The George Costanza Method

In an episode of the 90’s sitcom Seinfeld titled ‘The Opposite’, George’s life is going really badly for him so he decides to do the opposite of everything. As a result, his life takes a turn for the better. At a job interview, instead of dressing in a suit and tie and answering the questions in the standard way, he arrives in casual clothes and does the opposite, including criticising the boss of having made the wrong moves with the company! He’s hired immediately.
And so on it goes.

Seinfeld, Season 5, Episode ‘The Opposite’ (1994). © Warner Bros.

As the old adage goes “If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. So how do we break the inertia of always doing what we’ve always done? We do the opposite of course, not all of the time (unless you’re George Costanza), but as a safe-to-fail experiment. Skeptical? Let’s look at a real world example.

I was recently coaching a client using StrongSuits where she identified an overplayed strength that was limiting her and that she wanted me to help her transform. She’d spent much of her working life overplaying the strength of agreeability by finding it almost impossible to say no to requests from colleagues or to set firm boundaries with them, even when she practically couldn’t take on any more work. She found it near impossible to suppress the impulse to respond immediately to emails arriving in her inbox from colleagues and she checked her inbox several times an hour in case someone was trying to contact her. This resulted in reduced creativity, flow and productivity due to excessive worrying and context-switching on her part. Her strength of agreeability, of being flexible in meeting people halfway, was a wonderful strength, but overdoing it was limiting her effectiveness at work.

Some strengths-coaching approaches would suggest that she simply “dials down” the strength of agreeability or that she “manages her strengths so that they don’t turn into weaknesses”. But telling ourselves to dial something down feels like we’re a child being told to “pipe down” by a strict adult. I’ll add another old adage here: “What we resist persists”. Trying to suppress (literally hold down) an overplayed strength is most often futile because our emotional brains aren’t easily controlled. The result is either rebellion (against ourselves or others) by overplaying it even more, or the unwanted behaviour leaks out in unhealthy ways, or we eventually resign ourselves helplessly to “that’s just how I am” or “that’s just how people are”. Suppressing an overplayed strength also tends to suppress our other vital strengths, including the original (non-overplayed) strength itself, leading to suppressed life force energy or depression.

So instead, once she’d identified the overplayed strength and how it wasn’t serving her well, I suggested she try an experiment. I invited her to try out doing the opposite, but here’s the trick: to do it for a very limited time only and in a safe-to-fail context. My suggestion was to choose just one morning or afternoon to turn off or hide all incoming emails and to gift herself the time to work only on her own work-related needs. She accepted the challenge.

So what’s the rationale here?
Firstly, if she managed to achieve this, it would prove to her that her nervous system can actually survive her showing firmness to others, thus training her to be more able and willing to allow herself this behaviour in future. Secondly, it would start to train her colleagues not to expect an immediate response, or at least give her an opportunity to address any potential protests to this new behaviour from her colleagues in a safe, measured way. And lastly, if successful, it would likely result in her having a more creative, flowing and productive morning or afternoon than usual, thus providing positive reinforcement for her newfound behaviour.

This is what’s called a safe-to-fail experiment. If it failed she’d probably be no worse off than before and she could always go back to her old behaviour or “decrease the dose” (that is, to choose an easier experiment next time, such as delaying responding to one fairly benign email for just a few hours). And if it succeeded then she’d be more likely to set such boundaries again in future. The point is that she gets to start developing a new neural pathway that previously wasn’t accessible to her, so that the new behaviour becomes more natural over time (or even suddenly and dramatically so, as in George Costanza’s case!).

Thanks to Jason Little from Lean Change for introducing the metaphor of The George Costanza Method in the context of organisational change, which is used here in relation to personal change.