identify that unconscious goal that once you see it, once you recognize it, allows you to be freer of it. >> marcus i want to ask you on this. what if we tied that kind of approach and resolution about the individual. i want to eliminate racism in the country, and therefor resolve to make friends of another race. or, you know i want to be fitter. so engage in a protest march and burn calories while protesting. right? but is there a way to tie our individual and collective? >> what i love about that is you're not saying my goal is to have six-pack abs by the end of the year. you're not saying my goal is a bank balance of this or credit card balance. there's nothing in the world i would like to change. here's what i'm going to do. here's what i pledge to do for myself, my community, my country, my world this year with regards to that. that's modest and achievable. and i love that. i think that's much better than all the other inner focus goals
work. but more often than not, it doesn't. and those are the times we need to recognize we need an approach that basically honors recognizes that we're more complex than the conscious goals. >> i want to go to that a little bit. part of what i found fascinating about your verj is this idea that we care. maybe america in particular. we care about being free and autonomous autonomous. so we don't like to set budgets and diets because we don't like to be unfree decision makers. >> it's so ironic we can say we wan to lose weight for example, and then we can have an unconscious goal which is believing that we don't want to be run by somebody else's reduces. forgetting we are in charge of do we want to lose the weight or not. >> all right. i want to play with that a little bit.
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according to the most comp rehence iive research out there, we stick with it for six months but only 19% of us are keeping it two years later. lasting change is hard but not impossible. according to the next guest, we're all doing it a little wrong. back at the table, associate professor, marcus mabrey editor at large for the "new york times" and professor leahy from the harvard graduate school of education, cofounder of "minds at work" and author of "right weight right mind." all right, ladies. so what is it that we are doing wrong? >> well, we are using an approach that is basically the default for most of us called the will power approach. sometimes we call it the new year's resolution approach they're all the same. it's the basic idea if we amp up the will power and keep applying it consistently we're going to achieve our goal. and actually sometimes that does