Ep. 5 Universal Proven System of Behavioral Change (BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits)

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you going was troubled. He looked out from his home at the two vast mountains that rose thousands of feet high in front of him. These mountains forced the people from his village to detour miles and miles out of their way whenever they were traveling to the Han River. So even though he was nearing his 90th year, he decided he was going to move thes mountains. He recruited his three sons, grandsons, and they went to the mountains. They began breaking up stones and dirt and carrying them in baskets to be dumped down into the Bohai Sea. There was an old man who lived near a bend in the river named Jer. So which literally means wise old man. And he came out and began laughing at you gong for his foolishness and started trying to dissuade him from his enterprise. How can you be so foolish with your advanced years? The little strength that you have left you cannot even destroy a blade of grass on the mountain, let alone so much the earth and so many rocks. You going side and responded? You are so conceited that you are blind to reason when I die there will be my sons who will have their sons and grandsons. Those grandsons will have their sons and grandsons and so on to infinity. But the mountain will not grow. Why is it so impossible to level them juice? So was left speechless at these words. Fortunately for you gone, His determination was actually noticed by the heavenly God who had these mountains moved for him. And from that time on, no mountain has stood between the GI Joe and the Han River. This story was recounted in the book Chinese Mythology by Sandra and Owen Gibbons. Now Confucius also mirrors this wisdom by saying the man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones and the opposite is actually true, too. If you want to build big things, you actually have to start with small stones. So China over thousands of years produced one of the most incredible feats of engineering and architecture of all time in the construction of the Great Wall. It began with different warring states in China, building sections of the wall to kind of defend against each other between the eighth and the fifth century, and then these walls were consolidated it by the first emperor of China chin shirt Huang in the Chin Dynasty, right around 220 BC and then the sections that we actually know or that our most well known were built in the 14th century by the Ming Dynasty to actually defend against a Mongol invaders. The amount of wall built during this time spans almost 3900 miles. To put this in perspective, if you were draw a straight line from Florida all the way to Washington, which is the longest distance across the continental United States, it's on Lee 2800 miles. So the Great Wall of China, built in the 14th century, is over 1000 miles longer than the longest distance across the United States, even though now there are sections that have fallen into disrepair aren't maintained as well. If you were to add all of the branches, the entire wall with all of its branches, it would be over 13,170 miles long. If you put all of those sections together, it would go over halfway around the entire world. On the equator, hundreds of thousands of people were used during this time, some estimate, even up to a 1,000,000 people were used to build this wall. And I got the incredible privilege to be able to walk on this wall, and it truly is amazing to just watch the wall just disappear over mountain after mountain and mountainous. Far as you can see, it is monumental tribute to the combined effort of human achievement. We all have mountains that we want to remove from our life. Whether those are bad habits, you know, we want to change time wasters or, you know, to get out from under a mountain of debt. We also have mountains that we would want to build. Ideally, could be, you know, a new business or even just the simple act of exercising or flossing consistently. Why can these mountains be so hard to move? Sometimes we know they're important. We know it make a difference in our life. If we were to change in this area, so why can't we do something about it now? B. J. Fogg in his book Tiny Habits. The small changes that change everything says we are not the problem, our approach to changes. It's a design fault, not a personal flaw. So often we beat ourselves up for having these failures or not having enough willpower not having enough motivation to make the change in these areas. But he very vehemently argues that it's not a personal flaw. It's a flaw in the system that we actually use. So he's a Stanford University professor and a leading expert in behavioral change. He has solved the puzzle of how to change any human behavior he had developed. A universal system applies to all human behavior that we can use to transform our life. And he's actually used this method to coach over 40,000 people, and he continually refines it through applied research and real world application. If I could recommend just one book to read on behavioral change, and I would even argue self help in general, it would be this book. As you know, I'm constantly looking for tools to improve my life, but then also improve your life as well. But more importantly than tools are actually, systems systems are the comprehensive application of tools in a sequential fashion. BJ Fog has uncovered the system for human behavior and how we can use it, overhaul our life by lifting one stone or even one peple at a time. How does our definition of success shape how we live our daily lives? Join me, your host, Michael Bellman, as we create a life of success by exploring the cutting edge research and happiness, motivation, psychology, philosophy and welcome to thrive, culture success. So let's jump into this. B. J. Fogg talks about how all human behavior occurs when these three things happen simultaneously. Motivation, ability and a prompt. So if you want to look at it, you have B for behavior equals map motivation, ability, a prop for a behavior to occur. You need all of those things to be present, and they need toe happen at the same time. So you might have the motivation for something. You might even have the ability to do it. But unless you have a good prompt, you won't do it, and vice versa. You might have ah prompt but not have any motivation to do it. So all of these things need to be taken into consideration most often when we talk about behavioral change, you know, motivation is that catchphrase, word, motivation, willpower, those of the things that we try to change. We try to adjust for. But really motivation is, for me the most fickle aspect of those three dynamic to try to manipulate. He has a great quote that says Motivation is like a party animal friend. Great for a night out, but not someone you would rely on to pick you up from the airport. And that's really what we're looking at. We we want the person that you can rely on to pick you up from the airport. We want the thing that worked consistently day in and day out. The motivation is like a wave. It crests, and when it's cresting, you might be able to do things that are really hard, really difficult. But then a lot of times it crashes and leaves you kind of high and dry. So that's the first aspect of that. The second is ability, and we'll get into this more in depth a little bit later on. But there's five different areas that makeup ability. You have time money, your mental capacity, your physical capacity or the amount of effort it takes to do that task and then a routine, and I will show you later on exactly how we can manipulate each one of those variables to achieve the desired behavior, and the last variable in behavior is that prompted. We talked about this in the last episode a little bit about that. Q. And we'll dive into it on a lot more depth here. But essentially, there's three different types of props. We have a person prompt, which is something that's triggered almost intrinsically. That could be something even a simple. It's like you feel hungry or the need to go to the bathroom or, you know your intrinsic desire to do something. Then you have a context prompt, which is things that our environment triggers us to. D'oh, a lot of these things we don't even pay attention to. And then we have an action prompt. And this is one where it's triggered by something that you just did or routine that you already have in your day. The essence of tiny habits is this. You take a behavior you want, you make it really, really tiny. You find where it fits naturally into your life, and then you nurture its growth. And this is how we go about doing this. I'm gonna give you the overview and then we'll break down each things step by step. The first step is you want to clarify your aspiration. Second step is you explore behavioral options that relate to achieving that aspiration. The 3rd 1 is you match with specific behaviors that irrelevant to you. The 4th 1 is you make those really tiny. You start tiny 5th 1 You find a really good prompt six. You celebrate your success, you start off with clarifying the aspiration. And again, this is something that we've done in the previous episode. So go back to those if you miss that. But it could be a simple as you know, I want to be less stressed or could be more Pacific and be something like, I want to lose £20. So that's clarifying that aspiration. And you'd want to put that in a little bubble right in the center of a paper that you have. Then the second step is exploring behavior options. So here's what I want you to D'oh get a piece of paper, get a pen and pencil anything that you can write with and draw in the middle of that paper. Draw a little thought cloud or a little bubble in the middle, And inside of that, you're gonna write your aspiration. So this it could be something like, I want to be less stressed or, you know, I want to lose weight or I wantto, you know, interact have better relationships, interact with my spouse of my friends. Better write that right in the middle of that bubble. That's the first step. The second step is you explore behavior options and how you do this. He has a technique called magic wanding. So you ask yourself the question. If we could wave a magic wand, get ourselves to do any behavior to achieve that goal or that aspiration that you have in the middle, what would all those behaviors be and try to list out as many as you can think of? So 10 15 20 Just don't edit, you know, just list out all these different behavior so you know, to be less stress might be meditating. It might be getting to sleep on time. It might be having a better relationship with your boss at work, you know, setting better boundaries just liste liste les les les As many as you can think of and some prompts to kind of help you think through this is they could be one time behaviors that you could do to achieve that aspiration new habits that you want actually form or bad habits or negative habits that you would want to stop. You want to make these, you know, specific at first just write them down, but then looking and make him specific. So if you're trying to drink less soda, you know, you might say, OK, maybe going to cut out soda on the weekend. Or it might be I'm gonna drink one soda and set a three. So after your initial brainstorming session, where you've gotten, you know, 10 15 behaviors tried it, then go back and make those behaviors specific. So what your paper should look like at this point is you have your aspiration in the middle bubble and then surrounding that you have all of these different behaviors that can help you achieve that aspiration for this next part matching ourselves with specific behaviors. What you need is to get a bunch of index cards and take all of the behaviors that you just listed and write all of those on these index cards. We're gonna use that Thio match ourselves with the optimal behaviors that will help us achieve those aspirations. What are called golden behaviors? So there's three different features toe a golden behavior. The first aspect is it's effective in realizing our aspiration, so essentially it has high impact. The second aspect is you actually want to do the behavior, and that's the aspect of motivation. And the third aspect is you can do the behavior. That's the aspect of ability. Now, what's unique about his behavioral model is that aspect of you actually want to do the behavior so often. When we were trying to make behavioral change, we start with these behaviors that you know we we dislike or we don't want to do at all. But we think we should. What's different about this model is the motivation is actually baked into the process, so you're almost taking the motivation entirely out of the equation. So instead of you know, might be something like instead of going to the gym, which you don't really want to do, you don't really have the time to d'oh so again it's your ability to do it is low and your motivation to do it is low. It might be. You know, you throw a little dance party with your five year old daughter in the living room for five minutes, you know you can do it. You want to do it and you start there. You can always work up to the harder behaviors. The ones that are more challenging make you feel more apprehensive. But the way you start is with the behaviors that you already have the motivation to D'oh! You have the ability to do, and they have a high impact in terms of achieving your goal. Now, this behavior matching is probably one of the most important aspects of the whole process. So it's important that we do it well, and how we do that is we use a tool called Focus Mapping. So you have all these index cards. You've written all of these different behaviors on them. Now you can either picture just using your table or you can use a big paper and you draw ah, big plus sign or big graph. At the top end of that graph, you have high impact. The bottom end of that graph you have low impact. So basically, the vertical access is low to high impact. The horizontal access is low to high feasibility or ability. So can I get myself to do this behavior? You know, on one side you have low on the one side you have high, so again, at the top of the page, you have high impact bottom of page of low impact left side. You have low feasibility or low ability and right side. You have high ability. Or you can just picture this with your table and use index cards like that. So we want to do this in two different rounds. The first round. What you want to do is on Lee. Think about the impact. Don't think about the ability or feasibility of it. Just think about impact. So look at all of those index cards and arrange them on that graph with the ones that you know, we'll have a high impact to achieving your aspiration down to the ones that won't really have much impact at all. And again, don't worry about the feasibility or your ability. At this point, Round one. Just arrange, um, top to bottom high impact, a low impact, and you could do this by asking yourself the question. How effective is this behavior in helping me achieve your aspiration than in Round two? We start looking at the feasibility or the ability to be able to do the behavior. So when you ask yourself the question, can I get myself to do this every day? And for some of the behaviors that might be a one time behavior. But for a lot of, um, it's probably habits that you're wanting to implement. So you want to ask you a question. Can I get myself to do this every day and pay attention to the small dread or excitement that you feel? If you ask that question, you feel that little apprehension, a little bit of dread? Put it on. Maybe Maur on the lower side, the low feasibility, the low ability side. And then, if you have a little bit of excitement or it makes you feel you know that thrill or you think it be easy, put it higher on the right side, the higher feasibility side After these two rounds, what you have is a graph that's basically showing you the behaviors that will have impact or not have impact, and the ones that you can do or not do so if you look in the top right hand corner, those are the behaviors that both have high impact and our behaviors. You want to dio those air the Onley behaviors that you want to focus on. At this point, maybe it's to pick two or three of them, and those are the things that you want to do to help yourself achieve that aspiration and forget about all the other ones. These air your gold and behaviors, B J. Fogg says. When you start with the easiest, most motivating thing, you can ladder up naturally to the bigger behaviors. So in behavior design, we want to match ourselves to new habits that we can do even when we're at most hurried, unmotivated and beautifully in perfect. If you could imagine yourself doing the behavior on your hardest day of the week, it's probably a good match. It's probably a golden behavior. He developed a maxim emphasizing the importance of this that says, help people do what they already want to d'oh! Just a foundation for what behavioral change should look like. Help people do what they already want to. D'oh. So what we should have at this point is to maybe three, maybe more of those golden behaviors that will really help us achieve our aspiration. Now the next step is to take these behaviors and make him as small and as tiny as possible. So B J says there is no mountain to climb on. Lee a little hill, and the second maxim that he has is help people feel successful when we feel successful, warm or likely to repeat The thing that helped us feel successful. How we leverage that at this point is we make that behavior as tiny and as small as we possibly can. How we do that is by asking ourselves to questions when he calls the discovery question, which is what is making this decision iron behavior hard to do or difficult to dio. And then the breakthrough question, which is How can you make it easy to do the discovery question? No ties directly into that ability chain. Now, remember, we said there was five different aspects to our ability, time, money, our mental capacity are physical capacity or effort and a routine. So when we asked that question. What is making this desired behaviour hard to dio? We look at it through the lens of these five things. Is it an issue of Time? Is that's what making it difficult. Is it because we don't have the money to do the behavior? Is it because you know, mental capacity? Maybe we don't have the mental skills of their learning to do the behavior? Or is it a physical effort thing? Maybe it's a difficult thing to do. Or maybe it's, you know, you have to switch locations, you know, So there's some aspect of physical effort or physical capacity involved. Or maybe there is a conflicting routine that we have in our life that is more important. That's overlaying the routine that we want to develop. So we ask it without of ability, chain what's making this behavior hard to d'oh? And then you asked, How can you make it easy to do? And we can manipulate all of those variables? Maybe you found out, you know, the physical effort was what's making it difficult. So let's say you're having trouble. You no snacking at nighttime, maybe have a bowl of M and M it's out of the coffee table, so what you can do is you can make that physical effort harder so you can put it away in a covered. You can put it high up in a covered or depending on the level that you want to do, you can actually not even have them in the house. If you wanna have those snacks, you have to actually go out and buy them. That's adjusting that aspect of physical effort. And in that last example, you're also making the time harder or longer and money as well. So you can. You can do more than one variable to make something more difficult, or, if you're trying to make it easier, you want to think about what's called the starter step, the very start of the activity. So let's say you discovered that going to the gym was one of those golden behaviors that would help you get to your aspiration. Well, you want to think about the very start of that behavior and create a routine or create a habit around that, so it's not going to the gym. The very start of that might be, you know, putting out your workout clothes the night before or getting into your workout clothes. The first thing in the morning. That's actually the very start of it, and that's the habit that you want to do. You want to start as tiny as possible. So take those three or five golden behaviors and think about the very first step to that. Make them very, very tiny. That's that four step in the behavioral design process. Now the 5th 1 is making sure you find a good prompt. Now there's again three types of promise. The person one which is that intrinsic. You know, hunger cues or things that are happening internally is not very. It's kind of like motivation. It's not a very good prompt to use. This is, for instance, like just trying to remember a deadline or appointment on your calendar just by yourself, just internally trying to remember it. It can work, but it's not the most consistent, effective way to do it. The second aspect is context cues Now these can be really important and very powerful, you know, could be, you know, leaving post it notes, you know, putting reminders in your calendar. You know, things like that having a friend remind you those are all context cues, and they can be effective. But you could also get overloaded by it. So you get overwhelmed, and you just start to get desensitized to these context cues and not even pay attention to them anymore. Which is why the most important Q that you can use is the action cue. And this is very, very important because it uses routines or habits that are already so much a part of your life that you don't have to think about him. So, for instance, this could be when my feet hit the ground after waking up in the morning. It could be after you go to the bathroom, it could be after you brush your teeth. It could be after you feed your dog or, you know, during the middle of the day it might be after I hear the phone ring. I will, you know, do a certain action or could be, you know, after I get into the car after I get out of the car, or after I hang up the keys after work. After I washed the dishes after I turned off the TV after I put my head down on my pillow. There are so many action cues that are already a part of our day that we don't have to think about him. So just like in the last up. So we talked about habits stacking. We use those action cues to stack the habit that we want to have these tiny, tiny habits that we just talked about after an action cue. So, for instance, BJ Fog used the action cue of brushing his teeth toe actually start the habit of flossing his teeth. And he did it really, really small, really, really tiny. So his habit was. After I brush the teeth, I will floss one tooth. Now that sounds ridiculous, but what it does is it builds on success because he knows regardless, whether it's his busiest day, whether he's traveling for work, whatever is going on, he conf loss one tooth. He can do it. It's easy. It doesn't even need motivation because it's so simple and so tiny, and it has the ability to be able to do it so he could do that on a consistent basis, and it keeps the habit alive. So on days when things might be really, really crazy and really, really busy. All he has to do floss one tooth. He's okay with that. And then he goes to bed. That's totally fine. He also implemented another one, which is, you know, after I go to the bathroom, I will due to push ups. So instead of, you know, having it going to the gym five times a week, doing high intensity interval training, whatever it is, you know, it's just I'm gonna do to push ups after I go to the bathroom and you start really, really small regardless what you d'oh you do to push ups to squats, you know, after going in the bathroom and then you build it up. So maybe you start to feel confident with that successful with that, and then you start doing five or 10 or 30 whatever it is, But you can always scale it back down to the tiniest, tiniest step of going. All right. I did too. I'm set, you know, pat yourself on the back and keep going. So find a good action cue or action prompt. You can ask yourself, where can this have it fit naturally into my day? and then you can even write down. What are all the action prompts that I have in the morning that I can think of No coffee, toothbrush getting out of bed, you know, whatever it is, then doing it in the middle of the day and then doing it in the evening time. What are all the different things that I can think of and use those as action prompts for the new habit that you're wanting to build in. The sixth step in the behavior design process is celebrating your success, and BJ talks about in his book that celebration is so important that he would teach it before anything else teach it before you know, motivation, ability and prompt making up behavior. Before any of the note steps in the behavioral design process, he would teach people how to celebrate. Now what this does when you celebrate effectively, you tap into the reward circuitry of your brain is your brain essentially releases dopamine, which makes you feel good. And by feeling good at the right moment, you cause your brain to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviors you just performed. So in other words, you can hack your brain to create a habit by celebrating and self reinforcing. He goes on to say, There's a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior in the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future. And this mindset or this attitude goes contrary to a lot of what's taught in behavioral change, which is, you know, muscle through it. You know, no pain, no gain, all of those kind of catchphrase philosophy, sort of things. This is the other way, so you have to feel good to change. We have to find what feels good to help you change. He states that emotions create habits, so for in the business of creating habits, we have to pair it with emotion that makes us feel good. It's so so important to celebrate your success. And even if it's that tiny success for him, like a flossing one tooth, you have to celebrate it. So we want to develop our celebration around it. Two aspects to celebration. It has to be immediate, and it has to have an intensity and emotional intensity to it, so you can't celebrate your flossing habit. You know, the next day be like good job flossing. It has to be right after you do it. That's what encodes it into your brain. So he gives him promise that you can use to create your own unique celebration for the habits that you're wanting to implement. So some of the prompts are, you know, thinking about a song you really love. And so after you do that habit, you think about that song. Maybe it has a little pep to it. It makes you feel good. That's one way to build your celebration or you and explore different physical movements. So might be like a fist pound. It might be a fist pump. It might be, you know, a dance move of power post in a ways to move your body to express this emotion or could be verbally could be saying your rock star you're awesome. You did amazing. That was incredible, you know, or you can visualize or picture. You know, a crowd cheering for you standing ovation, trumpet fanfares. You know, cheering stadium. All of those things give you a positive feeling, and that again reinforces wiring that habit into your brain circuitry, and you can develop both an internal kind of celebration that you have and an external one. So if there's people around, have something that you say to yourself internally that still allows that celebration to occur, or if there's nobody around, you could do a fist pound. You can dance, you can do a gig, and that helps you feel good. You might laugh at yourself a little bit, but feeling good is the important, more important aspect to the celebration. Now, again, all of that sound might sound a little hokey. Or, you know, why do we need to do that celebration? You know, I understand the other parts, but he emphasizes, it's important so much that it's the first thing he would teach You teach people how to celebrate because it's how your brain works. The emotions create habits, so you have to pair the emotion with habit. If you want to be successful or if you want to be successful quickly, you have to pair a celebration with doing the habit, even if it's really, really small. It's still something to celebrate because you know that small habit is going to build and it's gonna multiply and grow to help you achieve those bigger things. So to make this very, very simple, he has his tiny habits. Recipe. This is the recipe of the formula you can use to insert any habit into your life that you want to. D'oh. So the recipe goes like this after I and then this is your action prompt. So, you know, after I brush my teeth after I wake up in the morning after I you know after a phone call. So after I, you know, action prompt or your anchor is what he calls them. I will do this certain tiny habit or behavior that our money to d'oh. So after I brush my teeth off loss one tooth after I go to the bathroom, I'll do you put two pushups after a wake up in the morning, I'll say it's gonna be a great day and then celebrate that. So whatever celebration you have, maybe it's smiling. Maybe patting yourself on the back to a fist pound so the full tiny habit might be. After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth. Then I'll do a fist pound and say you rock. So again, that recipe is after I certain anchor action prompt. I will perform certain tiny habit and then I'll celebrate. And that's the recipe. And then you use that to just experiment with different different anchors. Different prompts different tiny habits until becomes so much a routine. And then you can start increasing the intensity or building on that tiny habit to make it bigger. So let me sum up everything that we've talked about so far. So it's important to remember that any behavior is a result of three things occurring simultaneously. Motivation, ability and a prompt, and then the steps to design that behavior that you wanna have into your life. 1st 1 you clarify your aspiration that you have. Second, you explore behavior options by asking that magic wand. Question. If you could have a magic wand to get yourself to do any behavior, what behaviors would help you achieve that goal to create that behavior of swarm? So those those behaviors all around your aspiration third step you match specific behaviors using focus mapping to find those golden behaviors. High impact, low impact, low feasibility hi feasibility than the four step. You start really, really tiny. Break it down to the starter step. The very smallest thing to help you do that. And you can ask, You know what is making this behavior hard to dio and how can you make it easy and use that ability, chain of time, money, mental capacity, physical capacity and routine to break that down. Then you find that anchor prompt where you can just anchor that habit into something that you're already doing in your life, and then you celebrate the heck out of it and repeat that over and over again. This is a very 10,000 foot view of the book Tiny Habits, The small Changes that Change Everything by B. J. Fogg. I cannot recommend this book enough. Get it. There are so many more tools that he have for specific situations for how to specifically break bad habits. Read the book. Read it again. Apply it applied again. It is phenomenal book on how to change any behavior in your life. Now, in the next episode, we will talk about the neuroscience of our connection with other people and how we can use that connection to be the glue that holds our feeling of success together. I hope to see you back for another episode of Thrive Culture Success Engineering with your host, Michael Baumann. If you enjoy this show, it would mean a lot to me if you left a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help people find the show until next time. Thank you for listening.