Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(62)
The landscape inside our SuperFridge is beautiful. But that’s not the point. We designed it so we can see a bunch of healthy eating options quickly. We can eat as much as we want of anything in the fridge at any time. But we don’t put anything in the fridge that conflicts with our eating game plan.
Each week we invest time in shopping and preparing so our SuperFridge can do its job. When we get done refreshing SuperFridge every Sunday, I take a minute to breathe it in because it looks like a page out of Real Simple magazine. Beautiful!
The next step may be a bit harder because you don’t want to ruin the beauty. But this part is key: During the week, you need to dive in and eat all that wonderful food you’ve prepared. Don’t let anything go to waste. Empty every container if you can.
Although refreshing SuperFridge each week takes time and effort, the investment pays off quickly. If I need a quick lunch, I pull out a few things and I’m done. Dinner prep takes only minutes. When I want a snack at any moment (even in the middle of the night), I open SuperFridge and take anything I want. Still hungry? I go back to SuperFridge and find something else to eat. All good food. No deprivation. And no need to tap willpower.
SuperFridge resulted in weight loss, better sleep, and better energy. We weren’t perfect at the start of our SuperFridge quest. Not at all. But we learned how to make the fridge our best friend and ally in our quest for healthy eating.
Redesigning your environment can be fun, and the benefits show up immediately. With time, you will be applying this skill without thinking much about it. Eventually, you’ll walk into a hotel room, and if it’s not arranged to support your good habits, you will take a few minutes to adjust it—and voilà, it’s customized to support better eating, sleeping, grooming, and reaching your aspirations.
SKILL SET #5—MINDSET
The fifth and final category focuses on what I call Mindset Skills. These are about your approach and attitude to change as well as your perception and interpretation of the world around you.
As it turns out, you’ve already learned some valuable Mindset Skills.
Approaching change with an attitude of openness, flexibility, and curiosity
Being able to lower your expectations
Feeling good about your successes—no matter how small—by celebrating
Being patient and trusting the process of change
While celebration is the most important Mindset Skill, this next one ranks right up there with it.
The skill of embracing a new identity
When you can let go of old identities and embrace new ones, you will soar in your ability to go from tiny to transformative.
When people start Tiny Habits, I often hear them say, “I’m set in my ways”; “I’m not the kind of person who changes easily”; or “Nothing ever works for me.” But many of those same people changed their tune after as little as five days of the program and told me, “BJ, I can’t believe it, but I was wrong. I am the kind of person who can change” and “I learned that I’m the kind of person who can follow through.”
This phrase—I’m the kind of person who— kept coming up, so I decided to bake it into the Tiny Habits evaluation process by asking people at the end of my free five-day program to complete this phrase: ”After doing Tiny Habits, I now see myself as the kind of person who?. . .”
Once I began gathering that data, I saw how people’s self-concepts shifted as they grew more skilled at creating habits. They started the Tiny Habits program thinking they were one kind of person, and by the end of five days, they were starting to embrace a new identity. Many of these identities focused on having the potential to change, but other identity shifts were linked to the types of habits and changes people were making.
If you ask Sukumar, the push-up king from Chennai, identity was the key part of his puzzle. Before he started, he was thinking, I’m not an exercise guy. I’m not into eating healthy food. I’m the type of person who has trouble sleeping. To him, these were immutable personality traits—they were simply who he was. But when he dropped down and did his first two push-ups, he took the first step toward hacking the psychology of self.
All humans have a strongly rooted drive to act in a way that is consistent with their identity. When a group faces threats, any group member who is unpredictable creates risk for the group. That person gets shunned. There is a good evolutionary reason for this—when food, shelter, and other resources depend on group unity and collaboration, it is critical to reliably predict what a person is going to do. Your life might depend on it. As social beings, we all act largely in keeping with certain identities even if we don’t realize it.
When Sukumar started doing push-ups, he increased his physical strength and mental toughness. This made him feel successful at exercising—he started feeling less like a phony at the gym. Trying out different exercise equipment had felt uncomfortable before, and he was constantly questioning himself. Was he strong enough to use the bench-press machine? Would he be embarrassed if he could do only a couple of repetitions?
After experimenting with planks and push-ups, and seeing results, Sukumar’s identity shifted. He now understood how strength building worked and knew he was capable of doing it. He went to the gym more and felt better about it. He even signed up for biweekly sessions with his wife’s personal trainer. The group exercise classes were surprisingly fun (he had been way too intimidated to try them before), and he even made some friends in the spin class.