Episode 074: This week on Real Health Radio we are looking at goal setting.
We look at habit formation, outcome goals versus process goals, motivation, self awareness and getting clear about what’s important to you rather than just setting lofty goals.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 74 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/074.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey all. I’m glad you’re joining me for another episode of Real Health Radio – or, if this is the first episode you’ve ever listened to, then welcome. I hope you’re going to become a regular listener.
On today’s show, it is another solo show. This one is all about goal setting. I’d actually intended for this to be released just prior to the new year to give people an alternative to setting New Year’s Resolutions and following this information instead, but I was away on holiday from the 16th of December until the 11th of January, and I just didn’t get a chance to finish it off beforehand. I’d initially hoped to do it while away, but was just enjoying the break and decided to delay its release.
It’s also why this episode is being released later in this week than usual, but from next week it’ll be back to the regular schedule where podcasts are going to be released every Thursday.
What I want to do with today’s show is talk about how you can set goals and follow through on them, but it’s going to be a lot more than just that. It’ll be looking at habit formation and self-awareness and getting clear with what’s important to you rather than just setting some lofty goal. So even if you’re not really the goal setting type or don’t think of yourself as that kind of person, I still think it’s going to be really relevant to you, and I suggest that you listen on.
I’ve read a lot of books on the topic, everything form the Tony Robbins / self-help-y type stuff through to people like Alfie Kohn, who talks about education and how we can create an environment that leads to kids who are intrinsic learners.
But probably my favorite resource for this kind of stuff is James Clear. He has a website called JamesClear.com which has an absolute mountain of information and articles – everything from motivation to procrastination and goal setting and productivity and systems thinking and so on. There’s a lot of information in this show that has been influenced by James’s writing, among others, so if you do like what I cover in this episode and you want to learn more or want to have more information on the topic, then I’d definitely check out his site and make your way through his work. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.
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I think probably the best place to start with this isn’t with goal setting, but with habit formation. That’s because if you don’t understand how we create habits, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be successful at achieving any goal that you’re going to set.
Every habit that you have, whether that be a good habit or a bad habit, follows the same 3-step pattern. These 3 steps can be easily remembered as the 3 R’s. Number one is Reminder. This is the trigger that initiates the behavior. Number two is Routine, and this is the behavior itself, the action that you take. Number three is the Reward, the benefit that you gain from doing that behavior.
I want to run through how you can use these 3 steps to create a new habit, but let’s just start with looking at the 3 R’s for a habit that is already happening.
An example that James Clear uses and that’s easy to understand is answering the phone. The reminder is the phone rings. This initiates the behavior. The ringing acts as a trigger or a cue, and it tells you that you need to answer the phone. It’s the prompt that then starts the behavior.
The second R is routine, and the routine here would be you answer the phone. This is the actual behavior that you have. When the phone rings, you then answer it. Obviously this may not be the case; in some situations the routine may be that you look at the number and you then decide not to answer the phone, but let it go through to voicemail. You may have one set of behaviors if it’s a friend’s number that you recognize, and you have another set of behaviors if it’s an unknown number.
But there’s a reminder, i.e. the phone ringing, and then there’s a routine, which is typically you answering the phone. The third R, which is reward, is you get to then speak to someone. The reward is answering the phone and then getting to speak to a friend. Maybe the reward is the benefit you gain from finding out what they wanted to call you about or having the conversation with them or discovering whatever the piece of information was. That’s a reward that you then get for completing the behavior. In the example where you don’t answer the phone, then the reward is the voicemail that someone leaves you and you get to find out why they were calling.
Hopefully that’s a simple example to show the 3 R’s and how they can relate to a current habit. Let’s look at how you can apply this to creating a new habit.
The first R, again, is reminder. One of the biggest hurdles with starting a new habit is getting the process going. I’m going to cover in a little while why I think there’s some issues with relying on motivation as a driver, but for now, just understand that you’re better in the beginning when you’re setting up a new habit that you have some kind of reminder to get you going rather than trying to rely on just remembering yourself to do it or being motivated at that specific time to do a new habit.
One way of doing this reminder is to attach the new behavior that you’re wanting to create to something that you are already doing or already happens in your day to day life without fail. As a suggestion, get a piece of paper and create a list.
The list is going to be things that you already do each day without fail and then things that happen to you each day without fail. Things that you do each day would include brushing your teeth or having a shower or sitting down to breakfast or dinner or going to bed or putting your shoes on. Things that happen each day may include getting a text message or a commercial comes on the TV or the sun sets. So you now have this list that provides you with a set of potential reminders that you can then connect your new habit to.
For example, let’s say you decide that you want to be happier, and expressing gratitude is one proven way to boost happiness. Using the above list of examples, you could pick the reminder of sitting down to dinner. Every time you sit down to dinner, you’re going to do some habit that is then going to lead to better happiness. This one habit could be a cue to say something that you were grateful for during that day.
Or say you want to start flossing your teeth. You know that you already brush your teeth each day, so you decide to start flossing your teeth directly after you’ve brushed your teeth.
I got an email recently from Jamie Mendel, as I’m on her mailing list, and she’d just done an email about habit formation. She was talking about wanting to start the new habit of flossing. She mentioned that she loves taking long showers and would be in the shower for a long time, just daydreaming, so she started flossing in the shower because it was something that she was already doing, and she really just loved an excuse to either stay in the shower longer or at least justify why she was already in there. So pairing up that new behavior (the flossing of the teeth) with something that was already happening (being in the shower).
Wherever this is appropriate, I think just attaching this to something that is already happening is a really good way of reminding you, in the beginning, to start doing that new behavior.
The second R is routine. This is the actual habit that you’re going to be doing. You’re probably thinking that this part is pretty straightforward. You already know what the habit is that you want to start, end of. But I have one big suggestion with this, and it is to make it incredibly easy for you to get started.
Rather than thinking “where do I want to ultimately end up?” and making this the habit or the goal you aim towards, ask yourself, what is something that you could set that would become almost impossible to fail with?
If we keep up with the flossing example, maybe your goal is to floss just one tooth. You don’t have to floss your whole mouth; you just have to floss one tooth. Or with the earlier example about being happier, maybe the ultimate goal is you want to be filling out a gratitude journal each night and you want to be doing writing exercise, etc., but the starting place is just saying one thing you’re grateful for when you sit down at dinner.
Or maybe the goal is related to meditation, and ultimately you want to be someone who is meditating for 30 minutes or an hour each day, but instead you start by setting a goal of meditating for 2 minutes every morning after you’ve got dressed. Just 2 minutes, that is it.
The reason for this is for every one of these routines, they are totally doable. It’s not overwhelming, but instead it feels like a behavior that you could do without even thinking. But what ultimately starts to happen is when you do this behavior, you start to do more. Instead of just flossing the one tooth, you maybe do all of your top teeth, or you start doing your whole mouth. Or the 2 minutes of meditation becomes 5 minutes, and then 10 minutes and so on. But with each time, you tell yourself you just need to do the minimum, and that then gets the process started.
I know at this point we’re talking about small habits, but the same approach can be connected to bigger habits, like going to the gym or eating healthier. Say you want to start going to the gym, and currently you’re not going at all, and you feel terrible about it. You keep beating yourself up. You decide that ultimately you want to be going 4 days a week and that you’re going to be training for an hour each time you do these sessions.
To go from absolutely nothing to starting to go to the gym 4 days a week is a pretty big shift. Maybe the first week it’s not too bad because you’re really excited. There’s that motivation. But the week after and then the week after that, it gets a little harder. This is because you’ve set quite a lofty target, and you start to feel overwhelmed and it can start to feel impossible. In no time, you’re not going to the gym anymore, and it was just because it was too much and you’re now feeling like a failure.
Alternatively, you could’ve started things differently. You decide that you ultimately want to be going to the gym 3 or 4 times a week, but it’s not where you need to start. Instead, you set a goal of going for a walk for 10 minutes twice a week. This doesn’t have to be your goal; you could be doing something more, you could be doing something less. But what you want to do is set something so low that it’s almost impossible to fail because it feels so easy.
What happens is you start to actually meet that goal, and rather than feeling overwhelmed and like a failure, it feels like you’re accomplishing something. Now you’re out and you’re enjoying yourself, and you start noticing that you’re walking for 15 minutes, and then 20 minutes instead of 10, and then it’s 30 minutes. Then you start adding in another day, and in a short amount of time you find that you are someone who’s actually doing exercise and you’re doing it regularly.
The final R as part of the 3 R’s is reward. This is all about celebration. We want to continue doing things that make us feel good. Because an action needs to be repeated for it to become a habit, it’s especially important that you reward yourself each time you practice your new habit.
Now, in most situations, especially if this habit is something you’re doing repeatedly each week, the reward doesn’t have to be anything massive. It can be something similar to just congratulating yourself. At the end of a workout you could say, “Great workout today” or “Awesome work.” Or after flossing your teeth you could say, “Well done, 5 days in a row.”
This may seem simple or kind of mundane, but it’s amazing when I’m working with clients how poor people’s internal dialogue typically is. They may finish a workout and tell themselves how worthless they are, or they finish some meditation and they focus on how it wasn’t long enough or they weren’t good enough or they didn’t focus enough or whatever it may be. This isn’t very rewarding. It makes it less likely that you want to keep up the habit – or if you are doing it, you’re relying solely on willpower and you’re not really enjoying the process.
So find small ways of rewarding yourself and reinforcing a positive reason for continuing to keep up that habit or that behavior.
Those are the 3 R’s of habit formation. They may not apply to every habit, so I’m going to talk about other aspects and other ideas as I continue on. But I just thought it would be a good starting place.
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Let’s move on to goal setting. The first thing I want to mention with goal setting is the difference between outcome goals and process goals. An outcome goal is the end result that you ultimately want to achieve. This might be being able to lift a certain amount of weight, or to own a particular car or a house, to reach some certain position in your career, and so on. It’s the destination that you hope to reach at some point in the future.
Alternatively, a process goal is focused on the day to day activities that help to lead to the outcome that you desire. Say your outcome goal is to be able to bench-press 100 kilos. Your process goals may be to lift weights 3 days a week or to work with a personal trainer twice a week. Say your outcome goal is to write a novel. Your process goal is to write 4 evenings a week or to read a novel every month. So the process goals are the steps that you need to take to help lead to the outcome goal, or possibly lead to the outcome goal.
This is important for a number of reasons. Too often, when people set these pie-in-the-sky outcome goals, this is where the process ends. This is especially true of New Year’s Resolutions. People dream of all the wonderful things that they want to have happen, and they create this list, but then nothing happens when they look at how this is going to translate into reality. They don’t look at the steps or the actions that need to be taken.
There’s a great Seth Godin quote about this. He says, “Your audacious life goals are fabulous. We’re proud of you for having them. But it’s possible that these goals are designed to distract you from the thing that’s really frightening you: the shift in daily habits that would mean a reinvention of how you see yourself.”
The next reason that process goals are so important is that outcome goals can take a very long time to come to fruition. If this is what you’re constantly focusing on, it’s likely that they’re going to start to feel out of reach and that you’re going to give up. But with process goals, these are much easier to follow through on. They are little bite-sized pieces of the big goal, and they’re things that you can easily complete and have control over. If your long-term goal is to write a novel, this can be really overwhelming if this is what you think about every time you sit down to write. But if the goal instead is to write 3 days a week, this is much easier to follow through on.
You also want to make sure that you enjoy the process. This is something that people often miss. They set themselves some outcome goal that in their mind sounds amazing, but then the process that it takes to achieve this goal, like the day to day and the week to week activities, they don’t actually like doing them. If you don’t enjoy the process, chances are you are not going to reach your outcome goal. So setting process goals that you actually enjoy is really paramount. Otherwise, realistically, nothing is going to happen.
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Another reason for process goals over outcome goals is something called akrasia. As humans, we set ourselves goals and can be incredibly excited about them to come into effect, but we then do things that fly in the face of achieving this goal. We get distracted. We procrastinate. We do things that really completely sabotage our chances of reaching the goal.
This is by no means a new problem. Sure, it may be easier to be distracting ourselves now with social media and video games or a million and one other things that are available to modern humans, but this idea was described by people like Socrates and Aristotle, going back over 2,000 years ago.
The term that they use to describe it is akrasia. Akrasia is the state of acting against your better judgment. It’s when you do one thing, even though you know you should be doing something else. Loosely translated, you could say that it is procrastination or a lack of self-control. It’s what prevents you from following through on what you set out to do.
One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is what behavioral economists call “time inconsistency.” Time inconsistency is the tendency to value immediate gratification over future rewards. When you make some outcome goal for yourself, whatever that may be, you’re actually setting a plan for your future self. You’re envisioning what you want your life to be like in the future, and when you fantasize about that future, it’s easy for your brain to see the benefits in taking steps to reach that future goal.
But when it comes time to make the decision on what to do and what to do now, you’re no longer making a choice for your future self. Now you’re in the moment and your brain is thinking about your present self. But our present self really likes instant gratification. This is why there can be this mismatch between what you want in the future and then what you actually do today. Your brain values long-term benefits when they are in the future, but it values immediate gratification when it comes to the present moment.
This is why when there is some big outcome goal that is plotted in the future, it’s so much easier to feel far off and for you to go for instant gratification. But if you have process goals, you know that once you’ve done the work or you’ve done the writing or whatever it is, the bite-sized pieces, then you’ll have completed the goal. So you’re achieving the desire for instant gratification by actually reaching the goal as opposed to having to wait for months or for years for it to actually happen.
Actually, a lot of what I’m covering as part of this show is dealing with this issue of the mismatch between the future desires and the present enjoyment, because the more that there is only a focus on some future goal where you try to use this to constantly motivate you, the less likely you are to be succeeding with this stuff.
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On this idea of delayed gratification, there was a fantastic study done by Stanford University in the 1960s that looked at this. It’s known as the Marshmallow Experiment. The experiment was done with hundreds of 4- and 5-year-old children.
It would start with them bringing one child into a private room with a researcher, where they’d sit them down in a chair at a table and they had a marshmallow placed in front of them. The researcher would then offer the child a deal. The researcher said that they were going to leave the room, but they promised the child they would come back, and that when they did come back, they would give them a second marshmallow, but that this would only happen if they could hold off eating the first one. So they could either eat one marshmallow now or they could wait and eat two marshmallows in a little while.
The researcher would then leave the room and they would go for 15 minutes. There’s actually some incredible footage of the children then sitting there in front of the marshmallows that is hilarious to watch. I’ll put a link to this in the show notes and you can check it out. Some of the kids would just eat the marshmallow as soon as the researcher left the room. Others would try and just pick at these tiny little bits, but try not to eat it. Others wriggled and sat on their hands and tried to restrain themselves. The look on these little kids’ faces is absolutely priceless. There were a few who then managed to wait out the whole time for the researcher to come back in.
The interesting part of this experiment isn’t actually what happened in the room with the marshmallows; it’s what happened in the years and the decades after, because the researchers continued to check in on these children as they grew into adults and going forward. What they found was that the children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow, or at least waited a longer time, ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures.
The researchers actually followed these children for over 40 years, and basically in every area of life, those who were able to delay gratification for longer were more successful in basically whatever area they were measuring. In basic terms, the ability to delay gratification is crucial for life success.
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Obviously the question becomes, how do you become better at delaying gratification? There were a number of things that were identified from this study and also in a follow-up study that answers this.
One of the biggest factors is to do with a belief in the reality of the outcome. Do you believe that the outcome you’re holding out for in the future is really going to happen? When they looked at the kids who were able to delay gratification, they found that they had typically grown up in well-organized and structured homes where things would happen in a consistent pattern, and where when they were told something would happen, it did actually happen.
In comparison, those who struggled with delay gratification often lived in environments where they were more erratic and more chaotic, where they were less likely to be able to see the link between actions and consequences, outside of the realm of immediate impulse. For you now taking this information, making sure that you believe that your future plan is possible or your future goal is possible or is likely really is crucial.
Again, this is why process goals can be important, because you may want to be dreaming big in terms of your outcome goal, but on the inside you’re just not really that sure if it’s going to come true. Then delayed gratification is much, much more difficult. But if you’re setting process goals that are realistic and they are doable, then this isn’t so much of a problem because you feel confident in the reliability of the outcome, because you’re able to do it week after week, month after month.
Another factor to do with the success with delayed gratification with the Marshmallow Experiment is to do with focus and perception. The kids who did poorly in the experiment always directed their attention right at the marshmallow, even while trying to resist eating it. It was like they were staring the marshmallow down and were trying to use all the willpower that they could. Alternatively, the children who were successful in not eating the marshmallow were actually the ones who could legitimately distract themselves away from it. They had the ability to adjust their attention to something else.
For example, in later experiments, the researchers suggested to the children to imagine a frame around the marshmallow and pretend it was just a picture and it wasn’t really sitting there in reality. When the children did this, they were able to last up to three times longer than those who hadn’t been given this instruction.
From this we can see that another key to learning to delay gratification is largely to do with skirting around willpower or trying to use willpower as an option, because the more someone relies on willpower, the more likely they are to keep the issue front of mind, and the more likely it is that they’ll fail. But if they can avoid trying to use willpower and instead find ways to deal with the issue, like being able to focus and get on with other things or learn ways to perceive or reframe the issue, then this can make it easier to deal with and success is much more likely.
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Another idea I want to mention is to do with intention and the intention behind your goal. People often set a goal because of what they believe that goal will get them. It’s not so much the goal that they’re after, but the side effects they believe will happen because of it. The thing with this is that there are often multiple ways to get this side effect – ways that don’t always involve the goal that you originally have.
A great example of this is in a book called Un-Train Your Brain by Mike Weeks. Mike has previously been on the podcast, and I’ll link to the show that he was in in the show notes.
Mike is a life coach, and he had a 50-year-old guy who had come to him and wanted help in achieving a goal of getting a promotion. Mike asked him what he was specifically aiming for with the promotion. If he had to imagine it had happened, what would he be experiencing? The guy explained how it would feel really good to be the boss, to be in charge of the division and to create more growth and fame for the business.
Mike then asked him, what was his intention behind this? What did he want to experience when he had achieved this? The guy thought about it and he responded that he would be successful. Mike asked him, what are other contexts in his life where he already feels successful? The guy responded that he didn’t really know. He really struggled with it, but maybe it was playing squash, because he was quite good at playing squash, and that would be a time where he’d feel successful.
Mike asked him what evidence he had that becoming the boss would give him the feelings of success that he was after. The guy wasn’t actually able to answer this properly and just said that it was kind of his dream.
What proceeded as part of the conversation after this was that the guy then discovered that there were actually multiple ways in his life in which he could attain this feeling of success outside of the promotion. When he started to look at the promotion, there were lots of things he was having to give up, and there were lots of things he wasn’t going to be able to enjoy. He’d have to miss out on seeing his family, and all of the extra work. He actually discovered that there were going to be more enjoyable ways of getting this feeling of success and ways that he knew would definitely deliver it, whereas with being the boss, he didn’t know that it would definitely come true.
The guy then left this session without the enhanced ability to get a promotion that he originally thought he was coming in for, but with a realization that what he was actually after with the promotion was a feeling of being successful, and he could achieve this in multiple ways in his life.
I think it’s important when aiming towards a goal to know what the intention behind it is, because there are normally lots of ways that you can meet this intention that don’t link in to the current goal, and it might be that there are better options or better ways of achieving this.
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This leads on to an idea that I think is incredibly important, which is self-awareness. So often, people are doing things that they think they should be doing, or they’re setting goals because they feel like it’s what society is telling them is important. One of the biggest reasons that people are failing to meet their goals is from this lack of self-awareness and setting goals that really aren’t important for who they are or what they want to get out of life.
Let me give you an example. There’s a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk who I’ve been following for a number of years. He started out as a wine retailer working in his family business, and he did really well at this. He took his family business from $1-2 million a year to being $50 million a year or something along those lines. He then got out of that business and set up his own marketing company.
He has a specific love for social media; he was one of the real early adopters of Twitter and did very well on it. He more recently was someone who was banging on about how big Snapchat was going to be when everyone thought it was just something for the kids. He’s also done lots of startup investing and angel investing, and he put a lot of early money into Facebook. He was one of the early people with Uber, and there’s a whole list of other companies.
He is someone who works long hours – and I mean constantly long hours. He does 14-16 hour days most days. He doesn’t really like holidays. He’s constantly traveling and can be in three or four or five different countries in a week where he’s doing speaking engagements and meetings and everything. When he talks about this stuff in his posts or emails, he isn’t trying to show the glamorous side of all this. He’s talking about sitting in airport terminals at all times of the night and the relentlessness of it and just grinding out work.
But the thing is, he absolutely loves this. He set up his life in this way because it completely suits him, and he’s great at doing it and he’s very self-aware that this is the life that he wants to have.
When I look at his life, I know that I would absolutely detest it if that was what I was doing. I know that I need more downtime than that. I know that I couldn’t work the hours that he does even if I wanted to. I’m not particularly money-motivated. Sure, I want to have money, but material things are not a huge driver for me. For him, he wants to own the New York Jets. I moved to the country because I want to have more greenery and more nature in my life. I’m definitely more of an introvert, and I prefer time with myself or with my partner or with small numbers of people, where I can be having a proper one-on-one conversation.
So we have very different lives, but there is self-awareness that we have set our lives up in ways that are appropriate for who we are and what is important for us. This is why self-awareness is so important, because you can live your life in so many different ways, and you can also have an endless set of goals that you set for yourself. But the things that will truly bring you happiness or the things you will actually reach as a goal are the things that are in alignment with who you are and who you want to be.
Part of the reason why this is so important is because of the trade-offs you have to make in life to achieve the goals or to live life in a certain way. Too often, people imagine how amazing some goal will be, but they then don’t consider what it takes to actually achieve it. It’s like they want to have the goal if they have a magic wand, but they don’t take into account the repercussions of what it takes to reach it.
That’s why it’s easier to look at someone who is ripped or toned on the front of some magazine and wish that that was us, but outside of the genetic lottery that this person probably has won, there’s definitely a ton of sacrifice that then goes into them having that body behind the scenes that you never even see or consider. They may be at the gym every day of the week. They may be living their life eating out of Tupperware containers, having chicken and steamed greens meal after meal. They may have no social life because they can’t face the temptations or going out for a meal or they need to be in bed early so they can be up at 5 a.m. so they can hit the gym. They may have no period because it’s gone missing, or they have no libido because of the excessive training and the low body fat percentage that they’re sitting at.
When you see the picture on the front of the magazine, all you see is the body, when in effect there is this long list of sacrifices that it takes for this to happen – sacrifices that, when you discover them, you typically decide it’s really not worth it for the outcome.
Obviously here I’ve used quite an extreme example, but with any goal, there is going to be the reality of what it takes to achieve this goal. There will be changes in your life that have to happen. There will be sacrifices that need to be made. If you can structure things correctly, hopefully you can enjoy a lot of these changes and you can enjoy the process. But with every goal, there are going to be not-so-enjoyable parts that you just have to put up with to get there.
An idea that follows on from this about being realistic in what’s involved in reaching a goal is being realistic about what’s achievable when you look at your life bigger picture-wise.
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A concept to help think of this is the Four Burners Theory. Imagine your life is represented by a stove with four burners on it, and each burner symbolizes one major quadrant of your life. The first burner represents your family, the second burner is your friends, the third burner is your health, and the fourth burner is your work. The Four Burners Theory says that in order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners, and in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two of your burners.
Basically, this is looking at the fact that in life, there are going to be trade-offs. We’re constantly told that we can do and be anything in life, and while this may be true, it doesn’t mean that you can do and be everything at the same time. If you want to excel in your work and in your marriage, then your friends and your health may suffer. If you want to be healthy and succeed as a parent, then you might have to dial back your career ambitions. If you want to divide your time equally among the four burners, that’s fine, but you then have to accept that you will never reach your full potential in any given area.
There’s a couple of things I want to say with this. One is that you can outsource certain functions to free up some time in other areas of your life. Getting a cleaner, for example, could allow you to spend more time with your family or to spend more time at work. Dropping the kids off to childcare can allow you to spend more time with your friends or at work. Getting an assistant at work or taking on more employees if you’re a company could allow you to spend less time in the office and more with family or more with going to the gym. Outsourcing could be a way of giving you some more time to spend on the other burners.
Another suggestion is to accept that life naturally goes through different stages where it’s going to be more appropriate for different burners. For example, when you’re in your twenties and your thirties and you don’t have children, it can be easier to get to the gym and to chase career ambitions, so the health and the work burners are on full blast. A few years later, you might start to have a family and suddenly your health burner dips down a little bit while your family burner gets more gas. Another decade passes and you might revive or get in contact with old friends and relationships, or you pursue some business idea that you’ve been putting off.
There’s an African proverb or parable that says “a good hunter does not chase two rabbits.” Instead of trying to do everything at once, dedicate seasons of your life to one thing. Don’t completely ignore any of the burners so that, say, your heath completely deteriorates or you’re getting fired from work because your performance is so bad, but pick an area that you want to go after and make this your focus.
00:40:05
The idea of motivation is something that comes up a lot when we think of making changes. I want to spend a little bit of time chatting about it. The first thing I want to look at is the difference between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.
As a side note, there is a fantastic book called Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn that looks at this topic in great detail as it pertains to education and creating students that want to learn.
But looking at extrinsic and intrinsic, extrinsic motivation is when you are motivated to perform a behavior or engage in an activity to either earn a reward or to avoid punishment. Some examples would be studying because you want to get a good grade, or cleaning your room because you want to avoid being reprimanded or grounded by your parents.
Reward and punishments here can also be about society at large. It isn’t about necessarily winning a trophy or being grounded by your parents. For example, someone may not enjoy brushing their teeth, but the fear of bad breath and people within their circle of friends making a comment about bad breath is enough of an extrinsic motivation for them to keep up that behavior. Or someone may hate going to the gym or hate eating certain healthy foods, but they do it because of the extrinsic motivation, as these habits then give them a body that more matches up with society’s standards of beauty.
Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, involves engaging in a behavior because it is personally rewarding – essentially, performing an activity for its own sake rather than the desire for some external reward. Some examples would be participating in a sport because you find that activity enjoyable or solving a word puzzle because you find the challenge to be fun and to be exciting.
In life, there aren’t always these nice clear-cut intrinsic versus extrinsic situations. There will often be times where there’s a little of both. For example, you could play a sport and you do it because intrinsically, you really enjoy it, but you are also spurred on to train more and more because you also have a desire to win.
While I think neither of the forms are inherently bad, if you had to pick one of the forms for motivation, intrinsic form is normally better. Studies have shown that people are more likely to stick at a task, to invest more time in a task, and be more successful if they are intrinsically motivated.
But there is an added twist here, because if you take something that someone is intrinsically motivated to do and then you offer that person a reward for doing it, this actually decreases their intrinsic motivation. It’s a phenomenon known as the over-justification effect.
This is a big part of what Kohn argues in his book. Children are instinctively curious and they want to learn. They have intrinsic motivation for learning. But in the school setting, where it’s all about gold stars and grades and tests, this actually erodes away someone’s motivation.
If you are trying to create a new habit around the way that you eat or exercise or do a number of other things in your life, set things up so that you are going to be intrinsically motivated to follow through on it. This is why, if I’m working with someone and they want to get into exercise, I ask them the things that they like doing or excite them. I tell them not to think about what they believe is the best form of exercise or the healthiest form of exercise or what form of exercise they think will give them the best body, but rather, what feels like it’s going to be the most fun.
This could be something that they don’t normally think about as exercise – not just going to the gym and lifting weights or going for a run. It can be anything. It could be going to a salsa class. It could be going horse riding. It could be doing rock climbing. It could be doing acrobatics or playing squash. What are the things that they’ve enjoyed doing in the past or they’ve always wanted to do?
This obviously doesn’t work for everyone, and not everyone can come up with an answer straightaway, but I do think it’s a good starting point. The reason is the more someone can enjoy what they are doing, they are more likely going to show up and keep doing that activity. There’s no need for then delayed gratification because they’re getting instant gratification by doing something that they want to be doing in that moment.
Let’s look at motivation now in a different sense – motivation in the way that most people think about it. Motivation is some force that compels you to take action. To quote Steven Pressfield, “At some point the pain of not doing something becomes greater than doing it.” Every choice has a price, but when you are motivated, it’s easier to bear that inconvenience of action than the pain of remaining the same.
The problem with this is that motivation isn’t always so dependable. One day you can feel full of motivation for some project or some idea, but in two days’ time that motivation has vanished and you’re now left with nothing. This is especially true if goals are extrinsically motivated or where goals are for an outcome that feels like it is very far off in the future.
This is why I think that motivation is typically very overrated, kind of in the same way that I think willpower is overrated. Both are finite resources, and both are resources that aren’t always there when we want them or need them to be.
A couple of ideas for how you can take motivation out of the equation. The first is creating an environment that makes it the most likely that you’re going to follow through on a behavior, even if you don’t feel motivated. As humans, we tend to follow the path of least resistance, so why not make it as easy as possible that that thing you’re wanting to do takes place?
As an example, say you want to improve the way that you eat and you want to eat less chocolate or less biscuits, and this typically happens when you’re at work. My suggestion here would be take food in with you to work each day. At 10:30 when you are hungry, if you’ve taken a banana with some yogurt or a banana with some cheese or something like that in your bag, it is most likely that this is going to be the thing that you eat. If you haven’t taken this food in and there are biscuits in the canteen or there are chocolate bars in a vending machine, then this is the most likely thing that you’re going to eat.
The same thing when you get to lunchtime, the same thing when you get to the afternoon snack. Even if the thing that you’ve brought in isn’t the most exciting meal or the most exciting snack, chances are that if you have that and it’s nearby and it’s in your bag, this is going to be the easiest option and you’re just going to eat it.
The same thing if we look at what someone has in their house. If someone’s house is filled with healthy, unprocessed foods, chances are they’ll eat more of this stuff. If their cupboards and fridge are instead filled with ready meals and biscuits and frozen pizzas, it’s more likely that this is the food that is going to be eaten.
Look, please don’t get me wrong. This isn’t about deprivation. If someone has a terrible relationship with food and with cravings, simply changing the foods that they have around them isn’t going to magically repair that situation. But typically people follow the path of least resistance and will eat healthier food if that is what is within arm’s reach.
00:48:45
Another way to deal with the fact that motivation isn’t always going to be present is to create a schedule. Rather than hoping that you’ll regularly be motivated to exercise or to do some writing or whatever the task may be, set a schedule for when these things are going to happen and when you’re going to do them.
This idea was really hammered home to me when reading an article by Amber Rogers from Go Kaleo. She was talking about her journey into exercise – I think it was in her late twenties or maybe even in her early thirties. Up to this point in her life, she had never really exercised, but she wanted to start. She set herself a goal of swimming 3 days a week. She said that she knew that she wanted to do this, that it was a good starting place, and that she thought it was doable.
In the beginning, there were days where she didn’t actually feel like swimming. Maybe she was sore, maybe she was unwell. But with each of these 3 designated exercise slots, she would still go to the pool. On the days where she felt up to it, she would go for a swim. On the days where she didn’t, she would still turn up and she would just sit there and read in a café. Over time, more and more of the times she showed up, she would be swimming and there would be less reading. But regardless, she would always turn up at those times.
The reason that this is important is that we all have very limited time in our life, and we all have the same limited time in our life. But the more we show up to say the gym in this example, the more we are then used to spending this time in that way. We then start to arrange our life around it. But if someone is skipping gym sessions and then they start using that gym time to work more, that gym time now just becomes work time. It then becomes more difficult again to allocate that towards exercise.
Having clear times that you keep free for doing the new habits is incredibly important. With time, it will then just become very natural and it won’t feel like a challenge to be including these activities and this time in your busy life. But in the beginning, it will. So schedule things in your diary the same way as you would a meeting so that you can keep this time blocked out.
00:51:15
Connected to this idea is when setting goals, set stuff to a schedule rather than a deadline. Often when someone sets a goal, people will set a deadline for when this needs to be achieved. They may say “by summer, I want X to have happened” or “in 12 weeks, I want Y to have happened.” But the majority of the time, these deadlines are completely arbitrary. Nothing is going to happen if the goal isn’t met by the deadline, and really, the deadline is being set as a way of trying to motivate that person.
But there’s a better way of doing this. Instead of giving yourself a deadline to accomplish a particular goal by and then feeling like a failure because you didn’t achieve it, you should choose a goal that is important to you and then set a schedule to work towards it consistently.
A schedule ties in, again, to this idea of process goals that I keep banging on about, and gets you doing the behaviors that are really going to be making a difference. For example, when I started this podcast nearly 18 months ago, I set myself a schedule. The schedule was I would deliver a podcast show every week, and ideally this would be out on a Thursday each week. We are now 74 episodes into that, and I think there has been 3 weeks in this whole time where a podcast didn’t go out.
So this schedule has helped me to keep on track, even during the weeks when I was incredibly busy or I’d been unwell or I didn’t feel like doing a show. There is no deadline that I could’ve come up with that would’ve kept me as consistent as I have been by setting up this schedule.
00:53:05
Another idea with this as well is getting out of “all or nothing” thinking. Yes, you want to follow through on your goals, but something is better than nothing. Let’s say, for example, you have a goal of going to the gym 3 days a week, and that’s on a Monday, a Wednesday, and a Friday. It’s now Wednesday and you suddenly check the clock and it’s much later than you thought. You’d become engrossed in finishing off some report or getting back to some emails, and it’s now much later than you’d planned to leave. Normally you go to the gym for an hour, but now you don’t have time to do the whole session.
Often the response to this situation is “oh screw it, I just won’t go.” It’s this “all or nothing” mentality. But how about in these situations, you just do something? Can you instead go to the gym for 30 minutes instead of an hour? Or because you haven’t got there at that time and you’ve now missed out on your class, could you do something else at the gym, even if it’s for a shorter amount of time? Or could you alternatively walk home from work instead of catching public transport? Or could you get off a stop or two earlier than usual and walk? Or could you do some stretching when you get home? It might not be as much as you’d usually do, but at least it is something.
Or with a food example, the plan was to come home and cook a healthy meal for dinner, but you’ve now been a little bit more tied up with work and you’ve been there later and you’re feeling tired, so you just want to have something that’s much easier. In this situation, the default may be “I’ll just get a Chinese takeaway, or I’ll just get a pizza.” There’s nothing wrong with these foods, but is there anything you can do that is then still partly in line with your original desire to cook a healthy meal? Could you make a quick salad that you have with it? Could you steam some vegetables to have alongside it? Could you have some fruit with it?
Please don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here. There is nothing wrong with wanting to eat a meal solely for pleasure or skipping a gym session because you’re tired and you’re not up to it. I am all for people listening to their body and living and eating intuitively. But often, there are situations where if people weren’t so black and white and “all or nothing” in their thinking, then they would actually be okay with doing part of their goal.
In a situation where this is doable, then actually follow through and do what you can. Don’t do nothing just because you can’t do it perfectly.
00:55:40
An idea that I also want to mention is the concept of keystone habits. It’s a concept that I’ve previously written about, and I’m going to link to the article in the show notes.
For many people, they look at where they currently are and what they’re currently doing and then where they want to be and realize there are numerous things that they need to be changing. There’s this situation where they are going to have to be focusing on 5 or 10 or 15 things all at once, and just the thought of this is exhausting. It’s likely that having that many things all at once is going to lead to them throwing in the towel.
Instead of focusing on all of these different things at the same time, what you want to do is identify a keystone habit that actually creates a snowball effect. Let me give an example.
For lots of people, exercise can be their keystone habit. Maybe you haven’t been doing any exercise for a while, and you decide you’re going to get back into it. It might take a little bit of practice with that, and maybe you’re a little inconsistent to start with, but say within a couple of weeks, within a month, you’re getting to the gym 3 times a week.
Because you’re now exercising, you then decide you’re going to go to bed earlier. It’s not uncommon for you to get to bed at this stage at midnight or 1 a.m., but now you’re starting to get to bed at 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m. so that you can be up earlier to go to the gym in the morning, and you’ve noticed that you do much better with more sleep.
Because you’re getting to bed earlier, you’re getting better sleep, you’re now waking up feeling more refreshed, and because you’re feeling more refreshed in the morning, you have more time to make yourself breakfast. Previously it was a coffee on the way to work or maybe a bowl of cereal when you sat down at the desk, but now you’re making yourself some eggs that you’re having with some fruit.
This then leads to better energy during the day, so you’re now concentrating more at work and you’re enjoying it more. You’re now not so exhausted in the evening, so you’re doing more cooking at nighttime instead of just getting takeaways, and you feel more drawn to home-cooked food because of the exercise and other healthy habits you’re keeping up. There’s less of a pull towards processed foods.
You start drinking less alcohol, and this is not because of better willpower; you’re just enjoying having better energy and being more active on the weekends, so the desire to be out drinking heavily on a Friday night just isn’t there.
All of this stuff won’t happen overnight, but in the space of 4 months or 6 months or a year, all of these changes take place. It’s not because you focused on many different areas, but instead, just because you focused on this one keystone habit of exercise.
With keystone habits, when you’re not doing them, the opposite progression can also happen. For example, the exercise drops off and unconsciously you start going to bed later. You’re doing less of your own cooking again. You’re drinking alcohol again, or drinking it in higher quantities.
With goals, when there are lots of different things that you’re wanting to achieve, especially when a lot of these different things are all interconnected, it’s worth finding out the keystone habits that seem to pull everything together for you. I know in this example I’ve used exercise and I know that is the one for a lot of people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s going to be the one for you.
If I’m thinking about myself, sleep is probably the keystone habit that holds everything together for me. When I’m getting to bed early and when I’m getting proper sleep, life is very easy. I’m drawn towards healthy food, I love getting movement and exercise, I’m much more productive at work and can get totally immersed in it, and that’s why I prioritize and guard sleep so much, because I know the positive snowball or knock-on effect it has in so many areas of my life – and very, very quickly.
So really understanding keystone habits and what your keystone habits are is important.
01:00:00
Another idea that then overlaps on this is Pareto’s principle, or the 80/20 principle. Again, this is something I’ve done a podcast on, so I’ll link to it in the show notes. The general idea with Pareto’s principle is that inequality is found in most areas of life, and there is a handful of things that will account for a huge amount of impact, and then there’s this long, long list of other things that make a very small difference.
Let’s say you’re thinking about food or diet and I ask you to write a list of ideas that you think are important for health, and you write this long list of 30 ideas. For argument’s sake, let’s just say all of the ideas you come up with are true. Those 30 ideas that you have on a list aren’t all equal. While they may be all true, some of them are going to be much more important to you than others.
This is where actually the 80/20 part of it comes in. (The split doesn’t have to be 80/20, but I’m going to keep it as this for this example.) If you were looking at that list of 30 ideas, 20% of the ideas on that list are going to account for 80% of the benefits that you’re going to see in your health if you follow them. The remaining 80% of the ideas on that list are then going to account for the remaining 20% of the benefits that you receive to your health.
In effect, there are 6 ideas on this list of 30 that account for 80% of the results, and then there’s a remaining 24 ideas that are only going to account for the remaining 20% of the results. And even within those 6 really good ideas, there are probably going to be a couple of them that account for the majority of that 80%, and some of them that aren’t as big a deal.
The reason that this idea is important is that we all have limited time and we all live in a world where we’re constantly exposed to more and more things that we are told we must be doing to be healthy. But the reality is, there is probably a handful of things that make up 80% of the difference, while the rest of the ideas only account for the remaining result.
Like it’s important to identify the keystone habits that then create a chain reaction in your life of other habits that naturally occur, it’s also important to identify the handful of things that make the biggest difference for you for your health.
When things are going well and you have plenty of time, then by all means, focus on a wide variety of habits and do lots of different things to support your health. But when your time is stretched, knowing which of the things you should be keeping up because they account for the most amount of improvements is really crucial.
This may take a little bit of work. If you’re making big changes to get healthy and this is something you’re just starting out with, then this is going to take a little while to work out the things that really make the difference for you. But if you’ve been doing this for a while and you feel like things are going pretty well, see if you can start to identify the things that make the most impact so that these can then be the priorities in both good times and bad, and you make sure that they always continue to happen.
01:03:30
The final thing that I want to mention before wrapping this up is the idea of marginal gains. This idea comes from probably my favorite article from James Clear.
In 2010, Dave Brailsford took over as the general manager and performance director at Team Sky. This was Great Britain’s professional cycling team. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but he was hoping that he could change this. His approach when dealing with it was really simple: he believed in a concept that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as the 1% margin for improvements in everything you do. His belief was that if you could improve every area related to cycling by just 1%, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvements when taken over the long haul.
The team started to optimize the things you might expect – the nutrition of the riders, the weekly training programs, the ergonomics of the bike seats, the weight of the tires, etc. But Brailsford also didn’t stop there. He and his team searched for the 1% improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else – discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to the hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infections. They searched for the 1% improvements with everything.
Brailsford believed that if they could successfully execute this strategy, then Team Sky would be in a position to win the Tour de France within 5 years. Unfortunately, he was wrong, as they actually won it within 3 years.
In 2012, Team Sky rider Sir Bradley Wiggins (he was Bradley Wiggins at the time, now Sir Bradley Wiggins) became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. The same year, Brailsford also coached the British cycling team at the 2012 Olympic Games, and they absolutely dominated the competition. They won 70% of the gold medals available. In 2013, Team Sky repeated the feat of winning the Tour de France; this time it was Chris Froome.
Many have referred to the British cycling feats in the Olympics and also the Tour de France over the past 10 years as the most successful run in modern cycling history.
So what can we learn from this approach? It’s really easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and to underestimate the value of making better decisions on a daily basis. Almost every habit that you have, whether we’re talking about good habits or bad habits, is the result of many small decisions over time – and yet how easily do we forget this when we want to make a change?
So often, we convince ourselves that change is only meaningful if there’s some large, visible outcome associated with it. Whether it be losing weight or building a business or traveling the world or whatever the goal is, we often put pressure on ourselves to make some kind of earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.
This is also because of all of those transformation stories that people talk about, where they achieve some big thing in a very short amount of time, and we get swept up in these kind of stories. But really, if you’re looking at improving 1%, this isn’t notable or often feeling noticeable, but it can be really meaningful over the long run.
This pattern also works in the reverse, the aggregation of marginal losses. If you’re finding yourself stuck with bad habits or with poor results, it’s usually not because of something that happened overnight. It’s the sum of many small choices – say a 1% decline here and there – that eventually leads to a problem.
In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse, but as time goes on, these small improvements or small declines compound, and you’re suddenly at a very big gap between the people who make the slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don’t. This is why small choices don’t make much of a difference at the time, but they do add up over the long term.
To quote Jim Rohn, “Success is a few small principles practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment repeated every day.” Most people love to talk about success as an event. They talk about transforming their health or building a successful business or winning the Tour de France, as if these are events. But the truth is that most of these significant things in life aren’t standalone events, but rather the sum of all the moments that people have chosen to do things 1% better or 1% worse.
I know that just before this section I mentioned the 80/20 principle. It might seem that this bit of advice where we’re looking at the 1% improvements, or Dave Brailsford looking at the 1% improvements in everything he did, goes against the advice of the 80/20 principle. But for me, it’s really a complementary idea. The big part of the aggregation of marginal gains is that if you can be consistent with your actions and you keep this up over time, that is what makes the big difference. Even though on a day to day basis, it seems insignificant, over the long haul, it makes a really big difference.
You may be looking at where you are now and where you want to be in some aspect of your life and it can seem very far away. The way that you reach that place is by doing small habits consistently. In 1 year or 2 years or 5 years, you’ll be amazed at how much has been accomplished, but when you’re looking at the simple day to day habits, it’s hard to see how they’ll translate into those changes.
On the idea of looking for the 1% in every little thing, maybe this is important for someone who is an athlete or where their whole life is geared towards winning the Tour de France or something similar to that. But even within that list of all the different ‘1%s’ that they looked at, there were probably some things that made a huge difference to the team and a majority that made a tiny difference.
For you, with a busy life, with your work, with your family, and with your friends and all of that, I’d suggest mostly finding the things that make the big difference and just following them as opposed to trying to change everything.
That is the end of this podcast. My hope is that it can be a replacement for the New Year’s Resolutions – albeit a rather late one. If you have already set some goals, then see how you can use this information to help you achieve them. Maybe it can assist in making them stick, or you can discover the process steps that can then lead to the outcome goal that you’re after. Or maybe you decide that you’re going to give up on some of the goals because after you consider things like intrinsic motivation or self-awareness, you discover that they’re not really for you.
I’ll be back next week with another show, and this one will actually be released on the time and day that it’s meant to be, which will be next Thursday. But until then, stay safe and have a great week, or what’s left of it.
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This by far is my favorite podcast out of your listings as I’ve implemented quite a few guidelines and goals into my own life…THIS WAS A BIT OF A GAME CHANGER FOR ME! Thank you!