It’s amazing how much insight and inspiration can come from babies, as I was reminded after visiting my seven week-old nephew yesterday.
Most of time we were there we listened to “the baby’s music” which is supposed to make him happy (I’m a baby-newbie so forgive me if I’m embarrassing myself), but it made the rest of us pretty chipper too. It sounds like circus music: jaunty and jingly with a lot of irreverent little flourishes.
We laughed about it but we also couldn’t help bouncing and whistling along like goofballs.
I have no idea what effect the music has on the baby — I’m pretty sure nobody does, exactly — but I do know the effect we had on the baby, via the effect the music had on us. All of our playful behaviour affected by the music creates a positive environment of positive energy and contagious smiles.
I don’t presume to know anything about infant development, but think about it as an analogy for nurturing growth and positive change in the grown-up world.
Sometimes we try to change others directly without changing our own behaviour (hat tip @jamesshelley). Without changing ourselves, we might keep sending signals that trigger precisely those behaviours in others we want to change!
I’m thinking this way after reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip & Dan Heath. They astutely observe that, “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” Good people can do bad things and smart people can do stupid things when we’re surrounded by signals that induce that behaviour. By changing those signals, our behaviour follows.
As the Heaths say, change requires tweaking the environment and building habits before “rallying the herd.”
For more sustainable change and growth we need to address the environmental factors that affect everyone’s behaviour, especially our own.
Then we get into cycles of mutual reinforcement that become more resilient and genuine — like the way our cooing and goofy faces make babies smile and their smiles make us even happier in return…
[Note: I'm not always this mushy (must be leftover baby effects). Don't be sad if I follow this up with a pessimistic post about knowing whether our changes are the right changes...]
Consider the changes we hope to see happen. Forget how right we are and what’s wrong with others. Start by turning the dial that will create that change in yourself.
