Getting Some More Leverage in Your Life

You’re stuck. You know you need to move. You’ve been stationary too long, but you’re not moving.

What you need is leverage.

Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, is supposed to have said something that’s stuck with me throughout my career: give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it on, and I shall move the world. He’d have needed a very long lever, and to move it a very long way. But the principle is sound, and it applies to your life just as much as it applies to physics.

What Leverage Actually Means

In physics, leverage is simple. You use a rigid bar pivoting on a fixed point to multiply the force you apply. A small amount of effort applied in the right place moves something much heavier than you could shift with your bare hands. That’s why a crowbar exists, and that’s why you don’t try to dig a hole with your fingers when you’ve got a shovel in the shed. Try digging without one, and your fingers will bleed long before you’ve made any progress, which is a pretty good metaphor for what happens when you try to maintain change in your life without leverage.

In business, leverage means using borrowed resources to amplify your own investment. In negotiations, leverage is the pressure point that makes the other person move. In life, leverage is whatever gets you off the sofa and into action when nothing else will.

The concept is the same across all of them. You’re taking a small input and multiplying it into a much larger output by applying it in exactly the right place. Get your leverage wrong, though, and you’re going to end up with more than just bruised knuckles.

Why You Need Leverage Right Now

If you’ve been stationary for a while, you’re dealing with inertia. Not the good kind that keeps you moving once you’ve started. The bad kind, the kind that keeps stationary objects stationary. Remember Newton’s first law: a body at rest stays at rest unless acted on by an external force.

That external force is leverage.

I see patients every week who know exactly what they need to do. Lose weight. Exercise more. Leave the job. Have the conversation. Start the thing they’ve been putting off for years. And they can’t get themselves to move. It’s not that they’re lazy. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that the force needed to shift them out of their current stationary position is greater than the motivation they’re currently generating.

You can’t force people to take medication, to exercise, to stop smoking, or to lose weight. Believe me, I’ve tried. The leverage I have as a doctor, I use when I can. But what I’ve learned over the years is that for real change to happen, you need to apply the leverage on yourself. Nobody else can do that for you, and without enough of it, usually emotional leverage, you’re going to stay exactly where you are.

The Carrot and the Stick

There are two basic forms of leverage, and you need both of them working together.

The first is pull leverage. This is the carrot. The vision of what you’re moving towards. The life you want. The health you want. The relationship you want. The career you want. Pull leverage works by making the destination so attractive that you’re drawn towards it. You can feel it pulling you forward when you think about how good it’ll be when you get there.

The second is push leverage. This is the stick. The pain of staying where you are. The consequences of doing nothing. The future you’ll end up with if nothing changes. Push leverage works by making your current position so uncomfortable that you can’t bear to stay in it. It’s the thing that makes you think, “I can’t do this for another year.”

Most people only use one or the other. They either focus on what they want and underestimate how hard it’ll be to get there, or they focus on what they’re afraid of and get paralysed by anxiety instead of motivated by it. You need both. The carrot to pull you forward and the stick to stop you sliding back.

Think of the reasons why you want it. Think of the reasons why you need to make those changes. Then think of what happens if you don’t. Really think about it, not in a vague “things will be bad” sort of way, but in a specific, detailed, honest way. What does your life look like in two years, five years, ten years, if you do absolutely nothing different from today? Use both the carrot and the stick combined, because that’s leverage.

Emotional Leverage

Here’s where most self-help advice falls short. It tells you to set goals and make plans. This is rational, logical, and sensible advice. It doesn’t work for most people, because human beings aren’t rational, logical, or sensible. You’re an emotional creature who occasionally uses logic to justify the decisions your emotions have already made.

If you want real leverage, you need to engage your emotions. Not just your intellect.

Pain motivates people. I’m not being dramatic. The research on loss aversion by Kahneman and Tversky shows that you’re roughly twice as motivated by the fear of losing something as you are by the prospect of gaining something of equal value. Your brain is wired to avoid pain more strongly than it seeks pleasure. But that’s not a flaw. That’s a tool you can use.

So use it. Don’t make excuses. Don’t soften the reality of where you are. Look at where you’ll be in five years if nothing changes. Really look.

Not the comfortable version where things somehow sort themselves out. The honest version, where you’re five years older and still stuck in exactly the same place, having the same conversations with the same people, making the same complaints, feeling the same frustration, and wondering where the time went.

Where to Put the Fulcrum

A lever is useless without a fulcrum. You can have the longest lever in the world, but if there’s nothing to pivot it on, you’re just waving a stick around.

Your fulcrum is the point of maximum impact. It’s the specific thing you need to change that will create the biggest shift in your life with the least amount of effort. Not every change is equal. Some changes are leverage points that cascade into everything else, and your job is to figure out which one that is for you.

I had a patient who came to see me feeling overwhelmed by everything she needed to change. Her weight, her sleep, her stress, her diet, her exercise, her career. She had a list as long as her arm and no idea where to start. She was trying to change everything at once and achieving nothing.

We found her fulcrum. It was her sleep. When she started sleeping properly, she had more energy. With more energy, she started exercising. With exercise, her eating improved. It wasn’t a straight line, there were bad weeks and setbacks along the way, and it took the best part of a year, but over that time her confidence built, and eventually she felt able to address some other issues she’d been avoiding for a long while.

One change. Sleep. That was the fulcrum point where her leverage did the most work, and everything else pivoted around it.

What’s yours? What’s the one change that would make every other change easier? If you could only change one thing about your life this month, which one thing would create the biggest ripple effect across everything else? What’s your fulcrum? What’s the thing you need to focus that leverage on?

Leverage Through Others

You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, involving other people is one of the most powerful forms of leverage available to you, and most people underuse it massively.

Tell someone what you’re going to do. Make a promise. Set a deadline. Put something on the line. Research on commitment devices shows that people who make public commitments are significantly more likely to follow through than those who keep their intentions private. There’s something about saying it out loud to another human being that makes it real in a way that saying it to yourself never does.

Get others to hold you accountable. Find someone who’ll ask you the uncomfortable questions, someone who won’t accept your excuses, someone who cares enough about you to push back when you start sliding. That person might be a friend, a partner, a colleague, or a coach. Whoever it is, give them permission to be honest with you, because the people who tiptoe around your feelings aren’t going to give you the leverage you need.

You can also reduce the leverage you need by getting others to take some of the burden. Just ask for help, and accept support when it’s offered instead of pretending you’re fine. And maybe get rid of the baggage that’s weighing you down, so you don’t need as much force to get moving in the first place.

The Threshold

There’s a threshold you need to cross for change to happen. Think of it as the minimum amount of leverage required to break your inertia and get you moving. Below the threshold, nothing happens. You might want to change. You might plan to change. You might talk endlessly about changing. But you don’t actually change, because the force you’re generating isn’t enough to overcome the resistance.

The threshold is different for everyone. For some people, a gentle nudge is enough. For others, it takes a crisis. A health scare. A redundancy. A relationship ending. A moment in the doctor’s office where someone tells you something you didn’t want to hear. Something that creates so much leverage that sitting still is no longer an option.

Don’t wait for the crisis. Create your own leverage now. Find your fulcrum. Apply the carrot and the stick. Engage your emotions instead of just your intellect. Get others involved. Build enough force to cross that threshold before life forces you across it in ways you didn’t choose and can’t control.

Because here’s what years of medicine have taught me. The people who create their own leverage tend to make the changes they need to make. The people who wait for life to provide the leverage tend to stay where they are.

Give yourself a lever long enough, find the right place to put it, and move your world.

Further reading

• Robbins, A. (1991). Awaken the Giant Within. Free Press.
• Cialdini, R.B. (2006). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Business.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Covey, S.R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
• Thaler, R.H. & Sunstein, C.R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.