Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(29)
The Starter Step is a kind of mental jujitsu—it has a surprising impact for such a small move because the momentum it creates often propels you to the next steps with less friction. The key is not to raise the bar. Doing the Starter Step is success. Every time you do it, you are keeping that habit alive and cultivating the possibility of growth.
Sarika was surprised by how quickly her burner habit blossomed into multiple habits that led to a full-blown breakfast habit. Buoyed by her success, she enlisted her mom as a resource, and she also began skilling up. Within a few months, she’d moved beyond porridge and was whipping up morning dosas with chutney.
EASY-TO-DO ANALYSIS
Discovery Question
Breakfast Habit— What is making this behavior hard to do?
The problem: The weakest link in Sarika’s Ability Chain was mental effort. She didn’t have a plan for what to cook, and the dishes were piled up on the counter so she had nowhere to assemble a meal, and this felt too complicated for her to handle.
Breakthrough Question
Breakfast Habit— How can I make this behavior easier to do?
The solution: Sarika made it easier to do by using a Starter Step to break down an otherwise overwhelming process into discrete steps. Lighting the burner was easy to do, and this simple behavior gave her a sense of success that caused her habit to grow.
Scaling Back
Now we come to the second way to make a behavior tiny: Scaling Back.
This means taking the behavior you want and shrinking it. As a result, your Tiny Habit will be a much smaller version of your desired behavior. Consider my flossing habit: I wanted to floss all my teeth but began with just one. I scaled it back.
If your desired behavior is to walk a mile every day, you can scale back by walking to the mailbox. Nothing more. As with the Starter Step, the scaled-back version is your Tiny Habit—it’s your baseline behavior, the only thing you have to do every day to cultivate the walking habit that will eventually grow to full size.
EASY-TO-DO ANALYSIS
Discovery Question
Flossing Habit— What is making this behavior hard to do?
The problem: The weakest link in my Ability Chain was physical effort. The thick floss I used was difficult to get between my teeth, and this took effort and frustrated me as I struggled to get the floss between each close contact.
Breakthrough Question
Flossing Habit— How can I make this behavior easier to do?
The solution: I made flossing easier to do by acquiring the right tool—I found floss that glided smoothly between my teeth. No effort. No strain. But the key was this: I scaled the behavior back from all my teeth to just one tooth. Without scaling back, flossing would not have become a habit for me. I needed to start tiny.
Designing Your Tiny Habits
Take your Golden Behaviors from chapter 2 and see if you can make them tiny. Find a Starter Step or scale back—either way is fine.
Let’s look at some examples.
Habit to Make Tiny
Starter Step
Scale Back
Read every day
Open my book
Read one paragraph
Drink more water
Put water bottle in purse
Drink a sip of water
Meditate for ten minutes
Take my meditation pillow out of the closet
Meditate for three breaths
Clean the kitchen after every meal
Open the dishwasher
Clear the table after every meal
Take vitamins daily
Put vitamins in a small bowl
Take one vitamin
Eat blueberries for a snack
Pack blueberries in my work bag
Eat two or three blueberries
Pay my bills online
Visit one bill payment website
Pay one bill
Where Do I Start? Skills, Tools, or Tiny?
Because Behavior Design is a system with various pathways, there is no single right answer. However, I can guide you in making that determination for yourself. Even though you don’t have to do all three things to make something easier to do, using all three options is a great way to set yourself up for success by making sure your behavior is as simple as it can be.
To decide which jumping-off point is best for you, look at your motivation level. Acquiring skills and tools are often one-time actions best done when your motivation is high. When our motivation is high, we can do more difficult things; but when it’s on the low side, we need to compensate by making the behavior tiny. Gauging our motivation for completing each behavior helps us determine our next step on the road to making it a habit. It’s like checking the pressure in your car tires. Do you need to add more air or can you drive away without doing that?
Because I’m someone who loves systems, I’ve created a flowchart that tells you how to make any behavior easier to do. You’ll find it in the appendixes, but we’ll walk through an example here to help you conceptualize how this works in real life.