The Knowing-Doing Gap
People rarely do all that they know how to do. Almost everyone you know, including yourself, has a large gap between their knowledge and the action they take based on that knowledge. In other words, they have a “knowing-doing” gap. An easy example to consider is the perennial problem of weight loss; a person knows how to lose weight, says they really want to, but doesn’t do what they know needs to be done to drive the weight loss. We all know that in its simplest form weight loss is about burning more calories than we consume but even with that knowledge so few people are successful with this particular goal. They very clearly have a knowing-doing gap. This suggests that there is an enormous opportunity for an individual to grow, and deliver greatly improved results, simply by acting more effectively on what they already know. So what holds people back? Why do these gaps exist for 97% of the population?
The educational system is geared towards loading students up with information to create knowledge but an understanding of the mind shines a light on why knowledge alone will not guarantee success. There are two parts to the mind that are interesting to focus on:
The Conscious Mind – this part gathers information, it is the educated or intellectual part that school focuses on.
The Sub-Conscious Mind – this part causes the body to take action and it’s where paradigms reside; it’s the part of the mind that gathers habits of behavior.
Going a little further, we know that a paradigm is an idea fixed in the subconscious mind that causes a person to do something without any conscious thought; it’s like a person’s autopilot. Paradigms are habits that are built from birth into a baby’s mind as it absorbs ideas, based on its environment, through constant repetition. The baby learns how to get its parent’s attention, it learns how to feed, it learns to crawl and then walk and so on. These habits of behavior that constitute the paradigm continue to be built throughout childhood and many of them are passed along from one generation to the next. As people grow older they are usually completely unaware of their paradigm or where it came from. They have a certain way of behaving and acting and they don’t consciously think about it; they just do what they do in the way that they do it. It’s this lack of awareness of their habits, of their paradigm, that holds most people back from fulfilling their true potential.
A person can try to force a change in behavior to change a result, but that’s an intellectual process, a process that occurs in the conscious mind. This change can generate some improvement in results but only in the short term because behavior is habitual and controlled by the paradigm in the subconscious mind. Therefore, in order to create long term, lasting change, the primary cause of the current results, the habitual behavior or paradigm, has to change.
The old ideas in the paradigm have to be replaced by new ideas and that replacement process occurs over a period of time through the continual repetition of the new idea into the subconscious. The paradigm is like a personal thermostat; a person has to change the setting to change the outcome. The setting is changed as the ineffectual ideas in the paradigm are replaced by new, productive ideas. As the change occurs, the gap between knowing and doing reduces and results improve.
As you go through your day today, reflect on how much of your activity is automatic, or habitual, such as cleaning your teeth, going to work, walking the same way to the coffee machine in the office, taking the same train, bus, or car journey every night, and so on, even eating more or less the same food every week. Of course, if we had to consciously think about every little thing we did each day we would be overwhelmed and exhausted. Paradigms save us from mental frazzle but they are also the key to building new, sustainable, awesome results as long as you know how to go about making the change.
If you’re struggling to achieve a result you really desire or conversely, you’ve had tremendous success in changing life long habits, I would love to hear your thoughts.