The Architecture of Change: Part 1 - How Behaviour Is Created

Ever feel like your habits have a mind of their own? We dig into why repeated patterns persist even when you’re determined to change, and why willpower is the wrong place to start. Instead of flogging yourself for weak discipline or shaky motivation, we map the hidden chain that drives behaviour: the thought you mark as important, the internal dialogue it triggers, and the body state that locks it in.

We unpack how the unconscious treats vivid thoughts as real, how mood flips your self-talk from resourceful to ruthless, and how physiology aligns with the story you’re telling yourself. From skipped workouts to last‑minute tax panic, we show why action-only fixes fail: you’re pushing on the final domino. You’ll learn fast, practical ways to break the loop by changing state first—posture shifts, slow breathing, movement, even a splash of cold water—to weaken the cycle and buy space for a better choice. Then, with the body calmer, you can examine the thought, edit the language, and choose the next smallest step that actually sticks.

We also share why emotions are essential for decisions, how precision language reduces threat, and why journaling works as evidence rather than just therapy. You’ll see how your phrasing reveals hidden rules, learn to test absolutes, and design supports where change begins, not where it ends. We close with a look ahead to part two: fear, identity, and why positive thinking only works under certain conditions—and what to do when it doesn’t.

If this resonated, subscribe and leave a quick review to help others find the show. Tell us the line in your self-talk you’re rewriting today, and share the state-change tool you’ll try first.

Transcript

Aim: Awareness Over Willpower

Discipline, Motivation, Consistency Myths

Why Action-Only Fixes Fail

The Behaviour Triangle Explained

Thought Importance And Unconscious Mind

Mood, Self-Talk, And Outcomes

Physiology Aligns And Drives Action

Emotions, Decisions, And Results

Break The Loop Through The Body

Journaling As Evidence And Insight

Closing, Next Steps, And CTA

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, and welcome to the Rise Up Podcast. My name is Vicki Ross. I am your host. Now, this particular podcast, um, there was just too much to say, so I've made it into part one and part two. So do look out for part two when it arrives, and it should be soon within this week. So, with part one, I I've named it why you keep repeating the same patterns. There was just too much to put in, so that's why part two is about what happens next. So we'll leave that for you. Anyway, so this podcast, the Razor Podcast, is a space for awareness. It's just helping you see yourself differently and clearly and being able to create the changes that you want to have. So today I'm looking at something that is deceptively simple about why we keep repeating behaviors and even when we desperately want a different result. So we often think that the issue is discipline. And again, having spoken to a lot of people and we talk about the self-sabotage, they have this idea that they are there's something wrong with them, that they're lazy or they're not focused, or you know, and yet when somebody is doing something that they really love, oh my god, the focus is incredible. So I don't think that that is the problem. So sometimes they feel or they think that the issues uh that they're not motivated. And again, when somebody is doing something that they really, really resonate with and align with, they do not need any motivation, no kicking up the arse, they go and do it. Or consistency, and again, people will always do what they want, and they'll do what they want and not what they need. So consistency is not the issue either. But what if the real issue is actually how you're communicating with yourself, or it is one of the issues how you communicate with yourself. So I want us to go and explore that a little bit and see from which angle I come in and how I kind of help because I listen to a lot of what people say, how they say it, and I do think that communication is one of the most important things in any kind of transformation. So most people will look at a result. So, and then they try to change the action. So they will look like, for instance, oh, my genes don't fit. I'll diet, I have to diet. So they look at the action. Oh, I've been overeating, I haven't been watching my diet, I need to change that, and they try and control that to get a different result. They might be going, Oh, the result is I'm out of breath. Then they look to go, well, I'm unfit and I haven't done any exercise, I haven't been to the gym for years, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So then they go, Okay, I need to change my action, which is nothing, and I need to start exercising. Or perhaps I've heard this quite a lot, I left my tax returns until the last minute again. And what they then start to do, they promise that they'll be more organized for the next year, and they start doing their bookkeeping in the beginning, and then they just, I don't know, one day they magically forget, and the next thing they realize a whole year's past, and they've done one month's worth of books, and they now have to catch up on the other 11. So I'm sure you understand and resonate with what I mean when we say that we look at the results, we try and change the actions that we take that give us the results, and then wonder why we revert back. So these patterns quickly return when this is what we do, which is most people. And the question is why? Because you're trying to fix the result without understanding what created the action. And the action doesn't start where you think it is, it you know, where you think it is. The action doesn't start at the point where you're going, I'm not going to the gym. You have to go a little bit big, you know, back. So I want to I want to explain to you about what creates behavior so that you can start having an understanding. And again, the thing that I love most that Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about is that information, knowledge, is the precursor to change. And if you think about knowledge is power, when you learn about yourself, you empower yourself to change. So let me give you a little bit, very simple understanding of behavior. I always say there's three major things that create behavior or for any behavior to happen. There is a thought, there is an internal dialogue, a yakity yak that's going on inside your head, and then of course, there is a physical response, and together they create a behavior. So let's slow that down and let me explain each one. Because if you can break any one of those three, the behavior drops, it goes because it needs the combination, a very specific combination for that behavior to exist. So let's break it down and let's have a look and you know what exactly do I mean? So when you look at thoughts, though we have thousands of thoughts every day. I'm not even going to start saying how many and what study said what. We have lots of thoughts, but most of them, they just pass by. It's just like just moving. But the moment that you decide that a thought is important is the moment that you give it weight. The unconscious mind treats it as real. And this is crucial because the unconscious cannot distinguish between imagination and reality. If you think I'll always mess this up, and you give it importance, your nervous system reacts as if you are failing already, not remembering that you have failed in the past, but that you're failing now. So it can't tell the difference. The unconscious mind cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. So if that is what you're thinking, your mind thinks this is happening right now. The minute now you've given it some importance because you've become aware of it, and straight away then the other two things kick in, and the one is the internal dialogue. So once that thought feels real, the commentary begins, and we know this commentary, and this is where your mood matters. On a tired day, you might say something like, I never get this right, or this is so typical of me, or what's wrong with me? A lot of people use that, but on a strong day where you've slept well and you're like, you know, good, you'll say, Oh, I can handle this, oh, it's fine, I've done this, I've done worse, and I can fix this, or you know, so so you'll always kind of recover well on a good day. And the situation didn't change, it's just that your internal communication did. So if you're not aware of how you speak to yourself, you will believe whatever version shows up, and you will do this unconsciously. And you just got to understand, and I think you do, and accept, and I think you do, that some versions of yourself are not very kind. And this is what we need to be looking at. Now, the third thing that happens is we have a physical manifestation because we have to ask the question: how does the body know what to do? How does the body know how to feel emotions, how to walk in a certain mood? How does it know? So when the thought has been given importance and the internal dialogue starts, the body jumps in and joins as well. You know, this is a party and it's got the invitation. So if your thing was, I always fail, and you're not in a good mood about this, and therefore you believe that you never get it right, you probably find that your shoulders drop, that your chest tightens, that your breath, your breathing is shorter, your energy shifts. And now thought, your dialogue, and your physiology are aligned. Everything is in alignment, and your behavior follows naturally. So you might procrastinate, or you might go and try unconsciously to break the behavior by doing something different, like eating, because unconsciously, we all know that eating produces serotonin, it is a survival mechanism that we have, otherwise, we would forget to eat because it doesn't feel good and we would think like I don't care, and then next thing we'd be starving to death. So the body, when when whoever created us, created us, made sure that eating was a pleasurable action so that we would be motivated to do it. So unconsciously, when we're feeling bad and we want to shift that mood, we might want to go and overeat. You might withdraw because you know it's a fight and flight and hide, so we're just going to withdraw and hide and freeze and do nothing, or you might go and overwork so that you don't have to actually face the thoughts and the feelings. Not because you've broken, but because the loop is intact, it's all sorted, and then you have this reaction going on. So why changing the action rarely works? You know, so you look at the result and then you look at the action and you try and change the action. And let's talk about, you know, people want to change, but they try to interrupt at the behavior level, and it doesn't work. Because you've got to understand that behavior is the final domino, it's not the start of it, it's the end of it. So it's very difficult to change it there. You would require a lot of self-awareness and a lot of discipline and a lot of systems in place to keep reminding yourself to do something different. If you don't go back to the beginning, you'll just keep resetting the last piece and then going unconscious and then going, Oh damn, forgot. So instead of asking yourself, how do I stop doing this? Ask yourself, what thought did I decide was important? Because that's where the emotion began. There's a thought, and that thought drives an emotion. And why do we need this? Because the thought has a meaning. We've already decided what it means. When we first had the experience, the first time we did whatever, we had the experience, we gave it meaning, and that meaning gave it a feeling. And we need the feeling because feelings drive emotions, and emotions help us make decisions. Without decisions, we make no movement. We can't do anything. So everything is a decision that we do, and we can't make decisions without emotions. Here's something interesting to know. They experimented on some chimps, and I think this was in the 1930s, so I stand corrected for the dates. Chimps that had lost control and were angry or aggressive, and they did a lobotomy on them, and they found that they became very, very passive. So they thought, ooh, maybe we can do that to people. So there's actually a brilliant movie, it's old. It came out, I think, in the early 80s. It's called Francis with Jessica Lange. She plays a brilliant role. And what they did is they took people that had bipolar or you know, that they were emotionally unstable, let's say, let's just put it that way, and they gave them a lobotomy. But eventually, what drove these people crazy is because that they no longer had emotions, but they would do things like, for instance, if your shoelace broke while you're trying to tie your shoes, instead of them going, Oh, the shoelace is broken, I need to replace it, they would keep trying to tie their shoelaces because there was no mechanism to say stop, which is the decision that comes out of the emotion that this is futile because the emo the shoelace is broken, and that would drive people crazy. The the whole I I cannot, I don't feel anything, and therefore I can't make a decision. So we need our decision-making emotions, because emotions drive decisions, and decisions drive actions, and actions create results. So when we're looking at breaking the loop, the easiest place to interrupt is the body. So if you're standing sit, if you're walking around, if you you know just change your state, you know. I've even seen it when people are having, for whatever reason, an what we would call an ab reaction, an abnormal reaction, where they go into a panic and they start shaking, because that the then the shaking comes from too much adrenaline in the body for from the fight and flight and freeze response. So if because they're shaking, if you make them over-react, over-shake, so in other words, you exaggerate the shake, eventually the body will just and it will reset rather than continue shaking until the adrenaline's been used up. So I would then say break the loop in whichever way, change the state of the body. Um, this is why they also say that putting your face in ice cold water is very good for abreactions, is very good for depressions, because it it changes the whole chemical state of your body. So, because when you break, so so we why do we want to break the the cycle? We want to break this triangle. So when you break one part, the other two weaken. So you can change the thought and you can change the internal dialogue, but the other two are actually quite hard. The easiest one is to change the body. So then and only then you have the opportunity to examine that thought rationally, otherwise, you're analyzing it while it's still inside, and that's very difficult because your emotions have taken over. And the problem with that is that your emotions, your emotional memory is much stronger and bigger than your rational memory. And for you to be able to then control that emotion in that moment so that you can become rational and start to make sense out of the nonsense is very, very hard. I'm not saying you can't do it, but it's really hard. It's easier to do it when you're no longer in the little triangle. So I always like to say to people that journaling is super, super, super effective and good and it matters. Not so much as therapy, it is also very good as that as well, but it's evidence. Because when you're free, when you're free, write without editing, you reveal how you describe your problems, how your problems exist in your mind. And if you think about language, it's not random the way that somebody will explain a problem. They unconsciously have a very specific way of formulating that problem, and therefore, when they translate that through language to share it with somebody, it all there in the language. So the way you describe something reveals what you believe about it or what you think about it, how you feel about it, and people will say, but that's not what I meant. And I'm like, No, that's actually exactly what you meant, because that's what came up when you were unguarding and unconscious. So when you can see your language, then you can see how you construct your reality, and that's why journaling is so super cool to do. So, in closing, what I want you to think about is if you keep repeating a behavior, I want you to just start thinking about it that it's not because you lack discipline, but it's because something earlier in the chain is still unquestioned. So it could be that you've got a belief system and you've now tried and break the belief system, but then there's something underneath it, and something underneath that, and something underneath that, and therefore you need to keep going deeper and deeper until you get to the bottom and that it becomes nonsensical. So, in part two, we are going to go deeper, we're gonna go into fear to understand fear. We're going to talk about identity and why positive thinking doesn't always work. So it works sometimes depending on the conditions. So I don't want to say positive thinking never works, but it doesn't always work, and I'm gonna explain to you why. And into we will talk about what actually does work. So, what I'd like you to do for this week or this this program is just pause and notice your internal dialogue, notice how your body reacts to a thought. What is the thought so you can actually understand it, get the information, become very aware that when I think this, I say this to myself and I feel behave this way. Start to become familiar with yourself and the way you react. So if something in this whole podcast hit and I'd love to hear about it, I'd love to hear what this has helped you with. I'm being told to tell you to please subscribe, please rate my show because it helps others find it. And if you'd like to get more involved with things that I do, and I do a lot of lovely things around behavior and thinking and mind and you know living life on your terms, because that's what I really really believe that we all deserve. Get in touch with me by sending me a message, going to my website which is vicuross.com, or come and join my fabulous, beautiful membership community, uh, which is my Rise Up Academy. So I trust you enjoy this, and until the next program, take care and hears to your success.