Make it Harder to Do the Wrong Thing

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You enjoyed a big dinner just an hour or two ago, and you’re now comfortably watching your favorite TV show when you hear a jar of deliciously salty nuts in the pantry calling your name. You certainly don’t need the extra salt or the extra calories, so you try as hard as you can not to listen. But it’s no use. Your intelligent guidance is simply no match for the lure of a yummy snack. Yup, as usual, the nuts win.

A fundamental principle of following through

But wait. There’s still a way to give your good intention more control over what happens next by applying this fundamental principle of following through: The harder it is – the less convenient it is – to do the wrong thing, the less likely you are to do it. 

Here’s what to do:

  1. Go ahead and get the jar of nuts.
  2. Open the jar, take a smaller portion than you want – a smaller portion than you think it will take to satisfy you — and then put the jar back where it came from.
  3. When you’re finished eating everything you took, wait for as long as you can before taking more.
  4. If/when you can no longer resist the urge to eat more, again, take a smaller portion than you want, and put the jar back where it came from.
  5. Repeat this as often as necessary until the urge to eat more is no match for the inconvenience of actually getting more.

Look for the sweet spot

Whenever you have an urge to do something that you don’t intend to do, it’s worth experimenting with ways to make it harder for you to do the wrong thing. The trick, of course, is to find the “sweet spot,” that is, to make it hard enough to violate your intention without making it so hard – so inconvenient — that you’ll quit making it hard!

Using the example above, if you could agree to never have salty nuts in your house, you would obviously make it nearly impossible for you to do the wrong thing. However, if that’s just a step too far, you’d run the risk of completely giving up on making it hard enough to do the wrong thing.    

You can learn more about making it harder to do the wrong thing in the lesson on Willpower Leveraging in the Follow Through Strategies course, which is available to members enrolled in the Follow Through Master Program.