Introduction

My colleague Phil tripped down his basement steps and landed hard on his head. For a few moments as he lay on the floor, his arms and shoulders tingling, he thought he was paralyzed. Too wobbly to stand up, he sat against a wall and assessed the damage. The tingling in his limbs meant he still retained feeling (a good thing). His head and neck were throbbing. He could feel blood trickling down his back from a lacerated scalp. He knew that he needed to go to an ER so they could clean up the wound and check for broken bones and internal bleeding. He also knew he was in no shape to drive himself.

It was a Saturday morning. Phil's wife and grown sons were not home. He was alone in his quiet suburban house. He pulled his cell phone out to call for help. As he scrolled through names he realized he didn't have a single friend nearby whom he felt comfortable calling in an emergency. He'd never made the effort to know his neighbors. Reluctant to call 911 since he wasn't gushing blood or having a heart attack, Phil tracked down the home number of a middle-aged couple a few houses away and dialed. A woman named Kay answered, someone he acknowledged on the street but had rarely spoken to. He explained his situation and Kay rushed over, entering Phil's home through an unlocked back door. She found Phil in the basement, helped him to his feet, and drove him to the local hospital, staying with him during the five hours he was examined. Yes, he'd suffered a concussion, the doctors said, and he'd be in pain for a few weeks, but nothing was broken and he'd recover. Kay drove him back to his house.

Resting in his dark house later that day, Phil thought about how close he had come to disaster. He recalled the moment when his head hit the floor, the bright brittle sound at impact, like a hammer coming down on a marble counter and shattering the stone into tiny pieces. He remembered the electrical charge coursing through his limbs and the terror he felt at the prospect of never walking again. He thought about how lucky he was.

But Phil's fall triggered more than gratitude for not being crippled. He also reflected on the remarkable kindness of his neighbor Kay, and how she had selflessly given up her day for him. For the first time in years, he thought about how he was living his life. Phil told himself, “I need to get better at making friends.” Not because he might need people like Kay to save him in the future, but because he wanted to become more like Kay.

Not all of us require a violent life-threatening knock on the head to change our behavior. It only seems that way.

This is a book about adult behavioral change. Why are we so bad at it? How do we get better at it? How do we choose what to change? How do we make others appreciate that we've changed? How can we strengthen our resolve to wrestle with the timeless, omnipresent challenge any successful person must stare down—becoming the person we want to be?

To answer these questions, I'll begin by focusing on the triggers in our environment. Their impact is profound.

A trigger is any stimulus that reshapes our thoughts and actions. In every waking hour we are being triggered by people, events, and circumstances that have the potential to change us. These triggers appear suddenly and unexpectedly. They can be major moments, like Phil's concussion, or as minor as a paper cut. They can be pleasant, like a teacher's praise that elevates our discipline and ambition—and turns our life around 180 degrees. Or they can be counterproductive, like an ice-cream cone that tempts us off our diet or peer pressure that confuses us into doing something we know is wrong. They can stir our competitive instincts, from the common workplace carrot of a bigger paycheck to the annoying sight of a rival outdistancing us. They can drain us, like the news that a loved one is seriously ill or that our company is up for sale. They can be as elemental as the sound of rain triggering a sweet memory.

Triggers are practically infinite in number. Where do they come from? Why do they make us behave against our interests? Why are we oblivious to them? How do we pinpoint the triggering moments that anger us, or throw us off course, or make us feel that all is right in the world—so we can avoid the bad ones, repeat the good ones? How do we make triggers work for us?

Our environment is the most potent triggering mechanism in our lives—and not always for our benefit. We make plans, set goals, and stake our happiness on achieving these goals. But our environment constantly intervenes. The smell of bacon wafts up from the kitchen, and we forget our doctor's advice about lowering our cholesterol. Our colleagues work late every night, so we feel obliged to match their commitment, and miss one of our kid's baseball games, then another, then another. Our phone chirps, and we glance at the glowing screen instead of looking into the eyes of the person we love. This is how our environment triggers undesirable behavior.

Because our environmental factors are so often outside of our control, we may think there is not much we can do about them. We feel like victims of circumstance. Puppets of fate. I don't accept that. Fate is the hand of cards we've been dealt. Choice is how we play the hand.

Despite a hard knock on the head, Phil didn't bend to circumstance. His fate was to fall, hit his head, and recover. His choice was to become a better neighbor.

There's an emotion we're all familiar with hovering over these pages rather than coursing through them. It's not explicit. But that doesn't mean it's less real. It's the feeling of regret. It's implied every time we ask ourselves why we haven't become the person we want to be.

A big part of my research for this book involved asking people the simple question, “What's the biggest behavioral change you've ever made?” The answers run the gamut, but the most poignant ones—guaranteed to raise the emotional temperature in the room—come from people recalling the behavior they should have changed but didn't. They're reflecting on their failure to become the person they wanted to be. And it often overwhelms them with desolate feelings of regret.

We are not like Jane Austen's overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh (from Pride and Prejudice ), who boasts of her natural taste in music, then without a sixteenth note of irony, says, “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.” Unlike Lady Catherine, we feel regret's sharp sting when we reflect on the opportunities squandered, the choices deferred, the efforts not made, the talents never developed in our lives. Usually when it's too late to do much about it.

Regret was definitely in the air when I interviewed Tim, a once-powerful executive producer of a network sports division. Tim's network career ended prematurely when he was in his mid-forties because he didn't get along with his superiors. A decade later, in his mid-fifties, Tim was getting by with consulting jobs. He still had an expertise that companies needed. But he would never find the stable executive position he once had. He has a reputation: doesn't play well with others.

Tim has had years to confront the reasons for this reputation. But he never articulated them until the day his daughter asked for fatherly advice before she started her first TV job.

“I told her the greatest virtue is patience,” Tim said. “You're operating in a business where everyone's looking at the clock. A show starts and ends precisely at a given time. The control booth screens display everything in hundredths of a second. And it never stops. There's always another show to do. The clock is always ticking. This creates an incredible sense of urgency in everyone. But if you're in charge, it also tests your patience. You want everything done now, or even sooner. You become very demanding, and when you don't get what you want, you can get frustrated and angry. You start treating people as the enemy. They're not only disappointing you but making you look bad. And then you get angry.”

That was a triggering moment for Tim. Until he said it he hadn't realized how much his professional impatience was influenced by a savage network TV environment—and how it had seeped into other parts of his life.

He explained: “I saw that I'm the kind of guy who emails a friend and gets mad if I don't hear back within the hour. Then I start harassing that friend for ignoring me. Basically, I'm treating my friends the way I used to treat production assistants. It's how I face the world. That's no way to live.”

Tim needed an intimate father-daughter encounter to trigger an insight that fed the powerful feeling of regret. “If I could change anything about my life,” he concluded, “I'd be more patient.”

Regret is the emotion we experience when we assess our present circumstances and reconsider how we got here. We replay what we actually did against what we should have done—and find ourselves wanting in some way. Regret can hurt.

For such a penetrating and wounding emotion, regret doesn't get much respect. We treat it as a benign factor, something to deny or rationalize away. We tell ourselves, “I've made stupid choices but they've made me who I am today. Lamenting the past is a waste of time. I learned my lesson. Let's move on.” That's one way of looking at regret—if only as a form of self-protection from the pain of knowing we missed out. We're comforted by the fact that no one is immune to regret (we're not alone) and that time heals all wounds (the only thing worse than experiencing pain is not knowing if and when the pain will go away).

I want to suggest a different attitude, namely embracing regret (although not too tightly or for too long). The pain that comes with regret should be mandatory, not something to be shooed away like an annoying pet. When we make bad choices and fail ourselves or hurt the people we love, we should feel pain. That pain can be motivating and in the best sense, triggering—a reminder that maybe we messed up but we can do better. It's one of the most powerful feelings guiding us to change.

If I do my job properly here and you do your part, two things will happen: 1) you will move closer to becoming the person you want to be and 2) you'll have less regret.

Shall we get started?