CHAPTER TWO
Removing Resistance and Triggering Progress

The first rule of personal finance is that it’s not personal and it’s not financial. It’s about your ability to make ten changes and not get too depressed over it.

—JAMES ALTUCHER

I won’t bury the lede here: the love that Transformational Consumers will have or develop for your brand is directly proportional to the degree of HWW change your company helps them make or the incremental beauty, joy, or ease you add to the journey toward their goals.

Think of every Transformational Consumer’s process of pursuing any individual goal as just that: a process, a journey. Depending on the goal or the person, a journey might take a week, 72 days, four years, or a lifetime. All along the journey toward every HWW goal that our intrepid aspirants ever attempt, they will encounter two categories of phenomena: resistance and progress triggers. I often refer to these categories as things that get people stuck (resistance) and unstuck (progress triggers).

By definition, Transformers are the companies that remove resistance and trigger progress at critical moments along the journeys of the people they serve.

Resistance

Resistance includes any and every manner of emotional pushback, decision trap, logistical difficulty, ability hurdle, pain point, friction, or psychological bias that causes people to stumble, get stuck, get frustrated, or flat-out quit along their goal journey. Resistance is the root of the Personal Disruption Conundrum, that sense that people know what they should be doing to change their behavior for the healthier, wealthier, and wiser but can’t seem to make themselves actually do it.

Every field of human behavior studies this resistance, though they all call it something different. Behavioral economists talk about fallacies and biases. Behavioral psychologists talk about the hurdles to habit formation and the hardness of willpower. Product designers and technologists talk about “friction” ¹ or “pain points.” ² Tim Ferriss calls them “failure points.” ³

Psychoanalysts, spiritual teachers, and philosophers talk about how the ego creates “psychological resistance” to our efforts to break dysfunctional patterns and build optimal, new ones. In 1904, Freud himself wrote that “psychoanalytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a reeducation in overcoming internal resistances.” This concept only grew in its centrality to his work. By 1926, he had catalogued five different formats of resistance: repression, transference, gain from illness (secondary gains from dysfunctional behavior), the repression compulsion (repeating difficult, distressing, or traumatic behavior patterns), and self-sabotage—and characterized the work of psychoanalysis as a slow “working-through” all of these types of resistance. ⁴

The creativity guru and modern philosopher Steven Pressfield has written prolifically on what he calls Resistance, with a capital R, noting that it arises in reaction to “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.” In one of several books on how to release Resistance, he first describes it as a universal element of human experience. “We’re wrong if we think we’re the only ones struggling with Resistance,” Pressfield writes. “Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.” ⁵

Pressfield goes so far as to personify Resistance, writing about it as a villain with human-like traits and motives, including one overarching goal. “Resistance,” he writes “aims to kill . . . our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on this earth to give and that no one else has but us.” ⁶ This characterization is decidedly consistent with my personal and professional observations of how Transformational Consumers experience Resistance. Resistance is not futile. Resistance is fatal. In the minds of the Transformational Consumer, across a lifetime of unsuccessfully trying to make desperately desired life and behavior changes, Resistance can extinguish the spark of desire for the healthier, happier, more prosperous, more self-actualized life that these people want. Resistance can kill the dreams, beliefs, and bias toward action that are so elemental to the spirit of people who were once motivated and on a mission to be their highest and best selves and live their highest and best lives.

Being repeatedly stymied from reaching their most desired dreams by Resistance can traumatize people, especially those who run into it over and over again, without finding a way to overcome it, and especially when the dream is something as emotionally and culturally loaded as what you earn or how much you weigh.

In a post on the deep-thought blog Medium titled “How I Learned to Give Dieting the Middle Finger,” the radio journalist Jacquie Fuller shares an extraordinarily common, extraordinarily traumatic experience of Transformational Consumers who have butted up against Resistance to making long-term health changes repeatedly, over a lifetime. This particular experience is so common that it has a name in pop culture: the yo-yo diet.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s and pretty much until the day I walked into The Emily Program, I was the poster child for yo-yo dieting. In the ’80s, I actually ate an AYDS bar (remember those? I didn’t think so.) I brought a lunch of plain tuna on rice cakes to high school for months. In the ’90’s, I took Formula One until my heart felt like it was going to fly out of my chest. Over two decades, I intermittently Weight Watched my way from Exchanges to Points to PointsPlus. I Slim Fasted, South Beached, Atkinsed, Paleoed. I saw holistic nutritionists. I did pretty much everything except that one diet that’s all cookies because that sounded fucking stupid. In addition to the countless diets, lapsed gym memberships littered my past like bodies on a battlefield. (If you could lay them end to end, you’d have two lifetime memberships.) . . .

Dieting. Then not dieting. Then dieting again. Dieting, but wishing I could just eat like everybody else—without counting, weighing, planning, always always thinking about food. I was obsessed with food, but didn’t want to be. I was in a constant state of restriction—declaring the food-villain-du-jour (fat, sugar, gluten) as off-limits, then pretty much falling face-first into a vat of it. I need a t-shirt that says “I spent a near-lifetime sprinkling steamed vegetables with Molly McButter, and all I got was this t-shirt and a general feeling of white hot rage.”

But then Fuller hit a turning point. As she told about the therapists that helped her heal from a lifetime of this Resistance-induced trauma, she wrote,

One of the first assignments given to me in treatment was to eat dessert. Sounds simple enough, but every cell in my body recoiled at the suggestion. It wasn’t until I did this—ate dessert because a licensed, trained psychologist told me to—that I realized it had been years since I’d truly enjoyed dessert. I baked a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies, sat at the table with a glass of milk, and ate them slowly. I felt a veritable parade of emotions march through me—elation, fear, panic, contentment, sadness. I may have cried. And at the end of it, I felt a fullness that was only partly physical. I felt like I didn’t need another cookie. In that moment, or for a long time. Someone had thrown wide-open the once-locked cookie cabinet, and suddenly knowing I could go in there any time I wanted, diminished my desire.

I probably owe [the program] my life. I definitely owe it my joy.

Fuller went on to describe the founder of the program that finally helped her get off the diet roller coaster. In doing so, Fuller explained that the founder was “sketch” and her fashion sense objectionable before adding, “I’d like to kiss her. Like, hard.” She went on: “This program works. (For me.) Despite 10 weeks of insufferable videos, I’ve lost weight with so little suffering, my spouse actually remarked upon it (“I haven’t heard you complain at all.”).” ⁷

When your product, service, or content helps a Transformational Consumer heal from that trauma and (finally) remove impeding Resistance from his or her journey, your brand becomes a Transformer. And the more Resistance you remove, the easier you make progress, and the more pain and friction you remove from the journey, the more love and engagement that person will have for your product or company.

Progress Triggers

Your company can trigger transformational progress in just as many ways as Resistance can impede it. By no means are the following guideposts and examples exhaustive, but I hope they will start to expand the ways you think about companies helping their customers make transformational progress.

Facilitate with Knowledge

I often hear aspiring Transformer companies say they aim to educate their audiences with content marketing that delivers a ton of information about their goals and how to achieve them. My two cents is that information is just data, and there’s no shortage of that in the lives of Transformational Consumers. In fact, at this stage of the Internet, more information always threatens to overwhelm or distract this audience.

Knowledge, however, is information strategically configured and delivered to solve a specific problem or challenge people face. Many Transformer companies have built thriving product lines and brilliant marketing programs around knowledge solutions to HWW problems or challenges.

The Mint Life blog is one of the best examples of such a program, triggering Mint users’ progress toward financial goals like saving money toward a goal and getting out of debt with content that creates aha moments and powers progress. A post titled “The 50/20/30 Rule for Minimalist Budgeting,” for example, helps younger Mint users overcome the frustration with complex budget plans by offering a basic budget outline that assigns 50% of income to expenses, 20% to savings, and 30% to personal lifestyle line items such as dinners out and the like. ⁸

The Mint team credits the blog for the program’s early adoption and continued traffic momentum of over 13 million visitors per month, almost ten years after the blog’s beginnings. ⁹ In an interview with Kissmetrics Blog, Mint’s former lead designer flat-out called it: “Our app didn’t have a high viral coefficient, but we had content that [did].” ¹⁰

This sort of knowledge facilitates customers’ transformational progress by providing clarity and direction for what to do next: the just-right knowledge, in the just-right format, in the just-right time and place in their journeys.

Activate

Products and content can also activate customers who are already very motivated to take a specific, timely action wherever they happen to be on the web or in the world, something the Stanford computer-science professor B. J. Fogg calls “putting a hot trigger in the path.” ¹¹

A push notification to go for a run 30 minutes before the time a customer has logged runs in the past? That’s a hot trigger, placed in the customer’s path. Sending an April 14th email to investors who haven’t yet funded their IRAs, with a link to where they can do so and a reminder that the deadline is less than 24 hours away? That’s putting a hot trigger in the customer’s path.

You can also serve up activation via inspiration. People who are just embarking on a transformational journey (and people who have gotten stuck along the way) can often be reactivated with a spark of inspiration, small or large. On the small side, many companies publish inspirational quotes and mantras on social media channels, primarily because Transformational Consumers love that little kick-start of activation for a long week of entrepreneurial challenges or health/wealth self-discipline.

Content programs that reposition difficult parts of a transformational journey as more fun, beautiful, or enjoyable than they have seemed before can also be activating. Business and financial challenges (debt, diets, etc.), fitness challenges, and healthy recipe programs featuring gorgeously plated meal pics all fit this bill: inspiration-cum-activation.

On the large side, whole content programs, user success stories, and testimonial programs can be crafted with activation as the top-line objective. When the marketing technology vendor Marketo asked me to speak to business audiences around the world about how I’d used their software to grow a blog audience of over ten million people in less than a year, the idea was not just to explain the software’s features. The goal was to inspire people to believe that level of achievement was possible for them and their businesses, too. In delivering these talks, my goal was to help the marketers in the audience become unstuck and inspired with new ideas, beliefs, and yes, ultimately, the software as a tool they could use to execute their own marketing and business goals. (It’s worth noting here that Transformational Consumers frequently look to B2B products and software for help making progress on their wealthy and wise goals).

Persuasive Roles: Tool, Medium, Social Actor

At Stanford, B. J. Fogg also developed a framework for how computers and technology can be used to change how people act and think by serving three “persuasive roles” he deems the Functional Triad: tool, medium, and social actor. ¹² I take this idea even further: this framework suggests how companies in any sector, online or off and even including professional services, food, and consumer packaged goods companies, can think about inserting progress triggers into their customers’ journeys.

Tool. When your brand or company acts as a Tool, you increase your customers’ capability to do things in one of a few ways. ¹³ It might make the behavior they want to do logistically faster, financially cheaper, or physically easier to do. It might lead them through a step-by-step process that eliminates complexity and reduces the number of brain cycles. Or it might perform calculations or measurements that spike your hero-customers’ level of motivation.

Think about your bank’s app or your online investment dashboard. Tools. The software you’d use to organize your small company’s finances or the software your gym uses for you to register for classes? Tools. Think about the organic foods you buy and healthy snacks: also Tools. In fact, most athletic apparel, healthy food, and even things such as finance, fitness, and mindfulness apps that show you just how much money you’ve saved, how many miles you’ve cycled, and how many times you’ve meditated this year also fall within this Tool category.

Medium. As a Medium, your company provides experiences that help create transformation, by helping people learn cause-and-effect relationships, as MyFitnessPal does by helping people learn which foods and eating habits create weight gain and which do the reverse. According to Fogg, media also “provide[s] people with vicarious experiences that motivate” them (à la user success stories) and “help people rehearse a behavior.” ¹⁴

Inserting mindfulness into the loop of habitual or automatic decisions, with behavior tracking, logging, notifications, and emails, is one powerful strategy that Medium apps and businesses use to help people break habits.

Social actor. Transformer companies that play the role of social actor enable relationships that help create behavior change. Originally, Fogg wrote about social actors as computers that interacted in human-like, personal ways with their users. ¹⁵ But that was all before social media even existed.

In the context of Transformational Consumers, social actor companies that connect customers with each other via such social features as friend feeds, messaging tools, leaderboards, hashtag campaigns, and discussion boards may all set the stage for your customers to experience positive behavior change. Companies also serve as behavior-changing social actors when they host live events such as classes, workshops, and clubs; via product ratings and reviews; and by hosting and creating social media conversations between customers with similar aspirations.

Consider this beloved quote of Transformational Consumers everywhere:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

—William H. Murray

Yes, Resistance is real. But I read this quote as paying homage to the cosmic counterforce to Resistance. When you become a Transformer company, you reposition your business as producer of the exact sorts of events, incidents, and material assistance your Transformational Consumer audience needs to encounter in order to make progress on their journey. You reposition and rethink the very things you sell, your every marketing message, fashioning them into the “sorts of things that occur” to help Transformational Consumers who have set out on their own quests for healthier, wealthier, wiser lives.