Recently a customer shared his anxiety that the work we had been doing would mean that he’d lose the work he had done until now.

During our exchange, we had looked at three basic questions linked to his service “What’s it for?”, “Who’s it for?” and “What’s the promise?”

By taking some recent experience we had developed answers to these three questions and become quite precise in describing the aspect of communication he had helped his customers develop. The more clarity he had gained was already helping him draw a map of his next steps.

But the map described new territory.

The leap he is preparing to make is one of using his very own experience in a new way.

And that’s frightening.

We rely much more on how we do things than on what we do.

How we do things is the habit we developed.

What we do is what we learned by adding new knowledge.

Adding knowledge can be compared to adding a book into a library. We know where it is, we can go to that book to look something up.

The way we do something is usually something we hardly can describe. We learned and integrated it. It’s like riding the bike, once you learned it you don’t forget it.

Thus, asking someone to change a habit feels like asking him to throw his experience away. The art is to uncover how the existing experience is transformed into a new habit. By reorganizing the “library” we automatically develop new habits.