Fogg

In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things.

• Stop judging yourself.

• Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.

• Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

Once Juni understood a key maxim of Behavior Design—simplicity changes behavior—she refocused her personal efforts to create a constellation of habits, tiny in size but big on impact, that helped her to kick her sugar habit for good.

The Anatomy of Tiny Habits:

1. ANCHOR MOMENT: An existing routine (like brushing your teeth) or an event that happens (like a phone ringing). The Anchor Moment reminds you to do the new Tiny Behavior. 

1. NEW TINY BEHAVIOR A simple version of the new habit you want, such as flossing one tooth or doing two push-ups. You do the Tiny Behavior immediately after the Anchor Moment. 

1. INSTANT CELEBRATION Something you do to create positive emotions, such as saying, “I did a good job!” You celebrate immediately after doing the new Tiny Behavior. 

Anchor

Behavior

Celebration

If there’s one concept from my book I hope you embrace, it’s this: People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. For that purpose, I have created this exercise for you. Step 1: Write this phrase on a small piece of paper: I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

Step 2: Tape the paper to your bathroom mirror or anywhere you will frequently see it.

Step 3: Read the phrase often.

Step 4: Notice how this insight works in your life (and for the people around you).

The first thing to remember is that there is no one solution for every behavior challenge. Our job is to adjust the components - Motivation, Ability, and Prompt - and find out what combination works best in each circumstance to get the behavior we want.

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 is often unreliable when it comes to home improvement. And it’s also unreliable with diets, exercise routines, creative projects, filing taxes, opening businesses, searching for jobs, planning conferences—selfimprovement of all types. The Motivation Monkey’s traps are stealthy and numerous. They catch you whether you’re facing a big project or attempting to change your habits.

Here’s the unfortunate thing—most people believe motivation is the true engine of behavior change. Words like “rewards” and “incentives” get thrown around with such regularity that most people think you can create whatever habits you want if you find the right carrot to dangle in front of yourself. This kind of thinking is understandable, but it also happens to be wrong.

Yes, motivation is one of three elements that drives behavior. The problem is that motivation is often fickle, and this chapter digs deeper into the challenges it presents.

Even more problematic is the fact that we’re blind to at least some of our motivation much of the time. We may not fully understand where the desire to eat a certain food is coming from. Do I really love the salty taste of popcorn, or does my daily popcorn habit stem from nostalgia for the days when my family and I used to eat it during movie night? Changing, invisible, competing, and conflicting motivations make this element of behavior hard to pin down and control. This makes us even more frustrated when we fail in our efforts to motivate ourselves or others to make lasting change.

In Behavior Design, we’ve named this temporary surge in motivation the Motivation Wave. I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: 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 can vanish on Friday nights. These shifts are among the reasons why you cannot take full control of your motivation.

MOTIVATING TOWARD AN ABSTRACTION DOESN’T YIELD RESULTS: We all want to be healthy. We all want to have more patience with our kids. We all want to feel fulfilled by our work. And our desire to achieve these aspirations is enduring. (Or at least it doesn’t change quickly.) This seems like a good thing, right? Yes, it is. An aspiration is an excellent starting point for changing your life.

Millions of people genuinely aspire to live healthier, less stressful, and more fulfilling lives. But here’s the problem: People often believe that motivating themselves toward an aspiration will lead to lasting change. So people focus on aspirations. And they focus on motivation. And that combo doesn’t produce results.

The more vividly you can picture what you want, the better. You usually have to know where you’re going in order to get there.

I’ve found that people don’t naturally think in terms of specific behaviors, and this tendency trips up almost everyone.

People use the word “goal” when they are talking about aspirations or outcomes. If someone says “goal, ” you can’t be sure what they are talking about since the word is ambiguous. For that reason, “goal” is not part of the vocabulary in Behavior Design. Use either “aspiration” or “outcome” for precision.

Then we went to work. I focused our session on finding specific behaviors their customers could do in order to create an emergency fund, and these are a few of the ones we came up with.

• Call your cable company and scale back your service to the lowest level 

• Empty your pocket change into an emergency-fund jar every evening 

• Announce a garage sale, then put all the revenue into an emergency fund 

In the end, we came up with more than thirty different specific behaviors. Some were better than others, but all of those behaviors had a shot at helping the bank’s customers take concrete steps toward reaching the savings outcome.

To generate lots of behavior options, you can use the following categories during your own Magic Wanding sessions.

• What behaviors would you do one time? 

• What new habits would you create? 

• What habit would you stop?

After you come up with each behavior wish, think to yourself, Great. What else? and keep going. Eventually, you will have a Swarm of Behaviors that will range from wacky to logical to surprising. And that’s a good thing.

This concept is important enough that I gave it a name: Behavior Matching. And this is the most important step in Behavior Design. No matter what kind of change you want to make, matching yourself with the right behaviors is the key to changing your life for good. In Behavior Design we have a name for the best matches: Golden Behaviors.

A Golden Behavior has three criteria.

• The behavior is effective in realizing your aspiration (impact) 

• You want to do the behavior (motivation) 

• You can do the behavior (ability)

This is the landscape for a Focus Map:”

“

High-Impact Behaviour (very effective at helping me)

No (I can’t get myself to do this behaviour)

Yes (I can get myself to do this behaviour)

Low-Impact Behaviour (not effective at helping me)

When we match ourselves with behaviors that we already want to do, not what we think we should do, there is no need to fuss with motivational tricks or techniques later. We take the Motivation Monkey out of commission.

Behavior Design recognizes this reality: A key to lasting change is matching yourself with behaviors that you want to do. In your quest to exercise daily, for example, you’ll find plenty of options. If streaming Beyoncé and dancing for five minutes while you make breakfast is the exercise you want to do, then make dancing a daily habit. And forget about the treadmill at the gym.

We should be dreamy about aspirations but not about the behaviors that will get us there. Behaviors are grounded. Concrete. They are the handholds and footholds that get you up the rock face. Your path to the top is your own, and you choose your behaviors according to the particular rock you are climbing.

Notice that Krieger and Systrom nailed the motivation component by choosing a behavior that people already wanted to do. According to the Behavior Model, they were already in good shape. That alone might have brought them some success. But what they did next catapulted them into the pantheon of Silicon Valley demigods—they made their Golden Behaviors easy to do.

While small might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable. When it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big bold moves actually don’t work as well as small stealthy ones. Applying go big or go home to everything you do is a recipe for self-criticism and disappointment.

What I’ve found in my research and years of experience is that your answer will involve at least one of five factors. I call them the Ability Factors. Here’s how they break down.

• 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?

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.

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.

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.

No behavior happens without a prompt. People respond reliably to prompts when they are motivated and able, which is exactly what makes well-timed prompts so powerful.

On the flip side, if there is no prompt, there is no behavior even if you have high levels of motivation and ability.

Designing prompts is a skill you can learn and practice.

There are three types of prompts in our lives: Person Prompts, Context Prompts, and Action Prompts.

If you’ve created a Context Prompt and it’s not working, you are not doing anything wrong. You probably don’t lack motivation or willpower. Do yourself a favor—don’t blame yourself. Redesign the prompt instead. Find what prompt works for you.

An Action Prompt is a behavior you already do that can remind you to do a new habit you want to cultivate.

Action Prompts are so much more useful than Person Prompts and Context Prompts that I’ve given them a pet name: Anchors. When talking about Tiny Habits, I use the term Anchor to describe something in your life that is already stable and solid. The concept is pretty simple. If there is a habit you want, find the right Anchor within your current routine to serve as your prompt, your reminder.

With my underwear drawer still open, I realized I’d found my answer: behavior sequencing. You simply need to figure out what comes after what. Eureka!

Power Move: Start with Anchors: Ready for a twist? You can create successful recipes in Tiny Habits by starting with an Anchor. It’s basically a flip of what we’ve been doing. Instead of starting with a habit you want to create and finding a place for it, you begin with the routines you already have and find new habits to plug in.

Meanwhile Habits: When you look carefully at your existing routines, you’ll find tiny pockets of open time that are ideal places to cultivate a new habit. When I turn on the shower, the water is cold at first. I don’t like cold showers, so my typical routine is to wait until the water warms up, which takes about twenty seconds. This waiting period creates an opportunity: After I turn on the shower (and while I wait), I will…

The scenario above may sound strange to you today, but I predict that this will be commonplace and essential in the future. Businesses that help customers create habits will have a huge advantage over those that don’t.

When she moved out of that place of shame and discouragement, she was able to think more clearly. She realized that her ex hadn’t spent as much time developing his skills for getting along with people as she had. During their marriage, she had been the social buffer for his moods. So he had to figure all that out on his own when they divorced. Amy knew that this was hard for him, and she found compassion for him.

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.

Every undone task that paraded through Linda’s mind at night morphed into a rumination on all the ways she didn’t measure up as a mom or a partner or a human being.

Steps in Behavior Design:

Step 1: Clarify the Aspiration

Step 2: Explore Behavior Options

Step 3: Match with Specific Behaviors

Step 4: Start Tiny

Step 5: Find a Good Prompt

Step 6: Celebrate Successes

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.

There is a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior and the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future.

The point is that your brain’s reward system is influenced directly by emotions and less directly by what society labels as “good” and “bad.” As humans, we are deeply wired for emotions, which is why most of us are a mixed bag of habits—some we want and plenty we don’t.

The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milliseconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit.

Help people feel successful. Just four words. But so important. Note that this maxim doesn’t say, “Help people be successful.” It’s about feeling successful instead.

Every product or service that is growing and thriving today does this well. They help us feel successful. Look at the products and services you love—from shopping online to the clothing you wear to the apps you use every day for driving, communicating, or playing games. You’ll see that you’re getting a feeling of success from them.

When you rehearse in Tiny Habits, you are both training muscle memory and rewiring your brain to remember. And you can drill and wire in a habit quickly if you have an effective celebration.

Three moments for celebration: The moment you remember to do your new habit; while you are doing your new habit; immediately after doing your new habit.

The feeling of success is a powerful catalyst for change. Your confidence grows when you celebrate not only because you are now a habit-creating machine but also because you are getting better and better at being nice to yourself. You start looking for opportunities to celebrate yourself instead of berating yourself.

A much better approach is to design the garden (habits) you want. You identify what vegetables and flowers you’d love to have in your garden (motivation), you choose plants you can easily support (ability), and you consider which spot in the yard is best for each plant (finding a place in your routine).

It takes a bit of planning and care in the beginning to get those delicate little sprouts up and out of the ground, but you’ve made sure the roots are strong by celebrating your tiny successes. Soon it’s time to let your rooted habits do their natural thing—grow bigger.

... the formation time of a habit depends on three things.

• The person doing the habit 

• The habit itself (the action) 

• The context

Success leads to success. But here’s something that may surprise you. The size of the success doesn’t seem to matter very much. When you feel successful at something, even if it’s tiny, your confidence grows quickly, and your motivation increases to do that habit again and perform related behaviors. I call this success momentum. Surprisingly enough, this gets created by the frequency of your successes, not by the size. So with Tiny Habits you are shooting for a bunch of tiny successes done quickly. Not a big one that takes a long time.

One key to designing long-term change is to reduce or remove the demotivators. This allows the natural motivator (often it’s hope) to blossom, which in turn can sustain the new behavior over time.

When a demotivator goes away, you open the door to a bigger and harder behavior. The Action Line on my Behavior Model shows that you can do harder behaviors as your motivation levels rise.

In the previous chapters, you’ve already been working on Behavior Crafting even though I didn’t use that term. You have already learned how to:

• Identify a lot of behavior options (chapter 2) 

• Match yourself with behaviors that will lead to your aspiration (chapter 2) 

• Make the behavior easier to do (chapter 3)

Next comes understanding your preferences, strengths, and aspirations. In previous chapters, we’ve discussed the following skills related to Self-Insight.

• Clarify your aspirations or desired outcomes 

• Understand what motivates you—i.e., know the difference between what you really want and what you think you should do 

Here is the next skill that will take you from tiny to transformative. The skill of knowing which new habits will have meaning to you.

Here are some guidelines to predict if a new habit will be meaningful to you.

• The new habit affirms a piece of the identity that you want to cultivate. If you want to be a person who is loving and appreciative, the habit of saying thank you after your husband makes you dinner is inherently meaningful and will likely propel you toward transformation. 

• The new habit helps you reach an important aspiration. If the line from your new habit to your aspiration is clear, your habit will have meaning. A habit of putting on your running shoes may seem small and insignificant, but if your aspiration is to run a 5K, it’s decidedly not. 

• The new habit has a big impact despite being tiny. Sarika’s turning on the stove burner was small, yet it triggered a cascade of changes.

You can practice this skill by answering one question: What is the tiniest habit I could create that would have the most meaning?

As a result, he pushed himself just enough to make progress. This process repeated itself over the course of days and weeks. However, if there was a time that Sukumar didn’t want to do a lot of push-ups, he didn’t force himself. He did two and felt good about keeping the habit alive. Part of this skill is knowing when to back off and do only the baseline.

Steps in Behavior Design:

Step 1: Clarify the Aspiration

Step 2: Explore Behavior Options

Step 3: Match with Specific Behaviors

Step 4: Start Tiny

Step 5: Find a Good Prompt

Step 6: Celebrate Successes

Step 7: Troubleshoot, Iterate, & Expand

Here are guidelines for knowing how to adjust the difficulty of your habit:

• Don’t pressure yourself to do more than the tiniest version of your habit. If you’re sick, tired, or just not in the mood, scale back to tiny. You can always raise the bar when you want to do more, and— surprisingly—you can lower it to tiny when you need to. Flexibility is part of this skill. 

• Don’t restrict yourself from going bigger if you want to do more. Let your motivation guide you on how much and how hard. 

• If you do too much, make sure you celebrate extra hard. Pushing yourself too much to expand a habit can create pain or frustration, which will weaken the habit. If that happens (and it will), you can offset the negative feelings by amping up your celebration. 

• Use emotional flags to help you find your edge. Frustration, pain, and especially avoidance are signs that something is going on with your habit—that you’ve probably increased the difficulty too much, too fast. On the flipside, if you become bored with your habit, you might need to ramp things up.

When I was working with Weight Watchers, I asked the CEO if he thought sustainable weight loss was possible without changing one’s environment. His answer? No way. We agreed that if someone loses weight and doesn’t change his or her environment along the way, that person will eventually regain the weight. We both knew that context is powerful.

By layering your habit with environment redesign, you will reduce friction and set your habit free to go above the Action Line. All hail the mighty prewashed, presliced cucumber.

The skill of embracing a new identity. When you can let go of old identities and embrace new ones, you will soar in your ability to go from tiny to transformative.

Shifting identity helps you consider other new habits you might not have thought of doing that will move you closer to your aspiration.

Sukumar was questioning his negative notions of self that had once seemed so solid - identities that had caused him pain and frustration. If he could change those parts of himself, the ones that had seemed set in stone, he reasoned that he could change anything he wanted.

It’s time to set the record straight and acknowledge that bad habits are not fundamentally different from good habits when it comes to basic components. Behavior is behavior; it’s always a result of motivation, ability, and a prompt coming together at the same moment.

People who experience motivational interviewing can better understand their reasons for doing or not doing a behavior.

The answer is so important, I’ll say it three times in different ways: Pick the easiest one. Pick the one you are most sure you can do. Pick the one that feels like no big deal.

We live and work with others, and every change has a general effect on everyone for better or worse. We are always changing together whether we design for it or not.

After all, every group situation is unique— and group change, like individual change, is most successfully approached with a process, not a prescription.