Random musings: The Tiny Habits That Change Everything

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

The Tiny Habits That Change Everything

This is always a good time of year to talk about habits...whether creating new ones or eliminating old ones! Today's blog post is based on a podcast from The Art of Manliness:

We’re a month into the new year now. How are you doing on your resolutions? Have you already fallen off the wagon? Maybe the goal you set for yourself was just too big to successfully tackle. You need to think smaller. Tiny, even.

That’s the argument my guest makes. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and he’s the founder and director of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, as well as the author of the new book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Today on the show, BJ walks us through the three components that drive our behavior, including the simple yet overlooked relationship between motivation and ability. He then explains how to build habits that feel easier and require lower levels of motivation by picking behaviors that are good matches for you and breaking them down into smaller parts. We also talk about the need to tie your habits to turnkey prompts, the importance of celebrating your successes, no matter how small, and the way tiny habits can lead to bigger changes. We end our conversation with why you should think about the process of getting rid of your bad habits as untangling them rather than breaking them.

I've talked about habits before and also about motivation and ability.

No wonder this podcast seemed familiar! I actually wrote about it before...you can access it at the link for motivation and ability above. I go into more detail in that post, so why don't you go ahead and check it out.