It has been said that Choice Theory is easy to understand, but hard to do. What do you think? And if this is true, what makes it so hard?
There’s good news in Choice Theory, like the fact that it means –
+ I no longer have to control everyone around me.
+ I can talk to people in a way that helps us work through a problem and stay connected in the process.
+ I can self-evaluate my own behavior and make a new plan for the future.
So what makes these three “good news” pieces of Choice Theory hard to do? Consider the following –
+ I no longer have to control everyone around me.
This Choice Theory truism should come as a relief, and when you first hear it in a workshop setting or read it in a book, it does feel like a relief. Then you drive home after the workshop or head to your classroom the following day and suddenly it feels more like a restriction than a relief. Control, we come to realize, isn’t something from which we really want to be relieved. Of course, it’s more about the feeling of control, since Choice Theory reminds us the only person we can control is ourselves. This feeling of control is more than alluring, though; it can become a part of our identity.
It is hard to let go of something that means as much to us as being in control, even if it is pseudo-control. It is hard, too, if we don’t yet feel skilled in how to live without controlling others. The skill lies in identifying our own needs and boundaries and then living a caring, connecting life within them.
+ I can talk to people in a way that helps us work through a problem and stay connected in the process.
It is easy for us to agree that using the Caring Habits (accepting, trusting, listening, encouraging, supporting, respecting, and negotiating differences) is better than using the Deadly Habits (criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and rewarding to manipulate) when it comes to how we relate to others, but it is still hard to do. One of the things that is hard is to really listen, to really focus on understanding what your child, your student, your spouse, or your colleague is saying. We listen to reply, rather than listening to understand. As a result, we are quick to tell a child or student what to do, rather than helping them arrive at and verbalize a plan. Maybe a desire for expediency urges us to tell and direct her/his behavior; maybe it is a way to meet our own need for influence and power. Whatever the case, it is hard to focus on asking good questions, rather than telling what we think are good answers.
+ I can self-evaluate my own behavior and make a new plan for the future.
For me, this is one of Glasser’s most important contributions to the field of mental health, that being that people can learn to monitor their own psychological health and make choices to maintain or improve it. It is hard, though, to escape the gravitational pull of stimulus-response thinking. Stimulus-response is an outside-in world. In other words, we are what the circumstances around us make us. There is a strong appeal to this way of thinking because somehow we are drawn to being the victim. Somehow there is something need-satisfying in victimhood.
Choice Theory is about an inside-out world in which people choose their course of action and choose their responses to circumstances, whatever they may be. Living in an inside-out world means recognizing our own responsibility for our thinking and our actions. This, you may have noticed, is hard to do.
It is easy to blame and to criticize, especially when we do it silently and resentfully, all the while building a case for our rightness. It is harder to look into our own psychological mirror and admit that we are criticizing or blaming to try and get what we want. It is harder to choose to be positive and caring, regardless of what people do in return.
It is hard to escape
the gravitational pull
of stimulus-response thinking.
It is hard to switch from a stimulus-response approach to a Choice Theory approach to life. Glasser felt that it took him two years to make the switch. I think it is taking longer for me. In fact, I think I think I will always need to stay intentional about this switch. More and more I come into an awareness of the ways in which I choose irresponsible misery, rather than responsible joy, and I want to change that. If a Choice Theory approach is taking longer for you, I want to encourage you to stay on the journey. Insights will continue to dawn in your thinking; breakthroughs will emerge in your experience. Resist the pull of stimulus-response.
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I finished the Anatomy of Peace book, by The Arbinger Institute. I can very much recommend it. It describes a Choice Theory approach to life from a unique angle that even experienced choice theorists will benefit from. Again, I want to thank my friends at Livingstone Adventist Academy for sharing the book with me.
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I’ve recently been alerted to the message of Michele Borba and her work surrounding the topic of empathy. Have you heard of her? Looks very good to me so far. More on her work later.
The Better Plan . . 
Jim: I have always thought that stimulus-response thinking is so abundant in the culture (AND appears so common “sensical” if we sit on a hot stove!) that learning choice theory in the thinking component requires laying down new pathways in the brain in the body physiology component before the doing component really emerges with intensity.
But then……..
I think you are on to something with your “new pathways” theory.
My spine surgeon and chronic pain specialist friend, Dave Hanscom, would agree. His book, Back in Control, is such a great “choice theory” book, even though he doesn’t claim choice theory expertise.
Hi JIm, not really my theory. I think I read an article in the New York Times about this years ago and, at the time, I was instructing in Ireland and discussed it with my classes there. It made sense to all of us—that one has to lay down new pathways in order to establish habituated, organized behaviors, I would be curious to learn more about the immediate, creative reorganization vs the organized, habituated pathways: how does the process happen? It helped us all to understand how we have to practice thinking and doing Control Theory; everyone was patient with others as well as with one’s self!!!! Lots of reframing!!!
“It is hard to escape the gravitational pull of stimulus-response thinking.”
Such a profound statement, and I feel that “gravitational pull” is a very appropriate way to describe it. We (as humans) seem fundamentally geared to feel our thoughts/feelings/actions are simply a product of what’s going on in the outside world. Choice theory offers an empowering alternative, and I’m forever grateful for the lessons you’ve bestowed on me through this type of thinking.
I want to live choice theory better, but I am thankful for the changes it has inspired in me. Though I haven’t arrived, I am doing better. It means a great deal to me that you see value in this way of thinking and this way of being.
I know the feeling of a relief to not having to control others anymore. But still it is so hard to let go. The need of control is so strong in us and it is like nobody knows what is best better then me. I meet a lot of people like that and can see my self in that. But of course we know our selfs best, and I can not stand it if someone tries to control me.
I can remember once Bill told me that no control system likes to be controlled by something outside of itself. He said an easy way to understand control theory is to watch a cat!!! They know what they want and they are inventive to get what they want…..and he was smiling. All the time I knew him, I never knew him to have a cat!!!! I think the hardest part is when in order to stay in control in one’s own life is when you live with other(s) who are doing the same and somehow the edges of those lives touch each other, and then it is time for negotiation behaviors. I have noticed people with intense power needs develop competitive behaviors, and people with strong love needs develop accommodating behaviors, aye, and there’s the rub!!!! We are in our Vermont home now and the trees are about to let go to get ready for their winter incarnation; spring always follows so that metaphor helps me sometimes.
“I can remember once Bill told me that no control system likes to be controlled by something outside of itself.”
This is a truth, to be sure! And it has been interesting to me, as I have observed teachers over the years, that those who least like to be controlled by others–say a school policy or principal or some expectation of some sort–are the most likely to want to be controller of others–say their students. How true, too, that negotiation behaviors are of critical importance. Yet, how few of us really have them. I know this is a skill I am still developing.
I know this feeling of a relief when I first started to get to now Choice Theory, but it is so much in us to be in control of our lives and others that it becomes so hard. It´s like nobody knows anything about there own lives that I don´t know better (which is of course not true) but it´s like people think that. It takes a lot of practice to let go and just focus on one own life.
I agree. It is interesting how powerful the pictures (expectations) are that we place in our Quality World picture books. You explain it well when you point out how we can arrive at a way of thinking in which we believe that we know what is best for ourselves and others. We become less and less able to see another’s perspective as we label our own thoughts and pictures as the only ones that are really valid. What brings us, though, to the point where we treasure our rightness over an important relationship with another person?