We all have some aspect of our work, our lives, or ourselves that we are not perfectly happy with. Something we would like to be different. Something we would like to change. It is important to know in these situations that to be successful at creating the change we desire, two things that we absolutely must do are 1.) create a plan and 2.) take action.
In their book about decision making, Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe the planner and the doer. The planner and the doer exists within each of us; we all have both characters influencing our lives every day. As an example, the authors describe the planner as the part of us that sets the alarm clock at night with the intent of getting up early enough in the morning to exercise or to have a good breakfast before we go to work. The doer is the part of us that in the morning either hits the snooze button 50 times or gets us out of bed to implement the planner’s plan.
Many of us have set our alarm again and again with great intentions only to have our sleepy doers foil our attempts to do something good for ourselves. And all of us tend to blame our doers for this lack of well intentioned action. It is our doers, after all, that chose to hit the snooze button 50 times before finally dragging us out of bed just in time to take a quick shower and dress before we have to leave for work. It is our doers that are ineffective at getting us out of that nice, warm bed and into our running shoes or the gym.
It seems like the doer is at fault when we fail at implementing our plans and achieving our goals. But the real problem may lie with the planner. Any successful leader or manager can tell you that motivation is one of the most important keys to getting things done. In addition, they will tell you that part of their job is understanding exactly what motivates each of their employees. It is easy to see from this that one very important part of our planner’s job is to understand what will motivate our doer to take action. And this is especially true in situations where the action to be taken is challenging in any way.
Take some time to think about things that you would like to change. Identify in each case the work currently being done by your internal planner and doer. More than likely, if you identify things you’ve wanted to change for some time but have not found success at doing so, you have identified a problem for your planner to solve. Your next step then is to identify some things that will ensure that your doer has the proper motivation to take the right actions and get things done. Once you have identified the proper motivation, make completely sure that it is incorporated into your plans and you will soon begin to find that you are finally making progress toward achieving your goals.
