Have you preloaded your own operating instructions for 2025?
One core element of establishing a new set of habits is having (a) formula(s) you can use as a launch pad to help you take your first few steps as well as a recovery plan to get you back on track after you have (inevitably eventually) been thrown off course.
七転八起 (しちてんはっき / Fall seven times, stand up eight.) – “Shichiten hakki” (also “Shichi korobi hachi oki”) is a famous Buddhist phrase associated with persistence in the face of challenges and failure. After you begin pursuing something purposeful, you inevitably encounter moments when all hell breaks loose and it is natural and probably even necessary to fall or jump off the horse while you get things back in order. After that, it is natural to wander around in the wilderness for a while because you have lost touch with the experience of pursuing that purpose. Luckily, if you THEN get back on the horse and restart your journey, your commitment to that purpose often becomes even more resilient. If you do this enough times, you are more likely to eventually succeed in creating a new habit that contributes to success in similar situations in the future.
In the early 2000s, when Andrea Konuma and I were brought in to help a large Tokyo IT firm build a culture that consciously integrated well-being with performance, we provided the employees with a schematic we called RAFT (routines, anchors, frames and triggers) to help people build their own formula for creating successes in the midst of an increasingly crazy and demanding world of work. After trying various ways to help the “organization” improve, we realized that the fastest way to help the organization improve might be helping the individual employees take ownership of the improvements. I’ve written about this in a post titled “Who really controls employee experience.”
Through personal reflection and research, we realized that one of the biggest barriers to improving things was “remembering” to do things required to support those improvements. We designed the RAFT model as an “intentionality” launch pad the employees could use to start developing new habits and/or get back up and start working on those habits again when circumstances had thrown them off course.
Recently, I added ENGAGE to the RAFT formula to produce a variation called AFTER (ANCHOR – FRAME – TRIGGER – ENGAGE – ROUTINIZE) This variation places ANCHORS on the front end. This works better for me because I seem to need to clarify my sense of purpose before I start on the other steps.
ANCHORING helps us remember WHY we want to do something.
FRAMING helps us look at things from a useful perspective.
TRIGGERING helps us induce mental and physical states associated with the right actions.
ENGAGING is the process of creating the mental momentum to act.
ROUTINIZING is making conscious choices to schedule new actions to ensure we repeat an action enough times to create muscle memory around it.
Some people may prefer to use the nominal forms (ANCHORS, FRAMES, etc.), while others may prefer the verbal forms (ANCHOR/ANCHORING, FRAME/FRAMING, etc).
We also noticed that for different people, different elements of RAFT or AFTER are more useful. For example, in my case, I tend to start with ANCHORS, then progress to FRAMES and TRIGGERS. In contrast, some of our participants found that all they really needed to focus on was TRIGGERS. Some also found that the AFT part of the formula wasn’t particularly useful, but they experienced more transformational change when they established the right ROUTINES combined with some sort strategy to help themselves remember those ROUTINES.
My sense is that these details should be decided by each individual, but I believe that some combination of the AFTER elements will be useful for almost anyone trying to initiate a transformation requiring new behavior.
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Below are a few examples of how I have used anchoring, framing, triggering to help me be at my best in various contexts over the years:
Anchoring – By anchoring I mean remembering what is truly resonant and important to you. In a life full of distractions, unpredictable demands from others and challenges that require persistent effort, it can be easy to get lost along the way or give up on achieving something that it is important for you to achieve. When you start to feel as though you are drifting from task to task rather than moving with intention this is a great time to anchor your actions to the people, things and ideas you care about. Your anchor may be a value. I often come back to the value of “growth” as an anchor that helps me see the meaning in the coming day, even when that day is full of challenges. Your anchor may be a specific person or people whose interest you serve.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my family is my primary anchor. Considering how my actions for the next day or next year will serve the interests of my wife and sons helps me decide which of my actions are higher and lower priority. This has been especially true for me as a consultant. At various times, my work has entailed spending a lot of time away from them. All that time on the road has at times been tiring or even depressing, but thinking about how my work has enabled me to provide a home, food and resources to support their quality of life and growth helped me to remember that apart from the value I hopefully add for my colleagues and clients, I work quite simply to serve my family. Realizing that my family is my anchor has also helped me make career choices that didn’t necessarily serve my professional success. I once stepped away from a very successful and growing business and moved my family to a totally new location, so that I could spend more time with my sons and wife in an environment that I felt would provide more happiness for all of us. My family and I paid a significant financial price for the choice. There is a reason why we are often told to “make hay while the sun shines.” Still, the choice to prioritize time with family over time with clients and colleagues also enabled me to be truly present with my sons and wife in a way that I hadn’t been for many years. I look back at this one of the most meaningful periods in my life as a parent.
Framing – By framing, I mean articulating a perspective that gives clarity and shape to the decisions and actions you’ll need to make that day. I sometimes frame my day with a statement that clarifies what I should and should not focus on or do. Before a day of consulting or facilitating I often tell myself “My role today is to listen to people’s stories rather than telling my own,” or “Even if the people I am working with become agitated or distracted, I will remain calm, focused and curious.” On other days when I see my role as being more of a thought leader or teacher, I spend some time reflecting on specific bits of research or experience that I could share to provide a useful perspective to those I’m working with.
Framing can also take the shape of a question that guides my attention to a goal and the path to that goal, such as “What do I want my customer to be thinking and feeling at the end of the meeting?” or “What opportunities will I have to cue a breakthrough in the discussion?” Reflecting on these kinds of framing statements and questions often enables me to be more focused on what is happening within and around me and how to keep things moving toward my desired outcome for the day.
Triggering – While framing is about cuing your attention and thinking, triggering is about cuing mental and physical states that are conducive to success. When I was a competitive tennis player, I happened upon a novel way of getting myself ready to serve. Through many years of practice, I had developed the ability to hit several different serves with different speeds, spins and angles. I had also learned through many years of experience that it was very difficult to consciously control the physical techniques involved in producing these different serves. These serves seemed to just happen automatically under certain mental and physical conditions. What I needed was a way to trigger those conditions so that these serves would happen more often.
Through experimentation and repetition, I eventually discovered a combination of physical and mental routines that increased the likelihood of great serves. The first was a fairly common discovery. I needed to relax and let go of as much physical tension as possible so that I could create more whip. Closing my eyes and taking a deep breath triggered this. Next, I needed to create intentionality around what kind of serve I was going to hit. Through a process of trial and error with imagery, a mental routine emerged that enabled me to have confidence that I could produce the right serve at the right time. I found that if I waited for a moment with my eyes closed an arrow would emerge in my mind. The vector of the arrow corresponded roughly with the spin and placement of the serve. Rather than trying to physically control these factors, I just waited calmly for an arrow to appear. Then, without worrying about the physical details of producing that serve, I hit the serve that I had mentally associated with that arrow. Taking a deep breath, closing my eyes and waiting for the arrow to appear increased my sense of calm and it also led to better service selection. This set of physical and mental routines triggered successful serving for me.
In my work as a consultant, I also use triggering techniques to prepare myself mentally and physically to take the right actions during a day with colleagues and clients. As I did when serving, I use deep breathing to cue a relatively relaxed physical state that is easier to maintain throughout the day, helping me to stay calm and focused on the people I am with and what we are trying to achieve. I also often create a mental roadmap as a triggering device that is somewhat analogous to the arrows I used to trigger the right kind of serve. When I start the day by creating a roadmap, I don’t have to worry much about forcing the day toward the desired destination. When I encounter a certain milestone during a conversation or routine, that milestone reminds me of what comes next so that I can step back for a moment and sense where to go next in order to move things in toward the desired destination.
You can use different triggers to induce different physical and mental states depending on the situation and goal. For example, during graduate school I did a lot of the research and writing for my thesis in a specific coffee shop. At some point, I realized that sitting in that coffee shop made it easier for me to focus. I had spent so much time reading and writing there that I had come to associate coffee shops in general but that chain in particular with reading and writing. As a mobile professional, this is a pretty handy association (and a pretty solid business strategy for a coffee chain as well). Wherever I go in the world when I feel a need to sit and focus, I can usually find one of this chain’s shops or a similar shop where I find it easy to sit down and get something done.
When I have the disciple to use them, my Anchors, Frames and Triggers help me remember
- why I am doing what I am doing (or why I should do something else instead)
- what perspective (POV) will be most conducive to making the kind of contribution I want to make, and
- what emotional, mental and physical states have enabled me to make similar contributions in the past.
Once I have remembered these things, it is much easier to figure out what first steps I can take to ENGAGE with the people around me to do what we need to do.
Over a series of repetitions, I am then able to reflect on the specific factors or elements (usually variations on the 5 Ws and H) and construct a ROUTINIZED formula I can go back to when needed to reawaken the (physical, mental and emotional) muscle memory I have built up around success in that area.
Constructing and maintaining a RAFT or AFTER formula requires mental effort before and after the moments of truth that sometimes determine success or failure for me. At times the process is quite painful and it is almost always “disorienting” before it becomes “orienting.”
What has been quite powerful for me, though, has been that the effort I put into ideation, experience and reflection before and after moments of performance has often made the moments of performance themselves feel surprisingly effortless. It has also occasionally helped me achieve things together with others that would not have been possible if I wasn’t in the right state of mind and body. It has been a source of great satisfaction when I have occasionally heard from a friend, colleague or client that the experience we created together was powerful for them as well.
As predicted by the “Shichiten hakki” philosophy, there have been times when I have fallen off the horse or felt completely lost in the wilderness. Luckily, in many of those cases, I have been able to stand up and find my bearings again by going back and finding the RAFT I built together with Andrea and our clients over 20 years ago.
© Dana Cogan, 2024-25, all rights reserved.