Omar Usman – 3 Things I Learned from Switch Habit and Behavior Change Chip and Dan Heath
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In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book Switch by Chip and
Dan Heath.
Switch is a book about behavior change. It's
about how to make things a little bit
easier when that change is very hard. And
they give the example of a person riding
an elephant.
You, the the rational side,
know all the things that you need to
do, the behaviors that you need to change,
the habits that you want to establish.
But it's hard. It's like riding an elephant
because the elephant is the emotional side. That's
the thing that no matter how hard you
try to make it go a certain way,
it still makes you sleep in when you're
trying to establish a new morning routine, or
it makes you eat ice cream when you're
trying to go on to a new diet.
So the rational side and that emotional side,
they need to be in sync because oftentimes,
they're at odds with one another. So in
the book Switch, they give a 3 part
framework for how to make that change just
a little bit easier. So that's the three
things I'm going to be sharing today. The
first thing we have to do is direct
the writer. That's the rational side.
How am I thinking about this problem, and
how am I approaching the problem? So we
have to, 1, and this is the thing
that they they focus in on, is look
for bright spots.
We tend to fixate on all the reasons
that we're not able to change our behavior.
So for example, if I've been trying to
go to the gym regularly,
I keep thinking about all the different ways
that I failed. What they say in the
book is instead focus on the bright spots.
What are successful habits that you've established?
What are things that have worked in the
past?
Because not all strategies work for everyone. So
you might read something in a book and
it sounds like a great idea, but then
when you go to implement it, it might
not work out the same way. So instead,
look to your past experience.
Become a historian or a student of what
you've done in the past,
see what works, and then see what you
can replicate.
Once you identify those bright spots, those things
that have worked,
use that to now
script out your next moves. What is the
next step that you want to take in
order to get down in order to go
down this path? And then that's that other
part of directing the rider is
know exactly what the destination is. We've all
heard the idea of SMART goals, having something
that's measurable and attainable and all and all
those things. And and that's part of that
element here, but know exactly what the destination
is. You can't establish a habit of, let's
say, reading 25 pages a day if you
don't know what the actual destination
or the purpose behind that goal is. So
know where you're going,
know things that have worked for you in
the past,
and then script your moves, script the next
steps to help you get a little bit
further in that direction. That's what your rational
mind needs to do to direct the rider.
The second thing that we wanna do, the
second thing that I learned from this book
is
motivate the elephant, how to tame the emotional
side.
One trap that we fall into is
when we want to change a behavior, we
go down a rabbit hole of information. So
we buy books.
We start watching a lot of videos.
We find, like, subreddits. We we do all
of these different things. We join WhatsApp groups
all around this one behavior change that we
want to make,
and we assume that once we learn, we'll
start doing. But we've all fallen into that
trap. We want to change a behavior, so
we start learning about it as much as
we can. Let's take eating for example.
When someone wants
to eat better, quote, unquote, there's a 1,000,000
different options. You can do intermittent fasting. You
can do paleo. You can do a whole
foods diet. You can, you know, do calorie
restriction. You can do macros. There's a dozen.
There's a 100 different things that you can
do.
What ends up happening is that we start
researching all of them, and because we have
so much information,
we fall into this trap of wanting to
do what's best.
And so I have to research all these
different things
to find the most optimal
form of eating, or find the most optimal
exercise, or find the most optimal
morning workout routine.
And in that
pursuit
of optimizing and finding the most efficient or
the best possible way,
we end up not taking any action.
So it's it's like, for example, if I'm
trying to make find the most optimal form
of exercise,
and I spend 2 months
researching and buying books and taking courses,
And at the end of 2 months, I'm
just mentally exhausted from looking at all of
those things. Meanwhile,
had I simply done some basic exercises at
home every day for that 2 months,
it might not have been the most efficient
thing.
It might not have been the most optimal
workout. I may not have had the best
form,
but after 2 months, I would have noticed
some progress that I could have built on.
So we want to go for
that
feeling
rather than the information.
What are the feelings that I can cultivate?
What is the motivation that I can cultivate?
And get an attachment and get an attachment
to it. The other part of that motivating
the elephant
is something that we learn from marketing.
When you look at marketing material,
it convinces you to buy something based on
emotion.
We rarely change our behavior based on information.
And so that's why when we look at
when we look at these things,
it's never
it's never motivating you to buy a product
to, let's say, lose weight by teaching you
about cholesterol levels and and macronutrients
and nutrition and things like that, but they'll
nail into the emotion of
this is how you wanna look when you
go to the beach. Right? They they know
that the feeling
is what motivates a person more. So to
motivate that elephant,
we have to get out of that trap
of information. We have to stop trying to
learn more things, making us think it's going
to change the way that we behave,
but rather embrace that emotional side and say,
what are the feelings I have around something?
Why do I want to do it? How
will I feel when I do it? And
let that be the driver instead,
and be okay with it not being the
most optimal or efficient or optimized way of
doing something.
Along with that, to motivate the elephant,
we have to shrink the change, find the
easiest possible way to pursue down that path.
BJ Fogg calls this the tiny habits approach.
So for example,
if someone wants to establish a habit of
flossing their teeth every night, he says, well,
focus on flossing 1 tooth. If you wanna
focus on working out, do 1 push up
every day. I remember one person saying that
if you wanna establish the habit of going
to the gym,
don't go to the gym. Just make it
a habit to drive to the parking lot
of the gym, sit in your car for
5 minutes, and then drive home, and do
that a few times a week. The more
that you can shrink the chain, shrink the
action item that's actually demanded of yourself,
the easier it becomes to implement it, the
easier it becomes to progress down that path.
The last part of motivating that elephant,
what Chip and Dan Heath say is they
say,
grow your or make your identity
attached to this thing that you're pursuing.
And so a lot of times, we have
this script for ourselves, like, I'm not athletic.
I'm not a morning person. I'm a night
owl.
I'm you know, never trust a skinny chef.
We we say these types of phrases.
We attach ourselves to these types of phrase
to the type of person that we are,
and it takes on part of our identity.
We have to change the way the story
that we tell ourselves.
That be you know, change the script that
we tell ourselves of the type of person
that we are and the type of person
that we're trying to become. That's an integral
part
of working with that emotional side of it.
A lot of times, if we look at
the habits that we failed at doing,
sometimes it becomes part of our identity.
I'm the person that tried to learn a
foreign language 15 times and I failed,
and that just kinda becomes who we are
as opposed to,
I'm the person that's just experimented with 15
different ways, but I'm the type of person
that wants to learn a second language and
will learn a second language. The last part
of the framework, the third thing that I
learned is shape your path.
Tweak your environment.
How can you build your habits to make
something automatic and you're able to do it
without thinking? One great example actually is the
pandemic.
Once it came, we had to change our
behavior immediately. So let's take, for example, washing
your hands or sanitizing your hands. That became
a behavior change and a habit change that
we had to implement overnight. What I did
for myself, what our family did, let's take
the idea of sanitizing your hands. We just
put hand sanitizers
everywhere. There's hand sanitizers near the garage door,
near the front door. There's hand sanitizers
in the car, in both of our cars,
and there's hand sanitizers
next to the keys, pocket sized ones. So
that every time we leave the house,
we have hand sanitizers with us so that
when we go out, if we touch something,
we can immediately sanitize our hands.
Now if the hand sanitizers were located in
the kitchen pantry,
and we had to remember every time we
left the house to go get them, we'd
probably fail at that habit. But we change
the environment so drastically that it's impossible to
forget. It becomes habitual.
And now when it's in your pocket, you
can reach for it and sanitize your hands
whenever you need to. That behavior change was
a result of shaping the environment and tweaking
the environment.
So think in those terms. What are things
that you can do to change your environment
around?
One habit that I'm a big proponent of
is a reading habit. Reading at least 25
pages every day so you can get through
a number of different books. Well, how do
you change your environment to accommodate that?
Replace social media apps on your phone with
a Kindle app, so you've always got your
ebooks on the go. Maybe you
delete
Spotify or Pandora or, you know, the other
apps that you listen to in the car
and you replace it with an Audible app,
so you can listen to ebooks in the
car.
Where in your house do you read? Is
it at your desk? Is it on the
couch? Is it in bed? Well, guess what?
I put books in each of those places.
The bedside table, the coffee table in the
living room, the desk that I work from,
all of them have a couple of books
so that I can just constantly read whatever
it is that I feel like reading, and
wherever I am, there's less resistance to finding
a book. And so the habit
of reading regularly
becomes that much easier to implement.
So that's
three things I learned from the book switch,
direct the writer,
train your rational side, motivate the elephant,
tame that emotional side, and then shape the
path. Make it easier
for the elephant to go down the path
that you want it to go down. Hope
you enjoyed this video. If you did, please
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share any share your bright spots. Let's do
that. Share your bright spots. What are habits
that you've implemented in the past? What are
strategies that you use that work to help
you do it? Share those bright spots in
the comments. See you guys in the next
video.