Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(43)
One early morning, after a particularly bad night, when even the puppy videos didn’t calm me, I reluctantly glanced in the mirror and thought to myself, You know, this could be the day when the wheels totally fall off. A day of not just setbacks but paralyzing failure.
As I went about my morning routine, I picked up the floss. I thought to myself, Well, even if everything else goes wrong today, I’m not a total failure. At least I flossed one tooth.
I smiled in the mirror and said one word to myself: Victory!
Then I felt it.
Something changed. It was like a warm space had opened up in my chest where there had been a dark tightness. I felt calmer and even a little energized. And this made me want to feel that way again.
But then I worried that I was losing it. My nephew had just died, my life seemed ready to fall apart, and flossing one tooth had made me feel better? That’s nuts. How did that make me feel better?
If I hadn’t been a behavior scientist and endlessly curious about human nature, I might have laughed at myself and left it alone. But I asked myself, How did flossing that tooth make me feel better? Was it the flossing itself? Or was it saying “Victory!” into the mirror? Or was it smiling?
I tried it again that evening. I flossed one tooth, smiled at myself in the mirror, and said, “Victory!” In the days that followed, many of which were still difficult, I continued to floss and proclaim victory. No matter what else was going on, I was able to create a moment in each day when I felt good—and that was remarkable.
My Recipe—Tiny Habits Method
After I . . .
I will . . .
To wire the habit into my brain, I will immediately:
brush my teeth,
floss one tooth.
Anchor Moment
Tiny Behavior
Celebration
An existing routine in your life that will remind you to do the Tiny Behavior (your new habit).
The new habit you want but you scale it back to be super tiny—and super easy.
Something you do to create a positive feeling inside of yourself (the feeling is called Shine).
At the time, I didn’t know why my little celebration worked, but I sensed an important shift. I started using my victory proclamation with other new habits, and I noticed that those seemed to lock in more quickly than the ones that I didn’t celebrate. So I tried different ways to celebrate by giving myself a thumbs-up or doing a fist pump and saying, “Awesome!”
I also found ways to celebrate quietly: I could create a feeling of success by simply smiling and saying Yay! in my head.
When I started sharing my Tiny Habits method with others in 2011, I made celebration part of the program. I didn’t explain why I wanted the Habiteers to do this, I just said, “After you do your new habit, celebrate.”
Later, while training and certifying coaches to teach the Tiny Habits method, I learned that celebration doesn’t come naturally to everyone and that it even makes some people uncomfortable (we’ll tackle that later; don’t worry).
Despite my instructing them on how to celebrate, some Habiteers blew this off, thinking that celebration was optional or just too hokey to try. Even professionals who were learning my method in depth sometimes didn’t take celebration seriously. I started emphasizing this technique more and more because I became increasingly convinced of the power of feeling good as the best way to create habits. I knew that people who embraced celebrations turned out to be the most successful at creating habits quickly. What’s more, people who celebrated were telling me how surprised they were that this one little shift made such a difference. People said that they started looking forward to doing their new habits just so they could celebrate. Some would ask me, “Is that crazy?” (No. It’s actually a very good sign.)
Steps in Behavior Design
Step 1: Clarify the Aspiration
Step 2: Explore Behavior Options
Step 3: Match with Specific Behaviors
Step 4: Start Tiny
Step 5: Find a Good Prompt
Step 6: Celebrate Successes
Why have I been so adamant about celebration? To answer that, let me rewind to the early days of Tiny Habits.
A few months into my sharing the Tiny Habits method, I had an experience I will never forget. I was reading an e-mail from a woman named Rhonda. She wrote to thank me. She explained that my celebration technique had made a major impact on her life. To her surprise, she felt optimistic that she was finally discovering her potential. Once she started practicing Tiny Habits, she realized that she had endured a “lifetime of self-trash-talk.”
This insight from Rhonda galvanized me. It made me even more determined to share Tiny Habits and the powerful technique of celebration. Thanks to Rhonda, I changed course: The project I called Tiny Habits needed to be more than research. It needed to be a global intervention.
To be effective in my quest, I set out to learn more. I wanted to find out why saying one little word like “victory” could make such a huge difference. Why did celebration lock in my own flossing habit so quickly?
To find the answer, I kept teaching celebration to thousands of Habiteers and measured the impact each week. In everyday life I also observed how some people, including world-class athletes, celebrated their success naturally. And I dug into the scientific literature. I learned that no one had studied this phenomenon, but I did find related concepts here and there. After a few years of piecing them together, I had my answer.