Tiny Habits, page 9
Let’s take a look at the habit of doing a seven-minute workout—something that most people would say sounds easy. But is it? Let’s break things down by using the Ability Chain. Time is probably the strongest link; seven minutes is easy for most people to fit into their day. At least it is when compared to the expectation that one should exercise thirty minutes a day. Money? You can do this in your own home so this behavior is free. Physical effort? Aha. Here we go. For some people, doing a seven-minute workout sounds easy. However, most apps for this workout urge you to push yourself as you cycle through the exercises. And that’s not easy. So for people who follow directions, the physical-effort link is probably weak. That alone could be enough to derail your efforts at making the seven-minute workout a habit.
Which brings me back to my tiny flossing behavior.
Flossing takes only a few seconds (time). It cost almost nothing (money). I already knew how to do it (mental effort). It slotted nicely into my life (routine). So those factors were all strong links. But when I thought about the physical-effort factor, I was surprised.
Flossing was hard to do physically.
This may sound strange because flossing isn’t like digging a ditch or lifting up a car, but for me, it was hard enough to derail my habit. The important overshare here is that flossing is hard for me because my teeth are very close together. My hygienist calls this phenomenon “close contacts,” which means that it is a struggle for me to get the floss between my teeth. I have to wrestle with the floss to get it in there, then I feel like I am pulling my tooth out to wrestle it back out again. Then the floss would shred and get stuck, and I’d have to start again with a new piece. This wobbly little link in my Ability Chain was weak enough for me to blow off flossing for months at a time. The behavior was just hard enough and my motivation just weak enough that flossing was never going to become a habit the way I was doing it.
So what did I do to make flossing easy to do? I searched for floss that would fit between my teeth. After buying and sampling about fifteen types, I found the perfect floss for me.
Almost everyone I meet has habits like this that elude them. Think about all the things you don’t do for your health, your productivity, and your sanity that you want to do. So why can’t you?
You can—with the right approach.
Ask the Discovery Question and identify the weak links in your Ability Chain. Then zero in on the right problem to solve. This is what makes the Ability Chain such a transformative tool. It allows you to shift into action without confusion, irritation, or exasperation. When it came to my flossing transformation, I didn’t blame myself for lacking motivation to floss. Instead, I set out to make it easier to do by starting with one tooth and using thinner floss. Once I had shored up that Ability Factor, I did the behavior repeatedly. I cultivated a habit that I had been chasing for years. Once I had taken the first step, it felt easy to do the rest. I already had my hands in my mouth, right? Plus, the more I did it, the more skilled I became. This feeling of success motivated me to floss again the next day.
By keeping the behavior tiny, I helped this habit root itself into my routine. Here’s how to think about it: Imagine a big plant with small roots. When a powerful wind kicks up, the big plant might topple over because it’s not held firmly in place. And that’s how habit formation works. If you start with a big behavior that’s hard to do, the design is unstable; it’s like a large plant with shallow roots. When a storm comes into your life, your big habit is at risk. However, a habit that is easy to do can weather a storm like flexible sprouts, and it can then grow deeper and stronger roots.
So if you haven’t gotten off the couch in a year, don’t start with seven minutes of strenuous activity. Start tiny instead. Shore up the weakest link in your Ability Chain by making your new workout habit radically easy to do. Scale back to doing one wall push-up. Just one. When you run into a setback—a cold, for instance—you can still manage to do one wall push-up, stuffy nose and all. By going tiny, you create consistency; by staying tiny, you get your new habit firmly rooted.
Which leads us to the second critical question we should ask about any behavior or habit we want to cultivate: How can I make this behavior easier to do? I call this the Breakthrough Question, and it turns out that there are only three answers.
Let’s return to the PAC Person graphic to see how we can make a behavior easier to do.
All three approaches manipulate the ability element of B=MAP to move you above the Action Line and increase the likelihood that you will actually do a behavior. Regardless of what your aspiration is, increasing your skills, getting tools and resources, and making the behavior tiny are what makes things easier to do.
But it’s important to remember that designing for behaviors can take different paths. Sometimes all you’ll need is the right tool to make a new habit easier to do, like using skinny floss, and other times all you have to do is scale the behavior back to its tiniest version, such as flossing just one tooth. Think of making something easy to do as a pond with three different ways to enter the water. Whether you jump off the dock, wade in at the beach, or drop in from a rope swing, you’ll soon be swimming in the same water.
Now let’s break down each approach.
The Three Approaches to Making a Behavior Easier to Do
1. INCREASE YOUR SKILLS
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.
Increasing your skills could mean hiring a voice coach, taking a knife-skills class at your local grocery store, or practicing your push-up form. The act of “skilling up” feels natural when you are riding a Motivation Wave because you are using this energy crest to your advantage. They are one-time actions that make future behaviors easier to do, so why not do them when you’re bursting with energy at the outset? Let’s say you finish this chapter and are feeling jazzed about doing push-ups. This would be a good time to look up a video on the Internet about the proper push-up form while your motivation is still high.
You may not always have the energy for skilling up, and that’s fine. There are other ways to make your behavior easier.
2. GET TOOLS AND RESOURCES
Something as small as unwashed lettuce or mismatched Tupperware lids can be the difference between bringing a salad to work and grabbing a burger. If a behavior frustrates you, it will not become a habit. Getting the right tools to make a behavior easier could mean anything from getting a better set of kitchen knives to finding more comfortable walking shoes. If you want to make the Tiny Habits method easier to do, this book is a terrific first step. Getting personal guidance from a coach I’ve trained is also a great option.
Tools were crucial to making flossing easier for me. I had to find the right floss—thin and slippery. I became such a fan that I got myself a special tour of the floss factory when I traveled to Dublin for work. I know it seems weird (Denny thought I was nuts at first). But for a floss geek like me, a tour didn’t feel weird at all.
My former boot camper Molly is another example of how tools and resources can catalyze change. Molly had struggled with maintaining a healthy weight ever since she was ten years old. As an adult, her biggest habit hurdle was meal preparation. She couldn’t do it consistently even though she knew how much better she felt when she made her own food ahead of time instead of being cornered into making poor choices—vending-machine lunches or leftover meeting pizzas. Without a healthy prepared meal in her bag, she’d find herself with an anxiety-provoking dilemma at noon. “Am I going to eat? Where should I go? Will it be healthy enough?” Molly called this “decision fatigue”—the burden of making a choice when she was least equipped for it (hungry and busy)—and it not only created unnecessary mental spinning, it often led her to eat out of alignment with her healthy aspirations. As a busy professional, she was not only pressed for time, but she was also deeply ambivalent about cooking.
From a B=MAP standpoint, Molly’s motivation for meal prep was low but not nonexistent—she really did want the energy, good health, and confidence that came along with eating well. Ability was where Molly had the most room for improvement. As luck would have it, she met a resource—a good-looking one at that. Ryan, Molly’s future husband, was into Olympic weightlifting and paid close attention to nutrition. He was methodical about preparing meals for the week and didn’t seem to mind doing this as much as Molly did. She observed and adopted some of his techniques—using Tupperware and cooking massive amounts of sweet potatoes for low blood sugar moments. Soon they got into a habit of cooking and prepping every Sunday for the week ahead. While she loved spending the time with her husband, Molly was less enthused about spending five hours in the kitchen. Sunday would roll around and she’d make other plans so she could avoid the kitchen, promising herself she’d pick up a salad on the way to work every day. But she rarely would. Then she’d find herself in the middle of the workday staring down the leftover pizza in the conference room, knowing what she would choose and already disappointed in herself.
After attending my two-day boot camp, Molly knew this was a Behavior Design problem, not a character flaw or a matter of willpower. Instead of getting down on herself about skipping out on a Sunday in the kitchen with her future husband, she started thinking more strategically about how she could make meal prep easier. She joked that since meal prep was so fun for him maybe he could just do hers as well. She said that suggestion got her a raised eyebrow and a hearty laugh but not much else.
One day Molly went to a friend’s house and watched her use an unfamiliar device with a flat frame and an adjustable blade. Her friend sliced an entire carrot into a salad bowl in about ten seconds with no wobbly cutting board and no dull knife. This seemed like magic to Molly. She asked her friend, “Wow! What is that thing?” It was a mandoline—the first of many time-saving kitchen tools that Molly would later acquire (warning: mandoline slicers are great but also dangerous—be careful). Using her future husband as a resource and key tools like her handy mandoline, Molly reduced her Sunday food prep time from five hours to two and a half. Now she mandolines carrots, cucumbers, and peppers into Tupperware containers lined up for each day of the week. Cutting the time in half and making the process more enjoyable was all she needed to move her above the Action Line.
Months after she redesigned her behavior, Molly and Ryan were consistently prepping ten meals per week, which covered all their lunches and dinners on workdays. Ditching decision fatigue meant Molly could make room during her day for exercise, which helped her increase her energy and overall wellness even more. She found herself better able to keep up with Ryan on their trail runs, and she even proposed that they keep their healthy eating going while on vacation. The night before their honeymoon, Molly dragged Ryan to the bulk section of the supermarket to stock up on nuts and blueberries for the plane ride. A year later, she told me she is happier, more energetic, and more productive than ever before. Most important, she now asks, “How can I make this easier?” when she lacks the motivation to do something she wants to do.
Not everyone should buy a mandoline or fancy kitchen equipment to make their behavior easier to do, but in Molly’s case, she had experimented with other ways (buying precooked food, prepping meals every evening) and nothing had worked. She knew tools and resources were one Behavior Design strategy that she hadn’t tried, so she went for it. By cutting her time in half, she crossed the line from too hard to easy to do. In the end, I’d say that a flexible, experimental mindset for problem-solving was perhaps Molly’s most handy tool of all.
EASY-TO-DO ANALYSIS
Meal Prep Habit—What is making this behavior hard to do?
The problem: The weakest links in Molly’s Ability Chain were time (five hours was too much) and physical effort (chopping and cutting with bad equipment is laborious).
Meal Prep Habit—How can I make this behavior easier to do?
The solution: Molly used tools to help her eliminate the time and physical effort factors that were hampering her ability to act. She also leaned on Ryan as a resource to guide her in what to prepare for the week and how to do it.
3. MAKE THE BEHAVIOR TINY
Making a behavior radically tiny is the cornerstone of the Tiny Habits method for a reason—it’s a foolproof way to make something easier to do, which means it’s often a good place to start regardless of your motivation levels.
We have already looked at several examples of how to make things tiny. They fall into two categories: Starter Step and Scaling Back.
Starter Step
This is exactly what it sounds like: one small move toward the desired behavior. If you want to make a habit out of walking three miles every day, your Starter Step might be putting your walking shoes on. That Starter Step becomes your Tiny Behavior and the only action you need to do at the start of your new habit. The objective here is to begin with a crucial step in the process of doing the desired behavior. Tell yourself: I don’t have to walk. I just have to make sure I put on my shoes each day.
Putting those shoes on will shift your perception. Walking suddenly won’t seem so hard. Most days you’ll head out the door and take a spin around the block after putting your shoes on. This is one way Starter Steps can turn into bigger habits. However, I want to share an important part of the Tiny Habits mindset: Do not raise the bar prematurely. Don’t rush to make the behavior bigger. It’s always okay to not walk after putting on your shoes if that’s all you want to do for the day. By keeping the bar low, you keep the habit alive. You’ll ensure that you’re always capable of doing the behavior no matter how your motivation fluctuates.
One of Sarika’s biggest victories was cooking herself breakfast. This was a task that she had felt was both insurmountable and defeating. People cooked breakfast every day; why did this feel so hard for her to do? After taking a Tiny Habits course and learning about Starter Steps, Sarika was determined to play around with habits to see if she could design her way out of the problem. So Sarika decided that she’d turn the stovetop burner on first thing in the morning. That was her new habit. Oh, so tiny. It was a Starter Step to cooking breakfast. And that’s all she did the first few days. She’d leave the burner on for a few seconds, then turn it off. But she soon built on that Starter Step and put a pot on top of the burner. Then once the pot was there, she thought, Why not boil water for porridge? Once the water was boiling, it seemed silly not to put the porridge in, and she wound up making herself breakfast most days, amazed at how much easier it felt than what she’d built it up to be in her head. But if she ever felt rushed or distracted, it was okay if she just turned the burner on and off because the Starter Step is the behavior that needs to become hardwired into her routine.
The Starter Step is a kind of mental jujitsu—it has a surprising impact for such a small move because the momentum it creates often propels you to the next steps with less friction. The key is not to raise the bar. Doing the Starter Step is success. Every time you do it, you are keeping that habit alive and cultivating the possibility of growth.
Sarika was surprised by how quickly her burner habit blossomed into multiple habits that led to a full-blown breakfast habit. Buoyed by her success, she enlisted her mom as a resource, and she also began skilling up. Within a few months, she’d moved beyond porridge and was whipping up morning dosas with chutney.
EASY-TO-DO ANALYSIS
Discovery Question
Breakfast Habit— What is making this behavior hard to do?
The problem: The weakest link in Sarika’s Ability Chain was mental effort. She didn’t have a plan for what to cook, and the dishes were piled up on the counter so she had nowhere to assemble a meal, and this felt too complicated for her to handle.
Breakthrough Question
Breakfast Habit— How can I make this behavior easier to do?
The solution: Sarika made it easier to do by using a Starter Step to break down an otherwise overwhelming process into discrete steps. Lighting the burner was easy to do, and this simple behavior gave her a sense of success that caused her habit to grow.
Scaling Back
Now we come to the second way to make a behavior tiny: Scaling Back.
This means taking the behavior you want and shrinking it. As a result, your Tiny Habit will be a much smaller version of your desired behavior. Consider my flossing habit: I wanted to floss all my teeth but began with just one. I scaled it back.
If your desired behavior is to walk a mile every day, you can scale back by walking to the mailbox. Nothing more. As with the Starter Step, the scaled-back version is your Tiny Habit—it’s your baseline behavior, the only thing you have to do every day to cultivate the walking habit that will eventually grow to full size.
EASY-TO-DO ANALYSIS
Discovery Question
Flossing Habit— What is making this behavior hard to do?
The problem: The weakest link in my Ability Chain was physical effort. The thick floss I used was difficult to get between my teeth, and this took effort and frustrated me as I struggled to get the floss between each close contact.
