Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(10)

I’m not with you in person to teach this skill so I’ve created a tiny exercise at the end of this chapter for your benefit. If you need more guidance, you can go online to get the exact script and watch how other people teach the model. The few minutes it takes to learn to teach the Behavior Model is a terrific investment of your time.

Once you’ve learned the Behavior Model, you can apply this in many practical ways, including stopping or troubleshooting a behavior. And that’s what I want to explain next.





Fogg Behavior Model





Using the Behavior Model to Disrupt a Habit


Now that you know how motivation and ability work together and how prompts are vital to behavior, let’s go back to Katie. How can she break her scrolling habit? Her motivation is high. The behavior is very easy. That puts her habit far above the Action Line.





Fogg Behavior Model





What could she change?

Motivation?

Unlikely. Those happy feelings she gets when she sees that someone liked her post aren’t going anywhere; they’re baked into the app. Katie wants to stay updated on friends, and Facebook is doing that for her. Motivation is likely to remain high with this one.

What about ability?

This is where we find a big opportunity for change.

Katie could delete her Facebook account to make scrolling her newsfeed impossible to do. But perhaps that’s too extreme—she still might want to check it at other times throughout the day. Luckily, there are plenty of other ways to make it harder for Katie to look at her phone while in bed. She could delete the Facebook app from her phone. She could put her phone across the room on the bureau. She could put her phone outside her daughter’s door to ensure that she’d spring out of bed to shut off the alarm before her daughter woke up, or she could leave her phone in the car. Because Katie’s motivation for scrolling was so high, she had to experiment with a bunch of different options before she finally found this two-pronged solution: She put her phone in the kitchen at night and got an old-fashioned alarm clock for her bedroom. Putting some physical distance between her and the phone made her scrolling behavior harder to do, and having the alarm clock wake her removed the prompt altogether.

If you can’t change one component of the Behavior Model (motivation in this case), then you focus on changing the others (ability and prompt).

What about her exercise habit? As it turned out, she didn’t need any adjustment. Once Katie removed the distraction of scrolling, she started working out with the plans and tools she already had in place.



With enough tinkering, you can design for almost any behavior you want and short-circuit most behaviors you don’t. Katie did it fairly easily and successfully, but first she had to know the ins and outs of what was driving her scrolling-in-bed habit.

Months after Behavior Design Boot Camp, Katie told me how happy she was to finally have a solid workout habit in her life. She still got sucked into her phone on occasion over breakfast or while waiting in line, but it didn’t have the same iron grip on her. Most days, she was the master of her mornings. She felt physically stronger than ever, but most important, she was learning that Behavior Design could improve any area of her life.





One Model to Understand All Behavior


If you want to be highly effective at changing your own behavior—or anyone else’s—mastering the Behavior Model is the key. Once you have a clear view of how behavior works, you’ll be able to decode other people’s behavior as well as your own—a powerful skill. You can begin to foster positive habits and disrupt the ones you don’t like, and you’ll have more compassion for other people’s less-than-ideal behaviors.

I was getting on a flight a few years ago, and I saw an active kid seated behind me. As we settled in, I felt his little feet kicking my seat over and over. Ugh. I knew that he’d likely be kicking my seat during the entire flight. He’s a kid, after all. So before the plane took off, I asked myself what I could do to stop or reduce the kicking behavior.

I put my Behavior Model to work.

First the prompt. Could I remove it? Nope. I had no control over his internal desire, boredom, or whatever was prompting him to kick the seat. Then ability: Could I make his kicking harder to do? No. So I was left with one final option: motivation. How could I, in a calm and playful way, motivate this little guy to kick the seat less?

I decided to use the rule of reciprocity.

When someone gives you a gift, you naturally want to return the favor in some way. This dynamic helps humans get along with one another. It’s also one way we can gracefully influence motivation. I decided to give it a try.

I had a yellow smiley-face button in my computer bag. (Yes, I am practically Mister Rogers, let’s get that out of the way right now.) I got it out of my bag and showed it to the little passenger and his parents. “Hey,” I said. “I want to give you this smiley-face button. I’m hoping this will help you remember not to kick my seat during the flight.”

The kid said, “Yes!” and the parents thanked me with genuine smiles.

The flight went great—no seat kicking—and I made a few friends in the process. We waved good-bye at baggage claim.

By using the Behavior Model at home, you can help people in your household help you. As anyone in a long-term relationship can attest, tension over housework can be corrosive. My partner, Denny, and I have different views about household cleaning because I am more of a “tidy enough” person and Denny is more of a “disinfect everything” person. Over the years, cleaning the shower became an issue. Denny is hypervigilant about mold, but our shower doesn’t drain well, which leads to—you guessed it—mold, so he had been asking me to wipe out the shower after I used it. But I didn’t do it most of the time. In fact, I rarely did.