Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(88)

She told me later that she needed to get away from the people, the funeral, and the horrible absence she felt. But when she got to the porch, she realized that there was no getting away from this. And that’s when she broke down.

Linda had not only taken care of me when I was a little kid but also when I had turned the corner into adulthood. I came out of the closet when I was a grad student in the early nineties, and my sister was one of the first people I had told. She had handled it more lovingly and gracefully than I could have imagined. We were raised in a conservative Mormon family, so this was no small feat of human compassion. I revealed something that, for a devout woman, was emotionally complicated to say the least. But for Linda, I was her little brother, and she was there to take care of me. So I knew it was my turn that day on her side porch. Before I sat down to comfort her, I thought to myself, Whatever it takes, I’m going to help her.

On its face, this was a pure and deep desire—to help someone you love when they are in pain. But it was a galvanizing moment for me that would influence the ultimate direction of my professional work and life. Linda’s, too, as it turns out.

After Garrett’s death, the waves kept pounding on Linda’s shores. The years that followed her loss were filled with struggles: her husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and his rapid decline, the loss of the family business, and bankruptcy. Along the way, I tried to be there for Linda in whatever way I could be, but at one point, she found herself at a crossroads. She had worked her butt off to get her master’s degree and was doing steady consulting work all over the country, helping parents navigate the new terrain of social media. But after a few years of barely making ends meet and feeling burned out from being on the road and away from her kids, Linda wanted a new direction. Just as important, I knew she needed income to support her family.

At that point, I’d been coaching people individually in Tiny Habits—thousands of people each year. I didn’t make any money from my coaching, but it was fun to do and I learned so much about human behavior from this daily hands-on experience.

Interacting with hundreds of people each day took time, my scarcest resource. Even when I was on vacation or traveling to give a talk, I still took time to coach people from all over the world. I loved that my Habiteers were finding success with my method. They told friends about Tiny Habits, who then told their friends. And it just kept going.

While I felt great each day as I helped people, I started worrying about how all this was taking time away from my “real” work—the academic kind. But I couldn’t turn away the hundreds of people who signed up for my free program every week.

And then Linda needed help.

She was perfect for Tiny Habits. She already knew a ton about Behavior Design (she was helping me run workshops at Stanford), she was a very good teacher, and she was committed to working in health and wellness. I knew that training coaches in the Tiny Habits method was a great match for Linda’s skills and her passions. And I hoped that it could be a source of income for her. At the same time, I wanted to create a skilled group of professionals to help coach all those people who were joining my free five-day program. Would this be a good way to help Linda and also reduce the daily burden on me?

It was, but what I didn’t realize then was that it would become so much more. You’ve read about Linda’s amazing successes with Tiny Habits in this book, but working side by side with her to coach others in the Tiny Habits method, I was able to witness her life transform step by step. It was an amazing thing to watch. I saw her master the Skills of Change, I saw the confidence that this mastery gave her, and I saw how all of it radically changed her mindset. Over the course of about six months, I saw her help others change their lives all the while drastically changing her own. She was progressing and thriving, and most important, she had regained hope.

What I knew from coaching people in Tiny Habits was that it makes you happy. It’s very simple. You’re helping people change their lives, and you see the positive impact of that every day. That feels good—it gives you Shine.

Linda is an inspiring, incandescent example of what I’ve shared with you in this book—you change best by feeling good. She is living proof of a life transformed.



I had a dream in 2016 that I was on an airplane that was going down.

Was everything in the cabin shaking? Was the person next to me clutching my arm? Were people screaming? Probably. But what I remember is this: I knew that I was going to die. But strangely enough, I wasn’t gripped by fear or panic. And sad to say, I wasn’t treated to a highlights reel of my life’s greatest hits. Instead, I was filled with deep regret. The many insights given me would be lost. With my painful death coming at any second, I thought only of how I had failed in my duty to explain the truth about behavior change. I had failed to help millions of people be healthier and happier.

When I woke up and realized it was a dream, I thought, Wow. That’s strange. I was certain that I would die in a plane crash, and that was my reaction?

I got the message: I needed to share my insights broadly—and soon. I needed a way to bring all this to the world.

I had been meaning to write a book for years, but other projects consumed all my time, it seemed.

I was running the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, teaching new courses every year, training industry innovators, and working on a half-dozen other projects at any one time.

That dream was my wake-up call. Up until that point, only a small portion of my work had made it out into the world. And what was out there wasn’t as accessible as I wanted it to be. My work in Behavior Design was hard to find online. I was teaching and applying my work every day, but it was limited to my Stanford courses and people who could attend my industry boot camps. Everyone else could get a glimpse only when I gave a keynote or I tweeted. Even worse, I stashed file boxes and notebooks full of my frameworks, flowcharts, and innovations related to human behavior change in the closet in my home office—info no one had access to.