Tiny Habits

Highlights

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In my research on habit formation, dating back to 2009, I’ve found that there are only three things we can do that will create lasting change: Have an epiphany, change our environment, or change our habits in tiny ways. Creating a true epiphany for ourselves (or others) is difficult and probably impossible. We should rule out that option unless we have magical powers (I don’t). But here’s the good news: The other two options can lead to lasting change if we follow the right program, and Tiny Habits gives us a new way to tap the power of environment and baby steps.

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Keeping changes small and expectations low is how you design around fair-weather friends like motivation and willpower. When something is tiny, it’s easy to do — which means you don’t need to rely on the unreliable nature of motivation.

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No behavior happens without a prompt If you don’t have a prompt, your levels of motivation and ability don’t matter. Either you are prompted to act or you’re not. No prompt, no behavior. Simple yet powerful. Motivation and ability are continuous variables. You always have some level of motivation and ability for any given behavior. When the phone rings, your motivation and ability to answer it are always there in the background. But a prompt is like lightning. It comes and goes. If you don’t hear the phone ring, you don’t answer it. You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt. This isn’t always easy, but removing the prompt is your best first move to stop a behavior from happening.

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By using the Behavior Model at home, you can help people in your household help you. As anyone in a long-term relationship can attest, tension over housework can be corrosive. My partner, Denny, and I have different views about household cleaning because I am more of a “tidy enough” person and Denny is more of a “disinfect everything” person. Over the years, cleaning the shower became an issue. Denny is hypervigilant about mold, but our shower doesn’t drain well, which leads to — you guessed it — mold, so he had been asking me to wipe out the shower after I used it. But I didn’t do it most of the time. In fact, I rarely did. One day Denny invited me to look at the shower with him, and he put Behavior Design into action. “We both want a clean shower,” he said. I agreed. He saw that I had some level of motivation. Then he asked me about ability. What seemed hard about wiping out the shower? I told him that I didn’t know what his request meant. Did he want me to use my towel or a squeegee? Should I wipe down the walls? This was Denny’s aha moment. He hadn’t been specific about what he wanted, so the abstract behavior felt hard to do for me. What he did next was brilliant and simple. He showed me what to do. He walked me into the shower, and said, “Okay, when you turn off the shower [prompt], you grab the shower towel off the rack like this, then you put it on the floor and shuffle around on it like this. Then you throw the towel in the dirty laundry and you’re done.” What Denny showed me was so easy, it almost made me feel silly for not doing it in the first place. It took about ten seconds. Once he showed me what to do, my perception of the difficulty of the task changed — it suddenly seemed easy to do. I have wiped out the shower every day since Denny’s theatrical demonstration. Why? First of all, I wanted a clean shower, and I wanted to please him. So I had at least some motivation. But the behavior seemed difficult. Once he showed me exactly what to do, I saw it was easy, and I zoomed above the Action Line. Fast-forward to today: When it comes to household tasks, an area where I’m not an expert, I know to say, “Show me exactly what you want me to do.” I watch him, and my ability increases. These are a couple of small examples of how you can use the Behavior Model with other people. We’ll devote a whole chapter to this when we have more tools in our change toolbox.

Note: test

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Let’s say you want your employees to show up to your weekly team meeting on time, but they consistently arrive a few minutes late. Many managers would get upset, impose a penalty, or shoot dirty looks at the people arriving late. All those are attempts to use motivation to get the behavior of arriving on time to happen. And all of those are mistakes. You don’t start with motivation when you troubleshoot. You follow these steps instead. Try each step in order. If you don’t get results, move to the next step. Check to see if there’s a prompt to do the behavior. See if the person has the ability to do the behavior. See if the person is motivated to do the behavior. To do an expert job of troubleshooting a behavior for yourself or others, start with the prompt. Is the person being prompted to do the behavior? You might ask your tardy employees, Do you have a reminder to come to the meeting on time? If they don’t, have them find a good prompt. And that might solve the problem. No drama. No dirty looks. Just design a good prompt. If that doesn’t work, then you move to the next step. See if people have the ability to do the behavior. Ask your tardy employees what is making it difficult for them to arrive at your meeting on time. (I’ll explain a comprehensive approach in chapter 3, but this question is good for now.) You might learn that the tardy employees have a previous meeting that ends at the top of the hour and that they can’t arrive at your meeting on time. With that, you’ve found your answer. It’s an ability problem, not a motivation problem. But let’s pretend that they have a prompt and the ability, and that it is a motivation issue. In this case, you’d then try to find a way to motivate punctuality. (And there are lots of ways to do this, both good and bad.) Notice that fussing around with motivation is the last step in the troubleshooting order. Most people assume that to get a behavior to happen you need to focus on motivation first.

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You can’t achieve outcomes or aspirations solely through high levels of motivation, which is the least predictable and reliable of the three components in my Behavior Model. You’re not alone if you previously focused entirely on motivation. But now I hope you see that you can’t rely on motivation alone to create lasting change because you probably can’t sustain it and you might not be able to manipulate or design for it reliably. And I hope you see that this is not a character flaw. It’s human nature.

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When I teach boot camps and workshops on Behavior Design, one of the first things I ask people is what new behavior they wish to bring into their lives. This is what I hear. +  “I want to reduce screen time.” +  “I want to sleep better!” +  “I want to lose 12 percent body fat.” +  “I want to have more patience with my son.” +  “I want to be more productive.” And I say, “Great — I can show you how to make those wishes a reality. But those aren’t behaviors. Those are the aspirations you have or the outcomes you want to get.” Aspirations are abstract desires, like wanting your kids to succeed in school. Outcomes are more measurable, like getting straight As second semester.

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In the Tiny Habits method, I teach people to think about their new habits as small seeds. If you plant a good seed in the right spot, it will grow without coaxing. Starting with behaviors that you can and want to do makes for a good seed. Choosing behaviors that set you up for success increases your confidence and mastery as you go, thus increasing your natural motivation to do bigger and bigger behaviors. But it all starts small and honest and specific.

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Do you have enough time to do the behavior? +  Do you have enough money to do the behavior? +  Are you physically capable of doing the behavior? +  Does the behavior require a lot of creative or mental energy? +  Does the behavior fit into your current routine or does it require you to make adjustments? Your Ability Chain is only as strong as its weakest Ability Factor link.

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When you are better at something, it’s easier to do. By gaining skills, you’re turning up the volume on ability. How you increase your skills depends on the behavior. It could mean doing online research, asking a friend for tips, or taking a class. And you can increase your skills by doing the behavior over and over. I increased my flossing skills by watching some videos on the Internet (if you can think of a behavior, there is a video showing you how to do it). Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a global best seller not because her book focused on motivating people to keep their houses clean but because it focused on teaching them the block-and-tackle steps of how to tidy up.

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Why it rippled out so positively is the underlying secret to why Tiny Habits works so beautifully: People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. Amy set herself up for success by thoughtfully using prompts to design changes. Those changes worked because they helped her do what she already wanted to do. And that success? That felt good. So she kept chasing that feeling and felt increasingly confident that she could bring good things into her life by designing for them. Her ability to make behaviors easy to do and her willingness to play with prompts increased, which made starting new habits a snap.

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Getting relief from physical, emotional, or psychological discomfort is also a positive experience. It’s three a.m. and you are having another bout of insomnia. You’re restless and thinking about work. There’s a big deadline tomorrow, and everyone is rushing to get a project out the door. You’re the manager, so you’ve got to keep things moving. And as you lie there awake, you’re worried that there will be a productivity bottleneck in your inbox tomorrow morning. The thought of it makes you anxious. So you roll over, grab your phone off the nightstand, and check your e-mail. Whew, nothing urgent. No need to respond to anything. You feel relieved. This is a positive experience that you’ll seek the next time you wake up in the middle of the night. You check your inbox and once again you feel relief. And then checking your e-mail will start becoming a habit. During some of my corporate speaking events, I’ve asked audiences if this sounds familiar. At times, well over 30 percent have raised their hands and acknowledged this habit. Little did they know that relief was the cause. Early levels of some video games make it easy to feel successful. That’s by design. It makes you eager to keep playing. Candy Crush has been downloaded more than two billion times. It’s a simple (and free) matching game that you can play on your mobile device. The first level is ridiculously easy. To help signal that you’ve been successful, the designers built in all kinds of fun sensory experiences. There are pleasant little dings and satisfying visual cues. The word “sweet” even pops up after you reach a certain score. The result? You feel successful really fast — and you keep firing up that Candy Crush app whenever you have a free minute or two. Why? Because you are sweet at this game — and that? That feels great.

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habit, but I hope you see my point. The fact that emotions create habits is

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When Instagram was duking it out with its many competitors back in the day, my former student Mikey and his cofounder won the race because they created the simplest and best way to help people feel successful. If you try a product and it makes you feel clumsy or stupid or unsuccessful, you will very likely abandon it. But when something makes you feel successful, you want more. You engage. You make it part of your life.

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What might surprise you is this: In English we do not have a perfect word to describe the positive feeling we get from experiencing success. I’ve read piles of scientific literature on related topics, and I’ve done my own research in this area, and I am convinced that we are lacking a good word. (The closest label is “authentic pride,” but that’s not an exact match.) So, with the encouragement of three of the world’s experts on human emotion, I decided to create a new word for this feeling of success. Ready? I call this feeling Shine. You know this feeling already: You feel Shine when you ace an exam. You feel Shine when you give a great presentation and people clap at the end. You feel Shine when you smell something delicious that you cooked for the first time. I believe my celebration technique is a breakthrough in habit formation. I hope you can see why. By skillfully celebrating, you create a feeling of Shine, which in turn causes your brain to encode the new habit.

Note: A sense of pride and accomplishment

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answers

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If you can’t remove the prompt for your bad habit, then try avoiding the prompt. If you want to end your habit of grabbing a sugary pastry with your morning coffee, stop going to the coffee shop and make coffee at home, where there’s no built-in temptation. Ways to avoid prompts include: +  Don’t go places where you will be prompted +  Don’t be with people who will prompt you +  Don’t let people put prompts in your surroundings +  Avoid media that prompts you

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