Your goals point to where you want to go. Your habits are about where you are coming from and how you tend to travel.

Experience demonstrates that working with habit, instead of ignoring or fighting it, yields much better results in terms of satisfaction, authenticity, and endurance in addition to having fewer unwanted side effects.

So when I am with a client, I pay attention to the difference (or gap) between their goals and their mindset habits. 

With this information, I can assist my client, verbally as well as non-verbally, toward the quickest, most effective, and authentic path.

Here’s a story of Dave who wanted to make a big change in his professional life.  I will begin with what I noticed (along with the Five Rings translation) and then how I worked with him.

 

We began with a conversation about conflict because of the large gap between his goals: Fire - Ground and his habits: Water - Wind.

Fire - Ground has a neutral-positive interpretation of conflict.

Water - Wind views conflict more negatively.

This new narrative immediately gave him a very different perspective on self-sabotage, which helped him to let go of his old stories of self-blame. 

Dave was able to literally and non-judgmentally see for himself that he had the long-standing muscular response habit of collapsing his spine and pulling away under pressure.

An effective tipping point for moving changes through the bureaucracy of habits, without triggering its defenses, is by working with balance, shape and gesture.

So I taught Dave the simple steps to genuinely cultivating his Fire - Ground posture.  He experienced viscerally that when he was sitting like Fire - Ground, his response was spontaneously different.  He actually laughed in the face of his biggest fears.

And, he realized that he actually felt more positive, confident, and powerful in this not-normal way of sitting and standing.

I next engaged Dave in a conversation about the change process and the importance of working with both his desired Goal and his no longer wanted Habits.  

Working with Habit means acknowledging and accepting the past.  Dave needed to expect that given the chance, he would find himself giving in and then pulling away, Water-Wind.  

Each time he was able to stay awake as this habit triggers, he built his internal power, to say No to what he no longer wanted.   This moved him from operating in reaction to events to being pro-active.

Working with your goal means investing in the future.  Dave needed to actively practice the new and not yet comfortable Fire - Ground carriage.  

His practice was to prepare for business meetings by spending a minute or so experimenting with the Fire - Ground carriage and then letting his mood and thinking shift in response.

His job was to walk into the meeting from Fire - Ground, to sit in the meeting from Fire - Ground, and to speak in the meeting from Fire - Ground.

Dave began showing up with greater confidence and decisiveness. 

Because he was working with both sides of the Results Equation (Goals and Habits), he reported he was also becoming much better at really listening and collaborating with others, the positive sides of Water-Wind.