The Van Halen Effect

Hello to the new Top Tips subscribers from the recent training I delivered to the AAT North Kent branch. Welcome on board!

We had a fun training session looking at Leadership concepts like clear prioritisation, effective delegation and the importance of embedding a culture of trust.

During the delegation section we discussed the Yazoo Onion and unsurprisingly the topic of music came up.

A few musical references popped up and then out of the blue came the absolutely unwarranted and spurious assertion from a prominent branch member (mentioning no names Ranwinder!) that I have a “dodgy” taste in music!

Me!? A dodgy taste in music?!

This was like a dagger to the heart and clearly an outrageous slur. Regular readers will well know I clearly have impeccable music taste. More than that, I have a letter from my mum to prove it.

Cool For Cats

To be fair in my late teens I had a proper go at being a music snob. But the thing is being elitist about pop is no fun whatsoever. It doesn’t make sense for a start: pop means popular for goodness’ sake.

The main issue however is that you have to toe the party line that music is serious. And dour. And not much fun. You have to eschew loads of fun bands making fun tunes. ABBA were out of bounds!

When you’re a music snob it’s not the done thing to listen to anyone who appears to enjoy the music they make. There’s no place for dancing madly; instead you have to nod wisely to sombre deep cuts with oblique references to Sartre and drowning characters from Gormenghast.

So I rebelled. And embraced listening to whatever grabbed my ears. And what grabbed my ears in 1983 was Jump by Van Halen. 

Van Halen were one of those faux metal bands with poodle hair and spandex - admitting to liking them would have seen my membership to the cool kids club permanently cancelled.

But it was worth it because they were fun and Jump is a great tune, with a driving keyboard riff and playful lyrics, imploring you to leap up and dive headfirst into action, life and love. 

These days I use it as a very simple driver for habit change. I’ll share how it works because that’s what this week’s Top Tip is all about - habit change. Let me set the scene.

Ch Ch Ch Changes

When you’ve got a goal for a habit change that you want to achieve you’ll no doubt set various targets. Say you want to develop the habit of going to bed earlier to improve your sleep pattern. So you decide to go to bed at 10pm. Better sleep is the goal, 10pm bed is the target. Fine.

You manage to achieve this for a few nights in a row but then one evening you are chilling out on the sofa, watching your favourite box set and suddenly you become aware of the time. 

It’s 10.25pm. Mon dieu! You’ve missed your 10pm goal.

Obviously, common sense dictates you should now just go to bed and forgive yourself the 25 minute mistake. But this is where lots of us do a really odd thing. 

We somehow tell ourselves that because we have missed the initial target of 10pm, then the goal has passed us by. Completely. We tell ourselves that now all hope is lost and it doesn’t really matter what time we go to bed any more.

And so now we might well stay up and watch two more episodes before eventually heading off to the land of nod. Only now it could be way past midnight! Hours passed the initial goal and hours past the mistake. We compound the initial mistake with consciously chosen failure.

I refer to this as the Van Halen Effect.  I call it that simply because the chorus refrain in the song Jump goes “might as well jump”. It’s always suggested to me a type of “Sod it. In for a penny” sort of mentality. 

The 10pm target has passed by so instead of going to bed you “might as well jump” into the error, ignore the goal you had and keep watching TV.  

“Go ahead and jump”.

Eat My Goal

It happens with all sorts of other goals. Take food for example. People will set themselves a certain calorie limit. But then if they go over that limit, even by a small amount, they then just think “Sod it! I’ll finish the whole ice cream carton!”

It’s like when the presenter on Mastermind says “I’ve started so I’ll finish.” It’s not a logical thing to do but it happens. We tend not to entertain the idea of missing the target by a little bit. It seems to be an all or nothing mindset.

“Go ahead and jump!”

When you’re looking to change habits one of the key things that needs to happen is to make choices overt. When you catch yourself slipping back into the old routine you need to highlight that moment to yourself. And crucially that moment will offer you a pause. In that pause you get the opportunity to choose a different response.

Just one simple earworm, the lyrical phrases of “go ahead and jump” and “might as well jump” can be enough to pull you back to your senses. You make yourself aware of the Van Halen Effect and then refuse to go along with it.

The steps go like this:

1 - Awareness of missed target

2 - Jump earworm / lyric reminder of options

3 - Conscious choice to avoid The Van Halen Effect and instead do the right thing

4 - Book hair appointment for an 80s style perm

The first three steps will help you stay on track with your intended habit change goals. The fourth step is an optional extra.

This weekend enjoy looking up Van Halen’s Jump on YouTube. Headbands, big hair, tight trousers, slow motion karate kicks and winks to the camera - it couldn’t be more 80s if it wanted. Now that’s what I call "dodgy" music!