For more than 20 years, Jackie Kelm has been exploring a deceptively simple question: What actually creates lasting personal change?
An engineer by training, an author, a coach and the creator of Appreciative Living, Kelm describes herself today as a “Joy Engineer”. Her work combines Appreciative Inquiry, neuroscience-informed thinking, coaching and solution-focused principles to help people change the beliefs and patterns that shape their behavior.
Her latest focus is the Habit Breaker Technique, a 3-Step coaching process she has developed to help people change unwanted behavioral and thinking habits by working with the beliefs underneath them.
When I first contacted Jackie, I was interested in this dynamic, Erickson-trained professional coach making waves in ‘belief-based change’ circles and asked if I could write a blog post about her. I walked away with not only this blog post, but also so much more. After one coaching session with Jackie, so that she could show me what her work is all about in a practical way, I can honestly say that she has positively altered my relationship with sugar for what I hope will be forever.
Sugar seems to have lost its lustre, largely because the urge to consume it is immediately followed with a thought about how short-lived the good sensation would be and how deeply misaligned it is with my health goals. I still eat sugar, but not impulsively, and in a greater deal of moderation, which is a wonderfully therapeutic feeling.
For Jackie, learning that changing how we think can fundamentally change how we live was an intensely personal journey…
“I struggled my whole life with depression and binge eating. On the outside I was this successful engineer, I had accomplishments, and I looked like I had it together, but inside I really struggled.”
“When I was getting my MBA, I discovered Appreciative Inquiry, which is a positive approach originally developed for organizations. I thought, ‘What would happen if I applied this to my own life?’”
“I had tried therapy, 12-step programs, medication and a lot of other approaches, and nothing was really working for me. I started figuring out how to apply Appreciative Inquiry personally, and then the change was incredible.”
By that time, Jackie had already been coaching informally, using her own ideas, but in her search for a formal coach education program, she stumbled across Erickson and loved the philosophy behind the curriculum.
“I took The Art & Science of Coaching™ and fell in love with Erickson. It aligned perfectly with what I believed and was working towards.”
Jackie credits a solution-focused approach with a lot of the success behind her work.
“If I hadn’t had 20 years of solution-focused experience, I don’t think I could have developed this,” Jackie explains. “In many ways, a solution–focused approach is countercultural because our brains naturally have a negative bias. And that’s why it took me years to really accept that I didn’t have to problem-solve everything.”
As I personally experienced with the Habit Breaker Technique, you have to keep that solution-focused hat on. If you drop into traditional problem solving, the technique doesn’t work in the same way.
“Most people think about changing behavior, Jackie explains, “but what I’ve become fascinated by is changing the belief underneath the behavior.”
We tend to think, ‘How do I stop eating sugar? How do I stop procrastinating? How do I stop scrolling?’ But this behavior is being driven upstream by thinking and beliefs.
Jackie uses a simple metaphor of the “Cortex” and the “Reptile.” The Cortex is the conscious thinking part, saying, “I should stop doing this.” The Reptile represents those more automatic beliefs and emotional patterns, saying, “No, this helps me. This keeps me safe. This makes me feel better.”
What Jackie does in the Habit Breaker Technique is work directly with those beliefs. And when the belief genuinely shifts the behavior follows.
In my specific case, once I came to see that the joys of sugar are extremely short-lived and don’t in any way outweigh the negative consequences and guilt that arises thereafter, sugar lost that gripping hold it used to have on me.
We frequently regard habits as visible behavior, like overeating or excessive screen use. But Jackie explains how each habit is really three habits in one. There is a corresponding thought and feeling habit that go along with the behavior.
“Worry is a good example,” she explains. “We don’t normally think of worrying as a habit in the same way we think of smoking or snacking as habits. But it can become an automatic repeated pattern too that is driven by beliefs. So the Technique can be helpful in stopping those patterns as well.
While Jackie has had innumerable successes with the Habit Breaker Technique stopping clients’ urges and behavior, the technique doesn’t always address the underlying drivers of the habit such as feeling lonely, bored or unsafe.
If that root is not addressed, the habit can come back over time, or a new habit can arise to replace it. As she explains, stopping the behavior is real progress, but it isn’t always the whole story.
Jackie’s ultimate dream would be for the Habit Breaker Technique to become a mainstream concept, like Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset.
“I want people using it because I believe there is enormous potential here to accelerate personal growth and change,” she enthuses. “It’s essentially a way to rapidly shift limiting beliefs keeping you stuck. “I want this to be out in the world in a big way, and for that to happen, it can’t just be me using it. Other coaches need to be teaching it, coaching with it, and incorporating it into their own methodologies.
That is her dream, and why she created the Habit Breaker Practitioner Training Program. For Erickson-trained coaches, Jackie sees the technique as a complementary coaching methodology and tool that can be integrated into a broader solution-focused coaching conversation.
The strong Ericksonian thread running through Jackie’s journey is that of possibility, curiosity and the belief that people have far more capacity for transformation than they may initially recognize.
To learn more about 'The Five Principles That Underlie Appreciative Living', download Jackie's FREE resource here.
About Jackie
Jackie Kelm is the “Joy Engineer” and founder of Appreciative Living, where she has helped
thousands of people become happier and more engaged in work and life through coaching,
consulting, leadership development and other offerings. She is the author of two books on
Appreciative Living, and her work has been embraced by organizations such as Keurig-Green
Mountain Coffee, The Duke Integrative Medical Center, and the National Multiple Sclerosis
Society.
Jackie holds 4 coaching certifications and offers an Appreciative Living Coaching Certificate for
those who want to learn her transformational approach to personal development. She also
offers programs that coaches and consultants can take and then offer to their clients to teach
the Appreciative Mindset.
To follow and connect with Jackie on LinkedIn, visit her profile.