BJ Fogg is the founder of Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab and author of the bestselling book Tiny Habits.
These are some of the observations he made in a 2018 interview with the Stanford Graduate School of business on how building habits is the key to behavioral change.
- For decades, maybe longer, people have assumed that if you just give people information it will change their behavior. And this doesn’t work very well. And so I decided to give this problem a name, this fallacy a name and that’s what it’s called, the information action fallacy.
- And it goes like this. If we give people information that will then change their attitude, and then with attitude change they will then change their behavior. Now those links between information and attitude change, that’s not a very reliable link. And even if you can change somebody’s attitude, that doesn’t necessarily change their behavior.
- Habit formation isn’t a product of simply doing something over and over again. It’s not a function of repetition, it’s a function of emotion.
- Bringing our behavior in line with our goals is easier than we think — we just have to know the emotional levers to pull.
- A behavior happens with three things come together at the same moment. One, there is motivation to do that behavior. Two, there’s ability to behavior. And, three, there’s a prompt; something that says do this behavior now. And when all those things come together the behavior happens.
- And if any one of those things is missing, like there’s no motivation, or there’s no ability, or no prompt, the behavior does not happen.
- That’s why the feeling of success is so important. Because when you do a new behavior and you feel successful, then you shift it on this continuum automaticity and it becomes more automatic.
- By causing yourself to feel successful you are self-reinforcing. And you can do this deliberately. You don’t have to leave that reinforcement to chance or to other people.
- You can self-reinforce. What you’re doing is causing yourself to feel successful at the right moment in order to self-reinforce and cause that behavior to become more likely and more automatic.
- It’s long been said that repetition is the key to creating habits. And that’s just not true. It’s emotions. What role does repetition play? Well, if you do a behavior and you feel strong, positive emotion as you do it, that habit will wire in very quickly. it’s not the repetition that’s creating the habit, it’s the emotion that you feel.
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