Welcome to another issue of the Missionary Discipleship Newsletter. In this edition, Marc Cardaronella, Director of Catechesis and Faith Formation for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, talks about three of the biggest lessons he and others in his diocese have learned as they try to form missionary disciples there. In the short audio above, he talks about three lessons:
1) The importance of building a capacity of leaders who can help form missionary disciples. In other words, it takes missionary disciples to make missionary disciples.
2) The importance of doing this one person at a time, in small groups, while getting quick wins.
3) The importance and magnitude of creating a shift in culture. This bullet point is what I’m going to concentrate the rest of the way.
Marc does an excellent job of summarizing each of his points. Please listen when you have a chance. I’m a firm believer that we can always learn from other people’s lessons.
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As we know, metanoia means to move beyond our present mindset, beyond our present way of seeing things, which is another way of saying we have to change our minds, hearts, actions and lives in response to the Gospel.
Change. Not a word that many people like. In fact, Mark Twain hilariously said it this way: “The only person who likes change is a baby with a wet diaper.”
In order to become missionary disciples and to invite others to become missionary disciples, we have to change. They have to change. To become a follower of Christ means change, where we decrease and He increases.
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To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
— Cardinal John Henry Newman
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Change, as I’ve indicated, is not easy.
So, with all that in mind, I wanted to share the following thoughts below based on an excellent book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I hope the advice below helps stimulate your minds and is helpful in instituting changes in your lives or in the lives of your family members. I’ve pointed out already that metanoia is required in order to become a missionary disciple. What I’ve shared below is primarily aimed for people who want to make changes at their work, when your work is all about trying to help form missionary disciples. As you may know, if you work for the church, instituting any kind of big change in mindsets or hearts can seem incredibly daunting or impossible, like herding cats.
But change is always possible because nothing is impossible for God.
Obviously, prayer is a huge priority when you’re hoping for change. We always have to rely on the God and the Holy Spirit. So pray, pray, pray! And, when you have time, read below to expand your minds for ways that may be helpful in helping you to institute change at your work or among your families.
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— From a blog post by Itamar Goldminz
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The Rider is the rational, analytical part of our brain. Its strengths are “the ability to think long-term, to plan, to think beyond the moment.” The Rider is “a visionary…willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs…a clever tactician.” On the other hand, the Rider “loves to contemplate and analyze,” has “limited reserves of strength,” and tends towards “paralysis in the face of ambiguity and choice, and … relentless focus on problems rather than solutions.” Crucially, “the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant…(that)…anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose.”
The Elephant is the emotional and instinctive part of the human brain. “It’s lazy and skittish, often looking for the quick payoff (ice cream cone) over the long-term payoff (being thin).” The Elephant prefers the comfort and security of a well-trodden path, even if a new path is leads to a better outcome. But, the Heaths are quick to point out, “the Elephant also has enormous strengths…love and compassion and sympathy and loyalty. That fierce instinct you have to protect your kids against harm—that’s the Elephant”; and “the Elephant is the one who gets things done.” “[Change] requires the energy and drive of the Elephant.”
The Path is the surrounding environment, the context in which the Rider and the Elephant operate. Often change is hard, not because people—both rationally and emotionally—don’t want to make a change, but because the environment makes change hard, if not impossible. (The gifts of chocolate truffles and a gingerbread house stuffed with candies that arrived in the mail yesterday are just two small cobblestones in the Path that’s leading to that additional five pounds by mid-January.)
—From a blog posting called MassCommons
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If you’re contemplating a change, the Elephant is the one who gets things done. To make progress toward a goal, whether it’s noble or crass, requires the energy and drive of the Elephant. And this strength is the mirror image of the Rider’s great weakness: spinning his wheels. The Rider tends to over analyze and overthink things.
The Rider provides the planning and direction, and the Elephant provides the energy.
When the Elephant really wants something, the Rider can be trusted to find rationalizations for it.
The Rider has his own issues. He’s a navel-gazer, an analyzer, a wheel-spinner. If the Rider isn’t sure exactly what direction to go, he tends to lead the Elephant in circles.
To change behavior, you’ve got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path. If you can do all three at once, dramatic change can happen
Self-control is an exhaustible resource. We burn up self-control in a wide variety of situations: managing the impression we’re making on others; coping with fears; controlling our spending.
When people try to change things, they’re usually tinkering with behaviors that have become automatic, and changing those behaviors requires careful supervision by the Rider. The bigger the change you’re suggesting, the more it will sap people’s self-control. And when people exhaust their self-control, what they’re exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration or failure. In other words, they’re exhausting precisely the mental muscles needed to make a big change.
Knowledge does not change behavior. We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors.
Big problem, small solution. This is a theme you will see again and again. Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.
“What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?”
“Bad is stronger than good.”
Exhibit A: People who were shown photos of bad and good events spent longer viewing the bad ones.
Exhibit B: When people learn bad stuff about someone else, it’s stickier than good stuff.
People pay closer attention to the bad stuff, reflect on it more, remember it longer, and weigh it more heavily in assessing the person overall.
When your kids are making A’s and B’s, you don’t think much about their grades. But when they make a D or an F, you spring into action. It’s weird when you think about, isn’t it?
Decisions are the Rider’s turf, and because they require careful supervision and self-control, they tax the Rider’s strength. The more choices the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets.
To spark movement in a new direction, you need to provide crystal-clear guidance.
We want a goal that can be tackled in months or years, not decades. We want what we might call a destination postcard — a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible.
In almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.
Positive illusion: Our brains are positive illusion factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others.
Positive emotions are designed to “broaden and build” our repertoire of thoughts and actions. Joy, for example, makes us want to play. Play doesn’t have a script, it broadens the kinds of things we consider doing. We become willing to fool around, to explore or invent new activities. And because joy encourages us to play, we are building resources and skills.
The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.
People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one.
One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought. That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized.
If you’re leading a change effort, you better start looking for those first two stamps to put on your team’s cards. Rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.
A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar.
What good is a 5-minute session of cleaning? Not much. It gets you moving, though, and that’s the hardest part. Starting an unpleasant task is always worse than continuing it. So once you start cleaning house, chances are you won’t stop at 5 minutes.
Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure. (That’s why it’s so clumsy when people instinctively reach for “incentives” to change other people’s behavior.) So the question is this: How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?
Identity is going to play a role in nearly every change situation. Even yours.
When you think about the people whose behavior needs to change, ask yourself whether they would agree with this statement: “I aspire to be the kind of person who would make this change.” If their answer is yes, that’s an enormous factor in your favor. If their answer is no, then you’ll have to work hard to show them that they should aspire to a different self-image.
Three identity questions:
- Who am I?
- What kind of situation is this?
- What would someone like me do in this situation?
The Elephant really, really hates to fail. This presents a difficulty for you when you are trying to change or when you’re trying to lead change. You know that you or your audience will fail, and you know that the failure will trigger the “flight” instinct. How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road? The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure — not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route. This notion takes us into a fascinating area of research that is likely to change the way you view the world.
People who have a growth mindset believe that abilities are like muscles — they can be built up with practice. With concerted effort, you can make yourself better at writing or managing or listening to your spouse. With a growth mindset, you tend to accept more challenges despite the risk of failure.
You’re more inclined to accept criticism, because ultimately it makes you better. You may not be as good as others right now, but you’re thinking long-term, in a tortoise-versus-hare kind of way.
A growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill: “I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project!” “I could tell you listened to your coach’s comments; you really had your elbow under those jump shots today.”
Students were reminded that “Everything is hard before it is easy,” and that they should never give up because they didn’t master something immediately.
To create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.
Here’s the paradox of the growth mindset: Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down, but throughout, we’ll get better, and we’ll succeed in the end. The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that’s critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.
The teams who failed made the mistake of trying to “get it right on the first try” and were motivated by the chance to “perform, to shine, or to execute perfectly.” But of course no one “shines” on the first few tries; this mindset set the teams up for failure. By contrast, the successful teams focused on learning. They didn’t assume that mastery would come quickly, and they anticipated that they’d face challenges. In the end, they were the ones who were more likely to get it right.
Notice how many times people have tweaked the environment to shape your behavior.
Example: Robby and Kent who frequently arrive late and then sit in the back of the room:
Shape the Path.
1. Tweak the environment. Lock the door when the bell rings so latecomers are stuck in the hallway.
2. Build habits. Start having a daily quiz with one or two quick questions at the beginning of every class. If Robby and Kent aren’t present to take the quiz, they’ll fail.
3. Rally the herd. Post a class “on-time” record on the wall. Maybe when Robby and Kent see that they’re the only students violating the social norm to be on time, they’ll change their ways.
4. Build habits. Set a policy that the last student in his or her seat every day will be asked to answer the first question.
5. Rally the herd. Find a way to let Robby and Kent know that the other students dislike what they’re doing (as they almost certainly do). Often troublemakers have the illusion that their defiant behavior makes them folk heroes. They can be deflated quickly by frank peer feedback.
6. Tweak the environment. Do what Bart Millar actually did: He bought a used couch and put it right at the front of the classroom. It was immediately obvious that this couch was the cool place to sit; students could slouch and relax instead of sitting at a dorky desk. Suddenly Robby and Kent started getting to class early every day so they could “get a good seat.” They were volunteering to sit at the front of the classroom. Genius.
Leaders had to reshape the Path consciously. With some simple tweaks to the environment, suddenly the right behaviors emerged. It wasn’t the people who changed; it was the situation. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
Design an environment in which undesired behaviors are made not only harder but impossible.
A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.”
A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”
— From a blog posting by Derek Sivers
Marc Cardaronella on Lessons Learned and Instituting Change in His Diocese Regarding Missionary Discipleship