Stop blaming willpower and start building the skill of making change stick for good. Pretty much every person wants to change something, about themselves, their lives, or situation. But, so few ever succeed at creating change, let alone sustaining it.
In this conversation, we explore why real transformation is a learnable process rather than a test of grit. We look at the emotional hurdles that stop us and how to navigate the “alphabet” of success.
Our guest today is Eric Zimmer, the host of the award-winning podcast The One You Feed and author of the new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. Eric has spent decades studying behavior change, transforming his own life from addiction to becoming a leading voice in personal growth.
Together, we explore:
- The Three-Part Direction Rule: A specific strategy that ensures your small efforts actually accumulate into big results over time.
- The Still Point Method: A practical tool to interrupt negative thought patterns before they ruin your day.
- The Truth About Value Clashes: Why your inner conflict between security and freedom is the secret culprit behind your procrastination.
- Neutral Thinking: A critical mindset shift that allows you to bypass the emotional drama that usually makes you quit.
- The 90 Percent Rule: Why most of the change process happens before you ever take a single action.
If you are tired of the cycle of starting and stopping, it is time to change your approach. Play this episode to learn the practical, science-backed steps to finally becoming the person you want to be.
You can find Eric at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
Next week, we’re sharing our conversation with Arthur Brooks about The Meaning of Your Life and practical, science-backed ways to find purpose and discover your deepest calling.
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- Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
photo credit: megan leigh barnard
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Episode Transcript:
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] Okay, so if you ask a hundred people if there’s something meaningful that they really want to change about their lives, almost every single one will say yes. But if you ask those same people, how many actually have tried and succeeded, the numbers get pretty discouraging pretty quickly. We tend to think that if we can’t stick to a new routine, it’s because we’re lazy or unmotivated or just not wired for success. But my guest today, an old friend, Eric Zimmer, has a much kinder and more practical take. He argues that change is not a personality trait. It’s a skill. And like any skill, it’s something you can get better at with the right tools and practice. Eric is the host of the One You Feed podcast and the author of the new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot. He’s someone who has walked the path from the depths of addiction to helping thousands of people navigate their own transformations. And today, we’re breaking down a three part framework for consistent progress and talking about a simple way to catch those self-sabotaging thoughts before they actually take over. We even get into why your values might be fighting each other and how to fix that. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:01:18] Eric Zimmer. You and I have been rolling together as colleagues, as friends, um, for years now. And we have had so many conversations on the mic, off the mic. A lot more about, uh, this thing called change. Um, you know, most people genuinely want to change something, something in their lives, whether it’s a relationship, their well-being, their mental health, their work, you name it, there’s something in there. I don’t know if you took 100 people and you basically said, is there anything meaningful that you want to change? I would venture to say that very few people would answer no. And yet so many of us want to change something meaningful. Um, but so few of us succeed at the process of change. We fail. Um. Even when the desire is real. Take me into this. What’s happening here?
Eric Zimmer: [00:02:17] Well, I wish I could give you the one secret and be like, okay, just do this and you know, you’ll make change easy. I think change is a is a multifaceted thing. And we change and don’t change for different reasons. But I think there are some principles that we can apply and some ways of approaching change, as well as some mindsets that can make it more likely that we will change.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:45] So what are I want to go into those principles because I think they’re they’re sensible and they make a real difference. But also, I’m just really curious In your mind? Is there any 1 or 2? Just big myths, big assumptions, big things that are the main barriers for us?
Eric Zimmer: [00:03:06] I think there’s a couple things. One is, I really believe that change is a skill. I really believe that we can learn how to make change, but most of us tend to treat it as a character flaw problem, tend to treat it as I’m lazy or I don’t, I’m not motivated, or I’m not the kind of person who can finish things, or I just don’t want it enough. And so. And when we do that. We then don’t do what we really need to do in order to change, which is to learn to say like, well, what is happening? You know, a big part of my story is, is an addiction story. And maybe we’ll get into that. Right. And, and there’s a moment where it seems like the change takes. But there was a whole lot that came before that that was all really important. All the things that I tried that didn’t work, that taught me something like, oh, okay, well, I can do that, but I better not do that. Or this, you know, a lot of tinkering. And at one time I looked at all of that as like, I failed at changing. And in one sense, yes, I failed to get sober that time, but I, I was learning to the best of my ability. Now, I didn’t learn as well as I could because I was an addict and I was shame driven. And so I wasn’t really able to connect all the dots in the way that I would.
Eric Zimmer: [00:04:41] But, but when I got to a place where somebody helped me turn down that character flaw narrative just enough, I was able to look back and go, oh, okay, I see I can’t do that. Or you know what they said to do? You know, for me, it was a lot of like they say to do A, B, C, D, E, f and G and I do A and it doesn’t work. I’m like, all right, I’ll come back. I’ll do A and B and it doesn’t work. Right. And eventually I did enough of the letters of the alphabet that it worked. So I think that that change being a skill is one of the big things that we get wrong about it. And then I think the second one is I covered it a little bit, is that idea that change should just happen. If we look at one of the most well-known models of change that the behavior scientists have studied and has held up, it’s called the Stages of change model, or the very fancy transtheoretical model of change. Um, and it has six stages. Only one of those stages is action, but that’s the stage that we almost all jump right to and then are wondering why it doesn’t. Why it doesn’t stick because there’s a lot. There’s a lot that can come before that. That makes it more likely. And then there are things that can come after that. So I would say those are a couple of the big things.
Jonathan Fields: [00:06:06] Yeah. I mean, that’s so interesting. The, um, I want to dive into those a little bit more. The notion of your ability to change as almost like a character trait or a character flaw. You know, if you make the assumption, well, there are those that just have this magical ability to change big things, hard things, you know, and they seem to be able to just keep doing it over and over. You know, you want to get super fit. Boom. Six months later, you are you want to lose weight. Boom. You are you want to change careers. Boom. You do it. And you point to those people and you say, wow, they’re just different from me, aren’t they? They’re wired. I mean, how many times have you heard the phrase some version of they’re just wired differently? Yeah. Right. You would just assume like you have it or you don’t. Um, and, and so I love the notion of you basically pointing that out and saying, well, no, this is actually a set of skills and it’s something that’s a learnable thing rather than, you know, you have it or you don’t type of thing. So there’s no real, you know, the idea that, you know, it’s a character flaw if you don’t have it is a misnomer because it’s not a trait to start with.
Eric Zimmer: [00:07:17] It’s not. I think that those people often have a couple of different things. They may have advantages that the other that others of us don’t have that make change easier. You know, a classic example, as I look back on my early recovery, is I was in a position I could go to a meeting every day. I could go to two meetings a day if I wanted. Single mothers, different story, right? So to, to say that like, oh, Eric was able to do it easily and they weren’t is not exactly comparing things that are even. And then the. The other component is that people. Some people just know how to do it because either they intuited it or they were. They. It was modeled for them.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:07] Yeah.
Eric Zimmer: [00:08:08] Right. It was modeled for them. It was encouraged for them. They were in environments that made change possible. And so then they internalized that and they went, oh, I can really change because that belief that I can or can’t change is fundamental. If you if you don’t believe you can, you sooner or later won’t.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:28] And I think that really does. The bigger myth here is that we all have different starting lines. We’re all differently resourced, you know, we’re all we have different life circumstances. And when we point to somebody who is in a radically different place than us, um, and we try and make the direct comparison. You know, most times we’re probably going to lose. Yeah. We’re just not them. We don’t have their their circumstances, their situation, their environment, the resources, their, um, structural support. That second thing that you shared though, is also really interesting. I want to tease out a little bit more this notion that there is this existing model of change and it has six steps, and only one of those steps is action. Because if you ask the typical person, what do I need to effect real change in my life? Basically, they probably say, well, I just need the right plan. You know, I need the right step. Yeah, I need that. I need to know what are the steps to get me from where I am to that magical place that I want to be. If I have those steps and they’re the right steps, quote, right steps, well, then I’ll just follow the steps. Yeah. And you’re saying even if those are the right steps, this is still one sixth, um, of what’s going on and maybe actually not even one sixth. This is one of six. And it may not be equally weighted to the other five.
Eric Zimmer: [00:09:41] And I think there’s something else in there too, because. When I think I mean the the Transtheoretical model is one one version of change. And like anything, it has its strengths, it has its weaknesses. I think the other thing that’s really important to note, though, is that a lot of the change advice that we get, I would say it’s structural, right? Atomic habits is largely a book about structural changes, and those are hugely important. We we should make all the structural changes we can, meaning we should know what we’re doing. We should know when we’re doing it, how we’re doing it. We should make it easy, you know, to use James’s language, we should make it attractive. We should set up our environment, we should have support, we should do all of that. And that does a lot of heavy lifting. And even with that, the moment comes where it’s Tuesday morning, and at Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., you’re going to, uh, go for a run. Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. comes and you end up not doing it. And that is almost entirely call it emotional, call it internal. It’s a it’s a something inside doesn’t work. You are thinking or saying something to yourself that that causes you to make the choice you wish you didn’t make in that moment. And so people are often doing one of the, they’re doing one of two of those steps. They might be setting it up structurally, but not understanding how to work with themselves in the moment. Or they may be thinking it’s all about the willpower that they bring to that moment. And I think without both, it’s pretty hard to change. And again, back to talking about people who just do it. They have figured that out in their own way. You know, they’ve learned what to say to themselves in those moments when it’s time to do it and you really just don’t want to.
Jonathan Fields: [00:11:45] So a core part of your philosophy. You could even argue sort of like your central thesis is this notion of little by little, a little becomes a lot. Deconstruct this for me. Take me into this.
Eric Zimmer: [00:11:59] I’ll start with a story. So 30 years ago, I stumbled into a detox center in Columbus, Ohio. I weighed £100. I was jaundiced from hepatitis C, I was homeless, I was a heroin addict. And the prosecutor was telling me I faced up to 50 years in prison. So I went in there and they said to me, you need to go to long term treatment. To which I said, no, thank you, and went back to my room. And in my room I had that moment we talk about oftentimes for recovery, where I just saw clearly, like, if I leave this building, I am probably going to die or go to jail soon. So I went back and I said, okay, I’ll go to treatment. If we were filming the movie in my life, like that is the moment, right? Like, that’s the thing is, you know, the, the, the, the strings will swell in the background. The director will hang around a long time on that. And sure, it’s an important moment, but it’s only important because I followed it with thousands of little off camera moments where I chose to, uh, call my sponsor instead of my dealer, or I took a different route home versus going past the bar, or I decided to work out in the morning. And we prioritize this epiphany. We prioritize this chain, these big moments. And it’s not that they don’t have value, but it’s all the little moments that all accumulate. And most of us don’t love that story because it’s kind of boring. You know, it’s kind of boring. And so little by little is an approach. You know, we all know it on some level. We all will say, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And you eat an elephant one bite at a time. And and yet we don’t really buy into it fully because when things don’t change fast enough, we get discouraged. But little by little to me means something very specific. I mean, low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction.
Jonathan Fields: [00:14:15] Let’s tease out those three pieces.
Eric Zimmer: [00:14:16] Yeah. So low resistance just means you will, you can you can get yourself to do it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:14:22] Okay.
Eric Zimmer: [00:14:23] That’s going to be different for different people, right? Like I, when I used to try early on in my meditation career, it was really hard for me. It was like I’d sit down and, and it was like the dark circus rolled into town. Um, and I knew other people were like, I just feel so peaceful. It’s like, what are you talking about?
Jonathan Fields: [00:14:44] I’ve never really had that experience meditating, by the way.
Eric Zimmer: [00:14:46] No, no.
Jonathan Fields: [00:14:47] 15 years in, I’m waiting for. But but.
Eric Zimmer: [00:14:49] But some people report like I like.
Jonathan Fields: [00:14:51] It.
Eric Zimmer: [00:14:51] Yeah, yeah. I did not like it. So for me to sit there for 15 minutes would be really high effort for someone else. It might be low effort. Conversely, if I’m trying to get in shape for me, 45 minutes on a peloton bike may not be too much effort, but for someone else, a ten minute walk would be high effort. So that’s going to be different. So we’ll actually do it. And so then since we’ll actually do it, we keep doing it right consistently over time. And then in the same direction is a important part. You know, shows like ours provide some wonderful things to the world. And we also just inundate people with all different ways and ideas about how and what they should change. We’re not alone. Instagram. It’s everywhere. And little by little only becomes a lot. If it’s more or less pointing in the same way. What I think a lot of us have is just a lot of little things that are scattered all over the place. And so picking a thing or two and, and really letting that get sort of steady, then we can think about, okay, what else might we add? Because at some point you just can’t add any more.
Eric Zimmer: [00:16:12] You will find a place where you’re like, okay, I want to do this thing, this thing, this thing and this thing. And you, a lot of people will know this experience. Well, I can’t seem to get two of those going at any time. They vary. Maybe I’m journaling and I’m meditating, but I’m not exercising or I’m exercising, but I can’t seem to meditate. And it’s a lot of times that’s simply an an ability problem. And by ability, I mean you just run out of time. And so being able to narrow down and pick a direction for at least a period of time is also really valuable. So those are the three, three parts of it. Yeah. Small enough. You’ll do it? Yeah. I don’t mean necessarily tiny. I mean, now BJ Fogg wrote a great book called Tiny Habits. I don’t necessarily mean only floss one tooth. You might be able to floss your whole mouth, right? It’s going to depend on who you are, but keep doing it and do it in some sort of consistent direction.
Jonathan Fields: [00:17:10] Yeah, that last piece, I mean, I’m not alone with the first one. Totally makes sense consistently over time. Well, of course, like it builds over time and it accumulates little bits of progress and progress and you’re like, oh wow, this is actually turning into something the in the same direction. Um, that’s the one where I think a lot of us stumble and we don’t really think about it because we’re kind of like, look, we wildly overestimate the amount of energy and bandwidth that we have available to us. And then we’re like, well, I am capable of trying to push these five different paths of change forward in my life, trying to accomplish these five different meaningful things all at the same time. Like I am, I can do it. You know, it doesn’t take that much. And you know, when you do that, you know, then you become so fragmented with your effort and your energy that little by little becomes teensy, teensy, teensy, teensy, teensy bit by teensy, teensy, teensy, teensy bit. And you see no progress along any of those paths, even though you’re theoretically devoting a little bit of time to all of them over time. And it just becomes demoralizing. You give up and say, this just doesn’t work 100%.
Eric Zimmer: [00:18:20] And I think that the word you use there demoralizing is really important because success builds upon itself in in the world of change, if we go back to the fact that most of us, when we aren’t successful at making the changes that we want, we take it as a character flaw and we get down on ourselves. That drives down motivation. We know motivation goes up when we feel good about ourselves, when we feel good about our chances of success. And it goes down when we feel bad about ourselves. And so if you are like, all right, I’m going to do five things each day. You know, pick your morning routine, uh, guru out there who will give you the five things you should do in your morning routine. And you do three of them consistently, you’re going to still feel like you’re failing because you didn’t do all five. We would be much better off doing one and feeling good about it and getting it steady, then adding two. And you know, because I would much, you know, when I work with clients, I would much rather have somebody like, let’s say they’re trying to meditate.
Eric Zimmer: [00:19:35] I would much rather have somebody meditate for five minutes and do it every day that they say they’re going to do it. Let’s say they say they’re going to do it Monday through Friday versus do it twice a week for 30 minutes. Now, you might say that’s odd because the second scenario, they’re going to get 60 minutes of meditation and you’re suggesting that they get 25. But the reason is because if they say they’re going to do the five minutes and they do it, then we can feel good about ourselves and we can build. But when we’re failing and we are very harsh judges, when we’re failing, we think, I can’t do it. And we get back to, oh, God, I mean, that guy does it all the time. Why can’t I, you know? Morning routine guru number seven somehow gets through all eight of these things every morning. And so that’s another reason it’s so important is like, let’s pick what we can do, be successful and build.
Jonathan Fields: [00:20:43] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. One of the things that we tend to focus on also when we’re when we’re looking at doing something big or making a meaningful change, is we look at the habits that we have or that we don’t have, or that we want to build to help us get there. And habits has become such a huge focus for so many people. Not that there’s something wrong with actually examining your habits and building the structure around them, but you make an interesting argument that says, okay, so let’s, let’s say habits matter. It’s a part of, of the puzzle here. But before we build habits, we also have to look at values. We have to ask the question, what’s worth wanting? Why do we need to start there?
Eric Zimmer: [00:21:24] Well, I have a lot to say about habits, and it’s a term I’ve used in my own work on and off for years. And I have a couple of things. One is we have we all have a lot of habits, and a lot of them aren’t really beneficial. They may not be bad, but they’re not. A habit is something that happens automatically, right? And so we’re entranced by the idea of our good behaviors happening automatically. That would be lovely, wouldn’t it? I just never would have to try. It wouldn’t be hard ever again. I don’t think that really happens generally, not with any behavior that’s big enough to matter. Um, but the other problem, the downside of habit is that we just repeat it without really thinking much about it. Which means if you’ve thought about what’s important to you and you’ve built your life around that, then some degree of momentum is really valuable. But if you’ve drifted off course to some degree, and you’ve just got these background patterns running. That’s problematic. And that’s why kind of going back to like what really matters to me. What do I want? The, the second chapter in the book is about this idea of values and desires. And that chapter almost broke me. It was my it was my second chapter. I didn’t know what I was doing. I ended up writing something like 60,000 words before that chapter got anywhere.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:58] So you answer the question, right? Like what? What’s worth watching? Yeah. Like I just want to be done with this chapter.
Eric Zimmer: [00:23:04] Yeah, exactly. I just because when you start looking around inside, there’s a lot going on in here. You know, we are motivationally complex creatures. You know, I’ve done a podcast for years that say, like, we have two wolves inside of us, right? Feed the good one. But that is a radical oversimplification for what all happens inside of us. We want lots of things. Then you start. You start working with psychologists. You start rolling in words like needs and and all. So I, I try to simplify it down. I try to say, okay, let’s just kind of go to values and desires. Values are the things that we decide are worth wanting. Desires are what we just want. They just show up. And we end up now. Then with that, we end up with two kind of clashes. The first is the common. We all know desire. You know, I have a desire that’s competing with a value. I want to be healthy, but I want to eat or, you know, I, I want to be healthy, but I also want to eat this donut, right? That’s a value to desire clash. And those are those take a lot of effort. The question I pose in the book, the thing I think that clarifies those and helps, is what do I want most versus what do I want now? So the harder problem though is values to values clashes.
Eric Zimmer: [00:24:36] This is where it gets tricky because you might value writing a work of fiction. While you might also value making a new table. While you might also value keeping the Good Life project going right, then it gets tricky because these are all things that are worth wanting. And we have to do some of the hard work of, of being able to say like, what? What am I actually capable of doing? You know what? I, in my coaching work, one of the things I used to do with people that in the beginning I thought, this is terrible. Like I’m, I’m not doing a good job. Was that I ended up like we ended up I felt like I was killing half their dreams, right? But what we were doing was going like, okay, we can’t do all of this. You can keep trying to do all of it, but it’s not working. We have to pick. And we have to. And we also have to recognize that these conflicts, they exist, right? Almost anybody who’s a parent has a little bit of a. I value my career and I value my family. And those things are off. There’s a there’s a degree of opposition in those. And all we can do is be cognizant of them as. As as a tension that we’re going to have to navigate and dance with.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:07] We focus so much on habits, but, you know, you make this argument that says, we really actually, there’s a step before that which is really asking the question, what? What’s worth wanting. Um, you know, and it’s interesting because I do. I’ve seen values conflicts come up in my own life. And I’ve had so many conversations with people about this over the years. And one of the most common ones that I’ve seen is a value conflict between a value around financial stability and freedom of expression.
Eric Zimmer: [00:26:39] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:39] You know, so someone’s like, I want to provide for my family. I want to have money in the bank. I want to know I have a secure future and I just want to be an artist. I don’t, I want the freedom to just do the work they want to do. I want to paint, I want to write. I want to do all of these things. And yet in my mind, I know that very few people are ever able to actually support themselves, let alone a family doing this thing right. These things to me are both worth wanting. They both make me feel a certain sense of aliveness and fullness and joy and meaning. Um, yet they seem to be in conflict, you know? So, so like that. And it’s thorny, like there’s no easy. Well, this is what you do to resolve that.
Eric Zimmer: [00:27:24] Yeah, I think you’re right. There is no easy answer to this. It would be nice to not have to make a living at all. Not have to worry about it. Um, but that vanishingly few people have that at the same time. Vanishingly few people do so well that they just don’t even have to care like they do so well at their art that they don’t even have to care. The vast majority of people were making trade offs. You know, we’re making trade offs. There’s there’s, you know, there’s a lot of great artists. Over time, if you really look who, who continued to do who continue to work like a normal job and do their art. I still, I’ve been doing the podcast full time for six years and I don’t make remotely what I made as a software executive. Still, I make enough like I live. I mean, I have a I mean, I’m not saying like I’m I’m a starving artist. I’m not. And I was at that stage in my career where they just start giving you stupid money and I don’t that’s not where I’m at. And I have my moments where I think, huh, was that the right choice now? It unquestionably was. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to do what I do full time and the and the freedom that it gives me. But there’s a trade off, right? I am valuing that freedom over financial success, for sure. You know, it’s definitely a trade off.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:00] And I think sometimes we those it’s it’s a dynamic trade off, right? So like, those are the things where we have to keep revisiting them over time. Yes. And saying, do I still feel the way that I felt and is the trade off is is the decision that I made six months ago, a year ago, three years ago, five years ago. Is it still working for me? Have the circumstances of my life changed? Has my inner life changed in a way where it’s still letting me experience life the way that I want to experience? Or is it time to make some changes?
Eric Zimmer: [00:29:32] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:33] Years ago, I interviewed a guy named Matthew Grossman, who’s a professor at Yale who teaches a class called, I think it’s called A Life Worth Living. And he said, this is basically the most frustrating class that these students will ever take, because the entire class is questions with no answers. And probably the central question in the class was, what? What’s worth wanting? Yeah. And he’s like, we, we rarely ever visit that question, you know, and the answer to it is going to change over time. We have a lot of people telling us what’s worth wanting. And we often adopt like what they tell us as the answer because it’s just easier to accept that rather than to sit there and, and discern like what actually, for me in this moment in my life, what is worth wanting? And is it the same thing that I’m being told I should want? And those are often very different answers.
Eric Zimmer: [00:30:27] And we’re so impressionable. I tell a story in the book one day of I was in Atlanta when I was driving. Uh, I would go to, I would go to a library there to work. And I was driving through Buckhead in Atlanta and there’s a lot of trees in Buckhead, which is one notable thing about it. The other notable thing about it are there are enormous house after enormous house after. It just goes on and it goes on and I’m talking like huge, huge houses to the point. I’m like, how is this even possible? Like, who has this, you know, money? And so I find myself doing that drive. And that day, I, I’m starting to get the. What’s wrong with me that I don’t have that? The envy is starting to kick in. And at that moment, I paused and I listened to what was coming through the radio. And it was a band called the Gaslight Anthem. And they’re a band that you might say they head towards, like a punk ethos kind of thing. And, you know, I was really into punk rock as a kid.
Eric Zimmer: [00:31:33] And, you know, if it has an ethos, it’s about authenticity and about being yourself and doing what you want to do. And I just noticed that like here within like 20s of each other, I want this thing. And then I hear this that reminds me, I want this thing. And if I were to go work in a software startup company all the time, my, my desires and what I want would be shaped by that environment. We’re impressionable creatures. So yeah, continuing to reflect on what do I want. It’s really hard work. I love that idea. I love what that professor said. Like, there’s no answers to this. We. I just got done doing a podcast with a guy before who kept sort of being like, well, what do you tell somebody? I’m like, I don’t know what to tell. I have no answer. Like, you know, are they are they spending enough time with their family or are they spending too much time at work? Like, how would I possibly answer that question for another human being? But it sure would be nice if somebody would.
Jonathan Fields: [00:32:36] Yeah, we’d all love somebody else to tell us what the appropriate answer is for us in our lives at this moment in time, 100%. But it just doesn’t work that way, you know?
Eric Zimmer: [00:32:45] It does not. You know.
Jonathan Fields: [00:32:46] We have to sit with it. And often we have to sit with it for a long time. And and it changes over time. Um, which brings up another thing that’s sort of like one of the key elements of your approach to change, which is the notion, notion of, of self-compassion. You know, it’s this idea that, um, so many of us, especially if we get an idea in our head. We’re like, we want to become this thing or accomplish this thing or change into this, right? And we attach our a sense of ego and identity to it, especially if we have actually had some level of success in different domains of life before we’ve been able to do the thing or achieve that, get the golden ring, whatever it may be. Um, and then we look at this one domain where we really want to experience change. It’s not coming easily. Um, and we’re hard on ourselves. We’re just endlessly unkind to ourselves when it comes to us dropping into a change process and not just blinking and seeing it happen.
Eric Zimmer: [00:33:49] Yeah. I mean, besides stopping abusing drugs, uh, no change in my life has been more beneficial than learning to be kinder to myself. I mean, it is far and away the best upgrade to my life I’ve ever given myself. Just because. Right. We spent. Who do I spend the most time with me. You know, and I’m glad you know, it’s nice to not have an asshole in there all the time. So it’s just good to do on and off. It’s in and of itself, but it’s actually pretty critical to the change process also because as I said earlier, change is about learning, particularly if you can’t, if you’re not figuring out how to make the change, it’s because you haven’t. Something hasn’t been figured out yet. You know, I always would say to coaching clients, like, we are going to treat this like a puzzle. Puzzles have solutions. It may take us a while to figure it out, but it’s a puzzle. But we have to be able to learn. And when we are really hard on ourselves, we don’t learn, right? We shut. We get. Because being hard on ourselves revs up our emotional system, which just makes us not as capable of Asking, well, what went wrong there? What could I have done differently? It’s mostly like, oh God, what’s wrong with me? I’ll never. I mean, all the drama.
Eric Zimmer: [00:35:14] I have this, uh, I have a framework in the book about what happens when we get off track, because everybody does. And I’ve got a little framework and one of them is called Neutralize the Emotional Drama. Like when you get off track because it stops us from being able to learn. And so self-compassion is really important in that way. Now a lot of people will say, look, look, I’ve made a lot, I accomplished a lot by being hard on myself. And they’re right because that, that, that really angry inner voice is a kind of fuel. But it but I heard somebody once say, it’s a dirty fuel, it burns dirty and it gunks up the engine. And my experience is I start seeing it in people in their 30s, 40s and 50s that maybe they got by doing that before, but it suddenly no longer works. That being so hard on themselves, and it takes a lot of work to kind of unwind that. It’s a, it is a thought pattern that gets pretty deeply embedded. But I do believe that thought patterns can change. The good news is they they can change. The bad news is they take a while. Takes a pretty pronounced effort to like unwind a thought pattern that’s had its, you know, way of running for 30 years.
Jonathan Fields: [00:36:41] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. It is wild, right? Because so many of us get to a point where we have had this script, you know, deepening neural grooves in our brain for decades, and then we become aware of it, and then we become aware of how it’s limiting us and the way that we want to live and be in the world. And then we think, okay, now that I’ve now that I’ve seen it, now I’m aware of it. I’m a sentient being with a certain amount of ability and willpower. And now I should just be able to change this. You know, it’s yeah, you know, I should be able to wake up tomorrow and regrow my brain and change my behavior and start just living differently in the world, not acknowledging that it took three decades to get there.
Eric Zimmer: [00:37:28] Yeah, it’s.
Jonathan Fields: [00:37:28] Going to take a minute longer, you know, to actually change that.
Eric Zimmer: [00:37:33] Yeah. I actually have a method in the book that I think is, I mean, right, we’ve all we’ve done so many of these podcasts, you and I, we’re, we’re all repeating things again and again, right? Like we’re being reminded of the things we need to know. But I do feel like I do offer something, uh, new in this area. And it’s something I call the Stillpoint method because I started to think about like, how do you change a thought pattern? You can’t change it by thinking about it once a day. So what happens for most of us is we don’t remember. And we don’t do it frequently enough. So the Stillpoint method is that we use the science of behavior change that has things called prompts or triggers, like we get reminded to do something. So let’s say you’re working on being more patient. You could set an alarm on your phone to go off four times a day where you reflect on patience. Now, any one of those is invaluable, or any one of those has no value. It just doesn’t even matter. But four of them a day starts to add up. So I’ll give an example from my own life. I went back when I still worked in the software business. Every day when I would walk from my house to my car, my car, to my office and reverse route, I would do this little thing where I would just say, what are five things I can see right now? What are five things I can feel right now? What are five things that I can hear right now? Again, doing that one time.
Eric Zimmer: [00:39:14] Sure. It’s lovely. Right? Whatever. Who cares? But doing that four times a day, five days a week, month after month, my ability to be present deepened tremendously. So what we need, if we’re going to change a thought pattern, is to have it interrupted frequently enough. That we can then do it. So again, another one could be I have a still point. We actually have an app, so if you pre-order the book, you can get this app that that randomly does these. They just sort of your phone dings at you and, and you, you do the little still point like one is to ask ourselves just to do it. And when it goes off, just ask ourselves for a second, like, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? Takes 10s. But if we do that more often, we can eventually build to sort of the holy grail of these. And the Holy Grail is that you can capture, you can capture it when it’s happening, you know, but if I’m asking myself five times a day what I’m thinking and feeling briefly, just seconds, it’s more likely that when I start to spin out, I’m going to catch it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:27] Yeah. I mean, and that lands as really practical to me. And it also gets to one of the things that you talk about, which is it’s the, the notion of presence. Um, and. It’s sort of like the overlap of awareness and presence, you know, like the more we can be present in how we’re actually showing up in, in those scripts that just run, whether they’re emotional or thought scripts, um, or behavioral, you know, generally it’s all of the above. You know, the a big part is your ability to become present in the moment and aware of what’s actually happening, rather than what you wish were happening, or you’re completely unaware of what’s happening because we can’t affect anything until we’re aware of what’s real and what’s not real. So that’s like, that’s the foundation of change. I feel like.
Eric Zimmer: [00:41:20] It really is. I mean, it is the foundation to be able to change things. Um, particularly things that are habits in the bad sense, like awareness is critically, critically important. If we’re trying to add new things. The good news is if we do the structural parts of change that we talked about well enough, we get ourselves to choice points, right? We get ourselves to the point where we know what the choice we want to make is. And then what we’re able to do is we don’t have to examine all of our life for like, what went wrong. We don’t need to hire a Jungian therapist for four years, right? We can zoom in and go in that moment that I, instead of getting on the exercise bike, I chose to continue to scroll Instagram. Like, what was I thinking and feeling in that moment? So the structural actually brings us to a choice point where we can focus more easily on the emotional or thought pattern. And it’s really practical in that way because otherwise what happens for a lot of us is we never get to the choice point, which means that we’re vaguely procrastinating and we are looking at like, what is wrong with me globally, right? And if what we’re trying to do is take a behavior, that’s not the moment to solve all our deep seated emotional problems, we don’t have to. We just have to get skillful enough to talk to ourselves in a way that gets us over the hump.
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:52] If we zoom the ones out and we take a really big step back in time. Um, you know, you look at your life now versus 25, 30 years ago when you were deep in addiction. What feels most different to you now?
Eric Zimmer: [00:43:09] I’ll tell you a story because it’s a story that still, even after I’ve written it and told it sort of astounds me. And, um, you know, I had been, I had been, uh, picking them up for a couple months without even really thinking about it. Um, I’d wait in line at the pharmacy. I’d get the little paper sack with a stapled prescription. I put them in the passenger seat of the car, and I’d drive them to my mom’s, and I’d take him up and I’d give them to her. She had fallen. And what I’m talking about are opiates. Oxycontin, to be specific. Like the good stuff, right? 30 years ago, I might have robbed you at gunpoint for that. 30 years ago, I was I was helpless. I destroyed my entire life to get what was sitting right there in the passenger seat. And I tell that story not to brag or show off, I. I tell it to say like, Holy mackerel, we can really change. You know, we are really capable. You know, I would have thought. I’m an addict. I have an addict personality. Right? Not really. Because now I’m taking, you know, and so I that is a that is a, a sign to what little by little over a long period of time achieved a completely different consciousness, one that doesn’t even make sense to me because it was it took me a month before I even had the thought that I was doing it. That’s how you know, it’s how they were like a loaf of bread to me. I didn’t think about them. And so that would be kind of what I would say zooming out is we are we are really capable of immense change. We really are. But it, it takes it takes time.
Jonathan Fields: [00:45:06] It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I have asked you this question before. It was quite a while ago, so I’ll ask it again because time has changed in this container of Good Life Project.. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.
Eric Zimmer: [00:45:20] Right now for me? I am really focusing on something that I learned early in recovery, and it’s been in many ways, what I’ve worked on all these years. And there’s a line in the book that says selfishness, self-centeredness that we think is the root of our problem. And that’s a little bit of strong language. I get that. And yet I think it’s still true for me that that my life is best. The less I focus on myself and the more I focus on the people and the world around me. And so to me, a good life is really one where the changes that I’m making make me better and happier, but also are good for the world and the other people in it. And a good life is where I figured out how to do both of those things. Mm.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:21] Thank you. Hey, before you leave, don’t miss next week’s episode. I’ll be talking with Arthur C. Brooks about the meaning of life and practical, science-backed ways to find purpose and discover your deepest calling. Be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss it. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor and share it with just one person. If you want to share it with more. Hey, that’s awesome. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.