Why you struggle to make positive change even when you work hard for it

Has this ever happened to you?

You went on a course your company provided - communication skills, maybe, or a management training. You wrote down lots of frameworks that seemed useful. Then you went back to work, tried one of them out, and it felt artificial. You understood the theory perfectly well, but you couldn’t do it. And slowly, you forgot what you had learnt.

Why is it so hard to take on a new behaviour and keep it, when facts are so much easier to remember?

The flute masterclass that explained it
 

I recently attended a series of masterclasses with the flute professor I study with - and the penny dropped.

The same problem - how to learn a new behaviour and make it stick - exists in music. Learning an instrument is like learning an extremely complex new behaviour.

In the class, we learnt about breathing: How the lungs, the ribs and the diaphragm work together when we breathe in and out. Most of us have no idea how any of this is happening, or how it feels.

So when a flute student is told “take a big breath”, with no awareness of the mechanism, they just force air in. And they probably get a thumbs up from their teacher - “Well done for trying.”

Does that work? Do they learn to breathe better? No. Because they have not developed any awareness of what their body is actually doing.

My professor speeds this up with anatomical explanations and demonstrations. But he knows he has to be patient, and he often has to wait for the student to develop the awareness on their own. He said something that stayed with me: “Teaching is a game of patience.”

Why the education system lets us skip this

In the system of teacher and student, the student expects a reward. “Well done for practising that faster” or “Well done for using the technique.”

Awareness does not work that way. How are you breathing right now? How does it feel? Your teacher cannot see the answer and they cannot measure it. So they cannot mark it.

Which means a student can go all the way through their education without ever developing awareness of their own behaviour.

This is not just music. It happens any time you learn a new behaviour.

Take speaking with more authority. You can follow someone’s advice, use the phrases they gave you, speak a bit louder. And someone will say - “Nice, I like that.” But will it feel like you? And will you still remember to do it in six months?

Probably not. Not unless you know what you naturally tend to do, and why the new way works.

The reward system trains us to tick boxes - but real change is slower than that. You have to understand your own behaviour first, before you change anything.

Two things you need, to learn a new behaviour

1. Awareness. What are you actually doing right now, and how does it feel from the inside?

2. Knowledge. Why does the new behaviour work? What is the mechanism or science behind it?

The order matters. Knowledge without awareness doesn’t work. You cannot adapt something to fit you if you do not know where you are starting from.

So how do you develop awareness?

How to watch yourself without judging yourself
 

You may feel you already observe and criticise yourself far too much - especially if you are someone who replays meetings in their head.

This is different. You are collecting information here, the way you would collect data before changing a process - you don’t judge.

Three ways to do it:

Record yourself. Take one Teams call and listen back to two minutes of it. You will hear things you normally don’t hear while you are in it.

Notice your body. How does your voice sound? What are your hands doing? Do you breathe before you speak?

Ask specific questions for feedback. Not “how did I do?” Something like: “When I made that point, what did you notice about how I said it?”

Not everything you notice will be something you want to change. But the more aware you are, the more decisions you can make on what you want to change and what you want to keep.

Let’s try this on real advice

Say you have been told: you need to speak up more in meetings.

Step 1: What do you actually do?
 

That’s the step of awareness.

Watch yourself for one meeting, to find out what you usually tend to do.

Here is what you might notice. You have something to say, you formulate it in your head, then you check it. Is it worth interrupting for? Is it fully thought through?

By the time it passes all of your checks, the conversation has moved on, or somebody else mentioned a similar version already.

Now look at why you check your ideas before you share them. Perhaps at some point, a half-finished comment meant that someone doubted you or asked a challenging follow up question. If you suspect a room already doesn’t take you seriously, you really do not want to hand them an unfinished thought.

So when you reflect on this, you realise you are ‘editing’ your thoughts - that’s the root cause of why you are quiet in the meeting.

Step 2: Why does speaking up actually work?

That’s the step of understanding the science and mechanism. Does it work, and why?

Researchers at Binghamton University studied what makes people in small groups get seen as leaders. They measured how intelligent people were, what their personalities were like, and how much time each person spent talking.

The thing that predicted who was seen as the leader was talking time, not the quality of what was said. (I have linked the research below)

One thing to note: This was about small groups meeting for the first time. Over months, groups do work out who is worth listening to, and people who talk a lot without saying much lose some of their credibility.

But it explains this advice. When you ‘edit’ your thoughts, you speak less often. And that’s what people are assessing, in order to conclude whom to follow in a group.

Step 3: Your personal way of implementation

“Speak up more” by itself is not going to work - because your real problem is in the process of editing your thoughts.

Your solution: redefine at what point you think is an idea is ready to share.

Go early with something small, e.g. a question, a summary of what has been said so far. Or say that it is coming. “I have a view on this, give me a minute to put it together.” Now your silence reads as thinking rather than absence.

And this is why it will stick. When you know why something works, you can build a version that fits you - and that’s the version you will keep using.

Where do you find the why?

Sometimes there is research or science-based explanations, to help you understand why the new behaviour works.

When there is no research, work it out from someone real. Pick a person in your organisation who has the effect you want. Watch them: What are they doing, and why does it work in that particular room? Sometimes also a good course can hand you the mechanism.

But: Nobody can create the awareness for you. The most anyone / any course can do is ask you the right questions until you find it yourself.

Before your next meeting

Since the masterclass, I know how my own breathing feels. I breathe more calmly and fully. Which means I can play longer phrases without breaking them up.

Nobody could have given me that - I had to feel it.

Here is your next step: Pick the one piece of feedback you keep hearing. This week, change nothing. Just watch what you actually do in that moment, and write down one line about why you think you do it.

That’s where the change starts.

PS. The 30-Day Challenge works exactly the way this blog describes. It does not hand you a list of phrases to copy. Each day asks you a question about what you are already doing, and then shows you the mechanism, so you can build your own version of it. Click here to find out more.

PPS. The research on talking time as a predictor to being selected as a leader is linked here.