How's fear as a change agent?

Fast Company has a great piece on change. They open with this.

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren't just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We're talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon -- a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You're probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn't change.

Don't believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

<a href=http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html />Fast Company - Change or Die>.
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Contrary to what we believe, facts don't have the raw power to change us. They are dependent on our frame of reference. We filter and process facts though our frame. If things don't fit in our frame, we discount or discard them.

Making radical changes is more likely to aid our change than little changes. Small changes don't work very well because they usually have little or no payoff. It's too close to the old way to produce any significant benefits.

And here's the good news, 77% of 333 high-risk heart disease participants in a radical change program, involving a vegetarian low-fat diet, support groups, and meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise kept their new healthier lifestyles for three years after the study and didn't require any medical procedures. Of course, the program focused on the joy of living,

I highly recommend reading the whole article.

Here is Dan Miller's (48days.com) Summary of the article:

        •         Crisis is not a powerful motivator for change
        •          Change is not motivated by fear
        •          Knowing the facts does not cause us to change
        •          It's easier to make drastic changes than small ones