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Search Results for: bj fogg

Tiny Habits for Behavior Change with BJ Fogg

December 31, 2019 Leave a Comment

tiny habits

BJ Fogg teaches innovators about human behavior. He has a doctorate from Stanford and founded the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab – now called the Stanford Behavior Design Lab – in 1988. In this episode, he and Eric discuss his new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything. There is so much practical, applicable wisdom in this episode. If you have any changes you want to make, any habits you’d like to start in your life, this episode could be a game-changer for you. In it, you’ll learn the “how-to” when it comes to the science of behavior change. It is a skill you can learn, even if you’ve struggled to make changes in your life before. And the best news? It’s incredibly do-able – if you know how.

Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.

But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!

In This Interview, BJ Fogg and I Discuss Tiny Habits for Behavior Change and…

  • His book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything
  • That people change best by feeling good, not feeling bad
  • The Tiny Habits Method
  • The technique of Celebration
  • Learning to be a friend to yourself and treat yourself accordingly 
  • When it comes to changing your behavior, looking at yourself as a baby who is learning to walk
  • The 3 things you should do to set yourself up to succeed when changing a behavior
  • Stop judging yourself
  • Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors
  • Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward
  • Golden behaviors
  • The problem of “all or nothing thinking” 
  • The problem of expecting perfection from yourself when it comes to habits
  • That when it comes to habits, context is as important as the behavior itself. Change the context, it’s a different habit.
  • The Fogg Behavioral Model: Motivation, Ability and a Prompt
  • Troubleshooting a behavior change problem
  • The danger in assuming you know someone else’s motivation
  • Trying to motivate someone vs. taking away a de-motivator
  • Ways we can make a behavior easy to do
  • That we can plant a tiny seed in a good spot and it will grow without coaxing

BJ Fogg Links:

bjfogg.com

Twitter

BJ Fogg Behavior Model

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If you enjoyed this conversation with BJ Fogg on Tiny Habits for Behavior Change, you might also enjoy these other episodes:

Michelle Segar

James Clear (Part 1)

James Clear (Part 2)

Filed Under: Featured, Habits & Behavior Change, Podcast Episode

bj fogg- the one you feed

September 3, 2015 Leave a Comment

bj fogg- the one you feed

bj fogg- the one you feed

091: BJ Fogg

September 2, 2015 2 Comments

bj fogg- the one you feed

http://traffic.libsyn.com/oneyoufeed/BJ_Fogg_Final.mp3

Podcast: Download

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This week we talk to BJ Fogg about changing our behavior

Dr. BJ Fogg directs the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University.  A behavior scientist and innovator, he devotes half of his time to industry projects. His work empowers people to think clearly about the psychology of persuasion — and then to convert those insights into real-world outcomes.

BJ is the creator of the Fogg Behavioral Model, a new model of human behavior change, which guides research and design. Drawing on these principles, his students created Facebook Apps that motivated over 16 million user installations in 10 weeks.

He is the author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, a book that explains how computers can motivate and influence people.  BJ is also the co-editor of Mobile Persuasion, as well as Texting 4 Health.

Fortune Magazine selected BJ Fogg as one of the  “10 New Gurus You Should Know”.

Our Sponsor this Week is Spirituality and Health Magazine. Click here for your free trial issue and special offer.

spirituality and health magazine

 In This Interview BJ and I Discuss…

  • The One You Feed parable
  • The wolf you pay attention to is the one you feed
  • The two main limits in life: time and attention
  • The Fogg Behavioral Model- Motivation, Ability and Triggers
  • How behavior change is about more than motivation
  • Designing effective behavior change
  • Managing the Ability part of the behavioral model
  • Designing behavior to fit into our every day routines
  • The bigger the change the more motivation you need
  • Why taking baby steps is so important
  • How motivation comes and goes
  • How behaviors get easier to do day after day
  • Building upon small successes
  • That the ability to change behavior is not a character issue
  • Keeping habits going during difficult times
  • Creating good triggers
  • Thinking about behavior change as behavior design
  • Super Habits
  • That triggers need to change with context changes
  • The importance of celebrating small habit changes
  • How emotions create habits
  • Translating outcomes to very specific behaviors
  • The major hurdles in trying to change behavior
  • The importance of just taking the next step and not giving up

BJ Fogg Links

BJ Fogg Homepage

BJ Fogg Behavioral Model

BJ Fogg Tiny Habits course

BJ Fogg on Twitter

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Filed Under: Featured, Habits & Behavior Change, Podcast Episode

BJ Fogg The One You feed

August 31, 2015 Leave a Comment

BJ Fogg The One You feed

BJ Fogg The One You feed

Habits for Healing Anxiety with Dr. Jud Brewer

January 12, 2021 Leave a Comment

habits to heal anxiety

Dr. Jud Brewer is a thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University. 

In this episode, Eric and Dr. Jud talk about his book, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind and they explore something called the Habit Loop, using it to understand and heal difficult emotions like anxiety.

If you’d like to start out this new year restoring some balance and putting some healthy habits in place, or if you’re tired of waiting for the right circumstances to make progress towards your goals, Eric, as a behavior coach, can help you. 

To book a free, no-pressure 30-minute call with Eric to see if working with him in The One You Feed Personal Transformation Program is right for you, click here.

But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!

In This Interview, Dr. Jud Brewer and I discuss Habits for Healing Anxiety and…

  • His book, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind
  • Reward-Based Learning
  • Trigger, Behavior, Result
  • The Habit Loop
  • Addiction defined as continued use despite adverse consequences
  • Habits: Set and Forget
  • How if we don’t pay attention to how rewarding the habit is right now, we can’t change the behavior
  • How to heal anxiety as well as emotional eating using the Habit Loop
  • The role of curiosity in healing anxiety
  • Learning to be with difficult emotions and learning to allow them to pass
  • How to remember to be mindful throughout the day

Dr. Jud Brewer Links:

drjud.com

Instagram

Twitter

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If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer on Habits for Healing Anxiety, you might also enjoy these other episodes:

Dr. Jud Brewer on Addiction and the Craving Mind (August, 2018)

BJ Fogg on Tiny Habits

James Clear on Compounding Nature of Habits-Part 1

James Clear on Compounding Nature of Habits-Part 2

Filed Under: Featured, Podcast Episode

The Most Important Component of Behavior Change (And it’s Not What You Might Think)

October 24, 2020 Leave a Comment

The Most Important Component of Behavior Change (And it’s Not What You Might Think)

I wonder if you can relate:

If I didn’t have an alarm set for 9am every day, I would forget to take my vitamins at least 50% of the time.

I want to take my vitamins (it’s not a motivation issue) and it’s not a hard thing to do (it’s not an ability issue). But without this daily prompt, I would forget and this behavior just wouldn’t happen much of the time.

A mundane example, perhaps, but it’s a good one for illustrating how to go about determining why a behavior isn’t happening and subsequently setting the stage for it to happen.

Stick with me here – I’ll explain. And what I’m about to share with you will take you far when it comes to making habits stick (for yourself and others) as well as saving yourself a lot of frustration, drama, and grief when habits aren’t happening and you’re trying to figure out why and how to fix it.

Renowned behavior scientist, BJ Fogg, (a two time guest of the podcast – you can listen to his first episode here and his second one here) came up with a simple but incredibly effective and powerful formula that illustrates what it takes for any behavior to happen:

B=MAP

To explain, BJ Fogg says, “A behavior happens when the elements of MAP (motivation — your desire to do the behavior; ability — your capacity to do the behavior/how difficult it is to do; and prompt — a cue to do the behavior) come together at the same moment.”

When a desired behavior isn’t happening, we can use the Fogg Behavior Model to troubleshoot why. But not in the way you might expect.

We tend to – mistakenly – start with evaluating a person’s motivation. BJ Fogg says that instead, we should work this equation backward. We should start by determining whether or not the person had a prompt, then look at ability, and only after that do we look at motivation as a factor.

Here’s how he explains it in his book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything:

“No behavior happens without a prompt. If you don’t have a prompt, your levels of motivation and ability don’t matter. Either you’re prompted to act or you’re not. No prompt, no behavior. Simple yet powerful…If you don’t hear the phone ring, you don’t answer it.”

“To do an expert job of troubleshooting a behavior for yourself or others, start with the prompt. Is the person being prompted to do the behavior?…If that doesn’t work, then you move to the next step. See if people have the ability to do the behavior….Notice that fussing around with motivation is the last step in the troubleshooting order. This process of troubleshooting can save you some grief….In many cases, you’ll find your lack of doing a behavior is not a motivation issue at all. You can solve for the behavior by finding a good prompt or by making the behavior easier to do.”

As it turns out, motivation is the most unreliable and also the most complex. It waxes and wanes. It’s here one minute and gone the next. And it is connected to multiple factors such as what you want in the moment, rewards or detractors that are in place, and the overall context in which you and the behavior exist.

So, it makes sense – and his research supports – that we will be the most effective at getting to the root of the problem via the shortest path of least resistance: Start by asking the question “was there a prompt to remind the person to do the behavior?”. Then, look at ability and determine if it was too difficult to do. The last step is to examine a person’s level of motivation.

BJ Fogg says, “When you apply this troubleshooting method to your own behavior, you’ll find that it stops you from blaming yourself.”

And this is an important point. When we blame ourselves our inner critic is often at work. And even though it might have good intentions for us – like trying to get us to perform better – we know that when this inner critic shows up, we do NOT perform at our best.

Back to my example of taking my vitamins. On the days I don’t take them it seems harsh to assume I just didn’t want to or I was too lazy to swallow them or I defiantly said, “No way am I taking those vitamins!”.

It’s more likely that I just forgot because I didn’t have a prompt to take them. Put in an effective prompt and problem solved. It’s often that simple. And it turns out with many behaviors, that is the case.

This is also helpful when it comes to diagnosing what’s getting in the way of other people’s behavior.

Like, if your husband doesn’t take out the trash on Thursday nights so that the garbage collector will pick it up on Friday mornings, instead of jumping to the conclusion that “He didn’t do it because he doesn’t care about our family!” maybe start with putting a post-it note on the garbage can lid as a reminder that day. The same applies to your kids: If they don’t make their bed, instead of thinking, “They don’t respect what I tell them to do!”, make it part of their morning routine – after getting dressed and before coming down for breakfast.

Troubleshooting in this order can save us a lot of heartache and miscommunication.

Working the Fogg Behavior Model backward to troubleshoot for why a habit or behavior isn’t happening is something I often talk through with my private coaching clients.

We start the conversation by asking, “Did you have something to prompt you at the time you wanted the behavior to happen?”. If so, next we move on to ability and try to determine what might be making this hard to do. If it was a very easy behavior and it still didn’t happen, then we look at motivation.

There are lots of different kinds of prompts you can put in place. Here are a few examples:

  1. Time-based prompt (I’ll do ____ at 3 pm.)
  2. Location-based prompt (Every time I come to a red light, I’ll….)
  3. A preceding event as a prompt (After I take the dogs out in the morning, I’ll….)
  4. Emotional based prompt (When I feel ____, I’ll….)
  5. Other people as a prompt (When I see my friend, I’ll….)
  6. Technology as a prompt (Set a reminder on your phone.)

If you have a goal but your behavior is sabotaging your progress, it’s really helpful to have someone help you to diagnose what’s going on, customize a path forward, and support you along the way.

That is precisely what I do when I work 1-on-1 with clients in The One You Feed Personal Transformation Program.

Through weekly calls and daily email communication, I teach my clients how to apply the science of behavior change to help them achieve their specific goals based on their unique life circumstances, ensuring their long term success.

To learn more about the program, click here.

To find out if the program is a fit for you, I offer a free 30-minute Personal Transformation Coaching Session. You can book your call by clicking here.

On this call, you will tell me about the changes you’re looking to make and I will offer you my thoughts on how you might go about doing this. If we’re a match to work together, that will be clear and I never pressure people on these calls. If the program is not right for you, we part as friends and you will have my ideas to consider as you move forward towards your goals.

One thing I have learned from decades of coaching people is that, with the right approach and support, everyone can make real, meaningful change in their lives. You can grow and make progress and accomplish far more than you ever would have expected.

And this is something I love helping people do.

Here’s to creating a life worth living, 

Eric

Filed Under: Blog

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