Week 27 Day 7: Assignment: Catch Yourself Saying It This Week

For the next five business days, monitor your language when you describe work to others. Every time you use minimizing language -- 'just,' 'simply,' 'all you gotta do is,' 'it should be quick,' 'this is straightforward' -- make a note. At the end of each day, review your notes. For each instance, ask: was the work actually as simple as my language implied?

Here is the tracking protocol. Step one: set a daily reminder for end-of-day reflection. Step two: throughout the day, catch minimizing language in real time. The target phrases are: 'all you gotta do is,' 'just,' 'simply,' 'it should be quick,' 'this is straightforward,' 'no big deal,' 'easy,' and 'should not take long.' Step three: when you catch yourself, do not beat yourself up. The goal is awareness, not punishment. Instead, pause and rephrase. Replace the minimizing language with honest difficulty language using the framework from Day 5: scope, complications, context, and time estimate. Step four: at end of day, count the instances. Most leaders are shocked by the frequency. Seven to twelve instances per day is typical for leaders who have never tracked this behavior. Step five: for each instance, assess the accuracy. Was the work genuinely simple, or did your language minimize real complexity? If you minimized, write down what you should have said instead. Step six: at the end of the week, review the pattern. Which situations triggered minimization? Common triggers include: handoffs under time pressure (you do not have time to provide context), familiar tasks (the expert's curse), and delegation to people you consider competent (the assumption that competent people do not need context). Add your findings to your Leadership Operating Manual under 'Communication Patterns.' The tracking exercise often becomes permanent -- once you start hearing the minimizing language, you cannot stop hearing it. That awareness is the point.

The self-monitoring exercise applies principles from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to leadership behavior change. Beck (1976) demonstrated that behavioral change begins with awareness of automatic patterns, followed by deliberate interruption and replacement. The 'catch and rephrase' technique is a direct application of what CBT calls 'cognitive restructuring' -- identifying an automatic thought (or in this case, automatic language pattern), evaluating its accuracy, and replacing it with a more accurate alternative. Research by Meichenbaum (1977) on 'self-instructional training' found that the simple act of monitoring one's own language produces behavioral change within 5-7 days, even without external intervention, because awareness disrupts the automaticity of the behavior. The seven-to-twelve daily frequency estimate is consistent with research by Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) on habitual behavior, which found that approximately 45% of daily behaviors are habitual (performed without conscious deliberation), and that language patterns are among the most habitual behaviors because they are over-learned through thousands of repetitions. The trigger identification step draws on what Duhigg (2012) calls the 'habit loop' -- cue, routine, reward -- where identifying the cue (the trigger) is the critical first step in changing the routine (the minimizing language). Research on 'implementation intentions' (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006) found that people who form specific if-then plans ('if I notice myself saying just, then I will pause and rephrase') are 2-3 times more likely to change the behavior than people who simply intend to change.