317: How to Form Habits the Smart Way with BJ Fogg, PhD

Pete Mockaitis
BJ, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

BJ Fogg
Hey Pete, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get oriented first of all when it comes to what you’re doing when you’re not coming up with brilliant research which is being on the water with surfing and paddle boarding. What’s the scoop here?

BJ Fogg
Well, I’m just really drawn to nature, just being in the water or on the water or by the water is a really calming and energizing thing for me.

Yes, I swim a lot. I don’t do straight up surfing. I do surfing on standup paddle boards, which is fun and terrific. Yesterday, in the river I was swimming around with a mask looking at rocks. I just think being in the water, by the water is, it’s really important for my health.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm. Cool Great. When it comes to your health and that rejuvenation, you’re pouring that into some great stuff at Stanford and your research lab. Could you orient listeners a little bit to what is your area of research?

BJ Fogg
Yeah, I’m a behavior scientist. Right now in my lab, called the Behavior Design Lab, we’re studying new models of human behavior and new methods of how to help people change their behavior for the better.

If you rewind 20 years, I was just wrapping up a series of experiments about how technology, how computers can change our attitudes and behaviors. That was 20 years ago. I called it persuasive technology.

There’s a lot of attention in that area now, at least in the world, but my work has moved on. It was about ten years ago we shifted away from that and looking more just behavior in general and especially habits and how habits work.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Well, so you’ve sort of built out a whole Fogg behavioral model. Could you walk us through some of the tenants of that?

BJ Fogg
Yeah. In the work that I call behavior design, it’s a set of models and a set of methods. Models are ways of thinking about behavior.

I think the most important model and I decided to put my name on it, that should signal that I think it’s important, I called the Fogg Behavior Model. It’s essentially this, its behavior happens when three things come together at the same time.

There’s motivation to do the behavior, that’s one. There’s the ability to do the behavior, how easy or hard it is. Then there has to be a prompt or a cue. I used to call it a trigger, but now I’m calling it a prompt.
It’s motivation, ability, prompt. When those things come together at the same moment in the right way, the behavior happens.

Pete Mockaitis
From your TED talks and others I had mapped in my head motivation, ability, trigger. Well, just because I’m a dork, why did you choose to go from a trigger to a prompt?

BJ Fogg
I came up with the word trigger a long time ago, like probably 12 years ago. I thought it was – I talk about hot triggers and cold triggers. I thought it was kind of – it’s a fun word.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

BJ Fogg
But I always had to explain that by trigger I mean the prompt or the cue. I don’t mean what’s motivating you. There was always this little bit of education I had to do around the word trigger.

For a few years, I thought man, I’m going to change it to prompt, I’m going to change it to prompt. Finally I took the leap last year. That means a whole bunch of talks that I’ve given, a whole bunch of other people that have referenced my work. There’s kind of like a version 1.0 of the Fogg Behavior Model and this is version 2.0.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good to know. The dorky jokester in me was like was it too triggering to say trigger … had to be trigger warnings.

BJ Fogg
Triggering the wrong thing, triggering the wrong thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting.

BJ Fogg
As you know, as you look at my work, I’m all about how do you make it easy to understand human behavior. How do you make it easy for people to change their behavior? If there’s something getting in the way, it even can be a word, like the word trigger, man, you’ve got to fix it.

That’s what I ultimately I just owned up to that and said, “No, we’re going to take the word prompt.” Now it’s going to be clear and people aren’t going to have to be trained on what that word means.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it is a really clear framework. It really has kind of really changed the way I look at all sorts of behavioral change things. It seems so simple and true that it strikes me as but of course, this is the way.

BJ Fogg
Thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
But there’s some alternatives, right? There’s some different models out there. Could you maybe debunk some myths perhaps in terms of, “Hey, we often hear that behavior change works like this, but that’s actually kind of complete or even misleading.”

BJ Fogg
Yeah. About ten years ago kind of in a moment of frustration, the frustration – we were publishing these papers from my lab and people were emailing me and said just give me a checklist. I was like, “No, our papers are eight pages. They’re short.”

But after I got enough of those I sat down and said “Okay, I’m going to make a top ten list, the top ten mistakes in behavior change.” I cranked it out. I ran it by my lab members who made some revisions. We shipped it. We shipped it on I think SlideShare. It’s a set of slides.

It turns out, Pete, sadly enough that is the most widely accessed and used creation from my lab ever. This thing that I did in a moment of frustration, the top ten mistakes, turns out to be the thing that well over a million people have seen and they reference it. They will replicate it and so on.

One of the top mistakes, I won’t go through all ten. You can just find it online if you’re interested. Type in ‘top ten mistakes behavior change.’ One of the top mistakes is to just think of the aspiration like, “Oh, I want to lose weight,” or “I want to have more energy,” “I want to sleep better,” and then make yourself feel guilty about not reaching the aspiration. There’s two mistakes bundled.

That’s a fairly common thing, where people just have this vague thing in their mind they want to achieve and they think they can get there somehow magically or just by making themselves feel bad. That’s wrong or that’s not optimal anyway. It’s two ways.

Number one, you can’t design directly for an aspiration like have more energy or get more sleep. You’ve got to break that down into specific behaviors. You need to focus on behaviors that will take you to the aspiration.

Then the other thing is usually, the most reliable way to get a behavior to happen isn’t about trying to motivate yourself and certainly not through guilt, but it’s by making the behavior easier to do. Really what you want to do is figure out what behavior is going to take you to that aspiration. Then how do you make it easy to do so you don’t have to rely on motivation very much.

Pete Mockaitis
You mentioned that motivation is kind of pretty inconsistent or fickle day-to-day.

BJ Fogg
Yeah, it’s pretty slippery. Another model out there has to do with are you ready to change. For decades people have tried to – well, that has been perpetuated.

Behavior design doesn’t look at that question at all. It starts with the premise that everybody is ready to change in some way. You just have to figure out what way they want to change right now. You don’t have to wait around for somebody to be ready to change. Instead you have to figure out what’s their aspiration and what specific behavior are they willing to do right now to take them to that aspiration.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well I’m also curious to get your take then when it comes to the aspiration and thinking about it and wanting it and guilt and that stuff not doing the trick. I guess when it comes to I guess goal setting type standards or approaches, does that kind of mean that you’re sort of with or-

BJ Fogg
I am going to offend people here.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

BJ Fogg
These make people think I’m crazy. I think you can change your life dramatically without setting goals and without tracking your performance toward the goals.

That is not – that’s often packaged up with “You must set a goal and you must track or you won’t do it.” That’s not necessarily true. We change all the time without putting down, even for the worst, better or worse, change is change, whether it’s good change or whether you think it’s bad change.

The word goal is an imprecise word, so I don’t use it in behavior design. A goal can be an aspiration, a vague aspiration like, “Oh, I want to get more sleep.” A goal could also – or it could be an outcome, like “We want to increase sales in this company by 20%.” A goal can mean either thing. An aspiration and an outcome are very different.

If you say the word goal or if somebody says the word goal, listen or ask questions to verify are you talking about an aspiration or an outcome.

What I found is sometimes when you ask people to set goals, it actually discourages them or it scares them because they’ve done it before and they know if they say, “Okay, I’m going to lose 15 pounds in one month,” they know they are setting themselves up to be – to fail in a measurable way.

If I were coaching – and I don’t coach people in weight loss – but if I were coaching people in weight loss, I would say, “No, why don’t you just figure out what behavior are you going to do every day involving nutrition and just do it every day and stay tuned and watch how you progress.”

You don’t have to have an outcome goal. Instead you’re focusing on what you do every day. If you miss one day, so what? Just do it the next day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, excellent. Then what are your favorite tools in getting those behaviors to occur with that sort of daily or regular frequency is the tiny habit which I just love. Can you unpack what are tiny habits and how do they work?

BJ Fogg
Wow, I created this method called the Tiny Habits Method. It was a bit of an accident, where I was just goofing around with my own behavior and it started with me looking at the graphical version of my behavior model. It has two coordinates. It’s two dimensional figure that you can find online if you look at behavior model.

What that shows is if a behavior is easy, really, really easy, you don’t need a lot of motivation to do it, your motivation to be high or middle or low. When I saw that on my own model I was like, “Hm, that’s really interesting.”

If I instead of trying to floss all my teeth, what if I just floss one? If I instead of putting on all my sunscreen, just put on one drop? Will I be able to consistently perform that very simple behavior? Floss one tooth, put on one drop of sunscreen. It turned out that the answer was yes. You can be very consistent.

Then I started – there were ten people I recruited. I called them Team Yoda. I coached them in the method. It went really well. Then at one point I sat down and wrote up a five-day program that I thought I would share with a handful of friends. Well, fast-forward today, Tiny Habits method, which really emphasizes make it really, really simple and find where it fits naturally in your life and revise if it doesn’t work.

I’ve coached over 40,000 people now in that method, coached them personally through email. It’s grown in ways I wouldn’t have imagined. In fact, my forthcoming book is going to be called Tiny Habits. The broader scope is behavior design, but within behavior design, a special focus on the Tiny Habits method.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a few examples of tiny habits and sort of the three components that kind of make them come together?

BJ Fogg
Yeah. What you do first and foremost, you take whatever behavior, let’s stick with flossing, and you make it really, really small. Because the fact is flossing all your teeth does take some effort. If you’re not very practiced, it might be painful and you might see some bleeding. All of those things are going to demotivate you in the future. You just scale it back, floss one tooth.

Then you find where does that tiny behavior fit naturally in my day, specifically, what does it come after. Flossing is an easy one. It comes naturally after you brush. Then, we call this a recipe in Tiny Habits, you create this phrase, “After I brush, I will floss one tooth.” You’re specifying when you’re going to do it, after what existing routine. Then what are you going to do? You’re going to floss one tooth.

That’s all you have to do. Now of course you can floss more. You can floss all your teeth. But the requirement is just one tooth. If you do one tooth and stop, you have succeeded. You tell yourself “I did a good job. Good for me,” and you move on. The two pieces there are make it tiny, find where it fits in your natural routine.

The third piece, and this is going to sound crazy to people, but this is really important is what we call celebration. As you’re doing the new habit or right after, you do something to make yourself feel a positive emotion. You might say, “Good for you,” or you might give yourself a thumbs up or a high five or a smile in the mirror.

What you’re doing with that is you’re firing off a positive emotion so your brain rewires and looks forward to doing that new behavior again.

In other words, I know it sounds crazy but it’s very effective, if you can fire off a positive emotion while you’re doing the new habit or immediately after, then you are cementing, you’re rooting that habit into your life. That’s what causes the habit to form.

It’s not number of repetitions. It’s not utility. It’s not other things that people have talked about for years. The bottom line in three words is ‘emotions create habits.’ In the Tiny Habits method you don’t leave the emotions to chance. It’s part of the method. It’s part of the technique of creating new habits quickly and easily.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so great that emotions create habits. It seems like some of the habits that I’ve fallen into, it’s almost like I just happen to get a great emotion from the thing.

I remember it was last Thanksgiving, I guess I just sort of woke up earlier for no good reason. There was a treadmill. I was at my mom’s place. There was a treadmill. I was like, “I’m just going to do some walking here.” It would be hard to walk outside because it’s still sort of dark and it’s cold. “I’m just going to walk on this treadmill.” Sure enough, “And I’m going to drink some water.”

I felt pretty great. I was like, “Okay, let’s do that again.” It was like, “Hey, that feels pretty great.” Then I just kept doing it until before I knew it that was the thing that I really wanted to do always.

BJ Fogg
Good for you.

Pete Mockaitis
When we bought our home and I got my little home office set up, it’s like, “Well, where’s the treadmill going to go?” Just because Chicago winter it’s not so easy sometimes to put on all the stuff and go out in the crunchy, cold snowy environment. That’s more than enough to make me go, “Eh, no, I just think maybe I won’t do that.”

BJ Fogg
Right, well good for you. What I’m hearing in your story, and this is a … that you have that you may not have recognized. You allowed yourself to feel good. You allowed yourself to feel that positive emotion.

That – you watch high-performing athletes and they hit a good tennis serve or they make a three-point shot, what are they doing? They’re celebrating after. They’re raising their arms. They’re dancing around or whatever. I believe high-performing people are naturally good at celebrating behaviors that they want to become more frequent or they want to become automatic.

You want that three-point shot to become automatic. You don’t want to be thinking about it. As you watch sports, moving forward, if you thought I was crazy talking about celebrations, which will be most of you, next time you watch athletic performance, see what the top performers do when they do a behavior that they want to become more automatic or they want to repeat in the future.

Now a lot of people, and Pete, you may not be in this category, but a lot of people are very, very good at telling themselves they did a bad job, but they’re terrible at telling themselves they did a good job.

That’s one of the challenges when people learn the Tiny Habits method. Certainly one of our challenges in teaching it is giving people permission to tell yourself you did a good job and helping them find the technique to fire off that positive emotion. It’s different. Not everybody can go, “Good job BJ,” or give themselves a high five or do a fist pump or say, “That’s awesome.” You have to find what works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. I want to dig into a few examples here on all three of these ingredients, the celebration and then the prompt and the action. For celebration, while we’re having some fun with it, I’ll tell you one of my favorite little celebrations.

BJ Fogg
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess it’s linked to my childhood playing some video games like Mortal Combat.

BJ Fogg
Nice. Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that you’re bringing this to mind, it’s like I should probably do this more consistently. It’s almost sort of like happenstance. But I will say, because in the video game Mortal Combat if you defeated your opponent without suffering any damage, the announcer would say, “Flawless victory.”

BJ Fogg
Flawless victory. Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Then your character would like bow. I will from time to time, usually when no one else is around, celebrate with ‘flawless victory” and then bow and it really does feel quite good because one I guess it’s linked to dominating my friends in video games and kind of feeling skilled or whatever in that moment.

BJ Fogg
Oh Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s just a little bit silly. It makes me giggle a little.

BJ Fogg
Good for you. Now you can use that as a deliberate technique anytime you do a behavior that you want to become more frequent. Let’s say you leave sweaters on the cabinet in your bedroom. Well, when you take that sweater and put it away, you can say…

Pete Mockaitis
Flawless victory.

BJ Fogg
And kind of chuckle and feel good and notice the next time you go to put it on the counter, you’ll brain will go, “Wait a minute, let’s put this away and then I can hear…”

Pete Mockaitis
Flawless victory.

BJ Fogg
Exactly. When I was – man, surfing, learning to surf. I had some challenges learning to surf, broke some ribs, separated – every year something would happen. Finally I said no more lay down surfing. I’m doing stand-up surfing, stand-up paddleboard surfing. I finally nailed it this year.

What I found myself doing naturally is as soon as I caught a wave and just the feeling of catching a wave is amazing to begin with, I would say, “You got it,” which is kind of crazy because other people might hear me say that and whatnot. But what I saw myself doing was I was affirming that you got it. This is what you do next time. Then I caught on and got pretty confident in catching waves.

There’s lots of things I can’t do surfing, but I did get to the point where I could go out and reliably surf. That is like any other habit you want to bring into your life. You’re not going to be perfect at the start. You’re going to fall in, just like you’ve fallen on surfing. You just keep going. You learn little by little and eventually you can nail it.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. I’d love it if you could just get a little bit of, I guess, no, a lot of multiplicity of examples in terms of you said, you had a few things for celebration: got it, awesome, flawless victory, thumbs up, high five. Could you rattle off a few more quick celebrations people can do?

BJ Fogg
Sometimes it’s, “Whohoo.” One of mine, I have a range of them. I use different ones at different times. One will be a sound effect like, do, do, do, doo, like the castle. I don’t use this one, but some of the people I’ve – we’ve trained and sort of had coaches in this, but some of them go think “Ahhh,” like the crowd cheering for them. One of mine, just my go-to one is like, “Way to go BJ.” I just say, “Way to go BJ” to myself.

Then I will – you shared something from your childhood, so I’ll share mine. If I really need a powerful celebration, let’s say, it’s not quite a tiny habit or let’s say that I need to form the habit really fast, then I pull out the big powerful celebration.

For me what that is is I’m thinking of my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Bondy Eddy in Fresno, California. She says, “You did a good job.” For whatever reason, that’s really powerful. I imagine her saying, “You did a good job.” That fires off the emotion in me.

Pete Mockaitis
What I love about these is that they’re so varied. In a way I kind of delight in the weirdness or the eccentricity of it because it’s personal and it’s vulnerable.

But I guess, maybe this is a – here’s a book in here somewhere, but it seems like to achieve kind of great results in things, it seems like you can either put a lot of time, energy, effort into something, you can spend a lot of money on that something or you can just do something very different and slash weird in terms of your paths to victory.

BJ Fogg
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I would much prefer the weird path than the expensive path.

BJ Fogg
Well, I tend to be a real goofball, so doing things like celebrating was natural for me. Then when I talked about it, I found it wasn’t natural for everybody.

But I know this Tiny Habits method will sound strange to some people, but step back and look at the traditional ways that you’ve tried to change your behavior and evaluate. Did those work? Probably not very well. This method is about making it really easy. It’s easy to start. It’s easy to do consistently. That really matters.

When you fail – I don’t really use that word. When you don’t floss one tooth, when you don’t do the two pushups, it’s not a very big issue. It’s like no big deal. It’s like a baby taking a stumble.

Also, one of things I learned later about the method was because you’re changing your life gradually, it doesn’t prompt people around you to sabotage you. I did not know that happened until I started doing a little more work with Weight Watchers.

The reality there, unfortunately, and it happens more broadly than that, is sometimes when somebody tries to change in a big and dramatic way and they announce it, people – and I don’t know if it’s malicious or well-intended – they’ll say, “Well, you’re going through a phase,” or “Here’s the last time you tried this,” and so on. Sometimes the sabotage is active, which is really unfortunate.

If you are just doing two pushups every time after you pee or if you’re just flossing one tooth and eventually flossing all your teeth and if you’re taking care of your skin and you just kind of ninja redesign your life in ways that eventually people will notice, but nobody will step in right away and sabotage you.

I hope it hasn’t happened to many people listening to this, but it is a reality. There is a social factor of non-support that can happen when you try to transform your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true and it’s unfortunate. But picking up on the strange element for a second though.

When you said the crowd goes wild, “Rar,” in a way that seems so natural because I think as a child this is something I did all the time with regard to – I didn’t even play a lot of sports as a kid. But it’s sort of natural to sort of imagine that scenario and the crowd going wild. I think that if you rewind and reflect upon childhood, these sorts of celebrations were just normal par for the course.

BJ Fogg
I think you’re exactly right. You’re exactly right. I haven’t studied it scientifically, but it does seem that as kids we are natural celebrators. At some point it got pushed out of us. In some countries when I share this, they think I’m insane. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a crazy California woo-woo thing.”

But if you look at babies and I have gone online to watch babies start learning to walk. As they do something like walk further, sometimes they will clap their hands or they’ll shake their arms like, “Look, what I-“ I think they are reinforcing the walking behavior. I think it’s hardwired into them.

If the mom or dad is there also cheering them on, they’re accelerating creating the habit of walking, doing the movements that lead to successful walking. If you look at what athletes do, you look at how babies learn to walk, just go to YouTube and type in ‘baby learning to walk,’ you will see what we’re calling celebration. It’s that emotional wiring in in your behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. We have a five-month old at home. I’ve been seeing this too. When he successfully rolls over, particularly from the front – I’m thinking my front, my sides messed up. He’s lying on his stomach and he goes to his back, that’s the tougher one it seems.

BJ Fogg
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
He’ll look right at us and smile, so it’s like, “Yeah!” Something significant has occurred here. We celebrate him.

BJ Fogg
If people can embrace that, if people can say, “Wow,” that’s how Tiny Habits is a way to change your life through feeling successful. That matters. And by being playful. And by not getting all tense.

The old traditional way is, “Oh, you’ve got to get all wound up and if you don’t do it then you fail. Here’s a black mark on the calendar.” It’s about getting you to change through making you feel guilty. I’m kind of exaggerating that a little bit.

But the point – one of the takeaway points is you change better when you’re playful, when you’re flexible, when you recognize your successes. The things that don’t go as you intended, don’t worry about it, just move on.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. We covered, again, numerous sets of options for celebration. I’d also like to hear when it comes to the prompt. We’ve heard after you brush your teeth or after you pee. What are some other great prompts that are just superb hooks or places to put a tiny habit?

BJ Fogg
Anything you do reliably. Just watch yourself. What are the routines you do every day? You could even make a list of those. Then when you find something like, “Oh, I turn on the shower every day that means I can insert a behavior right after that routine. What might it be?”

In my own life, and I will answer questions about what the prompts are, in my own life what I find fits right there is after I turn on the shower, I think about one aspect of my body for which I’m grateful. It can be even something quite abstract like, my skin stretches or that I healed this little cut or something like that.

Just watch what you do every day. Typical ones are you put your feet on the floor and there’s a tiny habit for that, you pee, you brush your teeth, you start the coffee maker, you start the dishwasher, you buckle up in the car or you sit down on the train, etcetera. Anything you do reliably can be the prompt, the thing that reminds you to do the new habit that you want.

Now in the Tiny Habits method, we call that an anchor. Your existing outline I decided to call an anchor because I thought well, here’s this stable thing in your life that you’re attaching the new behavior to.

Getting out of bed in the morning is a stable thing. Pretty much everybody does that. Pretty much everybody pees in the morning. Pretty much everybody – not everybody gets in a car, but start the coffee maker. Pretty much everybody brushes their teeth. That’s a great anchor, the thing that serves to prompt flossing.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Then when it comes to the actual action, anything you can dream of that you’d like done and it’s tiny, but I’d love to get your take coaching 40,000 people, what are some of the tiny actions that just have profound ripple effects?

BJ Fogg
The superpowers. Yeah, superpowers. Yay.

One, and I did a whole TED talk just on this one, is as soon as your feet hit the floor in the morning, as soon as you stand up or touch the floor, say, “It’s going to be a great day.” Those words, “It’s going to be a great day,” seven words. Even if you don’t believe it, say it. What you’ll find is it changes the trajectory of your day.

That’s one of those things that a lot of people do it. I devoted a whole TED talk to it because I felt it was so important. People get back in touch with me all the time saying, “Oh my gosh, you changed my life.” In fact in one case, a woman said you saved my life with – I call it the Maui habit. She said you saved my life with the Maui habit. Wow.

Another one, totally different category that I would suggest is work in two pushups or two squats into your day. A good place to put those is after you pee. Most people – I did the research – I didn’t do the research. I looked up studies on this and people pee about seven times a day. Let’s say five of those times are during daylight hours.

That’s means you’ve got to do – my tiny habit recipe is after I pee I will do two pushups. I’ve been doing that for years now. I’ve done a lot of pushups and I’ve gotten a lot stronger. Some people – I work mostly from home. I don’t do it at Stanford. I don’t do it at public buildings.

You can do more than two. Today I started out with 15. Yesterday I might have done 25 first thing in the morning. But today I got down to do two pushups and the phone rang. I finished the second one. I picked up the phone and it was like I did it.

In the Tiny Habits mindset, the tiny behavior is always okay. If there’s some reason that I only floss one tooth, if there’s some reason I only did two pushups, yay, good for me. I got it done. I didn’t sweat it.

Pushups or squats, that is a really helpful thing. One is a kind of mindset shift. The other one is there’s something about pushups that people tell me it’s a gateway exercise to doing other things. That would be a couple that I put really high on the list. And of course flossing. That goes without saying.

Floss, your dentist will love you.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s some more. Let’s keep it going. I’m wondering maybe about hydration. That could be easy and powerful.

BJ Fogg
Yeah, what I’ve got right here is a glass of water. At a certain point in my morning after I put down my breakfast plate, I fill a glass with water and I walk in and put it here.

I don’t have my little bowl of vitamins here because I’ve already taken them, so I’ve returned it. There’s a time when I – it’s not take the vitamins, it’s put the vitamins in a little dish because I find that actually taking the vitamins is too hard.

The tiny behavior there is what we call a starter step. Just get the vitamins, put them in a dish, and then I put it here on my desk. Then at some point during the day, I take – I don’t know. I just take them during the day when I’m drinking the water so I get that done.

Certainly there’s – this is quite a tiny behavior, but I go into – I have – I created a gym in my garage. Every morning I go out there and do a specific thing depending on what I’m – first thing in the morning even though my real workout happens in the afternoon.

Right now I’m getting on to a vibration plate made by BulletProof that vibrates at 30,000 second or 30 – I don’t know what it does. It just vibrates you like crazy. I decided I wanted to do that for a period of time to see how it goes.

In the morning I go do that. If I go for five seconds and I’ve had enough, I get off. But it never ends at five seconds really, though I could and be okay with it. It usually expands and expands. Now I’m doing all sort of things on the vibration plate from pushups to squats to – I was even doing yoga yesterday on it, like keeping one part of my body on the plate for any kind of yoga move and that was interesting.

Maybe that’s not the best example, but maybe the takeaway there is play around with your behavior, be flexible, explore, have fun with it. You don’t have to be perfect. If some day you don’t want that habit, like some days yeah, I don’t want to do the vibration plate anymore, that’s fine. Let it go.

Do something else with that – basically it’s real estate – with that real estate in your day. You can do something else with it.

Pete Mockaitis
I like the notion of real estate there because it kind of reminds me of I am sort of organizing or cleaning a space. There are times in which you find that something just fits perfectly, like, “Oh, these Tupperware storage containers are absolutely perfect when stacked and rotated in this way, put on that shelf. Aha, it’s where they fit. It’s where they belong.” It just works forever.

It’s kind of for me, even though I’m not super tidy, it’s kind of exhilarating. When you say, “Ah, that is where that that fits perfectly and where it belongs and so it shall be.” To liken your own day and behavioral landscape similarly totally makes sense.

BJ Fogg
Yeah, that’s right on, right on. Let me go a little further with that. People often ask how long does it take to create a habit. I don’t know why people ask that because there’s no simple answer.

If you pick a tiny behavior you want and if you find where it fits in your day naturally, that habit will just click. It will just come together and it will feel like magic, like, “Oh my gosh, I’m doing these pushups just without thinking,” or “I’m tidying my desk,” or “I’m flossing,” what have you.

If it doesn’t, if you create a recipe, if you go, “I’m going to put pushups after breakfast. After breakfast, I’ll do pushups.” I can pretty much tell you that’s not going to work well for a few reasons. But let’s say you do that and it doesn’t work. Revise. Don’t get down on yourself. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t put a Post It note up to remind you. Just go, “Oh, I put it in the wrong spot of my day. Let me find another spot.”

Just like you would if you put a chair, you bought a new chair and you bring it into your living room and you put it somewhere and it’s like that didn’t really work there. You move it somewhere else and you go on with life. You don’t get down on yourself you put the chair in the wrong spot. You revise and you revise and you revise until you find the right spot.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. I want to get a quick tidbit and this could probably be a whole other interview, but when it comes to – you talk a lot about behavioral change internally for yourself, one person. If you want to encourage behavioral change in others or at work or on teams, what are some of the best practices?

BJ Fogg
Let me split this into two buckets. One bucket we won’t go to unless you tell me to. If you’re trying to get people to change in ways they don’t want to change, yeah, there’s approaches to that, but let’s not go there unless you really want me to.

Let’s take the other one, where people are open to change when they want to change. What you need to do in that case is match them with a behavior or a new habit that will help them reach their aspiration.

Let’s say somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, I just really want to be more productive.” Okay, that’s an aspiration. You have the opportunity at that point to give them a very specific behavior that would help them be more productive. Now there are dozens if not hundreds of options in the specific behavior.

That’s where the art and the genius of behavior change comes in. I call it behavior matching. You need to match that person with a behavior number one that will take them to their aspiration. There’s three characteristics.

Number one, it needs to lead them toward their aspiration, say of being more productive because if it doesn’t have impact, then it’s a bad match. Number two, it needs to be a behavior that they want to do, at least part of them wants to do. Don’t match them with something they don’t want to do. Number three, it needs to be a behavior they can do.

Notice those last two. One is they need to have motivation and they need to have ability. Notice the requirements of the two of the three characteristics for behavior matching is make sure they have some motivation for it and ability. Then, of course, it needs to have impact. It needs to lead to their aspiration.

If you can match people effectively, you don’t have to worry about motivating them because they already want to do it. Then all you have to worry about is what’s going to prompt the behavior. What’s going to remind them to do the behavior? In the Tiny Habits method you find an existing routine, but there are other ways to prompt to remind people.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. BJ, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

BJ Fogg
Well, I’m surprised I’m saying this, but I will. One, I looked over some research that had about 3,000 entries of how people – habits people wanted to stop. It listed their habits and how they felt about it and so on. I skimmed through it and when I got to the end of that I was like, “Oh my gosh, people are so hard on themselves. They’re so worried about the smallest little habits that are no big deal.”

I guess, and this is becoming a bigger part of my work, which is I guess why I’m bringing it up now, people just need to have more compassion for themselves and more – man, just don’t expect yourself to be perfect.

I’ll explain that a little bit more. Especially in today’s world, in today’s climate of fighting and discord and harshness, there’s got to be a group of us who are more compassionate and understanding and accepting of those around us and we need to do that for ourselves as well.

Just I guess in some ways lighten up, in some ways lower your standards or be more patient with the process of change. Just have – here’s the metaphor I’m writing into my book. I’ll share this. Here’s this little baby that’s just learning to walk. She’s taking these small steps forward and once in a while she tumbles and she gets up. When the baby tumbles, you don’t get mad at her, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

BJ Fogg
She just gets back up and progresses. If you, yourself, is that little baby that’s trying to do this hard thing, like eat differently or sleep better or exercise consistently, and you’re just taking these little baby steps, you’re learning how to make it work, you’re going to have tumbles, don’t get down on yourself, just realize that’s part of the process and just get up and keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

BJ Fogg
Well, the book I’m reading right now. I have many, many favorite books, but the book I just picked up that I’m reading is called The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature be Your Guide. It tells you – it’s terribly impractical for everyday life, but, again, it’s connecting to nature theme.

It tells you how do you find your way and navigate your way in the world if you don’t have any instruments and how to use the wind and the sun and the stars and all of that. It’s just fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool?

BJ Fogg
Wow, many, many favorite tools. One of them, I’ll pick a behavior change tool. One of them is a little timer that I have that’s very, very easy to set.

If there’s something that I’m procrastinating like looking over a legal document or filing my finances or things I don’t like, I take the time and I set it for three minutes or seven minutes. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to file these papers for three minutes. As soon as the timer goes off, I can stop.”

Now, what happens is almost always, once you get going you keep going, but see you trick yourself with this tool into getting started.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Now, this timer, is it a – how do I get it?

BJ Fogg
Well, I will send you a link to it. It’s a little kitchen timer. It’s a very, very small one.

One of my students just sent me a different timer. I happen to have it right here that’s a cube. I’m playing around with this. As you turn the cube it has – this one has 1, 5, 10 and 15 on it – as you turn it on its side to 1, it starts and it flashes. Then when it’s done it will go off and you set it upright and it ends.

I’m goofing around with this new – because he sent it to me. He’s like, “This is even easier than your timer.” He knows that I’m obsessed with simplicity, so I’m trying this one.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. Tell me, is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate and get folks retweeting and repeating it back to you?

BJ Fogg
Well, one of the surprises was after I read that research on how hard people are on themselves, I just said, “Man, maybe we all just need to lower our standards a little bit.” People really resonated with that.

There is just so many people that are feeling defeated and just beaten down and so on. Social media is not helping. Just kind of remember what I said about – three minutes ago about you don’t have to be perfect. Just have compassion for yourself. Just recognize your successes and don’t let your failures get to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

BJ Fogg
BJFogg.com is kind of the launch point. You can go to TinyHabits.com as well. But if you go to BJFogg.com, eventually it points you out to other places. Yeah, there’s stuff there about how behavior works, behavior design, Tiny Habits, some pointers to my earlier projects that had to do with experiments around computers influencing people’s behavior and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

BJ Fogg
Yeah. Here it is. Right down an aspiration you have. You may think of it as a goal, whatever you want to call it. Write it down. Then spend five minutes and come up with specific behaviors that would lead you to the aspiration.

Let’s say you want to be a better public speaker, “I want to be a-“ write that down. Then think well, what behavior could I do that would lead me to become a better public speaker. It might be watch TED talks, read a book on public speaking, sign up to give presentations at work, hire a speaking coach, and so on.

Come up with ten or so behaviors and then choose one or two and execute on those. What you’ve done in that exercise is you’ve gone pretty quickly through the behavior design flow, what’s the aspiration, what are the behavior options. Don’t just guess. Come up with a bunch and then match yourself with one or two of those and then move forward on those.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, BJ thank you so much for taking this time and sharing the goods. It’s been inspiring for me and everyone I’ve shared it with individually. It’s great to be able to do this on a bigger scale here with the whole listenership. It’s been a treat. Thank you and best of luck.

BJ Fogg
Pete, thanks so much. Thanks so much.