 David and Mark are both pranksters and delight in playing tricks on their fellow students. When they were just kids, it seemed cute, but has been proving more and more a problem as they become teenagers. Mark is thinking of dropping David's friendship as every time they get together they seem to fall back into the same pattern. Would this solve the problem? Or would he just continue with someone else's help if David was no longer in the picture? Performance is a discipline and change is a process. Clearly Mark is ready to make some changes and will commit time and attention to that effort. But what about the product? What is there to be accomplished? We do what we have learned. This continues of itself until there is a positive effort addressing change. People have a personal inertia that must be interrupted if there is to be change. In the performance discipline there must be a definition of a successful outcome before the change process can even begin. Does Mark have to turn away from David? The performance answer is to note the value to be gained and the cost of gaining it and the rest is locked away where it is out of sight and no longer of concern. If losing David's friendship will be required it is just another cost. But the ends never justify the means. Mark's process of change belongs to Mark. What he chooses as value is also valued because he values it. The rest goes into the box. Perhaps David also wants to see changes. To interrupt the inertia of his irritating behavior is that an option for Mark? We all deal with unknowns daily. There is no way to ultimately assure that what we do is the best of all directions. We apply the knowledge we have and apply the experience we have had with it and we do what seems best at the time. Our simple working tool is the black box and it is applied to deal with many of the unknowns. Those that deal with process can be locked away out of sight and out of mind. They are not important. When Mark decides what to do to gain the value result he will not be basing it on process. He will consider the results and what must be committed to gain the results. And so Mark decides what he wants to be as behavior, what he will value and how he will accomplish this. That is performance thinking. It is not something you or I can approve or judge for it is unique to Mark. We are outsiders not those who will define value for Mark to gain and not those who will value what he does accomplish. It is not our time and effort that Mark is committing but his own. It is a truth of human behavior that we will continue to do what we have learned to do and we will continue to do these things long after we may have decided not to do them anymore. This is part of being human. We do not unlearn what we have learned. Our effective change comes with replacing the unwanted behavior with something else and this is where performance focus has value. If we accomplish what we value, if we get the value result then we learn to favor what has worked for us. This is not simply meeting some goal but attaining a valuable result. Being effective is habit forming. Using performance thinking can also be habit forming. The difference that comes with performance thinking is that the focus is on your efforts producing what you value. Not only is the support for attaining results a good technique for accomplishment, it is also a way to harness your human inertia so that it becomes easier for you to keep the focus in later situations. So what about Mark? What about David? We know the change in Mark has to start with Mark. The rest is what are outsiders to the decision to commit his time and effort to any change. For our purpose, let us assume that Mark has some good experience with intentionally listening to people, giving them feedback on what they said so they know he was paying attention. Where being a trickster now gets him unpleasant results, this has worked. And instead of seeking out passives for pranks, he makes the effort to really listen to what the person nearest him is saying. He listens with the intent to let them know that he has heard them, receiving what they said, and will do what he can to let them see it. His urge to continue as a trickster will still be there, but he will do something rewarding instead. The trickster behavior will remain, but become less of a problem, and the listening behavior will become easier because it works for him. Keeping the performance discipline is a behavior that can be learned, something with a valued result.