What You Need to Know About Behavior Change
If you are anything like me, you have zero time to waste and always another behavior to tweak or change. It’s messy. Nothing about long-term behavior change turns out to be simple. There are, however, ways to optimize how you go about it.
My favorite behavior-change hack
When you miss your trigger, it’s an easy mind trop to then drop the whole new behavior you wanted to introduce. And if you miss more than one day, you give up. So I found this hack: I always set up a Plan B. If I miss the morning meditation, I have an afternoon time set up to do it. It relieves the pressure, introduces some compassion, and gives me a second chance all with one fell swoop.
Two questions to ask
Is there anything preventing this change?
What might trigger a return to a former behavior?
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
We all just got a huge dose of sudden, serious change. While some people are pining for a “return to normal,” a good number of high achievers and leaders have slipped behavior change to the forefront to stay at the top of their game while the world spins and shifts around them.
So how do you hack behavior change?
Knowledge and power
Clearly, information alone is not enough. The step from reading a blog post to implementation can ressemble leaping the Grand Canyon. Impossible. Unthinkable. Not even arising in your mind. Yet, as brain coach Jim Kwik says, “Knowledge is not power, it’s potential power. Acting on knowledge is power.”
In his new book, Limitless, he outlines a model for becoming, well, limitless—such an enticing goal! It takes mindset—believing it is possible, motivation—having a good reason, and methods.
I would add, it also takes self-compassion. Anatole France summed it up well: “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”
What it takes
According to behavior-change specialist BJ Fogg, behavior happens when three things come together at the same moment: ability, motivation, and a prompt or trigger.
Reading the blog post will provide some knowledge, improving ability, supplying a method. Chunking a change (slicing it into tiny, really easy steps) also improves ability.
You still need the right mindset (truly believing it’s possible).
And motivation. I’ve always found that I will stick to something longer if the desire to do it comes from the gut, not from some sort of obligation or justification.
The thing about motivation is that it peaks and wanes. It’s easier to do hard things when you are really motivated. What if one adjusted the difficulty of the behavior to the level of motivation in that moment?
You also need a prompt or a trigger—what can you use to remind you to do it? This is when stacking comes in handy—add it on to something you are already doing. Want to do pushups every day? Add them to your morning routine, rather than at some random time of the day.
If I boil this down to a step-by-step method, we have:
Identify the change
Find your gut-based why
Make sure you believe it’s possible and shift your self-talk
Learn what you need to learn
Chunk it into easy, specific steps
Find a prompt or trigger that will be there when you have a wave of motivation
Celebrate. Always. The feeling of success wires in a habit and it keeps you going.
Types of change
For those who like to geek out, BJ Fogg distilled change into 15 different types on his Behavior Grid.
He splits behaviors by duration:
Spot: A one-time behavior (Sign up for a coaching session — 😜)
Span: A behavior over a period of time (Take a cold shower every morning for 3 days in a row)
Path: A behavior that will last from now on (Stop badmouthing yourself)
He then multiplies these by 5 types of behavior changes:
Green: Do a new behavior (Try Bulletproof coffee)
Blue: Do a familiar behavior (Eat green leafy vegetables)
Purple: Increase behavior intensity (Sleep more)
Grey: Decrease behavior intensity (Reduce stressful encounters with coworkers)
Black: Stop existing behavior (Stop eating sugar)
A behavior change can then be categorised as, for example, a Green Spot behavior, a Purple Span, a Black Path, etc. Fogg’s Behavior Wizard gives examples and specific guidelines for each type of behavior change.