Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(27)

So if you haven’t gotten off the couch in a year, don’t start with seven minutes of strenuous activity. Start tiny instead. Shore up the weakest link in your Ability Chain by making your new workout habit radically easy to do. Scale back to doing one wall push-up. Just one. When you run into a setback—a cold, for instance—you can still manage to do one wall push-up, stuffy nose and all. By going tiny, you create consistency; by staying tiny, you get your new habit firmly rooted.

Which leads us to the second critical question we should ask about any behavior or habit we want to cultivate: How can I make this behavior easier to do? I call this the Breakthrough Question, and it turns out that there are only three answers.

Let’s return to the PAC Person graphic to see how we can make a behavior easier to do.





All three approaches manipulate the ability element of B=MAP to move you above the Action Line and increase the likelihood that you will actually do a behavior. Regardless of what your aspiration is, increasing your skills, getting tools and resources, and making the behavior tiny are what makes things easier to do.

But it’s important to remember that designing for behaviors can take different paths. Sometimes all you’ll need is the right tool to make a new habit easier to do, like using skinny floss, and other times all you have to do is scale the behavior back to its tiniest version, such as flossing just one tooth. Think of making something easy to do as a pond with three different ways to enter the water. Whether you jump off the dock, wade in at the beach, or drop in from a rope swing, you’ll soon be swimming in the same water.

Now let’s break down each approach.





The Three Approaches to Making a Behavior Easier to Do


1. INCREASE YOUR SKILLS


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. I increased my flossing skills by watching some videos on the Internet (if you can think of a behavior, there is a video showing you how to do it). Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a global best seller not because her book focused on motivating people to keep their houses clean but because it focused on teaching them the block-and-tackle steps of how to tidy up.

Increasing your skills could mean hiring a voice coach, taking a knife-skills class at your local grocery store, or practicing your push-up form. The act of “skilling up” feels natural when you are riding a Motivation Wave because you are using this energy crest to your advantage. They are one-time actions that make future behaviors easier to do, so why not do them when you’re bursting with energy at the outset? Let’s say you finish this chapter and are feeling jazzed about doing push-ups. This would be a good time to look up a video on the Internet about the proper push-up form while your motivation is still high.

You may not always have the energy for skilling up, and that’s fine. There are other ways to make your behavior easier.





2. GET TOOLS AND RESOURCES


Something as small as unwashed lettuce or mismatched Tupperware lids can be the difference between bringing a salad to work and grabbing a burger. If a behavior frustrates you, it will not become a habit. Getting the right tools to make a behavior easier could mean anything from getting a better set of kitchen knives to finding more comfortable walking shoes. If you want to make the Tiny Habits method easier to do, this book is a terrific first step. Getting personal guidance from a coach I’ve trained is also a great option.

Tools were crucial to making flossing easier for me. I had to find the right floss—thin and slippery. I became such a fan that I got myself a special tour of the floss factory when I traveled to Dublin for work. I know it seems weird (Denny thought I was nuts at first). But for a floss geek like me, a tour didn’t feel weird at all.

My former boot camper Molly is another example of how tools and resources can catalyze change. Molly had struggled with maintaining a healthy weight ever since she was ten years old. As an adult, her biggest habit hurdle was meal preparation. She couldn’t do it consistently even though she knew how much better she felt when she made her own food ahead of time instead of being cornered into making poor choices—vending-machine lunches or leftover meeting pizzas. Without a healthy prepared meal in her bag, she’d find herself with an anxiety-provoking dilemma at noon. “Am I going to eat? Where should I go? Will it be healthy enough?” Molly called this “decision fatigue”—the burden of making a choice when she was least equipped for it (hungry and busy)—and it not only created unnecessary mental spinning, it often led her to eat out of alignment with her healthy aspirations. As a busy professional, she was not only pressed for time, but she was also deeply ambivalent about cooking.

From a B=MAP standpoint, Molly’s motivation for meal prep was low but not nonexistent—she really did want the energy, good health, and confidence that came along with eating well. Ability was where Molly had the most room for improvement. As luck would have it, she met a resource—a good-looking one at that. Ryan, Molly’s future husband, was into Olympic weightlifting and paid close attention to nutrition. He was methodical about preparing meals for the week and didn’t seem to mind doing this as much as Molly did. She observed and adopted some of his techniques—using Tupperware and cooking massive amounts of sweet potatoes for low blood sugar moments. Soon they got into a habit of cooking and prepping every Sunday for the week ahead. While she loved spending the time with her husband, Molly was less enthused about spending five hours in the kitchen. Sunday would roll around and she’d make other plans so she could avoid the kitchen, promising herself she’d pick up a salad on the way to work every day. But she rarely would. Then she’d find herself in the middle of the workday staring down the leftover pizza in the conference room, knowing what she would choose and already disappointed in herself.