Exactly how to create a bias towards positive action through your environment
Hey guys,
Hope you’re all crushing it in your world at the moment.
I’ve personally had a productive week of opportunity, delivering a talk yesterday on high performance health and fitness to a global law firm in the city - if I can inspire any of them into action, I will have done my job!
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I just finished Atomic Habits by James Clear for the 2nd time.
It is up there with the most inspiring books I have ever read when it comes to self-improvement and working towards life 2.0.
Why? It is a blueprint for creating small habits that collectively compound, to manifest the incredible version of ourselves we wish to become. It is simple yet powerful, and best of all, can be applied by absolutely anyone for immediate improvement.
The feeling I come away with from the book, is that environment is everything. We are dictating who we are by the world we build around ourselves. We are the architect of our own being, casting votes for the person we are going to be with each decision.
And just as we put it all in place as we grow, piece by piece - career choice, relationship, bed time, diet, friends, exercise (or lack thereof), clothing, mode of transport - we also have the power to keep, remove, add or edit these choices as we see fit.
The best realisation I arrived at with this book is - for the most part, we are the boss of our environment.
If I don’t like the environment I’m in, where can I honestly look but internally?
For years, I had been bothered by my inability to convert my endless folder of ideas into outcomes. I would create spreadsheets, research websites, watch how-to videos.
What was holding me back? Action.
Thinking about the thing isn’t doing the thing
Saying you’ll do the thing, isn’t doing the thing
Adding the thing to a to-do list, isn’t doing the thing
Putting the thing in your diary, isn’t doing the thing
The only thing that is doing the thing - is doing the thing.
So, 2 big questions to reverse engineer and foster an environment which creates a bias towards action:
Who is the person I want to be?
What habits does that person have?
So we may ask:
What does that person eat for breakfast?
What time do they wake up?
Who do they hang out with?
What do they wear?
And so on…
In Atomic Habits, the focus is on using the anchors of being human as a start point. Taking the things that will never change about us in our lifetime, and leveraging what we already know about the human brain and our essential needs (food, water, security etc.).
As far back as humans have existed, we have always executed actions based on the following pattern:
Cue > Craving > Response > Reward
The human brain has not evolved for the world we currently live in. A world of plenty, where we are inundated with choice, surplus and instant gratification. Understanding our animalistic nature when it comes to forming habits is crucial.
Let’s take drinking coffee as an example.
Cue: You wake up > Craving: You want to feel alert > Response: You drink a cup of coffee > Reward: Satisfied craving to feel alert
Drinking coffee becomes associated with feeling alert. A habit is formed.
What are the downsides to this?
We might become dependent on a habit as it temporarily satisfies our immediate need. We might make that cup of coffee every time we feel tired, rather than explore the deeper idea for curbing tiredness.
The root cause of our tiredness is more than likely because:
We are in sleep debt (eg. Our body needed 8 hours but we gave it 7)
We are stressed (from over-working, or over-committing in our lives)
We aren’t exercising or using stress management to improve our mindset
Not because we haven’t had our grande skinny mocha pumpkin latte with sprinkles.
So how do we form new habits? How do we take the thing we want to avoid and do something different instead?
For each stage of our pattern of behaviour, you will first see the thing we are going to do to promote the new behaviour, then in brackets, you will see the thing we are going to do to eliminate the bad behaviour:
Cue: Make it obvious (Make it invisible)
Craving: Make it attractive (Make it unattractive)
Response: Make it easy (Make it difficult)
Reward: Make it satisfying (Make it unsatisfying)
Example: To reduce my feelings of tiredness, I want to device detox in the evenings and start going to bed early to read a book instead.
Cue: 9:30pm alarm set every night for TV off, phone put on charge in living room, and to read book (unplug TV, or set switch off timer and hide remote and remove any TV from bedroom so it can’t be watched in there).
Craving: Book you love is waiting for you on your pillow each night (Putting unplugged living room TV back on feels like a pain in the arse)
Response: Read a few pages of a book you love (Phone is out of sight & out of mind. You stay in bed reading because TV back on is difficult)
Reward: You won, you enjoyed your book, you slept great, and start a book list so you can tick off when complete (and if you did put the TV back on, you now associate it with the hassle of setting up)
We have to work at understanding how our brain ticks and actively create a plan to counteract it. And now it’s in my head I can’t not reference Goldmember, who once put it - ‘save me from myself’.
What will you change about your environment to encourage the habits you want to see in your life?
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