Original subtitles

It's great to be with you guys today. I

had to get up at like 4:00 in the morning

because I live in the wine country.

And so driving down here

early in the morning and the sun was

coming up. It was on one hand I

wanted a little more sleep. On the other

hand, it was a beautiful morning

coming in. I teach at

Stanford University. I do that one day a

week. I figured out how to do that along

with the Internet and phone calls and

what have you and why. It works all about

behavior and how you

design to change people's

behaviours. And what

we're going to do right now?

We're going to practice some behavior

change, and the organizers of this event

have been very good at providing some

supplies, so I want all of you to look

under your seat right now and see what

surprise is waiting for you.

What I want you to do.

And we debated whether we should really

do this or not. But we're going to do it

is. I want you to tear off one piece of

floss like this. And what we're going

to do, don't do it quite yet. We're going

to practice what I call a tiny habit.

And in this case, we're going to do

something very, very small. And I'm going

to have you floss one tooth. Not yet.

We're going to do it all together. I know

some of you think that that's kind of

gross, but we can do

this now. There's one more piece,

and I'll explain this a little bit later

in my presentation after you

do a tiny behavior that you want to

repeat in the future or maybe expand.

What you need to do is celebrate

victory immediately, right away. So I'm

not talking about going out to the bar or

going to making cookies or what have you.

You need to tell yourself in some way

that you're awesome. OK, so we're

going to practice this. There's a few

ways to do this. I've mapped out ten

different ways to celebrate, but we're

going to start with one that's pretty

common, that works, and it goes

like this. I'm awesome.

OK, you ready, 123? I'm

awesome. OK.

Let's try another celebration.

And this one is bingo ready

. 123 Bingo.

Awesome. Now I'm

awesome. There are some people.

When they're working with tiny Habits

from me, they like doing a little dance

and that makes them feel like, yeah, I'm

rocking it, OK, so. Ready Little

Dance 123.

Awesome. OK, now we're going to get to

this in a minute, so just hang tight.

I'll give you a little bit of background

and we're going to practice this

together. You guys are great sports and

practicing the celebrations with me. I'm

obsessed with how behaviour works.

Even on vacation I'm thinking about

behaviour. I'm watching baby, I'm reading

stuff on it. I'm trying to understand it

systematically and when I'm

sleeping and this is a little bit scary.

I'm thinking about behavior, model

behavior, grid domino actions,

motivation waves. In my sleep. And this

happens almost every night now, so that's

a little freaky, but I learned things, so

that's nice. I would have never

expected that a year ago

that today I would be doing

506070 push-ups a day,

but all this is part of being obsessed

with the behaviour and one of the things

that you need to do if you is

practice changing your own behavior and

that gives you an understanding of how

behaviour works now. The

way I arrived here.

Was very much like the flossing, but a

little bit different. And this was the

equation. After I pee, I will

do 2 push-ups. OK, so

I'd use the facility. Yes, technically

you flush the toilet 1st and then two

push ups. And you're done and you go,

awesome. OK, that's yeah, OK,

awesome. Yeah, well, after two it's

really easy. You move on, then you do 5,

then you do 8. And it

the current where I'm at now, I do 8, but

I always do extra credits, so I tend to do

12 or so and it adds up over the day. I

end up doing who knows 506070 depending

on how much water I've had and other

factors. The good

news is that

behavior and behavior change is

not as complicated as most people think.

It's systematic and there are ways to

understand behavior that are pretty

straightforward and simple, and I'm going

to share some of those with you today.

There are 15 ways behaviors can change.

They're not hundreds of behavior types.

There's fifteen ways. When we talk about

health behavior change, people are mostly

talking about long term change. And this

row, these are the five that represent

different types of long term change. I'm

not going to go into depth here. But what

I want to explain to you is when it comes

to long term change, there's only two

ways you can get it done. Number

one, you can change your

environment. So before, here's your

environment, certain behavior, and then

after the changed environment changes

your behavior. That's a reliable way. It

also includes your social environment.

Before, after. Now,

changing the environment is a reliable

way to change your behavior. However, it

can be tricky, especially the social

environment with families and coworkers

and so on. So there's. One other

way of changing your behavior long term,

and I'll give you a hint. It does not

have to do with motivation.

Surprise motivation actually applies

to other kinds of temporary behavior

change, but not long term. In other

words, relying primarily on motivation to

change your behavior long term is a

losing strategy.

And similarly for willpower. So if you

can take those off the table if you make

the behavior change. Tiny enough

now in this grid. This is where habits

live. Blue path. It's something familiar

that you do from now on and if you

make that very tiny, like 2 push

ups, floss, one tooth and so on,

it's very easy to repeat and make that

become a habit. Think about it this way.

You already know how to floss all your

teeth. That's not what you're lacking.

What you're lacking is the automaticity

of flossing. They don't need to train

flossing all your teeth. You need to

train making it automatic.

Now in the persuasion Boot

camps that I teach, we geek out about

this kind of stuff and this is one of the

crews with me up in the wine country

doing it. We look at the sequences of

behaviors that eventually land you here

to have it. We won't go in that kind of

depth today. But what I do want to say,

and this is a little bit controversial,

is this puzzle is solved and I'm going to

share the pieces with you and I'm going

to share some ways that it got solved and

we'll see what you think. That

there's a new way to create habits that

is reliable and systematic.

Now, when we look at health outcomes,

bullseye, What do we want to do? Well,

things like lose weight, manage stress,

and so on. But if you design for

the outcomes, you're designing at the

wrong place. You need to

design for the behaviors that lead to the

outcome. And if you take an issue like

weight loss, there are many, many

behaviors that can contribute to that

outcome. Stress reduction, eating

better, and so on.

And I would propose that most of the

behaviors that we need to do are habits.

So of the 15 ways behaviors can change,

the one that matters most to long term

health are habits. And as we

create what I call these tiny

habits, and we can't do it all at once,

little by little, we will then approach

this health outcome in a very reliable

way, in a way that doesn't regress in a

way that doesn't make you, oh, I give up,

and I'm just going to go back to how I

was. Let me share a personal example and

I hesitated about including this, but I

will. In 2010,

Igot one of these scales that's super

high tech and it can tweet out your

weight. OK, so I set it up so it's

tweeting my weight.

So I started tweeting it out in 2010, and

this is about a year so you can see

what's going on there. Not much change.

Up and down, up and down. What I learned

was #1. Simply

tweeting your weight didn't seem to have

any effect on me, and I looked up others

who had done it didn't seem to have lots

of impact #2. My Twitter

followers hated it. So I stopped.

But I kept, you know, I'd made it a habit

of stepping on the scale. It was right

there, a few months later.

Going up. So at one

point I thought, OK, I've been doing this

thing called tiny habits. It's

something I've I've applied elsewhere.

Now I'm going to apply it to weight loss

because I want to lose some pounds. So

after creating many, many, many,

many tiny Habits, this is where I am this

week. So that's probably the course of a

year or so. So you can see no real

change. And then putting together little

by little these Tiny Habits.

That took root and would grow.

I believe I've made a long term change

now. We'll see 510 years from now. But it

seems like these habits will be very hard

to undo. So I put this out there.

When you know how to create tiny habits,

you can change your behaviour and your

life forever. Now let me back up and

explain how I honed in on the formula

of tiny habits and you can see whether it

syncs with how you think about it.

There are three things that have to

happen at the same moment to cause a

behavior. Number one, there has to be

some level of motivation. You got to want

to keep your teeth clean. You got to want

to. Get stronger with pushups or

something like that. Next you have to

have the ability to do it and then

there has to be a trigger. Now when I say

trigger, I mean call to action. It's the

thing that says do push ups now, floss

your teeth now and so on. And it's these

three things together. When they

combine it once and the behavior will

also occur. A behavior whether it's plus

your teeth, do push ups, what have you

send a thank you note now motivation

ability or trade-offs. And this line,

this curved line represents that trade

off and if you're anywhere above the line

and the trigger occurs you will do the

behavior. So let me get some examples of

this. Here, below the line, let's

say I want you to run a marathon and

you have no motivation to run a marathon.

Both low motivation and it's hard When I

say run a marathon, run a marathon.

You're not going to do it, no matter how

many times I make that call to action. In

contrast, if I say, oh,

walk outside and walk back in

maybe 30 seconds. Simple to

do, you're above the line. Still, you may

not be very motivated, but because it's

so easy to do.

Now let's move up here. It's

hard to do.

I'm asking you to do something very hard.

In order to do something that's

difficult, you need high levels of

motivation. In fact, I think that's the

purpose. That's the only use of

motivation in our lives is to allow us to

do hard things. And if we're not doing

hard things, we don't need that much

motivation. When our motivation

lags, boom, can't do it.

Motivation is very slippery. So if you

set yourself up to do something hard and

you have to somehow sustain the

motivation, the motivation is going to

drop down and there's going to be a point

where you don't do it. And habits are

about repeating it and you won't create

the habit. So as I looked at this. As I

looked at my behavior model, I thought,

let's go right here. Easy to do

stuff that's so easy to do, it doesn't

require much motivation at all. So

whether your motivation is high, you'll

still do it. Whether it's low, you'll

Stew it. And so this is where the

insight around let's make it

really tiny.

Really tiny like 122 push-ups, 1 sip of

water and so on.

Well, when you look at it in this way.

It's a :). We're accounting for

motivation. We're accounting for ability.

So in the equation B = m AT those things

are done. What wasn't done and

what I hadn't solved

was the trigger. How do we

trigger that behavior

easily?Well, one day I

came home from the gym. I went into the

bathroom. I got in the shower. I turned

on the shower. I got out. I dried off. I

went into my bedroom. I opened the sock

drawer and at that moment, it hit me.

After. The secret was

after. If you use an

existing behavior in your life and you

put the new tiny behavior after it,

you can use the existing behavior to be

the trigger. So I was looking for what is

the T? What is the trigger? Well, the

triggers are your existing behaviors. I

was pretty happy about this. I thought

this was a breakthrough. It means you

don't have to put up post it, notes, you

don't have to set alarms and so on. You

just establish what it will come

after. So I went off.

Map this out and started practicing tiny

habits more and more on my own, applied

them to many things. And then about a

year ago, after I'd done this a while, I

thought, you know, I'm going to invite

some friends to do it, and it kind of

grew from there. So today

there's. I've actually coached

over 20,000

tiny habits, and this is a snapshot from

the spreadsheet. Here's the format for

tiny habits. It looks like this after I

whatever your existing behavior is, I

call that an anchor. I will.

Floss 1/2, 2 dopush ups and so on.

So what kinds of tiny habits do

people create? This is from this

upcoming week. I grabbed this out of the

database. A lot of habits are geared

toward the morning. After I start my

morning coffee I will tidy one item in

the living room. Other habits

are toward the evening, where you have

routines already set up. After a new

house at in today, I will kiss my wife for

10 seconds. These kind of tiny habits

workout really well.

So as you think about changing your

life, think about framing it in terms of

this format. After I pick an existing

habit that you do every day with the same

frequency that you want the new behaviour

to happen, I will. And you've got to make

it super tiny. After I pee, I will do

2 push-ups. After I walk in the door, I

will hang my keys on the hook.

After I brushed my teeth, I will floss

one tooth. That makes sense, right?

That brushing becomes the trigger or the

anchor for flossing one tooth.

And then you celebrate it. So now we're

on to the practice time. You ready for

this? Everyone get out your floss.

OK, in your mind, visualize. You're

brushing your teeth. Oh, I

think we need to practice celebration.

We're going to go awesome, right, 123?

. AwesomeOK, all right. We brush our

teeth last one tooth.

123 Awesome, OK,

if you keep at that. Over time, it'll get

easier and easier to floss your teeth,

and you can floss more and more. There's

different ways to celebrate. Find the

celebration that works for you.

Here's the phrase and it comes down to

this. I live up in the wine

country. I do a lot with the earth as

much as I can, and this seems to

map exactly what I'm talking about. Plant

a tiny seed in the right spot and it will

grow without coaxing.

The tiny seed, this pumpkin

came from a tiny seed that actually we

didn't even plant. It came from the

chicken manure that we put in the garden

and it grew. We didn't have to do

anything to it. It just grew tiny seed in

the right spot. So I encourage you

to look at your lives. Look at what

you want to change. Break it down to tiny

behaviors and put them in the right

spot. The right spot is

after something you're already doing.

And allow it to grow. You don't have to

amp up motivation. You don't have to draw

that much on willpower. All you have to

do is plan it out and let this natural

process emerge. Thanks everybody.