BJ Fogg- Habits

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr b J. Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Tech Lab

at Stanford University. A psychologist and innovator, his work empowers people to think clearly about the psychology of persuasion and then to convert those insights into real world outcomes. B J is the creator of the Fog behavioral model a new model of human behavior change. He is the author of Persuasive Technology, Using Computers to change what we think can do and co editor of Mobile Persuasion and Texting

for Health. Fortune magazine. Selected b J. Fogg is one of the ten new Gurus you Should Know, and here's the interview with Dr b J. Fogg. Hi, b J. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to get you on because behavior change is one of my favorite subjects and you are one of the best known researchers and practitioners in that area. So I'm really excited to go into a little bit more detail with the listeners on um what's known as the

Fog behavior model. But before we jump into that, we'll start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather

and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Wow, that's the provocative. Actually hadn't heard that parable before us. I love. So my reaction is it? I think the one you see is the one you pay attention to.

Not going to be my gut reaction. It's you know, the thing we really have limited in our lives is time and attention, and that just is you know, so you know, and it goes along, I guess in some ways with a meditation practice, the ability to focus on what you want to move forward and ignore the the distraction. Um,

that's that's my response. So like and and in fact, so when my meditation practice, and I'm not great at meditation, but one of the practical uses of it is to be able to stay focused on word projects or people or you know, you're going out to dinner and you stay at the dinner and you stay focused with let's go in there, rather than being distracted. And I do think that there's a direct connection. Excellent, Well, let's let's dive into, um, what one of the things you're known for,

which is the fog behavioral model. And at a basic level, it's really saying that in order for a person to achieve a certain behavior, change, to perform a certain behavior, they've got to be a combination of three things. Um, they've got to be sufficiently motivated, they have to have the ability to actually do the behavior, and then finally they need some sort of trigger to tell them to

perform the behavior. At that point, if those three things aren't kind of happening at the same moment, the behavior won't happen. And one of the things that's great about that is that a lot of people I talked to, a lot of people I work with, and I think you, I'm sure you run into this all the time, have this idea that these are that whether we're able to change your behavior or not depends on our level of willpower or in a lot of cases even our own

personal character. And um, it looks like you're showing that that's not the case. Well, you know, behavior is more than just motivation, you know. And so you did a great summary of by behavior model, and it's one of the elements, but it's not the whole. It's not the whole equation. And so what you sometimes you can design for motivation. Motivation is very slippery, It goes up and down.

We have computing motivations UM. Whereas when you look at the other two factors in my model, ability and trigger. When you design to make something easier, it tends to be more robust UM design change or better investment, because if you make something easy to do, it doesn't usually suddenly you can come hard to do. And then certainly

you've got a design for triggers. So usually when people kind of historically and traditionally when people talk about you know, behavior behavior changed, and really focused on motivation, even the phrase motivate thehavior change. And I think my work is an UM in kind of sharp relief to that. Yeah, motivations a piece of it, but how about facilitate behavior change or trigger behaviors you want? And I think those are the things you designed for first and foremost, and

that's where you really focus UM. And then you know, in my approach, the way I train people and you know innovators and also all the people and coaching in tiny habits, it's UM. You pick behaviors, you actually want to do, and that's where the motivation piece comes in. And don't don't think stuff you don't want to do, and then you have to like forge yourself to do stuff. That's that's not a long term success strategy, right, So let's dive into some of those pieces and a little

bit more detail. I think motivation. You know, you've got some great writings on what the different types of motivators are all there are, and we can go into that, but let's maybe later, but let's talk right now about what ability is. What do you mean by having the ability to do an action? And can you give me some of the types of things that we might be missing or some examples of that. Yeah, well, you know, so you can think of it as a continuum easy to do and hard to do. And then the visual

verse some of my behavior model. So people are listening to this thing, go to behavior model dot org and see the visual and the horizontal dimension is easy to do the hard to do. That's what I mean by ability. And there are three ways to think about making something easier to do. So if you're there's something you want to do, like they work out every day, um, there

are ways to make that easier to do. One is to get trained, like increase your skill, so you know, lessons or some sort of training could make it easier to do. Another approach is to create a tool or resource to make it easier to do. In my own life, I've set up a little kind of CrossFit jim in my garage, which makes it a lot easier to do

because it's right there and there in five seconds. Um. And then the third way is to actually scale the behavior back in some way, so rather than expecting yourself to work out for six minutes, work out for five things like that. So those are three ways to think about and walk through. Now, if you're designing for other people, it's really hard to get people to want to take courses or be trained, so that's not planning. Usually it's giving them a tooler resource that will make the behavior

easier to do. That's usually the one when you're designing for yourself for other people, that's the one that UM that I would focus on most and so um ability in this case you you actually I think break ability into six different potential areas to look at for that time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, which is like how how hard you have to think about it. Um right, social deviance, which is what do you mean by social deviance? Well,

it's it's part of the simplicity factors. It means you if you're doing the behavior, makes you feel funny or odd, like you're being den and it's no longer simple. So for example, let's let's say I'm in my garage doing the CrossFit stuff and I take off my shirt and I think, oh, maybe my neighbors will walk by and see me and make, you know, think that we're gonna without a shirt like Rocky Elbow. Then it's like that's made that h your heart, that it's funny. You would

pick that one out of the list. So there's six simplicity factors, and I've tentively scratched that one off the list because it also has a motivation. Yeah, as a motivational quality. It is it does have aspects of ability, but has aspects of motivation. So that's the one. If you're to come to my boot camp and work with me next week. For example, you I have a hand

I like, I look, I removed this one. And let's really talk about the five, the five others and the one that you know you didn't get to in the list. Yet I call non routine, and what I mean by that it's the behavior causes you to break a routine that you already have. It's no longer simple. So if you want somebody to join a conference call for three minutes, but it intrudes on another meeting they have, it's no longer simple even though it's a three minute conference call.

So you've got to look at how how behavior fits into your real everyday life, and you've got to design it sort of matches your routines rather than conflicting with your routines. Right, and I wish listeners and you can, as as you said, if you go out to any of your many websites, can see what this behavioral model looks like written now. But this isn't saying that people can't do anything that's hard. It's just that the harder it is to do, the more motivation you're going to

have to have to do it. So those things have to have to those have to move in tandem together. So if it's really easy to do, you don't need a lot of motivation, but if you're making a big change, you need a lot more motivation. One of the things that you talk about that, I know, preach all the time. You call them baby steps. I talk about just breaking things down into the smallest possible things, start really really small,

you know, abandon the all or nothing mindset. And you did a video about why baby steps can be so helpful. Can you give us the short version of why doing a very small version of a behavior? So say, for example, UM, we want to get to the point where we um, you know, look really muscular. Um, but we start out by doing fifteen push ups. You know, why is that a good strategy? Well, like you said, it's the behavior

is hard to do. You have to have high levels of motivation to do it, and motivations very slippery, and it's going to be a time when the motivation flips and you won't do the behavior. Whereas if it's easy to do, motivation can be higher or model and so you're going to be able to do the behavior reliably. You know, takes that any steps and if you take as you succeed on baby steps. And there's really two things going on here. One is the small behavior, we'll

call that a baby steps. That's one of the factors. The other one is as you feel successful and that's important in the whole baby steps approach. So as you do it and you feel successful, to think capital number one, the behavior gets easier to do the next time. So let's say you do five push ups one day. The next day, the five five push up is gonna be a little bit easier to do, um. Whereas if you took the big leap approach and did twenty five or fifty the next day, it's going to be harder to do.

Thatt your sore UM. So that's one thing. As usually as you do there, it will get easier to do in the future for writers. And and then number two, as you feel successful at it, you get more encouraged. Your hope goes up, your fear goes down. In other words, your motivation naturally rises. So you've got both things going on.

And that's you know, even though babies Steps it's kind of a cutesy little name, and people because of the movie What About Bob, and you know, the whole term baby I think they can discount the power of baby steps, but it's it's really kind of amazing to see the power of it. So it's people take smaller steps and feel successful, things get easier to do when their motivation naturally goes up, which means over time they can do

harder and harder things. So it ramps you up to be able to do the harder thing without uh, without you know, the risk of Wow, I did fifty plush us and now tomorrow I'm super sore, and so I'm either going to really hurt myself, I'm gonna be painful,

or I'm just going to not do it. So that's the big leaf approach, which I do not advocate, right, Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the biggest causes, you know, in my limited experience of you know, failed behavior change in my own life and people around me,

is trying to start out with too much UM. And you know, I think the other thing, for some reason is, you know, even when you don't call it baby steps, people seem to rebel against this idea because they think it seems silly, like that's not going to do any good, you know, like well doing walking for five minutes, that

isn't gonna make any big difference to my health. But I recently read something of yours which I thought was really UM is something that that I've noticed, but I certainly have never said it as well as you did, which is what's the importance of You talk about the importance of doing a habit, even if it's a very

small amount of it. So you were describing a month in which you got really busy and so you were unable to exercise as often or as much, but you talk about why it was so critical that you even did a little bit of it. So why is that? And the tiny habits method is like keeach people the method, and as we train coaches to use the method, one of the analogies we use is, you know, a habit is like a little plan it and what you're doing with you as your great the habit is you want

the plant to take root. You wanted to, you know, to firmly be in the ground and then you can grow it bigger. Now, once you have a habit, the key is to keep it alive. You just don't want it to die. And as long as you keep it alive, you still have the habit. And so in May, my I had a crazy, crazy schedule of teaching, finishing up some stuff at Stanford, doing a bunch of stuff in industry,

and my normal full size exercise habit. I just couldn't get that done with all the travel and all the responsibilities that I did do really tiny versions of it. In other words, I kept that little plant alive. I kept the roots connected in the soil. Because then when my circumstances changed, when I had time again, I was back to normal stuff, you know, the habit re emerged, the full habit. I didn't feel bad or guilty about not doing the full course of exercise I normally like

to do. Instead, I congratulate myself, like, good for you, even though your schedule is crazy, you kept the habit alive. You kept this And I really do think of this little plant and I just can't shrivel up and die. I just keep us alive because that means it will come back. Yeah, and you you retain some of that momentum and motivation, you know when I always have noticed when you when I ended a dead stop on something, you know, once I'm not have no momentum. It is

so hard to get started. Whereas to your point, as long as I've got a little bit of it going, it's easier to grow it. But boy, that that starting from nowhere is a hard point, which is why like tiny habits or baby steps is so important is because it's you know, it's sort of the walk before you run thing almost sometimes, I think, and I think it also has an impact on an identity, how you think about yourself. If you completely stop exercising, you'll think, oh,

I'm the kind of person who doesn't exercise. If you do three to five minutes of exercating the hotel room before you go, you know, teach to the big company, then still in your mind and it's like, oh, I'm the kind of person that exercises, you know, even when

I'm really busy. Right. And so even though it's a small act or small behavior, I think it affects how you see yourself and that affects a bunch of other things in your life because you tend to behave in ways that are consistent with your identity, and so you really do want to do behaviors that uh create and enforce the identity that will then lead you to the

outcomes what you want. Yep. And I think that that's such a key point is that I often, you know, talk with people who say, well, I'm the kind of person who always starts something and then doesn't issue or I'm the kind of you know, I'm the one that started exercising fifty different times and every time I stop and and I really I think that idea of not tying too tightly to that I'm that type of person because so much of this, which your model makes clear,

is about do we have the right strategies in place? Are we approaching it right. It's not a character issue. It's a motivation ability to trigger issue. And now back to the interview with b J. Fogg. So let's talk about triggers. So what what do you mean by triggers and what are some you know, examples of good triggers that you've seen versus maybe bad ones or or less effective ones would be the word that. Yeah, in my model,

a trigger is the prompter reminder. It's the prompt, it's the reminder, it's the thing that just do this behavior now. And the problem a lot of people have is they don't they're not clear about what their trigger is. And again, the trigger is not the motivator, but it's the cut then go to the gym and start working out, or it's the cut to you know, put an apple in your backpack or what have you. And so getting specific about what's going to prompt or remind me to do

this behavior and you're designed for it. So unlike traditional approaches and behavior behavior change where it's dependent where the people think about as motivation willpower, I think the behavior change as a design issue, in other words, designed the trigger, designed to make the behavior easier to do. It's a lot more like decorating room or rearranging your office. Then, um well, it's a lot like that because you're trying to step out, you're designing, and you're seeing if all

the pieces that they don't, you just redesign it. I have lots of ways to trigger, like I'll run through a few quickly, putting things on your calendar under a calendar Germans like even our chat today, you know, so, um it was on the calendar. I'm I'm a pretty big fan of to do lists as a trigger. Get something to do list, I'll probably either get it done or I'll schedule it to be done. I am not a fan of post it notes for certain for habits anyway,

because I think that doesn't scale. If you're working, you know eventually you've got many many habits, and if you're relying on post it notes ever, I just don't think that's a good approach instead. And in the Tiny Habits method, I have people identify a routine they already do to be I call it an anchor. To be the problem, you anchor it to something you already do. So perhaps as soon as I will in my own life, as soon as I see my spam folder, that's my trigger

to meditate. And it took me a long time to figure out where meditation fit in my day and what was going to be the trigger. But after you know, a bunch of trial and error, that's the time. So as soon as that last email goes out on my my spam folder, it's clear it's empty, that's that's the thing that reminds me, ah to meditate now in my oh my, I mean, other people can be triggers, and not just people animals. And so let me tell you

something I did. And I was training some people at Stamford Healthcare last week and then the training, uh, we all were like talking about changing her behavior. And I said, okay, great, I'm gonna play with my dog every morning. I'll throw the ball. She loves the ball, and so i'd take her out the door and I pulled out her little ball and he played. Next day, I did it again, and on day three, even if I didn't remember to get the ball, he was a look an upward. Yeah.

So she learned it within two days, and then she became my trigger to get the ball if I happen to forget. So, you know, the dog looking up and jumping towards the ball on the patio shelves is a trigger. It's like, oh, yeah, we're gonna play ball this morning. Well that turned out to be a little bit of a monster. I'm going off beside hand because now any time I walk outside with her, she expects me to

play ball with her. You know, my attention was just in the morning, So I have to kind of undo that, have it a little bit in her, and I'm not sure I'm going to do that. That's so funny. I've got a little dog who is the exact same way. I think. All she thinks about is that ball. And any time I walk in the kitchen where the ball is, you know, she is right there looking, you know, like she just her trigger seems to be constant. Um. Yeah, so let's talk about You say that successful triggers have

three characteristics. So um, you know, first, as we noticed the trigger. I mean, one of the challenges I had right is if I put something up as like a reminder to come up on my computer. I have allowful lot of those, so sometimes I just don't notice him anymore. Um. The second is that you say you associate it with a specific behavior. And then finally, and I think this is another great one, is that the trigger happens when we are both motivating and able to perform the behavior.

Sometimes I get a trigger, I get a reminder to do something at the moment that I can't do it. Yeah, and that's not helpful, and that's just frustrating. So people are looking or kind looked at the behavior model with

it the curve line on it. If you get triggered when you're below the line, and I call it the action line, that beings either you're it was too hard to do, or you didn't have motivations to or combination in either case, when you're triggered and you can't do the page you don't want to, that does not lead

to a good outcome. So you really don't want the trigger going off when you are you can't do it for at a moment that you're not motivated to do it, because you're going to be more likely to ignore it right the next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll you'll ignore it or it'll either frustrate you or annoy you. And in some cases, I was wearing a lotch from a certain company and I was driving along on the highway

and the watch happened me and said stand up. Now It's like, so it's triggering me to stand up, but I'm driving and so it So not only was that a little bit, well, it's funny, but let's imagine that happened over and over. The annoying but also hurts the credibility of the system. I think. So if you create some sort of product or service that triggers people at a long time, then I just think that that's not good for the brand. It's not just for the product

and so on. So the timing of the trigger matters a lot. You described having a pretty crazy schedule, right. Triggers work for me pretty well in routine, right When in routine, it's pretty straightforward. When when everything is chaotic, how do you work to redesign your triggers or are certain things habitual enough at that point that you remember

to do them, or how do you deal with that? Well, if we're talking about habits, there's a class of habits I call super habits, and super habits are the things you do all the time, regardless of the context. Brushing our teeth, going to bed, eating breakfast and stuff like that. And so those those habits endure even if I'm you know, in Seattle or Boston or you know, hiking. Um. Then there's another Most habits are not super habits. They're very

dependent on our context. So if we you know, so it's Monday and usually or at work, but we're taken it's a holiday, well the context is different. Your typical Monday habits probably aren't going to happen. But just that's fin of failure of will power, are motivation or not even behavior design, it's just how things work. And so I'm a big fan of creating like Monday through Friday work habits, weekend habits, you may differentiate between Saturday and Sunday.

And then also travel habits, so when you're on the road, a different set of habits. So you'll have your super habits, but then you'll have other habits you do when you travel, and don't expect your Monday through Friday work habits to automatically translate to travel because it's the context different. So you actually design a different set of habits with different triggers,

you know. Um, So that's I think I'm more helpful way to think about it, knowing that you're outside your normal environment, and like there's certain things that I will do when I'm at a hotel that I don't do when I'm at home, And there's things I did at Stanford that I don't do when I'm more backing from home. And so just realizing the context is also a big

part of what trigger this to do things. And so don't get down yourself if you you know, you go on vacation that you don't be your typical exercise, Well that's normal until you design a habit for that contact. That's just normal. It's not a personal failing. One of the things that you talk about with creating habits, you talk about how important celebration is. What what do you mean by that and why is it so critical? Yeah,

Celebration is the something that you do. It's a skill, it's an act that you do to fire off a positive emotion, to make you feel positive emotion immediately. That's what I mean by celebration. It's almost like a self cheer or a way to spark like happiness or something positive inside of you instantly. And the reason that matters, and so that's this is part of the tiny habits technique. The reason it matters is your positive emotions. How make

the behavior become more automatic. So if I well, let's take my little dog Millie. So I take the ball out on the patio. The first morning, I throw it, and she is so happy, she runs, gets the ball, brings it back. Well, that positive emotion starts wiring into her the anticipation to do the ball the next morning. In other words, emotions create habits, and so the celebration skill it's a hack, you know, like how do you

hack your behavior? Well, you learned to fire up a positive emotion, so then when the opportunity comes to that behavior again, you'll remember to do it and you'll want to do it. So I'll just give you. Um. You know, if somebody is not flossing and they want to make flossing a habit, well, after they floss, when there's all their teeth or I'm a fan of this lossing one too, you then celebrate and you say good for me? Are

you do a fist pump? For you do something goofy in the mayor to make yourself feel happy at that moment, because that's how you get your brain to want to do that behavior again. And so I call celebration. It's not a perfect word, it's about the best word I can come up with for that. That's all about. It's a hack. You're hacking your emotions in order to hack your behaviors. I know there's there's probably a long list, but just a couple that the big hitters off the

list of bad approaches to change in our behavior. Oh wow. Well, one one case thing is to distinguish between outcomes and behaviors. UM. And you need to translate. And so the outcome might be a loose ten percent of my body way or you know, be able to do fifty pull ups or finish you know, a big report or something like. Those are all outcomes. You need to translate that into specific behaviors. What are the behaviors that I do to reach that outcome?

So that step one uh and often UM overlooked. You've been designed for the behaviors. You can't design directly for the outcomes. Number two is probably being unrealistic about your

motivation level and how it will tag. So when you are thinking about, oh, I want to lose weight, or I want to study harder, I want to write more, I want to practice more, in that moment that you're thinking that through or in the course or what have you, your motivation is high, at least higher than usual, and at that moment you feel like you really can do these behaviors because your motivation time and what people don't account for it tomorrow or a week from now or

you know, thirty days from now, my motivation is going to tag and I'm not going to have I'm not gonna talk about this. So you've got to design an approach that accounts for the reality of motivation being very slippery. And then I think there's others. All this ends this one um. Just if you're looking at long term change. There's different kinds of behavior, somewhere one time and somewhere episodic.

But if you're looking at long term change, if you're looking at some kind of outcome like being more productive or being healthy or reducing stress, those outcomes can be challenging and so as you work on different behaviors to achieve them. I think it's so important to just keep going. So if you fall off the wagon, or if you mess up or you don't, it's not even messing up. If you don't do what you're intended, don't make a

big deal of it. Just take the next step, you know, just just just don't give up, and you know, don't don't don't take it out on yourself, dunk it down yourself to say, hey, you just pick it up the next thing and keep going. One of my favorites that would go on a list like that is ambiguity, like not really knowing exactly what the behavior you're going to take is like I'm going to go to the gym

and workout. Is you know I've given myself that before and you get there and or it's just harder to even get there because I don't know what I'm gonna do, what machines, how long. There's so many decisions to make

that it's easy to not do it. Yeah, there's an interesting I haven't named this, and I don't know if anybody has named it, but the idea of this, as you can get very specific about the behavior, often the behavior will just happen on its own, without you designing the trigger or making it either just getting clear in your mind what the behavior can lead to actually doing it. Not in all cases, but um, it's surprising how that dynamic works. And so yeah, that's clarity about what exactly

is the behavior that I'm going to be doing. I can have a piuse full effect. Excellent. Well, b J, thanks so much for taking the time. I think I could probably continue to have this conversation for hours, but I know you're busy and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. We will have links in the show notes to uh some of your various different websites, to the tiny habits, to the behavior model, etcetera. So thanks again, great, thanks for talking, great questions, and uh,

you know, just keep up the good work. It's it's really important that people understand how behavior works and that they move forward because like you can change your behavior, it's a skill and you get there by practice. But you've got to practice in the right way. And I applaud you for shining a spotlight the better ways to do it. Excellent. Well, thanks so much, goodbye, all right bye. You can learn more about b J fogg and podcast at one. You feed dot net slash fog. That's f o g G