When Galia bought her ticket to The Graham Norton Show, she didn’t expect to get a therapy session. Yet here she was, scribbling one of her worst fears on a paper card a staff member had handed her just before the show.
In a few minutes, Graham himself will explain why — in front of Will Smith, Kevin Hart, and on live TV. Having introduced his world-famous guests as pastime motivational speakers on their Instagram accounts, he prompts them to help his audience get unstuck. The first card he picks is Galia’s.
“I’m scared of feet,” Galia admits. “Any feet. My own, my friends’, any. Like, I don’t want to look at them, see them, be touched by them, just…yeah.”
Norton asks Will to go first. How can he help Galia get over her fear? Almost jumping in his seat, Will goes, “Oh, this one’s easy. We gon’ fix this right now.” — and proceeds to take off his shoe. As the audience breaks out in laughter, Will yells: “Galia! You just gotta come down here and confront your fear!” Right before Will can take off his sock, a laughing-but-terrified Galia looks grateful that Graham calls off the skit and passes the baton to Kevin.
Then, looking straight into the camera, Kevin Hart delivers one of the best and most profound pieces of advice I’ve ever heard:
“Galia, here’s the best way to get you over your fear of feet: You can’t take steps in life without feet. Your fear is prohibiting you from progression. The minute that you can look at feet and understand that feet are simply what move you forward, you will put your fear behind you.”
The audience loses it, and so does Will. Galia looks happy. Addressing first Kevin then Will, fellow guest Naomi Scott hits the nail right on the head: “Yours was like therapy, and yours was like medication!”
Behavior change is, first and foremost, identity change.
If you perform a habit often enough, even if it takes a lot of effort, eventually, you’ll start seeing yourself as a different person. The person who writes every day becomes a writer. The person who resists cigarettes long enough becomes a non-smoker.
Similarly, if an event abruptly changes your self-image, your behavior might follow suit overnight. Often, such life-altering incidents are traumatic, but they can also come from positive experiences and seemingly unimportant, innocuous moments.
If your parent dies of diabetes, giving up sugar might not feel like an option anymore. It becomes a necessity. In the same vein, starting a relationship could be the push to finally stop overworking. Or, you could sit on a wall outside a clothing store in Tokyo and almost casually realize you’ve allowed your health to go down the drain because of your material success.
Whether it’s your identity that shifts first or your behavior, the end result is always the same: A new you, both in action and perception.
There are no hard rules to achieving such change, and what works will highly depend not just on who you are but also on what habit you’re looking to transform and what your environment is like at the time. That said, there is one component of behavior change that tends to be more easily covered when taking a perception-first, action-later approach: motivation.
Going back to Galia’s fear of feet, the two entertainers took different paths to inspiring her to overcome her stigma.
Will attacked the problem with action. He wanted Galia to jump into cold water, to face her demons and realize: the world is still turning. It was a good idea, but, based on her reaction, Galia would have been too scared to take the leap.
Kevin, on the other hand, tackled Galia’s challenge from a point of perception. By getting her to look at the scary element in question as something that is not just meaningful and empowering but essential to life, he handed her a powerful perspective shift on a silver platter. Equipped with this new point of view, Galia might now be able to approach this part of her and others’ bodies as something necessary, beautiful, maybe even endearing.
Both Will and Kevin are multi-talents, but Will spends most of his time acting in movies, whereas Kevin performs live around the world on most days. I’m not sure how much their professions played into their micro-responses to this motivate-the-audience challenge, but the outcome suggests Kevin managed to tap a tad deeper into Galia’s psychology — and it goes back to the distinction Naomi Scott offered on their differing approaches: medication vs. therapy.
Will’s recipe of seeing, touching, and being in close proximity to feet in order to get more comfortable around them was like offering a pill or vaccine to Galia’s problem: Take this action, and your behavior will change.
For all we know, it would have worked. It might have gotten Galia over the hump. But if she’s unwilling to take the action — to get the flu shot, if you will — the treatment will fail. This is true for anyone trying to change anything about themselves: If you’re too scared to take the first step, your failure rate will be 100%.
Being extremely dialed-in to the situation, Kevin acted more like a coach or therapist would have: He offered Galia a new way to look at the world.
Great coaches are great mostly because they ask great questions. Being asked to consider a new opinion doesn’t feel as threatening as being asked to change your behavior. A new perspective is something you can try on lightly — if you don’t like it, you can drop it as quickly as you picked it up. It’s not a statement, not as pushy as “Do this!” It’s more of a cautious inquiry. “Have you tried looking at it this way?” “Oh, I never thought of that!” Of course, the therapeutic approach might fail just the same, but if it works, it’s near-all-powerful because it feels like you formed your new attitude all on your own.
Later in the show, Will and Kevin were asked to motivate another audience member. As before, Will focused on actions, and Kevin built his case from perception. Once again, people’s reactions revealed Kevin to be the clear winner of this advice-giving contest.
Whether it’s your behavior or your self-image, changing yourself is hard. Different ideas work for different people, and even what does the trick for you is bound to change many times over the course of your life. But if you feel like you can’t yet take the action required to get to the next level, try another angle. Test a new opinion. Motivate yourself with a shift in perspective.
It might not be feet that you’re afraid of, but, to paraphrase Kevin Hart: The minute you can look at your fear and understand that it might be the very thing moving you forward, you’ll put it behind you. Chances are, like buying a ticket to go see a talk show, it’ll feel small at the moment and you won’t think twice about it — but it could still change your life forever.