Why You Feel Stuck and How to Actually Change | Dr. Katy Milkman

19:54And the answer was yes.

19:56Lewis Howes:Really? Which is, you know, on the one hand, you're like, is that magic? Like, what's going on? On the other hand, you can start to see how it actually would play out and how this would be applicable in other settings. So they believed their job could give them a workout. out and all of a sudden maybe they're choosing to take the stairs from floor to floor to get those extra calories or like lean in a little bit more when they're you know using the vacuum right i live in a uh a townhouse and in philadelphia and someone pointed out to me like it's so great that you live in a townhouse all that passive exercise when you run up and down the stairs and now i am the one volunteering to like you know go grab the ketchup that we forgot if we're gonna have dinner on a roof deck that's exciting i can get extra exercise so there's like different choices that you make once you start to have a different set of beliefs about what you're achieving.

20:43So anyway, I think of this as related to identity because now you're starting to have the identity as I am someone doing a career that's physically active. And now you lean into that and then you experience the benefits. So I think the work on mindset is the best work I have seen that's really rigorous and that relates to identity.

21:01Lewis Howes:So if belief supports you getting those results you want or making the transformation of the change you want, how would you suggest that we learn to believe in ourselves more from a scientific point of view? Like what's the data suggest on, okay, if you say these affirmations, if you look in the mirror and do this exercise, if you just smile at people and you create more reflection of joy, like what is the thing that you've seen in data that helps increase belief in oneself. Yeah. I think the most powerful thing is who you surround yourself with. Really? So I think the social context you create, the people around you have so much to do with whether or not you believe in yourself.

21:45And by the way, I also want to add a really quick footnote because the academic in me can't stand not to, which is to say you can have excessive confidence and that can be harmful. So this is a little bit of a dangerous seesaw we're on here, right? You want to be confident enough and believe in yourself enough that you're going to lean into the opportunities and, you know, work towards the goals that because you believe you could achieve them. But if you're like, I've got this, I'm perfect. You're not going to practice. You're not going to work hard. So there is anyway, it's a it's a little bit of a delicate balance.

22:16But back to how do you get to that right level of belief? Everything I know from research points to the structure of the people you surround yourselves with, whether it's the people you work with, the people you train with if you're an athlete, the people you socialize with. They give you a lot of those beliefs in yourself. And you can choose them, but they will, with the messages they send you about what's acceptable behavior, what's normal, what they're achieving and how you measure up, it shapes so much about our confidence.

22:53Lewis Howes:Really?

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24:21Lewis Howes:Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. There seems to be, I think this is true. And I also love the examples of some of the great athletes who've accomplished so much that were doubted over and over growing up and kind of have this chip on their shoulder, like no one believed in them. And they said, I'm going to go prove them wrong type of mentality, which I think can get you extremely far in terms of success and results, but never feeling this fulfillment inside.

25:08Lewis Howes:You'd never choose that. No. Right? So I think what you're pointing to is like it's not a necessary condition. Right. It's not the best environment. It's not the only. Yeah, yeah. There are people who can thrive without it. But if you get to choose and if you want to create an environment where you're going to believe in yourself. So you think surrounding yourself with the right people, the right environment of people, the right community. What should those people be like? What should their attitude, their energy, their communication style be like with you? If people were reflecting on their five to ten people in their inner circle, what should they reflect on?

25:43Lewis Howes:They should have these qualities. They should say these things. Or here's some red flags. If your best friend tells you you shouldn't do this or your best friend says, eh, I don't think you look good doing it, whatever it is, what are those flags and what are those, I guess, positive signs? Yeah. Okay. Here let me pivot a little bit to another. We're doing a lot of academic stuff. I like it. I love it. I'm actually going to tell you a story about a person in academia. who is the most important person in my career, and that's my dissertation advisor. His name is Max Bazerman. He's a Harvard Business School professor, great human being, and a great academic.

26:19What he's truly exceptional at is mentoring. His PhD students have gone on to be tenured professors. Now everyone knows what tenure is at every elite institution in the world.

26:31Lewis Howes:So he's good at instilling belief in other people. Unbelievably good. Confidence, belief. Unbelievably good. And he does all the other things that you need to do to help someone succeed, right? Like, you know good coaches, right? You know, the training, like the actual teaching of skills, all those things are part of it. But I think he creates an environment for people to thrive. And it actually took me a while after I had graduated as one of his advisees. And I was trying to advise my own students and figure out what was the secret sauce that made him so wildly more successful as a coach and mentor than anyone else in our field.

27:04had really, I mean, stratospherically more successful. And what I realized is he had all the obvious stuff, all those obvious ingredients, like, you know, responsive and new as stuff and gives you feedback. But there was an unshaking belief. Like he treated you like family. He was there for you. He believed that you could do it. He always was giving that positive reinforcement. Another thing that he did that I think is so interesting and related to research is he sort of created, I'll call it like mentoring circles within the students he was coaching so that we were not always just being coached or mentored and advised by him, right, but he would put us in the position to advise more junior students.

27:49So there's this wonderful research that I write about in the book by Lauren Eskris Winkler, who's a professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern. And she had this amazing insight when she was doing research for her dissertation, she noticed that she was interviewing all these people who were struggling to achieve their goals. And as she asked them what they thought might help them achieve more, because that's what she was interested in, how do we increase achievement? They all had these really deep insights, you know, struggling salespeople and C students. When she got them to introspect, they actually knew a lot.

28:23They maybe just hadn't gotten there and no one had ask them. They also really liked being asked, like, what's your advice? How would you coach someone who was in your shoes? And she realized most of the time when someone is struggling or when we're coaching someone, our instinct, even if it's unsolicited, is to just whip out some advice. Like, here are the seven things that I think will help you get further. And it can be really demotivating because it conveys, like, I think you're kind of, you know, you haven't gotten your stuff together.

28:49Lewis Howes:You don't have the answers. I have the answers. I'm going to give you the answers. And that's our instinct. And she thought, what if we flip the script? What if instead of putting our arm around someone and giving them advice, we said, you know, what would you do? What would you do? And do you, and actually, how would you coach someone else? And not even just how would you actually have them coach someone else? Like put you in the role of a mentor and coach to someone else who has similar goals so that you feel like you're on a pedestal. Wow. wow, someone trusts me to give this kind of advice.

29:20I must, you know, be kind of cut out for this. Maybe I'm better at this than I thought. And then you're going to start introspecting in a way you might not if it was just your problem. Because you've got to help someone else and you don't want to let them down. And then when you do that, you actually figure out, well, I've got some good ideas. Like maybe I do know something. And then once you've told someone else to do it, you're going to feel like a hypocrite if you don't do it yourself. So this is another sort of social trick. Max would put us in these sort of advice giving circles where the senior students are working with the junior and he rarely gave advice actually.

29:50Lewis Howes:He more facilitated the experience for you to learn and create the answer within yourself I guess. Exactly. By helping others. By helping others. And he would you know he's nudging along the way and like good job or like maybe a little redirection. But and if you go to him and you're like I need to know how to do X he tells you. But there wasn't a lot of steer like backseat driving. Sure. If that makes sense. And I think that also helped build confidence. It made us believe in ourselves in those roles. And I now actually have an advice club of people who are former Mac students, maybe no accident.

30:27We sort of try to keep this going even beyond that point in our lives where he was coaching us. and each of us, we're at similar career stages, all professors, similar goals. And we reach out to each other for solicited advice whenever we're facing a challenge, a career challenge, and aren't sure what to do. And it's just been totally amazing. So it's this peer group of people who support each other, care about each other. There's friendship. That's all built in. We see others achieving and it helps us see, oh, if they can do it, I can do it. But then also we get to give advice and we grow from that as well.

31:03Lewis Howes:What would you say are the top three or five things that a coach can do to instill belief in someone else that you witnessed from him or that you've also seen with your peer group? I think a lot of positive feedback is super important, that that's like the predominant sense is that this person thinks I'm doing great, even if they're also telling me ways I can improve because you don't want to only, obviously, it's really important to also get, well, like a little more like this. You need that nudging, but it needs to be with a positive. Sometimes people call it a feedback sandwich, right? You like start with the positive.

31:42Anyway. Yeah. So I do think that positivity and like conveying they believe in you, I think creating social structure for you, which is one of the things, there was sort of a whole ecosystem of other students and supporters and who were all striving towards similar goals. and instead of feeling like we were in competition with one another, it was very clear that we were all part of a team. Almost every email starts with high team, right? These are academics all vying for jobs and to sort of achieve, and you could see it being very cutthroat and competitive. We weren't on a team, right? We weren't playing for a team, but we were a team, and that was how we saw ourselves.

32:18And then the structuring, you know, everybody's structured to help others who are below them. And it's sort of part of your role is working with them. So those are a few of the key things. I'm not sure I've hit your number.

32:30Lewis Howes:Positive feedback, social structure, supporting the team. Yeah, putting people in the role of advice givers or supporters and mentors. I think you, yeah, you said he believed in you. He treated you like family, mentoring circles. Yeah, so maybe we have hit the number you asked for. That's great. I love that. I think those were the keys. I love that. But how does someone build confidence within themselves if they feel like they're not confident? Maybe they don't have this mentor, this social structure to instill that. They don't have the people around them. Are there ways we can build inner confidence without other people believing in us?

33:10Yeah, I think, well, so first of all, I do think you can go out and find these people, even if you don't have them. And that we should proactively be creating those structures, right? So say you want to make up a goal. Say you want to run a marathon. A lot of people decide at some point in the book.

33:27Lewis Howes:Did you run a marathon? No. Two days ago, I started training for my first marathon, which is in three months, which is a small window of training time, but it's very sore today. I surrounded myself with a coach, with a team of support people who have done it before, who are encouraging. I'm not just saying, I'm going to do this on my own. I've never done it before. Exactly, not downloading an app and saying it'll just be the app. Because I know it's going to be challenging. I know it's something I've never done. It's something that has scared me my entire life. I know it's not supposed to be this easy like walk in the park.

33:58Lewis Howes:It's a marathon. And so I've set up the structure and the accountability and the schedule to follow through on the action steps needed in order to set myself up for the best possible position for, you know, staying healthy and finishing it and all these different things that I want to do with my goals. Perfect. Yeah. You already know all of this. I'm a former athlete. So I'm glad to say. In the athletic zone, that's funny. I do, I mean, obviously I know you're a former athlete, but I do think we underappreciate, at least when we're young, how much those skills translate. Oh, man, it's amazing.

34:34So many of the lessons about how do you structure practice, what are the, you know, in my book, I was a tennis player, so I talk a lot about like insights that actually came from that sport and then eventually influenced my research and understanding of, okay, if you want to build a habit, the best way to do it is not like standing in the same place, doing it exactly the same way every single time. That's never how you would practice in sports. And that would never work out when you're out on the field or out on the court, right? You've got to be in variable conditions and preparing for anything.

35:04Worst case scenarios.

35:05Lewis Howes:Yeah. Right. And yet often I think scientists and, you know, and anyone who's trying to create structures and success make mistakes that if you looked at it like an athlete and you said, well, how would an athlete tackle a parallel problem? We would know that's not going to work. It's too rigid. It's too much expectation of things being perfect. Perfect, yeah. Right. You talk about habits and behavior. What is the difference between a habit and a behavior and which one should we be focusing on more in order to get to where we want to be? Changing our behaviors or changing our habits? A habit is a subset of behavior.

35:46It's a pretty narrow subset, actually, if you look at the true scientific definition. So Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California is I think the world's expert on habit. And she would define it pretty rigidly as something you basically do automatically without almost consciously realizing you're doing it. Like you make the coffee in the morning with the coffee maker, you hit the buttons, you don't even remember.

36:06Lewis Howes:You're just like showering. You shampoo your hair, right? And you're like, did I do the shampoo? I was thinking about something else. You go up to work and you don't know how you got there. You're like, what? Because you're on autopilot, right? So that's like, those are the really rote activities. Like you hand sanitize if you're working in a hospital and you didn't even notice you did. Did I do that already? I study behavior, which is like a super category. It's even above routines or habits. And it's just all behavior change requires different behaviors to happen. Some of them are going to be on autopilot.

36:36Some of them are going to be routine. And some of them are one-time decisions that have big implications for your life. So I actually think having all of those categories in mind when we think about change is really important as opposed to narrowly focusing on one or the other.

36:49Lewis Howes:So what is the definition of a behavior? Oh, that's an interesting question. Like what is a behavior? A behavior is an action you take. Like really everything is behavior. If it's inside your head, it's not a behavior. Then it's like a judgment. But any actual action you take is a behavior. Any action you take. So what are the most common behaviors that we have that, I guess, hold us back? And then what are the behaviors that ultra performers... Okay, I thought you were going to go with most common. I was like breathing. No, the most common behaviors that hold us back. Yeah. And then the most common behaviors of the ultra high performers, successful in business and sports, what are those behaviors that they tend to lean into versus the ones where people are stuck?

37:39Yeah. Yep. Okay.

37:42Lewis Howes:Trying to ask you questions you've never been asked here. They're great. It's my goal. They're great. They're really great questions. Okay. Let me start with some of the most common behaviors. That keep us stuck. That keep us stuck. Yes. Yeah. I think common behaviors where we get stuck are, and this is like, you know, what are the most common New Year's resolutions? They're to change those behaviors that we get stuck on. Some of the most common things we get stuck on are things related to our health, right? We aren't making good decisions about what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, whether we're physically active.

38:15Those are really common points where we get stuck. Our finances, right? Making good financial decisions on a daily basis about how we spend our money, how we save, who we give our money to. Those are places people often get stuck. We get stuck in bad social loops. We sort of started by talking about relationships. So I think that's another place we get stuck. whether it's we're not, we feel like we're too shy, we're not meeting enough people, we're meeting the wrong people, we're in the wrong relationships. That's another area where we get stuck. I think education and career are sort of, I'd put them because they're like one follows the other.

38:52And that's another category. Like if you're a student, you're trying to achieve, but we often get stuck on not really studying rigorously and putting the time in and the focus in. And then that converts to work where we're not being as productive as we could be. We're I think those are some of the common categories that get us stuck.

39:11Lewis Howes:And what are the behaviors of the ultra performers or the elite who are accomplishing all their goals and pursuing their dreams? What are those behaviors that they do really well? So I have never gone and interviewed the ultra performers and said, like, list for me all your behaviors. So instead of answering your question perfectly, what I'm going to do is tell you some of the behaviors that research shows lead to great outcomes. And then certainly I have seen lots of top performers where I go, oh, they're totally doing that. It's great. So I think one of the most important things is like leaning on structure as opposed to expecting to just sort of follow the Nike, just do it mantra.

39:57And by the way, when you talked about how you're training for your marathon, I noticed you immediately went to all the structures.

40:02Lewis Howes:schedule structure accountability coaching investing like money into it all so there's more investment in it so it's like you've got to show up yes that is like for me it's so it's so ingrained in me that if you want to accomplish your goals you got to schedule these things you got to do on a daily basis and make it like break it down what's the daily goal what's the daily thing when are you going to do it what's going to cue you to do it who's going to watch you do it everything everything what's at stake for you what's it you know at stake for other people but what's the higher purpose that if you don't do this, who are you going to be hurting?

40:34And who is literally holding you accountable, right? Absolutely. You've got your coach involved. So those are the kinds of things that -

40:38Lewis Howes:So structure is one of the leading academic, the research that shows which will help you get more results. Yes. And there's so many pieces of that. And like each one of them we could unpack and talk about studies from, you know, okay, a big one is too often people say, I just have this big goal, you know, this big, I think if I set a big audacious goal. And by the way, that's good. It's good to set stretch goals, but then you've got to break it down, like into the, you know, what are you going to do this week? What are you going to do today? What are those component parts? And people get a lot further research by Albin Jura, the late Albin Jura of Stanford, great thinker, sort of did some of the pioneering work on this.

41:17We just did a field experiment where we tested with thousands of people who wanted to be volunteering 200 hours a year. And they had committed to that goal. And we found that just sending them reminders not to volunteer 200 hours a year, but to volunteer four hours a week led to vastly better performance. Just that really simple change, even in the way you communicate about this. When you invite someone to start saving$5 a day instead of$150 a month, you get vastly higher take-up. Interesting. But it's identical. So just little framing shifts where you think about let's break this down into the bite-sized component.

41:55Now it's harder to procrastinate on it. You can see how it's doable. It doesn't feel overwhelming.

41:59Lewis Howes:So you're saying if my goal is to save$105 or invest$105 a month or whatever this is, are you saying it's not the best approach to say I'm going to invest$105 a month, but I'm going to do$5 a day? Yeah. So I can't remember what this is. Yeah, it's$150 because it's like 30 days roughly in a month. $150. As opposed to saying I'm going to save or invest$150 a month, trick your brain into saying, I'm going to invest$5 a day. Right. You're saying by doing that, what should happen? Many more people raise their hand and say, I can do this. As opposed to$150 is too big for some people. It sounds big. You start thinking like, oh no, where am I going to have to cut?

42:41Like, I'm not going to get to go out to dinner three times that I thought I was going to get to go out. Am I going to make my rent? So you're like focusing on that big category,$150. And this was an experiment that was done led by Hal Hirschfeld at UCLA with a savings app, Acorns. And they just invited people. Either some people get randomly assigned, do you want to save$5 a day or$150 a month? It's literally the identical outcome. They will take$150 out of your account.

43:08Lewis Howes:Monthly. Monthly. Yeah. But they framed it differently and you get vastly higher takeout. Something like five times more people are interested. It just feels doable. Yes. I mean, it's like anyone can find$5 on their couch or like car, like the change. It's like, I can do this every day. But$150 may be like a big stretch. Right. But it is the same thing. And so that broken down goal is really important. So it's like if you're working out, as opposed to saying, I'm going to run, I don't know, 50 miles a week. It's like, that may seem like a lot, but I can run, what is that broken down to? Three miles, four miles a day.

43:41Lewis Howes:Four miles a day, five miles a day. It's more doable than thinking about the big number, right? Yeah. That's interesting. So how could you apply that in another area of life, do you think, in terms of fitness, in terms of finances? And what about relationships? I don't know. I think you can break down most big goals into its component parts. It might not be as simple as literally redoing the math, but it might be, I want to have a better relationship and I want us to spend more quality time together. Let's try to spend a lot more quality time together this year. Well, first you can get more concrete than a lot of.

44:17And so say you had a monthly goal, it might be like, okay, I want to make sure that we go on, you know, five just us dates a month to have that alone time. You might say that means, you know, every Friday plus one Saturday, we're going to do it. And that means, you know, once a week plus one time, one week that has two times. And we're going to, let's go map out when they are. It all becomes more bite-sized and achievable. And this is, again, you said you're like mapping out your schedules. schedules these are the the component parts that actually add up to achieving your yeah and i'm

44:48Lewis Howes:going to think of like okay what am i going to do this week what am i going to schedule this week not like i've got all this stuff to do for the next three months like what can i do for the next few days and what's coming tomorrow and then okay i see the full week and how am i going to manage my time and at the end of the week wow i can look at what i created and i can be proud of it and build for the next week yeah so that's really important yeah and time's going to keep passing And in three months, you're going to look back and say, oh, look at all those steps I took to get to me where I'm at.

45:15Absolutely.

45:15Lewis Howes:Winning the LA Marathon. I'm just kidding. Completing is the goal. Completing in five hours is my goal. Okay, so that's leading on structure. Structure. Let me add another super important strategy that I think a lot of high performers use that research supports. And this one, I think, is vastly underappreciated, too. And it sort of relates to what I was poking at earlier, like the just do it Nike, like, no, that's not really right. I think this is really a misconception that's related to that. And the idea comes from research by Ayelet Fischbach of the University of Chicago and Caitlin Woolley of Cornell.

45:55And what they showed is that if you ask people when they have a big goal, what approach are they going to take to try to get to it? Most people say, like, I'm going to look for the most efficient route. It's all about efficiency. What's the most effective path to that end goal? That's how I go for it. And like a small fraction of people say something different. They say, I try to find a way that I'll enjoy getting to that end destination.

46:17Lewis Howes:Have fun. Have fun. So you could think about someone who wants to, we've been on a marathon, say you're training for a marathon. You know, somebody who's like, I'm going to just go to the gym and get on the treadmill and grind it out. It's going to be hard every day. Yeah. And another person is like, I'm going to go on a run with a running group. We're going to go through on the most beautiful trails that I know. We're going to do it together. Maybe I'm even going to download some great reading material, listening material before I go so that I have something fun in my ears. Those are really different paths, right?

46:50Like this one might be more efficient because you don't have to coordinate with other people. You'll do it every day. You're going to know exactly your mileage. It's going to be really controlled. But it turns out if you don't enjoy it, you don't persist.

47:00Lewis Howes:Ah. And so they've done experiments where they show that if you just actually encourage people to choose the most fun way to pursue an exercise goal or study. They did this with with students in math class, you know, giving them fun activities that were sort of going on in the background. You can use markers and play music and have snacks versus just grind it out. People achieve more because they persist longer when they find ways to make it fun to do. That's crazy. What's good for them. But we misunderstand this. We don't think we need that. We sort of think like, oh, that's kid stuff. Like I'm just going to push through.

47:37And we're wrong. We won't ultimately. And that's because of impulsivity. Because we overvalue the present experience relative to the long-term gains. It's just how we're wired. We don't appreciate that about ourselves. So we make these mistakes.

47:51Lewis Howes:We'll probably quit more frequently when it gets harder and harder if there's no like daily joy or fun. If you're just like, I got six months, 12 months, two years until maybe this goal happens. This is exhausting. It's draining. It's pulling me away from having fun in my friendships or these activities. So it sounds like if you can make the challenging steps the fun activity in your day-to-day life, then you'll stick with it longer is what I'm hearing you say. Absolutely. And I think it's so underappreciated. Yeah, that's so true. What about, what else around structure? You said there's a bunch of subcategories within structure.

48:25and the importance of having structure for high performers. Yes. Okay. So another really key thing is having if-then plans. I love that. So this is based on research by Peter Golwitzer of NYU, who studied the way different people were making plans around goals they wanted to achieve. And he found that some people sort of said, you know, I will eventually do it, or I'll do it once a week. And other people laid out real detail in their plans. And they had sort of if-then statements like, if it is a Thursday at 4 p.m., then I will go train for my marathon in this location. As opposed to sometime this week, I'll get around to it.

49:06The more structure, the more clear it was, what's the cue that's going to trigger the behavior, the more follow through he was seeing. And then he started running a series of experiments where he would actually have people basically fill in the blanks. Like fill in the if X happens, then I will do Y sentence instead of just saying I plan to do Y and looked at what are the outcomes and saw this really matters. It turns out we've done research showing that if people are prompted to just write down the date and time when they intend to get a flu shot, they're more likely to get a vaccine. If people are asked, when will you vote?

49:38Where will you vote? How will you get there on a call? Try and encourage them to go to vote in an election. They're significantly more likely to show up. So these very simple tricks are being used widely in health care now and voter turnout because it's so powerful to create those if-then plans instead of just sort of the flimsy ones to get to an end goal.

50:01Lewis Howes:Gotcha. Okay. I like the if-then plans. If-then plans are super important. Yeah. We haven't talked about tracking or accountability, although we've alluded to them. Let's do it. So those are other really important pieces of structure. Tell me more. So tracking does seem to be really useful in terms of achieving goals because if you're not, if you don't have visibility into whether you're, you know, getting anywhere, it's hard to reward yourself. And rewarding yourself is part of sort of the loop that makes you keep feeling satisfied and doing something. For the actual behavioral change to be implemented, right?

50:33Exactly. So it's a really simple thing, but this tracking does seem to matter. One of my favorite studies of this shows it actually in water conservation where people were taking showers that were long. And they were committed to conservation, but their showers were long, so that wasn't totally working out for them. And then they were randomly assigned to two groups. One group's getting something they know they're being monitored and someone else can see how much water they're using. The other group gets, you know, a visual. They can literally see in real time how much water they're using.

51:03Lewis Howes:Three minutes left, two minutes, like, whatever. Well, it wasn't a countdown. It was just showing total gallons used. Leaders or gallons. Right. So it's like really visible. It's going up. You're wasting this much every moment. Yeah. Right. And you can sort of think like, oh, how much did I use total yesterday? Right. So you can imagine that kind of thing. It's like gamification. Yeah. It's related to gamification, although there were no sort of stars and bells and whistles. It's more just I know where I am. And I know how much I've used. I'm a horrible human being for wasting this much water.

51:35Lewis Howes:No, I'm just kidding. Well, yeah. I mean, that might be the kind of thought. Right, right, right. Hopefully it wasn't that extreme because then it could come with negative. But it had a big impact on it. Tracking. Tracking and measuring. Just having a sense because then you can say, like, I hit the goal. You can make the goals more concrete that way. Like, I'm going to do 10 ,000 steps a day. My little Fitbit jiggles and it makes me happy. That's gamification. That jiggle gives me so much joy. But the tracking gives you visibility into how you're doing it. It's important. And then accountability, which you've mentioned a bunch of times, does absolutely the research supports when someone else you care about, when they're holding you accountable, it matters because it changes the cost-benefit calculus of achieving your goals.

52:17Lewis Howes:Is there research around that that proves that? Yes, absolutely. My favorite work, so this is in the category of what's called commitment devices. So it's a category that economists have been studying for decades because they find them really weird. So economists get really excited when they hear about commitment devices because they're like, these shouldn't exist. It breaks all our theories. A commitment device is when you create some sort of penalty or constraint on yourself. So we're used to the government doing that sort of thing, right? They put their speed limits. They fine you if you're tempted to speed.

52:52And we're like, yeah, that makes sense. But what if you find yourself or penalize yourself for not achieving your goals? That's crazy. Who would ever do that? And yet lots of us do. And it's effective. And someone who's holding you accountable is sort of like creating a penalty. Because if it's now visible to someone else, whether you've achieved more, you're going to feel shame if you don't. So that's the penalty. If it's invisible how you're doing. Yes. Now you could say also they're going to see the upside. So maybe it's not only a commitment device. that there's also an opportunity for pride and so on.

53:25But losses tend to loom larger than gains to us. Accountability tends to, I think, be most potent because of the sense that you don't want to let, you don't want to fall down when someone's watching. And commitment devices are generally extremely effective. The most effective ones are actually when you put money on the line. Right. So you can put cash down that you will forfeit if you fail to achieve a goal. and research shows that that helps. That works. It works really well.

53:55Lewis Howes:Putting money down and saying, okay, I'm going to pay$1 ,000 to something I don't believe in if I don't accomplish this goal or if I don't do the steps at least to get there by a certain time. Exactly. And it's like, wait. That'll incentivize you. You incentivize yourself, which is very counterintuitive. Why am I finding myself? But it works. My favorite study is on smokers who wanted to quit. Half of them are given sort of your standard suite of stuff. Here's ways to quit. The other half are given all that stuff plus a commitment device. You can put money into this account for six months, and it'll disappear if you fail a nicotine or cotinine test in your urine at the end of six months.

54:3630 % higher quit rate. And the group that just had the ability to put that money in there.

54:40Lewis Howes:My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode. And the School of Greatness drops new conversations every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday around money, mindset, healing, manifestation, and relationships. And if you're not yet following the show, then you're missing all of them. Please tap the follow button right now, and you'll get notified the moment every new episode drops because the next one might be exactly what you need. Now, let's get back to the conversation. How many days does it take to go from total beginner to reasonably proficient at a new skill? Well, if you practice for a focused hour a day, then about 250, which also happens to be the number of reasons to choose T-Mobile.

55:23Lewis Howes:Here's an excellent reason. They have the fastest 5G home internet according to Ookla Speedtest, which you can test for yourself, worry-free, with their 15-day money-back guarantee. Another great reason, it's fast and easy to set up too. Plug it in and you're online in practically no time with no appointment or technician needed. Those are just a few reasons. Find yours at t-mobile.com slash home internet, where you can check availability and try it for yourself. They're so sure you'll love it. You get your money back if you don't. Fastest according to UCLA speed test intelligence data, second half of 2025.

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56:31Lewis Howes:Visit usbank.com slash smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply. Someone once told me that you pay attention to what you pay for. And so in the coaching world, when you're investing in a book or you're investing in a coach, usually the more the investment in that book or program or coach, the more you want to pay attention to getting the result. Would that be similar to this study that's like, okay, if I put$100 in this thing in six months if I stop smoking, people are like, eh,$100 doesn't matter.

57:13Lewis Howes:But if I put$100 ,000 in, I'm going to pay attention because that's a lot more money that I don't want to lose. You know what's really fascinating is it goes back to the very first thing we talked about, which is sunk costs and the tendency we have not to ignore them. So, you know, if you buy a book, it's sunk cost. You can't go return it. Maybe you can. But in most cases, if you dog-eared it a tiny bit, you're probably not going to return it. So you should ignore it. It's a recoverable. It doesn't matter. But we don't. That's not how we're wired. And as a result, as a result of wanting to sort of recover that sunk cost, we do work harder when we feel like, oh, I've invested so much in this.

57:48Lewis Howes:More money. Yeah, exactly. So it's a trick. It's sort of a mistake that we do it. But it works. And so let's hook into that and use it to motivate us to achieve more. So the more at stake you have of your own whatever money or time or energy, the more likely you'll achieve that goal or make that change. It's just, yeah, you can change the cost-benefit calculus moving forward. You can also, if you've invested in the past, then the sunk costs that we tend not to ignore will feel like they should change that. So there's sort of two ways, prospectively and retrospectively. You can put a bunch of money into something and then you're going to feel guilty if you don't do it.

58:24Or you can use these commitment contracts where you literally put money on the line on, say, a website, one of these, you know, stick or be minder that you'll have to forfeit if you don't achieve your goal in the future. They're both tactics that can work for different reasons.

58:40Lewis Howes:Why do you feel like so many people – oh, actually, I was going to ask you about this. With people putting penalties on themselves, even if they don't have accountability or it's not a public commitment or something like that, But if we... We say we're going to do something and then we break our word to ourselves. Does that shift our identity or does that keep us in a lower level identity of less confidence, less belief in selves? But actually when we keep our word, we increase the level of self-esteem and confidence, whether people know about it or not. Like how does that affect our belief in ourselves or our confidence?

59:18That's a really interesting question. And specifically, you're saying when we fail and it's visible to others versus when we fail and it's invisible, how does that change our confidence?

59:26Lewis Howes:It's more like when we say we're going to do something and we don't take those actions. And we constantly, I say I'm going to work out five days a week, but I'm going to do one day. And I keep saying, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, and I keep not doing it. How does that affect our belief in ourselves and our confidence when we continue to break our own word to ourself? Got it. Yeah, as you, you know, the premise of the question is, right, like it's not good for our confidence to continually fail. We do have a really amazing, what Dan Gilbert of Harvard has called a psychological immune system, where we sort of figure out ways to still end up satisfied and somewhat happier than maybe we would if we took everything at face value.

1:00:11so we can bounce back. And I actually think fresh starts and the fact that the fresh start effect exists may be related to sort of the psychological immune system for all the failure that we, you know, we constantly fail at our goals. Goals are hard to achieve. Most of them we fail at. And we have built these ways to sort of stand up again and say, okay, but this time it's going to be different. And it's probably a good thing by and large. But of course, it's not perfect. And the more we fail, the more difficult it is for that psychological immune system to win.

1:00:48Lewis Howes:And what about the more we keep our word to ourselves, do we build more confidence and self-esteem and momentum towards achieving other goals as well, the other way? Sure. Yes, absolutely. Especially if we're tracking and we can sort of give ourselves that pat on the back, if it's visible to others. sort of the more things that reinforce what we're achieving, I think, the better in terms of giving us that boost and confidence. And it's interesting, there's some new work that's starting to be done on the power of streaks and visible streaks and sort of seeing like momentum. Exactly. There's apps like Duolingo, it's just trying to get people to learn a new language and they're really making it prominent to you.

1:01:29You know, look, you've done it five days and we'll keep the streak going. And they're really trying to play into that momentum. and psychological momentum and streaks, they do build and they make us feel like, okay, you know, I don't want to lose what I've achieved and accomplished. And that's very motivating.

1:01:43Lewis Howes:Okay. What would you say is the number one thing we need to know about changing our behavior for the better? That is a big question. I think the number one thing is like a high level thing as opposed to a tactic. And that high level thing is really what I built my book around. And that is the importance of not just sort of taking any of these different tactics off the shelf willy-nilly that we've been talking about but trying to figure out what are the barriers for you and match the tools that you put together to build your your strategy to what's holding you back so if you're struggling with i i just dread doing this activity then find a way to make it fun if you don't believe you can, then you need a new social structure and set of supports.

1:02:31And like you're going to, maybe everybody can benefit a bit from all of these things. If you're procrastinating, create a commitment device, like find yourself if you put it off any longer so that you'll no longer consider doing that. So what is the barrier? And then make sure you double down on creating the structures that will be relevant to it. Because everything we've talked about is good. It's all useful on average. That's what you're going to get the most out of.

1:02:54Lewis Howes:So how do we create an assessment for ourselves to see what we need the most of? Maybe we feel like we're not procrastinating, but actually we are procrastinating. Maybe we feel like we're a confident person, but actually lack confidence. Or maybe you feel like you're not lazy, but actually you are. What's the assessment? What's the list of questions to ask ourselves or just things to be aware of so that we know, okay, I need to dive into the confidence problem and start applying these things. or I need the commitment devices. Yeah, you're like, and you've got my book's chapters are organized.

1:03:29You've got them open in front of you. And I organized the book very intentionally around sort of these are the different barriers and here's what all the science says about how to overcome them. And so we've been jumping around across chapters. You know, one of the things that I think is really wonderful about this particular topic is that I don't think there's as much self-deception here as there is in other domains. I think it's easier to diagnose just from a very simple understanding of what the barriers are. Almost like if you look at the table of contents in my book, you'll see yourself in it or read a couple, you know, a page and you'll understand like, what do I mean by laziness?

1:04:03I mean, like you're taking the path of least resistance. You tend to fall back on habits. OK, if that if it's like bad habits that are really getting in your way, then here's the set of strategies. So I don't think there's as much self-deception. I think it's fairly straightforward and people will see themselves quickly in their own challenges.

1:04:20Lewis Howes:What's the biggest thing you want to change in your life right now? Oh, my God. I have to choose the biggest. There's so many. I do a lot of me-search, by the way. This whole career, a lot of it came from realizing that I wasn't optimizing in my own life and that there were hacks and scientific strategies that could be applied to improve. And I'm constantly, anyway, I think there's sort of like two categories of scientists who study this stuff, the superhumans. And they are out there who are like so self-controlled and amazing. And they look around at like all the little ants around them and they're like, what's wrong with you?

1:04:56This is so peculiar. Let me study it. And then there's the other group, which I fall into, which is the people are sort of like, God, I'm a mess. I'm struggling.

1:05:02Lewis Howes:Let me improve myself. Yes. What's the solution? Yeah, like let's find scientific. So I'm the messy category. right now I think the thing that I am struggling with most is work-life balance and it's been a really tough year on that for so many reasons I have a I have a five-year-old who was out of school for a long time and needed to he was doing homeschool pre-k which you know over zoom goes about as well as every five minutes it's like oh get back on there yeah yeah yes it's about as tough as anyone would imagine, Zoom pre-K. So that was tough. And then I had this book that I wrote and was really, you know, I put so much of myself into, and that was a tug.

1:05:43And then I do research primarily about health behavior change. And in the last year and a half -

1:05:48Lewis Howes:And your health was struggling, yeah. Well, yeah, we've needed some health behavior change in the world as the global pandemic struck. I've studied vaccines and encouraging people to take vaccines. And I felt like there was more need for my expertise than ever before and that I wanted to give as much as I could. And I have lost work-life balance to some degree. Like, you know, many late nights at the computer instead of stepping back. Many missed, like, you know, outings with family. Because this is so important. I have to do this now. The mission is important. Yeah. But there has to be a balance.

1:06:22And so that, I think, is the biggest thing I'm trying to change.

1:06:24Lewis Howes:What would you fall into then? Which category would you want to? Procrastination. Procrastination towards spending more time taking care of your health and being with family and down time. So procrastinating, being lazy. Not that way. Yeah, but it's true. We all have our own. Relaxing. I've talked about the idea of wants and shoulds. Yes. So wants being like the things that provide us with sort of more the instant hit of gratification and shoulds being the things that are good for us in the long run. But they're not always candy and salad, right? Sometimes some of us get mixed up on those wants and shoulds.

1:07:00And for me, the want this year has always been like, oh, I feel like I have this mission. And it has overtaken some of the things that are really important and really should be at the center. You know, having a five-year-old, having a family, and making sure that that's a priority. So having more balance is my biggest challenge right now.

1:07:19Lewis Howes:So the procrastination problem. Is that what it is? what would you, what in that chapter on the procrastination problem, what tool should you be looking at more and how should you be applying that tool from the moment you leave this interview for the next couple months? How could you integrate that tool into your life? I think accountability and commitment are some of the things that are probably the most powerful here. So one of the studies that I talk about in that chapter has to do with pledges and the power of doctors who were overprescribing unnecessary antibiotics to their patients ended up doing that less so when they put a formal pledge up in their office saying, you know, when you come in, you've got a stuffy nose and you're begging me for your antibiotic.

1:08:08I don't do that. It's not recommended by the, you know, by best practice. And I follow best practices. This is not what I should be doing. That pledge reduced that dramatically. I think sort of pledges. My partner is someone who I can have holding me accountable, setting hours and sort of planning around what what are those hours and what are they going to be allocated to? Like, am I really going to work on Friday and Saturday night until 11 p.m. instead of taking time for myself and my family? Those are the kinds of tools and sort of I've already instituted this in part because of these issues.

1:08:45Like my phone goes away during dinner with my family when we're out doing activities. It needs to be away because otherwise I'll be tempted to check and see, oh, you know, is there something coming up from work that I should be responding to? So it is a little bit backwards, but the tools apply whether or not the things that are tugging you in the wrong direction are pizza and junk food or work.

1:09:06Lewis Howes:Right. So what is, have you already been implementing all these things or is it something you need to have a conversation with? I'm implementing some of them, but not as many. We're actually, I'm about to have a fresh start. So Friday, tomorrow is a Friday. And then I go on a vacation with my family for a week, which I'm really looking forward to. You haven't had a vacation in I don't know how long. I just had one two weeks ago. And I don't know, it was like, I can't remember the last time. Years? Five years? It feels like years. Also pandemic stretches out. Yeah. Time taffy. You know something I did that was an incredible, I don't know if this is possible for you, but this was probably four or five years ago.

1:09:45Lewis Howes:I was like, I really feel like I need to get away on a vacation. And I realized at the time for 15 years of my life, because I got a cell phone when I was 17 or 16 or something for 15 years of my life, I had my cell phone on me every single day. Like there was never a day I didn't have my phone near me at some point. Like I checked it every day and I was like, that just doesn't feel right. Like to always at least one point in the day, I touched my cell phone for 15 years. And I said, what's the thing that scares me that I think could help a reset? And my producer at the time, Christine, she was like, I was like, I'm going to go to Hawaii.

1:10:22Lewis Howes:And what I'm going to do is just going to leave the phone in the hotel room when I go out. And she's like, what would it look like if you didn't take your phone or computer with you on the plane? And I was like, I don't even know if I could do that. But I actually ended up doing that for five or six days, left all electronics at home. And it was the scariest thing the first day. But then it was like freedom. Freeing. It's amazing. It felt incredible. That's how I take vacations too. Really? You leave all the stuff at home? I don't bring a computer. I normally do bring my phone. But it's like stored away in the safe.

1:10:53Stored away in the safe and I take email off of it. Smart.

1:10:56Lewis Howes:No social media and email or whatever. Right. All the things that would be a drag, they're gone. It's just a phone. It's just a phone. It's just call me and that's it. Yeah. So, no, I think that's absolutely critical. And that's a commitment device, right? You put constraints on your own access to things that would tug you into a place that's not good. You'd be tempted to do this thing that's not good for you. You've created a commitment device when you... Interesting. Right? And it is weird. Like, you are constraining access to tools that you normally value. That is a very weird thing if you sort of step back and think about it.

1:11:25But it helps. And there's a lot of ways we can create constraints that help us achieve more.

1:11:30Lewis Howes:What about non-negotiables? Like creating a non-negotiable, like every, like for dinner, non-negotiables, I put my phone away or on Friday at six o 'clock, I turn my phone off for the weekend. Totally. Is that something that works in this or is that? Absolutely. It absolutely works in this. That's a kind of commitment device. That is a commitment device. Those are boundaries, rules, constraints. And I've got it down for dinner. I mostly have it down during the day on weekends. My real remaining problem is like late nights once my son is in bed. After dinner, you're back and working until midnight.

1:12:07Lewis Howes:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, those are things I'm working on. I love the research behind the accountability and the commitment, the pledges. I think that's a really cool idea. How could we apply pledging in our life around a relationship, your finances, or your health? Well, I mean, actually, interestingly, society is already set up with a lot of pledges involved in relationships without, you know, us even getting involved. I'm engaged. I'm married. This is my boyfriend. I'm not single anymore. Right. We're talking about, you know, sunk costs, wedding rings. These things are all related. Right.

1:12:42And it's interesting that these structures have bubbled up, even though the research that sort of proves how effective they are came decades, hundreds of years later in many cases. But, you know, a lot of the things that exist that help us be true to each other or, you know, even if you think about taking professional pledges when you become a doctor, the Hippocratic Oath, a lot of these kinds of pledges, they're already there. But one thing the research points to is can we build more of them and how can we use them and how can we create ways that even when there isn't a structure, right? Maybe you're not going to get engaged to your coach in this marathon because that's not a thing in marathons.

1:13:21But is there something from that idea that you can build? Like can you commit or pledge to each other in some way that will make your commitment to each other more meaningful and more powerful? So anyway, it is interesting to see how society has already built some of this in and then think, can we take inspiration from it and from the research to build more of it in other places?

1:13:43Lewis Howes:Right. Can you talk to me about temptation bundling and what temptation bundling is and how we can utilize it for our lives? Yes. This is the very first bit of me-search I did. Me-search, I like it. This is my me-search. So, okay, this idea came and then sort of I got to this field later. I was a graduate student actually getting a PhD in computer science and business, which was, you know, the classwork was not that fun, I will admit. And I wasn't, there were a lot of classes I had to take that were tough, a lot of problem sets. And I was exhausted when I would come home, like, focused, so focused all day and, like, trying to understand what everybody was saying and make sense of all these different, to me, it was almost like a different language.

1:14:29to think that way. So I'd come home. I was tired. I didn't want to pick up my problem sets and get the work done. All I wanted to do was what any sane person wanted to do, like curl up on the couch and binge watch TV. Yeah, exactly. Like any reasonable human. I was also a former athlete and like feeling physically healthy and active was important to me for identity, mental health, physical health. But I couldn't drag myself to go to the gym, which I also knew I needed to be doing because I was just so drained. and I realized there was a way maybe I could solve those problems all at once. What I started doing, and I'm certainly not the only person who would come up with this solution, but I might be the only person who's named it and studied it, is I decided I was only going to let myself enjoy indulgent entertainment while I was exercising at the gym.

1:15:15Lewis Howes:Right. So if I really want to watch the Kardashians, I need to be on a treadmill or doing it here where I can enjoy it while moving my body. You got it. So for me, it turns out, I've already admitted I'm a nerd, so no one's going to be surprised to hear this. And also, like, I can only handle so much sensory input. So I did it with audio novels. TV was, like, too much. I couldn't follow the characters and everything. So, like, you know, James Patterson, Alex Cross style, actually Harry Potter. I love Harry Potter and, like, Voldemort, what's going to happen next. So I would only let myself listen to those books at the gym.

1:15:47And I would find myself then coming home from this long day of classes craving a trip to the gym. Excited. so excited what's gonna happen to alex cross next is he gonna get you know is he gonna escape is he gonna get the bad guy and then i'd get to the gym time would fly while i was there because the workout isn't painful it's fun i didn't even notice sometimes i worked out too long because i wanted to hear what happens next and then i come back when i'm done i'm refreshed i'm rejuvenated i've had my break i was ready to dive into my classwork and i turned around you know my grades improved a lot thank goodness because i was having a tough time there for a little while in grad school.

1:16:21And it was just all better because I had figured out by linking a chore with a temptation, I could make it fun. And we already talked about the importance of making it fun for persistence. This is just a tactic for doing it. So I've since done research showing I'm not that weird. A lot of my research is like, oh, look, I'm not weird. It works for other people too. So we ran large randomized controlled trials and showed that teaching people the temptation bundle, giving them temptations to hook with a chore improves outcomes in terms of exercise you can think about porting it to other places like only listen to this podcast if it's somebody who loves your podcast while you're you know cooking your family a homemade meal or while you're catching up on household chores or while you're going for a run what is the thing that you sometimes don't do put off because it's not instantly gratifying can you link something you love with it a snack you only let yourself pick up when you're heading to hit the books.

1:17:14Social. Make it social can be a way to make something fun, right? That can be the temptation bundle. I only get to see my best friend when we're going for neighborhood walks and getting in our morning exercise, right? And we'll gossip only at that time. That's where we'll reserve the gossip for the exercise walk. So what are the ways that you can find something that you love?

1:17:34Lewis Howes:The guilty pleasure is with a healthy habit. You got it. But when is the best time to start a new habit? Yeah, this comes back, I think, to what we were talking about with fresh starts and these chapter breaks. And so psychologically, those break points are a great time for starting something new because we have that renewed enthusiasm, optimism, the ability to say, OK, yeah, I couldn't do it last time, but I can be optimistic now because I've turned the page on a new chapter. But actually another thing that can help beyond just that psychological chapter break is a physical change, especially if a habit that's not such a good one has been associated with a place or location.

1:18:18Lewis Howes:So like you went through a breakup and you're living with the person for a year or two or 10 years. It's actually moving into a new physical location and kind of creating a new environment and fresh started by physically moving. Is that what you mean? Totally. And that's going to sort of any of the things that had you in a rut that you want to, you know, sort of rip away, it's going to be easier to pull them apart. I think the easiest example would be like, say you have a habit of picking up a Dunkin' Donuts on the way to work every morning, like, you know, three donuts. And then you realize like, that's maybe not great for me or even one, maybe not great for you.

1:18:56Sorry if that's news to anyone. So you want to break that habit. If you're like moving to a new job, you are literally not going to walk by the same Dunkin' Donuts on the way to work.

1:19:05Lewis Howes:Right. Or if you take a different route. If you take a different route. You can give yourself a fresh start. So you can create changes that make it easier to break habits. If you move out of living with, right, so just think about how this is an insane example. But you're in a relationship with someone. It's not working out. You could imagine you don't move out. You just say, like, well, we'll cohabitate and we'll, like, move into different rooms. That would be a terrible idea. Terrible. Terrible idea, right? And, like, that's part of, though, the thing that we do when we're trying to change other habits is basically, like, still living with the environment that was holding us back.

1:19:42So thinking about are there breaks in the environment that can help shape change is great. And there's this research by Wendy Wood showing that when people, college transfer students, when they're transferring to a new college in a totally new community versus just like basically going to a different, you know, they're still living in the same environment with the same habits and friends and just going to a different, you know, I used to go to this college down this street. Now I'm going to that college. So the more disruption there was to your environment, the more that habit disruption came along with it.

1:20:15And people were able to build better in different exercise routines and social routines.

1:20:19Lewis Howes:Really, like improvement and change would happen. Right. More easily when there's that shift. The drastic physical change, the environment change. Yeah. Interesting. Huh. So moving like in a different state or a different climate or a different just like all around environment will help you shift those. Or a different job, a different place you hang out. Whatever it is, the physical change can actually sort of help in addition to that fresh start psychological change. That's cool. Is what I think the research points to. This is Wendy Wood's research that you're talking about, right? Yes. Sounds like someone I should interview.

1:20:56You should interview Wendy Wood. She's amazing. She's down the street.

1:20:59Lewis Howes:She's here. Everybody I've talked about. One of the things that's really fun about behavioral science is we have this. I co-direct this initiative with Angela Duckworth called the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. We have 150 scientists in our network around the world who all study behavior change and have like, you know, they're different areas of expertise. Wendy is... Adam and Ethan are in there too, I think. Exactly, exactly. I think Adam, Ethan told me about this. Yeah. Yeah, Wendy's down the street at USC and she wrote a great book, Good Habits, Bad Habits. I'll have to read that. Yeah.

1:21:26Lewis Howes:Okay, cool.

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1:23:07Lewis Howes:What else do we need to know about behavioral change to support us in accomplishing and achieving our goals?

1:23:17Lewis Howes:Besides everything in your book. We've covered a lot. We've covered a lot, yes. We've covered a lot of ground. You know, we talked about it at a high level, but I want to come back to something we talked about at a high level that I think is one of the most important insights in the book and that is flexibility. And I think we should talk a bit about flexibility. Maybe we should even talk also a little bit about recovering from failure. Oh, I like this. Yes, let's talk about it. Okay, so to talk about flexibility, I'm going to tell you about an experiment that surprised me. And maybe I'll, well, now I've told you it surprised me, so I won't set you up and ask you to guess because you'll know.

1:23:52Okay. I ran this experiment because I thought I knew enough about habits to help people form lasting habits with a tactic that ended up not working. So it was an experiment I ran at Google. I ran it with John Beshears of Harvard Business School and a few other collaborators. We wanted to get Googlers to build a lasting exercise habit. So we had 2 ,500 of them who signed up. They all said, I'm in. I want to build it. It's called the Fresh Start Challenge. It's the beginning of the new year. They're all ready to go to the corporate gym more regularly. And we randomly assigned them to different groups.

1:24:25We thought we had a formula for helping them build a lasting habit based on sort of a month program. We were going to get them to kickstart this habit during this month. Okay, so one group is told we want to focus you on consistency in your routine. You tell us the ideal time for you to work out. Say they say 7 a.m. We say great. You're going to go to the gym at 7 a.m. as consistently as possible. You'll only be rewarded when you hit the gym right at around 7 a.m. Go for it. You're a 7 a.m. workout person for a month. And after a month of this sort of reinforcing that, you're going to have a habit and we're going to let go and we'll see that you keep doing it.

1:25:01Okay. The second group, we say, okay, what's your ideal workout time? Let's make your plan. Say this person says 7 a.m. too. And we say, great, 7 a.m. is a good time. Go 7 a.m. sometimes. But we want you to mix it up. Go whenever you want. Just do it a lot for the next month. And when the month is over, we think you'll have a lasting habit. Flexibility is key. We thought the people who we got going consistently, we actually, we thought that was probably better.

1:25:24Lewis Howes:Consistency is the best way. That's what we thought. If you do it consistently every time, every day, you're going to be able to stick this habit. You're going to be a robot. Right. You're going to keep going. A machine. A machine is better than a robot. Yes. So we thought that was the thing to do. Both groups in our experiment, you know, ended up going to the gym at the same frequency during this month-long kickoff period, but in different patterns. The group that we'd said, routine, routine, routine, 85 % of their workouts are at the same time. The group, we said flexibility, flexibility. Only half of their workouts are at that same time.

1:25:58So then we let go. The month where we've been really holding their hand is over. And what we really care about is who's going afterwards, like who's built a habit that lasts.

1:26:07Lewis Howes:For the next month, six months, year, whatever. Year, yeah. We're looking at the data. And we're sure it's the routine people. We analyze the data. It's not. Flexibility. Flexibility. Flexibility is key. Not consistency is key. Flexibility is key. And we're like, what? What's going on? So we dig in. And we're analyzing this data. We're like, what's going on? The people who had gone more consistently at their regular time, they did keep going a little bit more often at their special time. So if you're a 7 a.m. person, you're going a little bit more at 7 a.m. if you were in that rigid group than if you were in the flexible group.

1:26:37But they're rigid. That's the key word.

1:26:39Lewis Howes:It's almost like if you miss that time, I'm not going at all. That's right. I miss the day. So I'm not going to go at noon or 5 or 7. They don't go if they miss their 7 a.m. That's it. They give up on themselves. It's an only under these circumstances kind of habit. But the flexible people, they go a tiny bit less at their regular time. But if they miss that time, they have another time. They have a backup plan. They have a backup plan after that. So they're going to the gym more net-net because they've built this flexible strategy. Like they have their first best, their second best, and their third best.

1:27:06They've built a no matter what habit, if you will.

1:27:09Lewis Howes:I'm going to do this at midnight if I have to or 11 p.m. As long as I get it in. They've learned how to roll with the fact that life is not consistent. And so, you know, they have a most regular time, but they also have a next best time and so on instead of an only rigid routine. And I thought this was so interesting to me. And I write about this in the book. It brought me back to tennis because, and we sort of talked about this a little bit earlier. I was saying flexibility. You never practice a sport only under perfect conditions. Right. Right. Like I never trained and hit forehands, always standing at the baseline perfectly aligned.

1:27:42Like, you know, I did some of that.

1:27:43Lewis Howes:The sun shining at 78 degrees. Yeah. Yeah, but if that's all you do in your training regimen, you're hosed because that's not what you're going to find in the real environment. Yeah, when you're out on the court in a real match. You're going to have to be able to run backwards and forwards and have the sun in your eyes at a different angle. And so I think that's what we learned from that. That's so important if we're trying to build good habits, if we're trying to build routines that will last, to understand that we need to, okay, have a first best, but have a second best and third best and practice being flexible as we're trying to build up that performance.

1:28:17So you're actually talking about your – I think it's different if you're meeting with your Spanish coach at 8 a.m. every day. There's nothing wrong with that. But probably practicing Spanish and saying, I'm always going to do it at 5 p.m. And otherwise, no matter what, sometimes there's no one holding you accountable. You're not meeting with your tutor.

1:28:36Lewis Howes:Sure. So you're going to want to say, like, I'll try for 5 p.m. But I'm going to practice at some point. I'm going to practice at some point. Even if 5 p.m. falls apart, then I've got my 9 p.m. backup plan. Right, right. Or if life happens and I want to do a dinner at 5 with someone's friend, then I can do it afterwards or before. It's related to failure. Yeah. Which was the other thing I said we hadn't talked about. Because flexibility is about like... You don't fail. Because you can shift it. Exactly. Whereas if I have to do it at 7 a.m. and I don't make it and I'm done for the day, I failed.

1:29:06Lewis Howes:That's interesting. So tell me more about failure. That was the next thing you were going to say, right? I think some of the tech... First of all, I think the thing I want to study most next and sort of that I think is the most important understudied topic in my field is recovery from failure. And, you know, of course, we've got Carol Dweck thinking about, like, failure is growth. And I'm saying Angela Duckworth thinking about grit. It's not like it isn't studied. I just think there's so much that we need to know because almost inevitably we fail when we're trying to achieve anything ambitious.

1:29:37Okay. And a lot of people don't get back up again. Why is that? And figuring that out is so important.

1:29:41Lewis Howes:Why do we not get back up? Because it's so defeating or it's deflating or we told people we were going to do this and then we let them down or we let ourselves down or. All of the above. You know, all of the above. or we don't have a growth mindset, or we think maybe something else will be easier. We're perfectionists, and so then we procrastinate if it's not perfect. There's a million reasons. That's one of the challenges, and that's what makes it so hard to solve. But we know a little bit, and flexibility seems to be one of the key things. Having a growth mindset, so you can say that failure isn't diagnostic of me, but it's an opportunity to grow and learn, and I can get better and do better the next time.

1:30:16So these are some of the things, but I think we need a lot more. One study I really like, and I'm talking a lot about exercise studies, even though it's just a part of this world. But it's like the fruit fly of habits, like going to the gym. Marissa Sharif, who is a professor at Wharton with me, has this really cool research on what she calls emergency reserves. I call them mulligans. She wanted to work out every day. So she was doing some research. And she realized, okay, I want to set a tough goal like every day that's good for me. But sometimes I'm going to fail. And she knew about something else called the what the hell effect.

1:30:57Well, aptly named when you have a small goal failure, people often throw up their hands and give up and then, you know, abandon completely.

1:31:05Lewis Howes:Small goal failure. Yeah. So like I'm only going to eat 1 ,500 calories today. That's my goal. And then I see donuts in the coffee room. I eat it. And then I'm like, what the hell? And then I have pizza. Everything, yeah. Yeah, I go crazy. So that's the what the hell effect. It was originally studied related to dieting. I'm not saying it's healthy to have those kinds of goals. But anyway, that's where it was studied. So we do this what the hell effect thing all the time. So she was like, how do I balance these two problems if I want to have a tough goal? But if I have a tough goal, I'm going to have some goal failures.

1:31:31And I'm going to get what the hell and I'm going to quit. So she came up with this strategy for herself, which she then studied both with productivity and also with exercise goals and all different settings for her dissertation work. And the idea was she's going to set that tough goal, but give herself some emergency reserves, some sort of like, if you play Monopoly, like the get out of jail free card that you save for the real emergency, but you've got it in your back pocket and then you can declare like everything's okay. I'm going to use this now.

1:31:58Lewis Howes:So three times a month I can go with the emergency card like I'm exhausted. I didn't sleep well last night. I got too much on my plate today. So these are one of three days that I can say it's okay and I'm not a failure. And it's got to be limited. Right. So it doesn't become like, well, every day is an emergency. Well, I never worked out. Yeah, yeah. And she thinks calling it an emergency is important, even though I like to call it a mulligan, because you don't want to be tempted to use it. She says she actually almost never takes it. But what she does is she sets, like, seven days a week goal, but she gets two emergency reserves.

1:32:25She almost never takes them.

1:32:26Lewis Howes:Each week. Each week. Two a week. And then she's done this research showing, like, if you do that kind of structure, right, the seven day a week tough goal, she compares that to what about just a five day a week goal, which is structurally the same as seven days with two get out of jail free cards. Yes. Or you get the seven. Which one is better? Seven days with the emergency reserves crushes the other two. Just much better performance because you're striving for that tough goal, but you don't give up on yourself if you have a miss. And so that makes it better than everything else. And so I think this is something we can do is like, can we give ourselves a tiny bit of wiggle room?

1:33:04Not so much that we'll wiggle all the time.

1:33:06Lewis Howes:Or even it's like, okay, I have one cheat meal a week or something, or one day I eat whatever I want. But I know I could have pizza two nights a week if I wanted to. But then you're like, well, I know I could eat it this night as an emergency. But I know it's coming in three days. So I'll just wait. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she's done it looking at productivity too. Like you need to do a certain task every day. And your goal to make your big, you know, the most income is if you do it every time. But, you know, if we set different goals and give you different emergency reserves, you can get more productivity from the same workforce, from the same individuals, because they feel like it's not overwhelming.

1:33:45They see the wiggle room and they're able to keep pushing themselves.

1:33:49Lewis Howes:So having the Mulligan method or approach to your recovery from failure strategy is a good strategy is what I hear you say. Yes, yes. I think that understanding and appreciating the value of things like cheat meals, emergency reserves, it lets you forgive yourself. And that's the fundamental thing. Like failures happen. Understand how to forgive yourself. It can be through flexibility, which we talked about sort of having the backup plan to the backup plan to the backup plan instead of the if only plan. And it can be with these kinds of sort of thinking about how will I give myself an emergency reserve or a mulligan so that being prepared for life to throw you curveballs in different ways I think seems really important to success.

1:34:29Lewis Howes:How else do we learn how to recover from failure? So we don't beat ourselves up. I'm a horrible. I'm a loser. I suck. I'm no good. I can never do this because I keep failing over and over again. I think a lot of us are in beat up mode. I think you're right. I think besides these structures that we've talked about, I actually think I'm going to go back to social because I think that's another thing that helps with recovering from failures. If you've built your team and your support structures and recovering from failure also has to do a lot with confidence to know that you can get back up and that there is another chance and that it's okay.

1:35:06I think that social support can be an important part of recovery as well.

1:35:10Lewis Howes:It's so interesting you say that. And I wanted to bring this up earlier when you were talking about your mentor. Was it Max? Great memory, yeah. Well, I take a lot of notes, so I try to remember it that way. Otherwise, I wouldn't. But you mentioned that he does something really integral where he essentially has you coach someone else or kind of coach yourself in the question as opposed to him giving the advice. Simon Sinek, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. Sure. I was asking him about, because I believe self-doubt is one of the killer of dreams. When we doubt ourselves, it's hard to go after the goals and take the risks and be consistent and all these things, without the belief at least.

1:35:50Lewis Howes:And I was asking him, what do you think is a great way to instill belief in someone who doubts himself? And he was like, well, I have a good example. I have this friend of mine who's kind of been down on her luck for many years. She's very talented and smart, but for whatever reason, she wasn't believing in herself. And I would try to tell her I believe in her and give her the confidence and say these things, but it just, nothing was working. Then one day I said, you know what? I asked her if she could coach me on something. And he was like, I'm actually really struggling with this area of my life.

1:36:20Lewis Howes:And I think you're really smart and talented in this. Can you coach me? And him switching it around from giving her advice to saying, will you coach me on helping me improve this? he saw her confidence go through the roof. And so I think it's pretty cool that your mentor does the same with you and your team of colleagues where it's like, okay, you guys coach each other on how you would solve this problem. And it builds that confidence with each other. So I think it's cool in terms of building competences. We should always be coaching others, even if you feel like you don't believe in yourself.

1:36:51Absolutely. And of course, it's this slightly tricky tightrope to walk in that if you're always coaching others and they don't want it. You're like destroying their confidence. That's one of the things I like about this idea of like advice clubs, circles of friends who all want the coaching from each other. They come and solicit it. And they also, you know, so they build each other's confidence in multiple ways by saying, hey, I'm, you know, I want your advice. I'm soliciting it. I believe in you. And then you get the chance to coach. But also when you're struggling, you can go to them and solicit advice.

1:37:22So it's this beautiful circle. And I think it's really related to but what Simon Sinek was saying.

1:37:27Lewis Howes:I love this. I'm excited about all these strategies and the research here. I want people to get your book, How to Change, a science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. Make sure you guys get a copy of this book and get a few copies. Lots of good strategies for change and transformation. I've got a couple final questions for you. This is called the three truths question. It's a hypothetical scenario. So I'd like you to imagine you get to live as long as you want to live, but for whatever reason, and it's your last day on earth, and you've created and accomplished everything you want to create and accomplish in your life many years away from now.

1:38:02Lewis Howes:But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you, or it's got to go somewhere else. All your written work, the audios, the videos, the research paper's got to go with you somewhere else. But you get to leave behind on a piece of paper. You get to write down three things you know to be true from all your lessons in life, whether it be from research and academics or just life lessons. the three things you know to be true that you would want to kind of share with the world, and this is all we would have to remember you by, are these three truths or three lessons. What would you say would be those for you?

1:38:36Wow. Okay. I mean, I think we've talked, obviously, about a lot of the biggest truths already. I have to pick three. I think number one would be if you want to achieve your potential, if you want to achieve your goals, find a way to make the path to achievement fun. It cannot be painful in the moment. It has to be enjoyable to get there, or else you're not going to persist and achieve as much. To me, I think that's number one. Number two is probably about fresh starts. I think I would want to leave people with the realization that life is full of these moments that give us renewed confidence in ourselves, renewed motivation, a sense of a new beginning and a clean slate.

1:39:32And that by looking for them, by looking for opportunities to create chapter breaks when things aren't going right, we can get further. I'd like to do even more research on this to prove this in a million different ways. But what we know already is it's clear. These moments arise. They help us pursue our goals. We can call them out and help people achieve more. So the fresh starts are there. They're real. They're coming. And they can give us the opportunities we need to grow and give us that psychological immune system boost that we need. Okay, so make it fun, fresh starts. I think my third comes back to what we just talked about, about the importance of flexibility.

1:40:23That you have to create flexible approaches to achievement, that you cannot be too rigid, that rigidity is the enemy of habit and success because life throws you curveballs constantly. and of course routinization, we all understand that there is sort of a habit loop and when we want to build but we have to build it with a recognition of the real world and the real constraints we'll face so I think those are my three

1:40:54Lewis Howes:those are cool, I like those I want to acknowledge you for a moment Katie before I ask you the final question for your commitment to obsessing over this research and figuring out how can I help as many people as possible with the data, with the science, the research studies, and leaving something you loved behind, which is sports to go all in in school, and then continue to be in this pursuit for however many years you've been doing this now and making this your life's mission because it's making a lasting impact on a lot of people. One tool that someone can get from this book or this interview could really support someone in overcoming a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of dissatisfaction, of being stuck in something could prevent them from dying sooner than they need to, from changing a habit or routine, psychologically or physically.

1:41:47Lewis Howes:So I really acknowledge you for being committed to your mission and doing it in a fun way. I appreciate it. I acknowledge your efforts here. And again, I want people to get your book, How to Change, The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katie Milkman. I think you'll be very inspired, so make sure you check this out. you are also on social media which which platform would you say are you on the most that you gosh that's your your go-to twitter twitter okay twitter the most katie underscore milkman right on twitter and you're also katie milkman on instagram and and uh facebook can find you there as well but twitter is your go-to where you'll be most active lurking most reactive yes exactly so if you want to connect with katie retweeting yeah if you want to connect with Katie, you'll see a lot of people's comments there.

1:42:36Lewis Howes:Share this podcast or the YouTube video over on there and tag her and let her know what you enjoyed most about this. You've got a podcast as well called Choiceology with Katie Milkman, right? I do. And so people can check that out. You can go to katymilkman.com for all more information about the book and all the different things you're up to as well. Anything else that we should be aware of or supportive for you? For anyone who's really into the academic stuff, I run this initiative with Angela Duckworth called the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. And we put out a lot of research papers. And so that might be another place.

1:43:14People who want to get into the nerdy stuff, see the data, that's another spot. Where is that?

1:43:19Lewis Howes:If they go to kittymilkman.com, is that there? They'll find it or bcfg.upenn.edu, University of Pennsylvania. That's another place to find out about our center. We've got to get Duckworth on here as well. I've had a few people try to make the connection for that, but I think she's not traveling right now. She's just getting back on the road. Okay, perfect. I'm sure you can find her at a time when she's in LA. Perfect. Okay, Katie, final question. What's your definition of greatness? Oh my goodness. It's such a good question um i should have prepared for this huh i think my my definition of greatness is people who are uh there's a north star something a purpose and meaning and mission that's driving them forward creates greatness to me and that's when i see someone who has that clear north star that purpose and they've built their life created the structures to support it and are sort of leaning towards it in all aspects of themselves.

1:44:23To me, that's greatness. And it can be seasonal, so the North Star can change seasonally. But seeing someone who's really lined up everything because they have that North Star and purpose, that's when I feel like I'm in the presence of greatness.

1:44:38Lewis Howes:Love it. Okay. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. This was really fun. My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode right now because we are on a mission to impact 100 million lives every single week. And every follow here on this podcast helps us reach more people. Make sure to hit the follow at the top of this show's page right now. It's the single biggest thing that you can do to support the show and the impact of us reaching you every single time we have new episodes. I appreciate you and I can't wait to see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

1:45:14Lewis Howes:Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts, share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter.

1:45:53Lewis Howes:And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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