSEEN DEGREES January 17, 2014

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�9A (hopefully) Monthly Newsletter on Health, Fitness, and Habit-Based Coaching

Habits gather by unseen degrees, As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

- OVID, METAMORPHOSES, BOOK XV, LINE 155. DRYDEN'S TRANSLATION.