Tiny Habits

Key Concepts

The Fogg Behaviour Model

The Fogg Behaviour Model: B=MAP

• Behaviour happens when Motivation and Ability and Prompt converge at the same moment.
• The more motivated you are to do the behaviour, the more likely you are to do the behaviour
• The harder a behaviour is to do, the less likely you are to do it.
• Motivation and ability work together like teammates. If one is weak, the other needs to be strong to get you above the curve. In general, the more you do a behaviour, the easier it gets.
• No behaviour happens without a promt.

Fogg's Maxims

Fogg's Maxim:

1. Help people do what they already want to do
2. Help people feel successful

Three things to do to design successful habits and change behaviours:

1. Stop judging yourself
2. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviours
3. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward

Tiny Habits

The Anatomy of Tiny Habits: ABC model

1. Anchor moment reminds you to do the new Tiny Behaviour. This anchor can be an existing routine, such as brushing your teeth, or an event that happens, such as a phone ringing.
2. (New Tiny) Behaviour is a simple version of the new habit you want. You do the tiny new behaviour immediately after the anchor moment.
3. (Instant) Celebration is something you do immediately after doing the new tiny behaviour to create positive emotion, such as saying "I did a good job!"

The Tiny Habits Method

With the Tiny Habits method, you focus on small actions that you can do in less than thirty seconds.

Tiny allows you to start right now. It meets you where you are - whether your life is in a desperate spiral or your are stressed out but otherwise fortunate.

Behaviour Design Process

Behavour design process:

1. Clarify the aspiration: get clear on your aspirations or outcomes. What do you want? What is your dream? What result do you want to achieve?
2. Explore behaviour options: select one aspiration, and come up with a bunch of specific behaviours that can help you achieve your aspiration.
3. Match yourself with specific behaviours: golden behaviours are effective (i.e., high impact) behaviours that you want to do (i.e., high motivation) and you can do (i.e., high ability).
4. Start tiny: make the behaviour so tiny that you don't need much motivation
   1. What is making this behaviour hard to do?
   2. How can I make this behaviour easier to do?
5. Find a good prompt
6. Celebrate successes
7. Troubleshoot, iterate, and expand

Troubleshooting Behaviours

Three steps for troubleshooting a behaviour: try each one in order. If you don't get results, move to the next step:

1. Check to see if there's a prompt to do the behaviour
2. See if the person has the ability to do the behaviour
3. See if the person is motivated to do the behaviour

From now on, I want you to look at your behaviour the way a scientist looks at what's growing in a Petri dish - with curiousity and objective distance.

...

I want you to treat your life as your own personal "change lab" - a place to experiment with the person you want to be. A place where you not only feel safe but also feel like anything is possible.

Dealing with Motivation

Motivation is a desire to do a specific behaviour (e.g., eating spinach tonight) or a general class of behaviour (eat vegetables and other healthy foods each night).

Three sources of motivation:

• Person: what you already want
• Action: a benefit or punishment you would receive by doing the action
• Context: your friends are doing it

High levels of motivation are both scattershot and unsustainable.

Your motivation crested, then came crashing down. And maybe you blamed yourself for not sustaining it. You're not to blame. This is how motivation works in our lives.

Willpower decreases from morning to evening. Complex decisions get harder by late in the day. Motivation for self-improvement vanish on Friday nights. These shifts are among the reasons why you cannot take full control of your motivation.

Clarify Aspirations and Outcomes

Aspirations and outcomes:

• Aspirations are abstract desires, like wanting your kids to succeed in school.
• Outcomes are more measurable, like getting straight As second semester.
• Neither aspirations nor outcomes are behaviours.

A behaviour is something you can do right now or at another specific point in time. You can turn off your phone. You can eat a carrot. You can open a textbook and read five pages. These are actions that you can do at any given moment.

Techniques for Identifying Behaviour Options

Techniques for exploring behavour options:

• Swarm of behaviours:

  • Write aspiration inside the cloudlike shape in the middle
  • Fill the surrounding boxes with specific behaviour

• Magic Wanding:

  • In this exploration step, you have magical powers, which allow you to get yourself to do any behaviour.
  • Some behaviours are one time
  • Some wishes are new habits
  • Use the following categories for Magic Warding session:
    • What behaviours would you do one time?
    • What new habits would you create?
    • What habit would you stop?

  Techniques for matching with behaviours

  Focus mapping technique for identifying golden behaviours:

  • Put actions on a two dimensional space
    • One dimension is impact (very effective vs not effective at helping us to reach an aspiration)
    • The other dimension is ability and motivation (I can or can't get myself to do this behaviour)
  • Perform the mapping in two rounds
    • Round 1: consider only the effectiveness of the behaviour
    • Round 2: ask yourself "Do I want to do this behaviour?"

  When matching ourselves with behaviours that we already want to do, not what we think we should do, there is no need to fuss with motivational tricks of techniques later.

Techniques to design behaviours of tiny habits

When you are designing a new habit, you are really designing for consistency. And for that result, you'll find that simplicity is the key. Or as I like to teach my students: Simplicity changes behaviour.

What makes a behaviour hard to do?

1. Do you have enough time to do this behaviour?
2. Do you have enough money to do this behaviour?
3. Are you physically capable of doing the behaviour?
4. Does the behaviour require a lot of creative or mental energy?
5. Does the behaviour fit into your current routine or does it require you to make adjustments?

Three approaches to making a behaviour easier to do

1. Increase your skill
2. Get tools and resources
3. Make the behaviour tiny
   1. Starter step: "the objective here is to begin with a crucial step in the process of doing the desired behaviour. Tell yourself: I don't have to walk. I just have to make sure I put on my shoes each day." Let the behaviour scale by itself. Don't raise the bar immaturely.
   2. Scaling back: take the behaviour that you want and scale it back. Your tiny habit will be a much smaller version of your desired behaviour.

We're not aiming for perfection here, only consistency. Keeping the habit alive means keeping it rooted in your routine no matter how tiny it is.

Techniques to design effective prompts

Three types of prompts in our lives

1. Person prompt relies on something inside of you to do a behaviour (e.g., hungry, thirsty)
2. Context prompt is anything in your environment that cues you to take action (e.g., sticky notes, app notifications, your phone ringing, a colleague reminding you to join a meeting).
3. Action prompt is a behaviour that you already do that can remind you to do a new habit you want to cultivate.

A range of positive experiences can reinforce a new behaviour that leads to a habitual response. For example, anything that gives you instant pleasure can reinforce a behaviour and make it more likely to happen in the future.

In my own research, I found that habits can form very quickly, often in just a few days, as long as people have a strong positive emotion connected to the behaviour. In fact, some habits seem to get wired in immediately.

Celebration is the best way to create a positive feeling that wires in your new habits. It's free, fast, and available to people of every colour, shape, size, income, and personality. In addition, celebration teaches us how to be nice to ourselves - a skill that pays out the biggest dividends of all.

The definition of a reward in behaviour science is an experience directly tied to a behaviour that makes that behaviour more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters.

Rehearsal technique

To wire in a habit fast or help yourself remember, you need to reheasrse the behaviour sequence (the anchor, then the new habit), and immediately celebrate. Repeat this sequence seven to ten times.

Change is a skill

The skills of change

1. Behaviour crafting: selecting and adjusting habits you want in your life (i.e., identify behaviour options, match yourself with behaviours, make the behaviour easier to do)
2. Self-insight; understanding your references, strengths, and aspirations (i.e., clarify your aspirations or desired outcomes, understand what motivates you)
3. Process: adjusting to the dynamic nature of life in order to strengthen and grow your habits. (i.e., how to troubleshoot, how to revise if a habit isn't working, how to rehearse a habit)
4. Context: the skill of redesigning your environment to make your habits easier to do
5. Mindset
   1. Approaching change with an attitude of openness, flexibility, and curiosity
   2. Being able to lower your expectations
   3. Feeling good about your successes by celebrating
   4. Being patient and trusting in the process of change

Applying Tiny Habits to disrupt unwanted habits

Behaviour change masterplan for disrupting unwanted habits

1. Focus on creating new habits
2. Focus on stopping the old habits
3. Focus on swapping a new habit for the old one

Break down general bad habits

A general habit, such as "eating too much junk food", is actually comprised of multiple smaller habits. Thus, the same techniques as swarm of behaviour and magic wanding can be applied to solve the problem:

1. Identify the general habit that you want to stop
2. Identify specific habits related to the general bad habit
3. Pick the specific habit to design out of our lives based on the following criteria: pick the easiest to stop, the one that you are most sure you can stop, big the ones that feel like no big deal.

Deal with the prompt

After identifying the habit to stop, focus on the prompt to stop it:

• Avoid the prompt: don't go to the place 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 prompt you
• Ignore the prompt

Redesign the ability to do the bad habit

Another technique to stop a bad habit is to redesign the ability to make it harder to do:

• Increase the time required
• Increase the money required to carry out the behaviour
• Increase the physical effort required to carry out the behaviour
• Increase the mental effort (e.g., reseting the password to something complicated and don't let the system to save it can help us to reduce the usage of social media and other unwanted online services)
• Make the habit conflict with important routines

Manipulating the motivation to carry out bad habits

Last technique for designing bad habits out of our lives involves manipulating the motivation to carry out the bad habit:

• Reducing motivation to carry out a bad habit:
  • Going to bed earlier to reduce the motivation to hit the snooze button
  • Putting on a nicotine patch to reduce the motivation for smoking
  • Eating healthy food before going to a party can reduce your drive to eat bad food at the party
• Add a demotivator to stop a habit

Applying Tiny Habits for groups

Design process for group change:

1. Clarify your aspiration together: Behaviour Design always starts with getting clear on your aspirations.
2. Explore behaviour options together
3. Match your group with golden behaviours: the best way is to rely on focus mapping method.
4. Make the golden behaviour easy for everyone to do
5. Find a way to prompt the golden behaviour
6. Celebrate success to wire in the habit
7. Troubleshoot and iterate together

Two elements of an effective feedback:

1. It relates to a domain you care about
2. It is in an area where you feel uncertain

Two-minute script to teach the Fogg Behaviour Model

Step 1: Introduction

Let me explain how behaviour works by teaching you the Fogg Behaviour Model. This will take about two minutes.

Behaviour happens when three things come together at the same moment: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt.

Step 2: Drawing the graphic

You can visualize this model in two dimensions. Along this vertical axis is the level of Motivation for a behaviour, and it can range anywhere from high to low.

Along the horizontal axis is the Ability to do the behaviour. It's also a continuum. On the right is high ability, and I'll lable that side as "easy to do." On the left side of this axis are behaviours that are "hard to do."

###Step 3: An example

Suppose you want someone to donate to the Red Cross. If they have high motivation and if it's easy for that person to do, they will be here in the upper-right corner of the model. When a person here gets prompted to donate, they will do the donation behaviour.

In contrast, if someone has low motivation to donate to the Red Cross, and if it's hard for them to do, they will be here in the lower-left corner. When that person is prompted, they will not do the behaviour.

Step 4: The Action Line

There's a relationship between motivation and ability. This curved line, called the Action Line, shows that relationship. If someone is anywhere above the Action Line when prompted, they will do the behavour. In this case, they will donate to the Red Cross. However, if they are below the Action Line when prompted, they won't do the behaviour.

If someone is below the Action Line, we need to get them above it for the Prompt to instigate the behaviour. Either we need an increase in motivation or the behaviour needs to be easier to do, or both.

Step 5: A brief summary

This model applies to all types of human behaviour. In summary, when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt come together at the same moment, that's when a behaviour will occur. If any of the three element is missing, the behaviour won't happen.