Bridging the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

How many of us know what we want to do? We know how we would like to eat, we know how much sleep feels best for us, we know how we would like to communicate with others and listen attentively, we know what foods we should eat to properly fuel our bodies.  The list could go on and on.

But…what we DO doesn’t always align with what we KNOW!  

Often, we have the knowledge but we don’t always put it into action.  I see this in our kiddos. Our two girls have very different habits in the morning. One daughter wakes up early, gets herself organized, gets lunches going and is ready to rock in the morning. Our other daughter is sleepy in the morning and takes her time getting dressed, likes to brush her hair, try a couple of different hairstyles and come downstairs 10 minutes late every day.

Does our late kiddo know what time she is supposed to be downstairs? Yes!

Does she manage to make it downstairs on time? It depends on the day.

When I’m coaching, this gap is particularly evident. Our athletes may know what they are supposed to do, yet often they don’t do it. Actually doing what we know we want to do requires developing habits so that the “doing” starts to happen automatically.  And how the heck do we develop these healthy habits?

It would be easy for me to sit back as a parent and judge, however, there are some things I know I should do but I don’t do them either.  I’m a grown woman with a background in health and wellness and in the past 5 years my weight has crept up to 30 lbs over my ideal weight! (Ok, it was 10 pounds over before that. Ok, ok, the last time I was at my ideal weight I was a teenager!) So yes, I know a lot about how to lose weight but unfortunately I haven’t been putting it into action! My healthy habits have stayed on the shelf of good intentions.  so I know, but I don’t do!

Developing these healthy habits requires vision, commitment and how-to knowledge. It takes commitment to truly decide to change from “I know” to “I do”.  And it takes vision to commit – we have to be able to see ourselves succeeding in making this change. We also need how-to knowledge to map out the journey from “I know” to “I do”.

There are so many places in my own life where I know better but I’m still not doing what I know I should do! There a big gap between what I know and what I do. While I look at these gaps with frustration, I have learned that these gaps have to build up to a critical point for the vision​ and commitment for change ​to kick in.  

In the Slight Edge, Jeff Olson calls this “the day of disgust” – that day when it all hits you and you get to that turning point of saying: “okay, now I’m finally going to take action on what I know I should do.”   In these moments – sometimes in these very low moments – we’re able to gather enough momentum to take action and start doing.

For many of us, there might be a gap between seeing the vision, and making a commitment to take action.  And having the knowledge of exactly how to proceed can impact deciding to commit to action, so these three factors can loop back around and impact each other.

Four Simple Steps to Move from Knowing to Doing

Here are four simple steps to help you move from knowing to doing.

1) Create a Vision

How can we help ourselves with creating a vision?

• Visualize ourselves as becoming a person who does this thing. Repeated visualization of taking action can help us start to gain the momentum we need to put what we know we should do into practice in our own lives.
• Amplify this visualization by putting up physical or digital images of our goals in places we see often.  One way to do this is by creating a dream board.
• Incorporate positive self-talk by telling ourselves we’re the kind of person who does the positive habit or who can achieve that big goal.
• Manifesting success involves feeling the emotions we would have if we were to achieve our goal. Imagine being the successful person standing at the end goal and feel the emotions associated with that accomplishment. Imagine being exactly the kind of person who successfully maintains this habit and how that would feel.

2) Deepen Your Commitment

How can we amplify commitment?

• Share our intentions with loved ones to create accountability. Saying the words out loud gets us one step closer to taking action.
• Prioritize taking action on this specific habit or goal.  Prioritizing it involves making deliberate choices to make building this new habit or taking action towards a goal one of the highest priorities on our list of things to do.
• Post our commitment in writing around our homes.
• Set daily reminders in our calendars to complete the task associated with that habit or goal.
• And finally, record our progress using an App like Winstreak. Tracking our daily activity will move us towards our goal.

3) Create a How-to Plan