He tells the story of a woman in his book who wanted to eat healthier but hated chopping vegetables…but when she got a mandoline, she was able to quickly slice things so that she could always have the healthy snacks she intended.ĭesigning clear prompts also requires some thought, as I discovered when I previously tried Tiny Habits. Get tools and resources, as Fogg did with finding better floss. What is the most ridiculously small version of the behavior? Make the behavior tiny, as we’ve already discussed. If you are starting a push-up habit, five push-ups may be a challenge, but if you keep at it, it may soon be easy to do 10 or 20 or more. By making flossing easy, and celebrating his small wins, he started a flossing habit that sticks to this day.įogg also describes other ways you can make the behavior easier: On a high motivation day, he went out and bought several kinds of floss to figure out which floss made it easiest to floss.

His canonical example is that when he had trouble flossing consistently, he started by flossing one tooth, and celebrating each day that he flossed one tooth (and sometimes flossing more when he felt like it). By designing clear prompts, and making the new behavior incredibly easy to do (low ability needed), we can make sure they happen even if the motivation is low. If we rely only on motivation, then when motivation is low, we will revert to our previous habits.įogg suggests that rather than rely on motivation, we can explore the space of Ability and Prompts to change our behavior, and hence the Tiny Habits methodology. But motivation is variable – it can be diminished on days when we haven’t gotten enough sleep, when we haven’t eaten well, when we are in a fight with a friend or loved one, etc. People tend to subscribe to the New Year’s Resolution model of behavior change, where they believe that if they just want the new behavior enough, they will change. The clever thing about this model is that it takes the focus off of motivation as the key to changing behavior. If our combination of Motivation and Ability is above a threshold when the Prompt occurs (he calls the threshold the Action Line), we will do the behavior. we know that when we are going to bed that we should brush our teeth). In this conception, all behavior is instigated by a prompt, although that prompt may be internal (e.g. In Fogg’s Behavior Model, Behavior is a function of Motivation, Ability and Prompt (B: MAP).

I was planning to skip the book since I figured it was more of the same, but after hearing a podcast interview with him, I realized he covered more in the book than what had been in the course. I went through BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits course back in 2014 with limited success in creating my intended habits.

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