Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(57)

Another way to get dancing in public above the Action Line is to add motivators. Sometimes this is a good approach, but often you are adding stress and tension to people’s lives because the Motivation Vectors are pushing harder against each other.

Suppose no one is dancing, and the big boss, who paid a lot for the live music, gets on the stage and announces that if you don’t dance you won’t get a year-end bonus. Ugh. So you dance, but it’s tense.

Suppose your friends are on the dance floor and you are standing alone by the punch bowl. Suddenly your friends start chanting your name while signaling you to get on the dance floor. You shake your head no. Then everyone in the room chants your name. This would certainly add motivation to do the behavior, but it’s not hope that is motivating you, it’s social pressure. Despite your significant fear, the Motivation Vector upward is so strong that you are pushed above the Action Line. That means you get on the dance floor and pretend to have fun because social pressure (a powerful motivator) overwhelmed your fear (the demotivator).

This company party shows how conflicting motivators function for a one-time behavior. The same dynamics—vectors pushing against each other—apply to daily habits and long-term change.





One key to designing long-term change is to reduce or remove the demotivators. This allows the natural motivator (often it’s hope) to blossom, which in turn can sustain the new behavior over time.

Suppose your boss invites you to lead a daily team meeting each morning. Part of you wants to do it, hoping that this will advance your career, but part of you is fearful of taking this on.

Your boss knows you are a bit reluctant to do this (and he hasn’t yet read this book), so he adds an incentive: If you lead the meeting just once, I’ll take everyone to lunch.

So you lead the meeting.

The first time people do a behavior is a critical moment in terms of habit formation. If you feel like a failure running the meeting, your fear vector will get stronger, moving your overall motivation level down so it’s likely that you won’t want to lead meetings in the future.

But your story is different. You do an amazing job leading the meeting. You get a lot done, and your colleagues compliment you on your style. This is where the feeling of success plays a powerful role. If you feel successful in running the meeting, the demotivator of fear will get weaker or it might vanish entirely. Your overall motivation level will increase. Now that you are consistently above the Action Line, you say yes to your great new habit of directing more meetings.

But that’s not all.

When a demotivator goes away, you open the door to a bigger and harder behavior. The Action Line on my Behavior Model shows that you can do harder behaviors as your motivation levels rise. If you vanquish the fear of running meetings, you are more likely to say yes when your boss invites you to lead company-wide meetings, which is a harder behavior because it takes more time, energy, and thinking—but now your hope surges. As a result, you run big meetings and your career advances.





Before Success





After Success





I now understand why my Tiny Habits data showed so many breakthroughs. When people feel successful, even with small things, their overall level of motivation goes up dramatically, and with higher levels of motivation, people can do harder behaviors.

This is how tiny successes can change the game for you at work, at home, and even inside your own head.

The big takeaway: Start where you want to on your path to change. Allow yourself to feel successful. Then trust the process.

But there’s more I want to share with you so you become a Habit Ninja—a person who understands how to change. I want you to be able to envision any aspiration and achieve it reliably and confidently. Instead of guessing or being distracted by flashy dead-end paths, you will know exactly what to do.

To become a Habit Ninja, you do something familiar: You learn skills.





The Skills of Change


Many people believe that forming good habits and transforming your life is a mysterious or magical process. It’s not. As you know by now, there is a system to change. And underlying the system is a set of skills.

I’ve found that change is a skill like any other skill. This means you won’t be perfect at the start, but you will get better with practice. And once you have these skills, you can apply them to all sorts of situations.

When I started mapping out the Skills of Change, I found that they fell into five categories, and I designed the Tiny Habits method to teach skills in each category. As you applied what I shared with you in the previous chapters, you were actually practicing and gaining the Skills of Change. I didn’t point that out back then, but now is the time for me to be explicit.

Acquiring the Skills of Change is like mastering any other set of skills. In order to become a top-notch pianist, you need to read musical notation, keep tempo, phrase melodies, memorize music, and expertly finger passages. The more you practice in the right way, the more confident and capable and flexible you become.

You won’t become a proficient pianist overnight, just as you won’t become a Habit Ninja overnight. But you can get started immediately and watch your skills increase.

Think of any skill you have learned: driving a car, swimming, playing cards, speaking a second language, even walking. You weren’t perfect at the beginning—and you didn’t expect yourself to be. What was difficult or scary at the start, like merging onto a busy highway, eventually became ordinary and easy. That’s how skills work. And that’s the right way to think about behavior change.