Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(19)
That same day you actually do sit for thirty minutes as the monk suggested. You struggle to quiet your mind, but you feel pretty good . . . until you get bored. The next day you try fifteen minutes. You feel okay for a while. But some days you don’t do it, and on others you can’t quiet your mind. You tried and you failed, and you feel bad about it. Eventually you stop.
Why didn’t it work?
For starters, you’re not a Buddhist monk. But it’s mostly because this behavior was probably too hard for you. Not to mention that you probably started with unrealistic expectations about meditation. The Buddhist monk meant well, but he was talking about what worked for him. Meditating might not work for you the way it works for him.
The other thing to consider is that the videos you’re watching and the articles you’re reading and the bloggers you’re following may or may not be credible sources of information. While this approach to choosing behaviors is better than mere guessing, it’s still risky because it wasn’t chosen according to any criteria other than what excited you in that moment.
Wrong way #3: Doing what worked for a friend
Advice from a friend or family member is the most well-meaning of all, but it’s not the best way to match yourself with a new habit. While hot yoga may have changed your friend’s life, does that mean it’s the right practice for you? We all have friends who swear their new habit of getting up at four thirty a.m. changed their lives and that we have to do it. I don’t doubt that getting up super early changes people’s lives, sometimes in good ways and sometimes not. But be cautious: You don’t know if this habit will actually make your life better, especially if it means you get less sleep. So yes, you can try what worked for your friend, but don’t beat yourself up if your friend’s answer doesn’t change you in the same way.
All of these approaches involve guessing and chance. And that’s not a good way to design for change in your life. Having systematic criteria for how to choose behaviors for yourself will make you effective in getting results, and the next step in Behavior Design will save you from guessing.
THE RIGHT WAY: MATCH YOURSELF WITH SPECIFIC BEHAVIORS
Steps in Behavior Design
Step 1: Clarify the Aspiration
Step 2: Explore Behavior Options
Step 3: Match with Specific Behaviors
Once you have a wide range of behavior options thanks to Magic Wanding and your Swarm of Behaviors, shift gears and get practical. In this step, you will match yourself with specific behaviors, and there’s no guessing in this systematic approach.
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)
There are a few good ways to behavior match. Getting help from a coach is a great way if you have someone in your life who can skillfully match you with Golden Behaviors. You might be working with a trainer, a doctor, a dietician, or a person who has either the training or the intuition to know what will work for you. For example, a coach trained in Tiny Habits for Weight Loss can match you with the tiniest behaviors that lead to the most weight loss. If you’ve found an expert like this, consider yourself fortunate. For everyone else, I offer you a method I designed called Focus Mapping.
You’ll use the Swarm of Behaviors you created earlier. Doing a Focus Map should take you less than ten minutes start to finish. At the end, you’ll have two or three behaviors that rise to the top. Those are your Golden Behaviors. And that’s what you design for while setting aside all the other options.
A Golden Behavior can be a one-time action. Canceling your cable subscription is a task done one time that will probably lead to watching TV less. Other Golden Behaviors will be habits you repeat day after day, such as charging your phone in the kitchen instead of next to your bed.
Focus Mapping
Focus Mapping is my favorite method in Behavior Design. I created this during ten years of working on Stanford projects, changing my own life, and helping business leaders to design new products and services. Over the years, I’ve worked hard to improve Focus Mapping, and today I believe this is the best method for matching yourself with Golden Behaviors.
This is the landscape for a Focus Map.
You’re eventually going to plot each behavior in your swarm on this landscape. First, I’ll show you how it works using our buddy Mark, who is trying to reduce his stress.
Mark writes each behavior from his Swarm of Behaviors on its own index card, then he goes through the stack of behavior cards one by one.
ROUND ONE
In the first round of Focus Mapping, Mark thinks about only the impact of the behavior—how much it helps him to reduce his stress—and he doesn’t consider the feasibility or practicality of each behavior in this round.