Pushkin.
Whatever outcomes you have or lifestyle you're enjoying right now, it's kind of a byproduct of the habits you've been running, and so if you want the outcome to change, it's actually the habits that need to change.
Writer James Clear has helped millions of people achieve their big goals through small shifts and behavior, and he believes that our habits can have a powerful impact on how we see ourselves.
True behavior change is really identity change. Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So your habits are how you embody a particular identity.
On today's epsiodisode, a tactical guide for actually reaching our goals. I'm maya shucker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. If you're like me, you often set ambvicious goals like wanting to meditate or to cook more at home, but you struggle with execution, like sure, I want to read more in the evening, but when I sit down after work, Instagram is just way more appealing. So this is where James comes in.
He believes that tiny changes in our habits are the key to reaching our long term goals. His best selling book, Atomic Habits distills the strongest insights from academic research, including how to break bad habits and form good ones, and he teaches us how to design our habits so they actually stick. We started our conversation with the basics, So let's start off with what a habit is. How do you define habits?
Well, if you talk to an academic or researcher, they're probably going to say, hey, technically, a habit is a behavior that's more or less automatic or mindless, So like brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or unplugging the toaster after each use, like things that you don't even really think about, you know, usually it's thirty seconds or last two minutes or lastening. They're very quick, automatic routines.
But there is this interesting thing about habits, which is that's not usually the way we talk about it culturally. Like if I were to ask you, hey, what are some habits you're trying to build, You're probably not going to tell me something mindless and automatic. You're probably going to say, I want to get in the habit of writing every day, or I want to get in the habit of going to the gym four days a week.
And I know what you mean when you say that, you mean I want it to be this regular practice, this ritual that I repeat consistently. But that stuffs pretty effort. Puone requires concentration and careful thought, like especially writing. You know it's ever going to be mindless, the way that brushing your teeth might be.
Why are good habits so hard to pick up and bad habits so hard to kick?
What is the difference between a good habit of bad habit? Well, most behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time, So broadly speaking, let's say that a behavior has an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome, like kind of the canonical example of
a bad habit is smoking a cigarette. Well, the immediate outcome of smoking a cigarette might be that you reduce stress, or that you get to connect with a coworker outside the office, or many other things that we often would say serve you in some way or serve some need that you might have. It's only the ultimate outcome of continuing to smoke for ten or twenty years or whatever that is negative. Good habits are often the reverse, Like the immediate outcome of going to the gym for the
first week is often unfavorable. Your body's sore, you feel foolish and stupid, You're worried that people are judging you or think you're doing the exercises wrong. It's only the ultimate outcome of sticking to a good habit for a year or two or three that you get the results that you want. And so I think my summary of what is a good habit and what is a bad habit is that the cost of your good habits is in the present, the cost of your bad habits is in the future.
One of the things that I studied during my POSTOC in cognitive neuroscience is temporal discounting. And I think, you know, there's lots of reasons why it's really hard to invest in good habits, But in addition to the rewards of the good habits not being salient in the moment, we also do discount the value of future rewards in a
pretty significant way. So even if we're told intellectually, okay, this thing is going to pay off, our brains are wired it's such that we just don't assign the same value to those future rewards versus the present day ones.
Sure, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, But my understanding of it is that for most of human history we evolved in what was roughly an immediate return environment. So your ancestors saw a storm on the horizon, they take shelter. Now that gives them in a media benefit. They need a meal, they forage for berries in the bush, that gives them an immediate benefit. And so our paleolithic prehistoric brains are largely the hardware that is the same as it has been for the last fifty thousand years.
Grew up in an environment like that, or we're evolved in an environment like that, and then now in modern society we live, in many ways in a delayed return environment. You go to work now so you can get paid in two weeks. You study now so you can graduate in four years. You save for retirement now so that you can retire in two decades, and so a lot of the behaviors, a lot of the habits we want
to build, have extreme temporal discounting going on. It's not even just like a day or two from now, it's many years from now, and we're not wired to work that way.
Can you say more about why it's important that we're so intentional about how we build our habits.
So first reason is your brain is building habits all the time, whether you think about it or not. So if you're going to be creating habits anyway, it benefits you to understand and what the process is and how it works so that you can design it to your benefit rather than to your detriment. I think a lot of people feel like they're the victim of their habits. Oh I did that, I didn't even realize that, or oh,
my habits are kind of happening to me. If you understand how it works, now you don't have to be the victim of your habits. You can be the architect of them. And as far as I can tell, you can only effectively direct your attention toward one thing at a time. The more that you can figure out how to offload stuff and not have to think about it, the more that you kind of have operations going on automatically in the background, and you can now direct your
attention towards something else. If you had to think carefully about how to tie your shoes every time you did it, or how to brush your teeth every time you did it, or where the bread is and the pantry every time you grabbed for it. I mean, an individual day would become very cumbersome.
By the way. Given my husband, Jimmy, I actually am searching for where the bread is every day in the country.
Jimmy, if you're listening to this, stop moving to bread.
I know, just keep it in one damn place.
Okay, But yeah, you get that's the idea, you know, like your brain wants to do that so that you can more smoothly get through the day and focus on some of the other demands of life.
Yeah. You talk about the difference in your book between goals and systems. What do you mean by this?
So your goal is your desired outcome, the target, the thing you're shooting for. Your system is the collection of habits that you follow each day. So almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. Whatever outcomes you have or lifestyle you're enjoying or not enjoying right now, it's kind of a byproduct of the habits you've been running or the system you've been following
for the last six months, year, two years. And so if you want the outcome to change, it's actually the habits that mean to change. And this doesn't mean that goals are useless, like I actually think goals are really helpful for setting a sense of direction, gaining clarity, figuring
out what to optimize for. And I am someone who's very goal oriented, so in a lot of ways, I say all this stuff as a reminder to myself to try to focus a little bit more on the habits and the system and a little bit less on the outcome and the goal.
I also think that when we engage with the kind of system that we want to build around us to achieve the goal, it actually has a nice sobering effect on the goal itself. So in a bubble, it's really easy to think audaciously, like incredibly ambitiously about the goal
you're trying to achieve. But when you pressure test it in the context of a system, all of a sudden, the practical realities of how it is you're actually going to achieve that goal come into the light, and you might think to yourself, hmm, I might need a slightly
more modest goal at least this time around. And that's not to say don't be ambitious, but that pressure testing is actually critical so that you don't feel that you're constantly failing or just set moonshots that you have no chance of reaching when it comes to day to day reality.
I actually think it's a beautiful point. It's really wise of you to bring it up. A lot of the time, when I'm thinking about building my business, the first question that I feel like you should ask is how do I want to spend my days? And then inside of that you can ask questions like how could I grow the business more effectively, how can we reach more people? How can we make a bigger impact. But a lot of entrepreneurs start by asking how can we make the
most money possible? And I feel like that's a very bad way to start, because you end up with a bunch of options that are not the way that you want to live your days. And so to your point about dreaming ambitiously, people will often come up with goals that they have for themselves, but then when they have to start implementing that or thinking about the system, they realize, oh, this isn't how I want to spend my time. Yeah, you know, this isn't what I want to be doing.
And what you find is that a lot of the people you're jealous of, or the results that you're envious of, a lot of the things that you kind of wish. Oh, well, you know what if I had what they had. You don't want to do what is required. You're not even interested in living that life. You know, there are many things like sometimes I I'll talk to some of my entrepreneur friends and just say something like, whatever the optimal way is to make money, you probably don't even want
to do that. Like, you probably don't even want to make the most money because it's a lifestyle. It's completely unrelated to how you want to be spending your time, and you could transfer that into pretty much any domain in life.
Yeah, yeah, I really like that. And I think, look, some of us have the luxury of thinking how do I want to spend my days? Others of us don't have that luxury, and we just have so many demands on our time and our resources. And so the reason why it's good to engage with systems at the outset of goal pursuit is that there will just be natural constraints and limitations on imagine single mom of three working two shifts to make ends meet. They need to set
reasonable goals given the demands on their time. So it's useful no matter what your starting point is. So you've convinced us that systems are important. I mean, they're really the driver of whether or not we achieve our goals. Can you tell us, James, about the four elements of habit formation, and then we can talk about how to try to optimize given those elements.
Sure. So there's a much longer scientific discussion of the cinnatomic habits, but the brief summary is that I like to break a habit into four different stages, and I think if you understand these four stage you understand how habits work. So the first step is there's a queue. So there's something that you notice or gets your attention. So for example, you hear a siren, that's an ambulance
coming up from behind you. That's an auditory queue that starts the habit of pulling to the side of the road. Or you see a plate of cookies on the counter in the kitchen, that might be a visual queue that starts the habit of eating a cookie. After the queue, the second step is the craving. There's some kind of interpretation that your brain makes about what's going on. So you see the plate of cookies in the counter visual queue, your brain thinks, oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable.
And so it's actually this moment of assigning a favorable meaning to the cookie that gives you this motivation, the urge, the desire to walk over, pick it up and take a bite. So that's the third step the response, and then finally there's a reward. Oh, it is in fact sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. So Q craving response reward, And you can kind of imagine those four stages like going around a clock Q
craving response reward, Q raving response reward. And the more that you cycle around that clock, the tighter that feedback loop becomes. The more that behaviors are preceded by a reliable queue and followed by an enjoyable reward, the tighter the habit is, and the more ingrained and automatic it becomes. And so that's kind of the very brief scientific description of what's going on in your brain when you're building a habit.
Yeah, what if the queue is simply a thought, Like for a lot of times, the queue is simply I want jalapino kettle potato chips, And it's like, I don't really know if there's a physical que in my environment or a particular context. It just that I know that thing's delicious, and so my brain during the middle of the day will just serve it up.
Yep. The answer to this is going to differ depending on which researcher expert you talk to. For myself, I don't know. Some people believe that internal cues are a thing that they can arise spontaneously, and then that that could somehow dry before it. I guess I'll just say I'm not sure that spontaneous thoughts exist. It seems as if life is a very long, cascading chain of cause and effect, and that every thought actually comes from somewhere, even if you can't pin it down yourself.
Yeah, there's no question, just from like a physics point of view, that the thought about the kettle chips was preceded by something. But it does feel different to me when the queue is a plate of chocolatech of cookie sitting on the counter, versus when the queue is a flurry of subconscious thoughts that are then followed by wanting the kettle chips. Because in that frame I feel like I have less control over whether or not I get access to that queue. I don't even know what served
it up in the first place. It was just a random smattering of thoughts that unfold it in a particular sequence. That's why it feels relevant.
Yeah, habits of thought seem to be very hard to interrupt, you know. It's like, if this is bubbling up for me, how do I fix this habit where all of a sudden, I feel like I have this urge to do something or to eat something, or to ruminate on something. And I will say that I don't have a great answer
to that. It's not like saying, hey, if you don't want to eat more peanut butter, let's just keep jars of peanut butter out of the house, exact because now there's a lot of friction between you and the action, right.
Yeah, those neurons are inside your damn head. Can't run away from them, folks can't lock them up.
Yeah. Yeah, And so it's a very tricky thing and I don't know that I have a good answer to it.
After the break, James teaches us how we can build habits that actually stick. We also discuss how our identity can shape our habits, and how our habits can shape our identity. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plants. Let's talk about how we can make good habits stick. Talk to me about the four laws of habit building, and then for each one, I'd love to ask you a couple of questions.
Sure, let me just give a brief summary and then we can dive in. If you want a habit to stick, there are basically four things that you want to happen. So you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, so the first laws to make it obvious. You want the craving to be attractive, to be compelling, so the second laws to make it attractive. The more compelling or enticing or motivating a habit is, the more likely are going to feel like you want to do it.
The third laws you want to make it easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionalless simple habit is, the more likely it is to be performed. And then the fourth and final laws you want to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable habit is, the more rewarding or pleasurable it is the more likely you are to feel compelled to do it in the future. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking, no, I have this habit, I keep procrastinating on it. I just can't quite seem to get started.
You can just go through those four laws and ask yourself, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And the answers to those questions will reveal different steps that you can take.
So let's start with how we can make things more obvious. What are some examples?
I think one interesting thing you can do is just hold a habit in the back of your mind that you're thinking about building, and then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day and look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are obvious here? What behaviors are easy here? And you're going to start to notice different things. So, for example, I had a reader who wanted to practice
guitar more frequently. He would go once a week and then he would not practice, and he'd show up with the next lesson and his instructor would say, you haven't practiced, and so he took his guitar out of the case, put it on a stand in the middle of the living room. He would pass it thirty times a day, and so he's more likely to pick it up and play.
So get you get the idea right, which is you're just trying to make the thing that you want to do more obvious, and you're trying to make the thing you don't want to do less obvious and increase friction there.
What do we do in situations where we really don't have a lot of control over our environment. This actually became quite salient during quarantine for me. So I remember I was working basically from my kitchen, and so there was no ability for me to make something like obvious you're not obvious in that context or as much harder too.
Yeah, so what if we can't do something about this? So COVID is a very easy example that you just mentioned. You know a lot of people suddenly they're working from the kitchen or from their living room. Now I can snack all day or turn on TV anytime or whatever. So this is a strategy. It comes from BJ Fogg, Professor at Stanford, and he's got this kind of tiny habits method. I refer to it in atomic habits as habit stacking, because you're going to stack your new habit
on top of an old one. But the idea is just that in FOG's insight, which I think is really smart, is that it's often easier to stick to a new habit if you chain it or link it to something that you just did before. So let's take your example of working in the kitchen. Maybe something you already do each morning is that you make a cup of coffee, and maybe there's some new productive behavior that you want to do so that you get into the swing of
your day. You know, just say work on the most important past, just to use a general thing, but it could be more specific if you know what it is for your job. So your habit stack could be something like I walk into the kitchen, I make my cup of coffee. After I pour my cup of coffee, I
will immediately start working on the most important thing. And you give yourself this order of events that things always happen in the same way, and so you kind of try to link the habit to a specific queue in that environment.
Let's talk about making things attractive. So what does this mean in the context of habit formation. I'm assuming you mean I should just bring a life size poster like David Beckham with me everywhere I go.
Honestly, though like that could do. It depends on what the habit is. So I think my current answer to this I wish I had written this in the book, but I didn't. It is worth asking yourself what would this look like if it was fun. One of the most common New Year's resolutions is to exercise more. And I think that a lot of people are exercising or going to the gym in January just because they feel like they should go to the gym, or that like society wants them to or they're expected to. And there
are many ways to live an active lifestyle. Some people like lifting weights like a bodybuilder, and that's great, but you don't have to do that. You could kayak or rock climb, or go for a run or do yoga. Like we could come up with an almost infinite list of what that might look like, and you should choose the version of that habit that is most fun to you. And this doesn't mean that every habit in your life
is going to feel like going to a concert. Right, It doesn't mean that like your habits are going to feel like the most fun thing that you do. But most things in life, there may not be like a thousand ways to do it, but there's almost always more than one way, and you can almost always find a version that is more fun than the default. And so I think you should start there.
Yeah, I think one thing we can suffer from I certainly suffer from this is having a bit of a purity complex around building new habits or certain behaviors. So one of my goals is to just eat more vegetables. Team I'm a vegetari, so you know, it's a pretty pretty substantial fraction of what I should be eating, but I don't. And so my goal is to eat salad more regularly. But I had a purity complex about it.
So it's like, well, if I'm going to eat salad, then I should get the healthy dressing and I should be really sparing in terms of the toppings salad toppers I put on it. And my husband kind of changed my mind about this. He like makes his salad a party every day. There's like a party inside his bowl, James, and so I have become very expensive. In my definition of what a salad topper is, it could be crushed
of potato chips. The other day, I put Snyder's honey mustard pretzels on top of my salad and I just go like I go to town with the salad. And what's remarkable, since implementing this new rule at work this whole year, I basically had salad for lunch like ninety percent of the time. And so that was a really good lesson for me, which is, if you're trying to introduce a new thing, you don't have to reach for perfection or feel like it's a painful, arduous process, and
therefore it's virtuous. There's some middle ground there, and it actually led my habit to stick because I do look forward to I look forward to lunch now like a lunch that includes salad.
That's a great example. There is so much truth to the fact that you should try to do things in the beginning that feel good and are enjoyable, and if you can find a way to make it enjoyable, then you have a reason to keep repeating it. And now that you're having salid ninety percent of days, sure, maybe there are little ways that you can start to optimize it.
I think you bring up a good point about there's a certain type of person that has this mindset where it's like for it to be virtuous or for it to count, it has to be perfect, or it has to be done you know, really well.
Or that or very hard in pa.
I need to feel like I'm suffering otherwise it doesn't count yep. And that's a mindset that I do think, even if it has served you in your life where you found it useful in many ways, which I think a lot of the people who believe it because they feel like it's served them, it's worth releasing that for a little bit and at least experimenting and seeing what it might be like for it to be fun for a little bit and to get the habit established and you can scale it up and turn into something more.
And this can take many different shapes, but I do think that this is a very deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize it and turn it into all the things that
you want it to be. And so you figured out how to get salads established as part of your daily routine, and you made it fun, and once it was established, great, then there were so many ways that you could figure out how to make it healthier. But you try to figure out how do I get this going first? And
I think that's a great lens to use. There's also another question that I think is worth just kind of thinking about or holding on to, which is a lot of people start by when they think about the habits they want to build. I think especially this is a pitfall for ambitious people or talented people who you know, really when you start sitting her down and thinking about what I want to achieve, your natural inclinations to be, like,
what could I do on my best day? You know, what would it look like if I was at peak performance? What would it look like if I was really firing on all cylinders. You start to get excited about who that future peak performance you could be, and instead, I think it's almost better to ask yourself, what would I stick to even on my bad days?
Yeah? I really like that.
What would I stick to on my worst day? And that becomes the baseline for the new habit. You know, you're like, even when I don't feel like eating salad, I'll probably eat this one that tastes really good and has the potato chips on it, and it's like kind of fun and exciting, and you can come up with like what that might look like for me. For my writing habit, one of my objectives is just to write
one sentence a day. It's like, look, even when I'm exhausted and the day has gone terribly and I haven't gotten anything done I wanted to get done, I can write one sentence before I go to sleep. So figure out what your baseline is for what you can stick to even on the bad days, and then great, if you feel better, scale it up from there. But I think your example is a nice way of seeing how that can work out.
I this also, you know, fits into your make it easy bucket of habit formation. I love one of the stories that you talk about, which is a guy who is trying to commit to going to the gym.
Yeah, there's this reader, my name Mitch, and he's lost over one hundred pounds and now he's kept it off for more than a decade. And when he first started going to the gym, he had this strange little rule for himself where for the first six weeks he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes, so he would get in the car, drive to the gym, do half an exercise, get back to the car, drive home.
He was mastering the art of showing up. He was figuring out how to make it part of his daily routine, how to make it fun or easy enough that he would do it. And there's this great quote from Ed Latimer where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. Like, there are a lot of things in life that are like that. You know, the hardest step is the first.
One, absolutely, And then what about the fourth law of habit building making it satisfying? How is this different from making something attractive? Is this more the residual feeling that you're left with after the experience.
No, it's a good question. They're definitely related.
You know.
The make it attractive is often not exclusively, but often it's about your expectation of what the payoff is going to be. So it's the attractive part is usually about anticipation motivation, whereas the satisfying part is about the resolution of that anticipation. So making it attractive is like I expect this cookie to taste good. Making it satisfying is I just ate it, And it did in fact taste sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable.
Right.
But the point here that the kind of practical takeaway, and I refer to this in the book as the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated, behaviors that get immediately punished get avoided. And it is such a basic, simple idea as soon as you hear it stated. But all human beings like to feel good. We all want to feel praised, to feel rewarded, We all want to feel satisfied and to
enjoy experiences in life. And so the more that your habits can give you a positive emotion like that, the more likely you are to repeat them in the future. And we also, on the flip side, want to avoid things that have consequences that feel painful, that it cause you to suffer, that are unenjoyable. So the basic idea here is how do I feel after I can lead the habit, And the more that you feel good or enjoy it, the more likely are to show up again
in the future. So that's kind of the big picture view of it.
This is why my absolute favorite number one habit building strategy is temptation fundling, which is, you know, it was a concept created by my friend and former collaborator Katie Milkman, and essentially all temptation bundling is you pair the undesirable thing. Right.
Let's say you have to fold laundry with a desirable thing, which in this case is of course listening to an episode of A Slight Change of Plans, right, And so you pair these two things, but really crucially you deny yourself the ability to do the pleasurable thing outside of the context of the undesirable activity.
Right.
So if you're not doing laundry, then you're not listening to your favorite episode of a podcast or a TV show or whatnot. And I cannot tell you what a game changer this has been for me in my life. One of the biggest reasons that I was drawn to your work, James, and what I found so refreshing in Atomic Habits is that you talk about habits in the context of identity.
So we often talk about habits as mattering because of the external results they'll get you. But I think the real reason the habits matter is that every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So your habits are how you embody a particular identity. So, for example, every morning that you make your bet, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Every time that you study biology for twenty minutes on Tuesday night, you embody the identity
of someone who is studious. And individually these are small things, but collectively it's like casting votes on this pile and building up a body of evidence for being that kind of person. And the first time that you go out and shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don't suddenly think, oh,
I'm a basketball player. But if you do that every day for the next six months or year or two years, at some point you kind of cross this invisible threshold where you say, hey, being a basketball player must be a big part of my life, Like that's kind of part of who I am. And I think this is ultimately where we're trying to get to, and this is in atomic habits. I call this identity based habits, but it's basically this idea that true behavior change is really
identity change. It's really getting you to shift the story about who you are and what's normal for you. And if you start to take pride in that aspect of your story, if you start to believe I'm this kind of person who does this, it becomes a little easier to stick to the behavior. And I think that's the deeper, more meaningful reason to care about your habits and what they are, because they're shaping you every day.
Yeah, and I love how subtle changes in the way that we frame things to ourselves or to others can have a big impact on our behavior. So the whole research on identity priming which says that we act in ways that align with our current identity or the identity that we aspire to have, so it can use health reinforcing.
And you give the example of someone who's trying to quit smoking cigarettes and they're offered a cigarette and one person says, no thanks, I'm trying to quit, Okay, that person's identity is of being someone who's trying to change versus someone who says no thanks, I'm not a smoker. They no longer identify as someone who smokes, and that slight tweak in how we self identify can have a big impact on our subsequent decisions.
I think that behavior and beliefs are two way street. So you know, what you believe influences the way you act, and the way you act influence is what you think about yourself. And so that's why I often encourage people start with, you know, one sales call or one push up or one minute meditation like that action can help cast a boat for believing something new about yourself. Yeah, but the example that you're giving here, you can see
how it works the other way as well. You know, we all have beliefs and identities that serve us and that hinder us. So things like I'm terrible remembering people's names, I'm not good at directions, I have a sweet tooth. These are all little stories that you tell yourself that reinforce a certain type of behavior. And progress often requires unlearning as much as it requires learning. And so one of the big challenges with the behavior changes, can I
unlearn some of the identities that are no longer serving me? Yeah, And so that's a tricky thing, and I think the best way to do it is by taking small actions that cast votes for this new identity that you want to have and gradually let the new identity crowd out the older one. But it's not a one time thing. It's not a one day thing. It's a lifestyle.
Yeah.
And the more that you can start to embrace that, the more that you can start to foster and build these new identities.
It seems so appealing to tether your identity to your behaviors because it is such a hugely motivating force. Right. If you self identify as a runner, you're more likely to run. If you self identify as a writer, you're more likely to write. But it's a double edged sword, right, because if we wrap our sense of self, our sense is self worth so much in our habits, then if you lose the ability to do something, it can be
so destabilizing. Right. So let's imagine a woman who's been a runner for the last ten years, self identifies as a runner, then has kids and endures some sort of injury as a result of her pregnancy that renders are unable to run. Now you're not only mourning the loss of running, but you're mourning the loss of yourself in some more fundamental way. And so how do we think about that trade off so that the transitions in life.
I mean, the show is all about slight changes of plan don't carry such a heavy burden.
This is very common. I've heard about this from a lot of readers since the book has come out. So some other examples that are similar to what you're mentioning. A person who identifies as a soldier. They've been in the military for many years, and then they leave and they become a civilian. What am I now? I feel like I lost my identity. I recently heard from a mother who her kids have now grown and gone off
to college, and she's suddenly an empty nester. She's like, for the last twenty years, I've been a mother, So you know, like I am still now, but in what way? You know, it feels so different. And so we all can think of these inflection points that we have in our life where we're kind of mourning the loss of a previous identity, or there's this trans from someone that we thought we were to this new stage or this new chapter. There is always going to be some part
of greeting that is part of that. And you know, if your life is not going to look the same, then that I don't think. I don't think it's reasonable to tell people we just don't feel that way, you know, like that's a natural part of being human.
Right, especially if it's constituted a part of your self worth, your self identity.
But I do think there's an effective way to think about it, or maybe some useful things that you can do that don't necessarily remove it from your life, that feeling, but maybe lessen the blow or give you an effective way to move forward. So, in the case of the military example, I'm a soldier for a long time, I've become a civilian. What am I now? Well, you may not still be a soldier, but you could be the
kind of person who falls through on their mission. You could be a good teammate, you could be the type of person who is reliable. And these are all qualities that were part of your life as a soldier and they can still be part of your life now as a civilian. And so I think that's one of the first questions is which of the traits or pieces of my previous identity are transferable into this new chapter. And so that I feel like maybe the label is different, but I don't have to lose who I am or
how I operate. You know, or what I consider to be core parts of my personality, I can still find outlets for those, So I think that is one effective way to kind of manage that change.
So, James, you've shared so much valuable content with us today. For the listener who's feeling energized to begin this new habit, what's your advice to them?
I feel like sometimes the two best time frames to focus on are either ten years or one hour. So ten years is like, if you think about most of the meaningful things you're trying to achieve in your life, building a great marriage, raising kids that you're proud of, growing a successful business, or launching a startup, writing a book, getting in the best shape of your life, pick whatever it is for you. These are almost always multi year things, and so it's a big thing to try to accomplish.
But I think just think about that big fisher thing you're trying to move toward, and then scale it down and ask yourself, what can I do in the next hour to move me toward where I want to be in ten years? And if you just make it granular like that and try to have one good step today, you turn around in a year or two or five or ten and probably be surprised by a lot of
the progress that you made. So in that way, I think you can have a strategy where small habits are not just about doing things that are small, they're also about doing things that are powerful. And that's one of the main reasons why I chose the phrase atomic habits. It's not only tighty, it's also powerful.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my conversation with James, don't miss the next two weeks of A Slight Change of Plans. We're revisiting two of our favorite episodes. The first one is an episode on the science of making and keeping friends, and then a conversation about how a small shift in mindset can make stress work for us rather than against us. And I'm excited to share that we're back with the new season of A Slight Change of Plans beginning in early March, and
it is a goodie. We can't wait to share it with you. See you soon. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson, Morgan, our producer Trisha Ba and our sound engineer Andrew Vastola. Louis Scara wrote our delightful
theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocal. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker