Greg McKeown:
Welcome back. My name is Greg McKeown, and I am here for part two of my conversation with Leo Babauta. He is a phenomenal author. He’s a blogger; he’s a speaker. He has himself an amazing story about how he went from, I don’t know if the right word is chaos, but to simplicity, to being able to really bless many, many people’s lives. Millions around the world who have read his work have listened to his podcast. It’s the Zen Habits Podcast. He’s also the founder of the zen habits blog. You may know him already from that. He’s drawing from principles of Zen Buddhism but combining them with principles and practices of habit formation. That’s a really special combination because if you can take something deep but combine it with something that’s so tangible, so immediately relevant to every single person because we all have habits, and we all have habits to get in the way of us achieving what we want to and becoming the kind of person we want to. You can read his books, the Power of Less and Essential Zen Habits, which will be the focus of our conversation today.
Well, let’s get to it. Leo, welcome back to the show.
Leo Babauta:
Thank you. It is an honor.
Greg McKeown:
So, tell us a little bit about this backstory. How did you get here?
Leo Babauta:
Okay, so this goes back to 2005. So, in 2005, I was in a really tough place in my life. I was a father of five kids, with one on the way.
Greg McKeown:
Wow!
Leo Babauta:
Yeah, I did most of the work. So there’s that.
But I also was deeply in debt. I was in a bad place like health-wise. I was a smoker. I was sedentary, could not stick to an exercise program, was overweight, and just eating a lot of junk food. I was a procrastinator. I had a hard time like I wanted to wake up earlier to get stuff done, and I was having a hard time doing that. It’s really having a hard time changing anything in my life, and so I was feeling terrible about myself, and I was having a hard time making ends meet. And so, there was a lot of motivation to change, but just didn’t know how to do it.
And so I looked at all of these things that I wanted to change, that I was struggling to change, and I said, “You know what I’m going to. Just do one.” And I chose to quit smoking, which is not necessarily the best one to start with because it’s a really hard habit to change. But I chose it because my wife was going to be giving birth in a few months, and when she gave birth, she was going to go back to smoking if I was still smoking. So I’m like, “If I quit, maybe she’ll quit.”
So I was motivated, so I made a promise to her and to my daughter that I was going to quit my 11-year-old, 12-year-old daughter and so…
Greg McKeown:
You’re emotionally committed. There’s a lot on the line.
Leo Babauta:
I was committed committed. So then I started doing all the research that I could and found out, like how to actually quit smoking and change a habit, and I started trying everything, every single thing that I could, and the things I learned from that helped me to change everything else after that, because after, while I was quitting smoking, I started running to like help relieve stress, and I just kept doing that and applying the same things I learned from quitting smoking to running, eventually ran a 5k and then I’m like I could run a marathon and so I signed up for a marathon, ran a marathon a year later, have run several and an ultra-marathon since then.
I started changing my diet. I went vegetarian and eventually vegan, and not just that, but eating a lot more vegetables and healthy stuff. I lost a lot of weight like. At one point, it was like 70 pounds. I don’t know how to translate that into rational, rational units. So there’s weight loss. I also started getting out of debt and finally got out of debt. I started decluttering my life, simplifying, meditating, you name it. I changed my entire life and started the blogs and habits after that, and it was all from some of the things that I learned from that first habit change, quitting smoking. So, it was transformative.
Greg McKeown:
It was a single habit that was disproportionately important. It was an essential habit.
Leo Babauta:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
It’s almost like your life split into two possible paths around this time.
Leo Babauta:
Yeah, I love that.
Greg McKeown:
If you’d stayed with it, suddenly your wife is also smoking. Your children see a version of you that is not all bad by any means, but she’s suddenly a more frustrated version, a less healthy version, someone who has low integrity to yourself in making commitments. There’s a whole journey of what that looks like, but in an active, first of all, an act of personal responsibility, where you go, “No, I am doing this, and I’m going to make that choice, and that you can make one-time decisions and live them out through your life.”
You see this other life that has not just been possible but actually emerged into this whole, different level of contribution and a different quality of life and everything that’s come with it. Do I exaggerate?
Leo Babauta:
No, you got that so right, and I really love that you talked about what I was modeling for my kids and integrity and sticking to something. Yeah, even just I would be angry at them and, like, you know, yell at them once in a while. Like, not, I wasn’t the worst father, but it wasn’t the father that I wanted to be. So there are a lot of places like that.
Greg McKeown:
Every time I do something I know I should not, or I don’t do something I should, I am then a worse version of myself for the people around me because I don’t have the integrity to be able to handle the challenges of interpersonal interaction, communication and so on. Right? These are tough interactions and skills, maybe ten times harder than, maybe, personal choices and actions, and so you need the strength of the first to be able to even go into, you know, battle. Let’s say with the second. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. Your thoughts. And then what happened following this?
Leo Babauta:
No, I agree, like that’s, we start with our own personal integrity and working with the stuff that comes up for us here, and once we do that, it’s going to transform how we, how we be with others. But many times, it’s like I need to start over there because that can be really complicated or painful or challenging without starting here. So I really love how you put it.
What happened beyond that was dual, discontinued change. You know, zen habits was the blog that I started in 2007. So, a little over a year later, I started sharing some of the stuff, and the blog took off in the first year. Not only did I have a huge readership, I think 26,000 people signed up for the blog, but I quit my day job, got a book deal, and never looked back. So I’ve been deepening into this work ever since I started training with a Zen teacher not too long after that and deepening into my studies there. I started going into different coaching programs and learning about different kinds of ways of growth and transformation, and then I started offering more and more of that in the work that I do.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, let’s try and break this down. I mean, habits have been treated in lots of different places in lots of different books. But can we start with something like, you know, like how was a habit formed, you know, and just just just some of the science, research that’s on that and then build from there?
Leo Babauta:
Yeah, well, I would say a lot of, as you said, has been written about how habits are formed, so I’m not gonna go into too much detail in the science of that, but just a real basic jist of it is formed through repeated action like we start to form patterns in our brain that form a groove. And the interesting thing about that is if you’ve already formed the groove, like quitting smoking. Actually, all of us have a lot of grooves that we formed. It’s hard to get out of that because we try and get out of it, and we just slip back into the groove. It’s like trying to forge a new path when the old path has a lot of, like, gravity to it. So it’s it’s difficult, and we have lots of good reasons for those old grooves. So, you know, quitting smoking would be one, and procrastination would be another. Social media addiction, you know all kinds of substance addictions, and you know all of it. So all of that it’s difficult to change because we have not only an existing groove, but we have really good reasons for it. It’s actually meeting a need. And so if we want to change some of those things, we have to learn to meet the same needs in a different way.
And so, for example, if I want to, you know, let’s talk about starting a new habit, forming meditation. So if I want to sit down and meditate in the morning, but my current groove is, when I wake up, I get on my phone, I start checking my messages, I start responding, and then the whole day takes off from there, and so I’m going to be moving out of that groove into sitting down and doing nothing for, let’s say 10 minutes. That’s really difficult. Difficult because when I Am at that decision point, do I sit down and do nothing, or do I go to my usual thing? There’s gonna be a gravity, a weight to that old way, and I can sit there and do nothing, but at the same time, my body is gonna want to meet the need of.
I have some anxiety about all the messages that I haven’t answered, all the tasks I haven’t done, and so how do I actually meet the need in the way that’s not the usual way, which is like checking my phone and doing whatever I can do there. And so, interestingly, meditation in this example, already meets that need, but we don’t usually take it that way. It’s just like I have to force myself to sit here and not do the thing that I think I need to do. So that’s that’s difficult. That just kind of highlights how it can be difficult to change those grooves. Does that answer the question?
Greg McKeown:
Yes, it does so. Traditionally, the language we would say there’s a queue. I mean, that cue could be just a wake-up. I mean this specific example. I struggle with this and still wake up. And there’s a set of pre-existing habits, and part of it, for most people, is picking up their phone. Either that’s done immediately because they have it right there, plugged into the right by the head, or they go grab it if they’ve managed to make that much distance. And then, of course, built into the phone is just any.
Leo Babauta:
A lot of cues.
Greg McKeown:
A series of cues, right? Like seriously highly repeated and then highly immediately rewarded rootings. So okay, pick up the phone.
Leo Babauta:
They’re designed.
Greg McKeown:
Literally designed, deeply designed to hook us and to learn about our patterns and to then adapt to those patterns. I mean, they’re surely the modern phone, and they’re not really phones, of course, but they’ve got to be among the most addictive items ever created because they adapt to our weaknesses and our particular interests and our particular unique way of approaching things.
Okay, so picking up the phone is like that’s a queue with a routine with many rewards in it, and so you’re cycling into that from the first second you wake up. Now you’re saying, okay, meditate instead, and I don’t think there’s that many people who are pushing back on that as a like. No, I think that’s a bad trade-off. Meditate instead of reaching for my phone immediately.
Leo Babauta:
But it feels like a bad trade-off when you’re doing it.
Greg McKeown:
I think that the pull is so much stronger to the phone than the meditation.
Leo Babauta:
Yeah, meditation is a really badly designed app.
Greg McKeown:
Nicely said. So what do you do? Just slow that down for us. What are you saying we can do at that moment to shift?
Leo Babauta:
Well, what I was saying is this is why it’s difficult to change. That’s why I was trying to explain habit change in general if we actually do want to make that shift. There are a number of things. So, let me go back to the smoking.
So, with quitting smoking, you already saw in my story something that was a couple of things that were really important. One was commitment. Previously, when I failed to quit smoking seven times before, tried failed previously, it was like, “Ah, today I’m going to quit smoking. It’s like today, I’m going to change my diet. Today, I’m going to start exercising. Today, I’ll start meditating.”
And so it’s just like, “Yep, I’m going to do that.” As if it’s, yeah, the easiest thing in the world. It’s like I’m going to take out the trash. You know it’s not that big of a commitment, and, of course, when you hit against your resistance, when you hit against the old groove because your commitment is so low, you know you will give in pretty predictably. So you know, the moment I get stressed, I’ll reach for the cigarette.
So, in the story I shared, you heard me say I decided I’m going to change one habit, and I picked quitting smoking. So, all of a sudden, it’s much more committed than what I was doing before, which is trying to change everything at once. Second, I said I promised my wife and my daughter this is, like you said, an emotional commitment I was in, and I told them there’s just no way I’m going to be backing down, and if I fail, I will come back up and do it again, and I will just not quit and actually did fail once, and I learned from that and told them about it, and then I said I’m still committed to this.
Another thing that I did that increased the commitment was I set a date in the future, and I said, “I will quit smoking on November 18th, 2005.”
And this was two weeks in the future, and because it was in the future, I marked on the calendar, I told people about it, and I committed to that date. But what I did was I built up to that date, and I started preparing for it, which leads me to the next thing. So what I did there was I took around a little piece of paper and a little pencil, and every time I had the urge to smoke, I would write down a little tally mark on the paper. So what I was doing was I would still let myself smoke because I wasn’t at my quit date yet, but what I was doing was bringing in awareness of the urges, which is usually invisible.
And then, second, what I would do is I kept another piece of paper where I wrote down what happened right before I had the urge. So I got into an argument with my coworker or my wife, and I got out of a meeting. I ate a big meal, I woke up, whatever it was there was. Those are the cues. Like you said, that happened beforehand, and really, the cues gave me an emotional thing that happened. And so the emotional thing I realized is it was almost always stress, not always. Sometimes, it was a reward. I had done something really good, and so now I need to give myself a cigarette. It was also something I noticed was it was a social lubricant. If I had a cigarette, I could talk to people, and it gave me something to do if I didn’t know what to say.
Greg McKeown:
It just helps as a form of stress because it’s a social stress, right, like the social anxiety in that moment.
Leo Babauta:
That’s right, yeah, exactly. So I have social anxiety, and so I reached for the cigarette. So I learned what my cues were, and at the time, I called them triggers, but cues has become a more common phrase for that, so I wrote them down, and what I realized is like, for each one, I had a need, and what was I gonna do? What was the need underneath that, and what was I gonna do to meet that need so that I wouldn’t have to reach for smoking. And so first, almost always, it was stress. I couldn’t. So one of them was going out for a run. I couldn’t always go out for a run. Every time I was stressed, so I had, breathing was another thing. I tried Meditating. Massaging my shoulders and neck was another one. Another one I learned a little later was frozen grapes were really good. So I was eating a lot of candy at first because it was like something to put in my mouth, and that wasn’t great. And so I tried this trick I found on the internet, which is frozen grapes. It’s delightful, and somehow it meets some kind of need. I don’t know what it is. There should be some research into that. But frozen grapes.
Greg McKeown:
Frozen grape syndrome.
Leo Babauta:
Frozen grapes. There you go, okay. So, I did all this prep work, and I also created some accountability for myself. So, I joined a group online of other people quitting, and I made a commitment to them I would post on that group before I smoked. I also committed to calling an accountability partner. So I did a lot of things around accountability and commitment, and then having a group was also really important. So I had other people I was going through. I learned from their stories. I wasn’t the only one going through this, so those were all important. The next thing I learned that I wanna share. But quitting smoking is a really good way to learn this. But actually, any kind of physical thing that you do, the habit that you wanna quit, so let’s say, you eat potato chips or chew your nails or get on your phone, will be another example of that. So what you want to do is you want to have a little bit of a moat that stops you from doing the thing. So, for me, I threw all the cigarettes out, and I would have had to drive to the store to get some cigarettes. So I would still have the urge, and I would like I should drive to the store right now, which you know, and my brain is like almost panicky like I need to go and get that cigarette.
And then I would start to because I had this moat. There was nothing there in front of me that was that I could just reach for. I would also have a lot of awareness around it, and so I would notice. Number one, what are the thoughts that are leading to me justifying smoking? And one common one was just one puff is not gonna hurt, which is literally true. Is literally true that one puff of a cigarette does not actually kill you, like it’s not gonna lead to your long-term death. A long-term sickness, but that is a complete lie. It’s a rationalization because if I quit, you know they just had that one, it’s gonna lead to the next one. It’s gonna make it a slippery slope, right? And that’s true of all slippery slopes. Procrastinating, you know, anything that we do and getting on my phone. I’m just gonna check this one message. It’s always a slippery slope, and so it is. It’s true that checking one message actually is not a bad thing, but if you notice every time you check one message, you’ve now checked 20, you know that’s, that’s a different thing. Or you know, I’m gonna look at my social media app for, like, you know, 10 seconds. Yeah, of course, that’s not gonna hurt you. Yeah, that’s not actually what happens.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, well, in the car. The opposing idea is, well, if you, if you never take the first, you know, if you never have one puff of a cigarette, you never have to worry about the second or the tenth of the hundredth. Right, like there’s an opposing idea that that keeps you, that produces a moat.
Leo Babauta:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
It keeps you from it, either in the first place or, if you’re quitting, from falling back into the habit.
Leo Babauta:
Yes, but what you notice, what you’ll notice is, in the moment of that stress, that opposing idea that you just said carries no weight.
Greg McKeown:
So what does work, then?
Leo Babauta:
So, first of all, you have to know. You start to bring awareness to those things and write them down. Journal about this. So what are the things? Keep a list of all the things you tell yourself, like “this is one time is okay” or whatever it is. You might tell yourself, “I deserve a reward,” or “Life is too short for me to suffer. I’m making myself suffer right now. Life is too short.” These are very common ones. Write those down, and what you want to have is the opposing idea. What’s the? What’s your answer to that? That’s gonna call out the lie of that other one. And so you write those down, and you want to tell yourself those things when that moat, when you hit that moat.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so just just slowing down and then carry on. So this is there’s a book that was written here called Soundtracks. And I like that metaphor for these thought patterns that you’re describing. That we have soundtracks, you’re saying, pay attention to them because they’re already there running, and then you’re choosing your own soundtracks. That you say, these specific soundtracks that I want to listen to, are you saying that none of those soundtracks that you came up with helped in the moment? You can’t be saying that, or you’re just saying the one particular one I came up with wouldn’t have helped you in that moment.
Leo Babauta:
They do help, but if you haven’t done this work beforehand, what happens is in that moment, they won’t help. So you want to, you want to, you want to do this work when you are not in that moment.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Leo Babauta:
So you know, and you’re sane like you, you’re like, “Okay, I know I don’t want to do this, but I know this is the argument my brain will come up with.” Because the brain is very invested in having you go back to the old way.
And so it will come up with some incredible arguments. We won’t know that that’s happening, and we’ll just give in, like, of course, life is too short to suffer, right? Look, that’s, there’s truth to that. And so you know, in that moment, it feels really true. And so you’re just like, huh, and you don’t even think about it, you just do it, and so you want to have noticed those, written them down, and then come up with a counter-argument, like you’ve just done when you’re sane.
And then, when you come to that moment, you’re gonna practice the new belief because it’s the belief that you actually believe in when you’re sane. But in that moment of a little bit of insanity, like you have to remind yourself of that. That’s why you have, that’s why you know Alcoholics Anonymous has all these slogans, is because those slogans argue against our brains, rationalizations, and we want to drill them in so that when, when we are in that moment of weakness, we can remind ourselves of the truth of that. And we would want to have had some emotional Connection to the truth of that, and some you want, you want to speak truth to error.
Greg McKeown:
I like that, I’m something like that. I think that you’re saying it, but so I love this idea. That’s like personally chosen, and it’s specifically to address the error Thought process, the old soundtrack, so that we’ve chosen it ourselves and so that we’re gonna speak that out when the old thoughts come up.
Leo Babauta:
Yeah, okay, the next piece of this moment, and this is also a slowing down into this moment in our previous episode, we talked about slowing down. So this is a slowing down, and what you’ll notice if you really slow down at this moment when you have the urge to smoke, and you’re starting this rationalization, you’re reaching for, or, you know, again, the phone would be another example of that you’re like I put the phone all the way across the room or in the next room, but I want to, “Just this one message is gonna be totally fine.” And then you, like, you’re about to reach for it, which means you’re gonna have to walk out of the room and go to it. So, at that moment, I highly recommend that you slow down and just sit still for a minute, one minute, and what will happen is you will have an urge that will usually these are invisible, and they are just automatic commands, but you’ll have this urge to get out of the discomfort of your stress and go relieve it, and so what you want to do is just notice the urge.
And there’s a thing that I learned about called urge surfing, and what happens is the urge rises as this feeling in your chest, and it goes up like this. So it goes up, and then it crests, and if you just keep your attention on it, it’s uncomfortable, but it crests, and it goes down. And then what happens is it comes back again, and then it crests, and it goes down, and it goes back, and it crests, and then eventually the waves are really small, and it’s not even a big deal.
But the amazing thing is that that’s actually not even that hard. It feels almost impossible in that moment where you’re just like, “I just need to get out of this.”
And this is the extra, the same thing that happens with overwhelmed with a task. If you are facing a task and you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re just like, “I need to go check my email and clean my kitchen.” And it’s just this like burst of like. I just can’t, I can’t deal with this, and you just need to get out of it. But if you actually commit yourself to just staying there, it’s a meditation. Stay there for a moment and watch the physical sensation rise, crest, and fall. It’s actually not that hard. It’s way easier than we think it is. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s way easier than we imagine, and if you could do that, you will master your entire life. I.
Greg McKeown:
What I love about what you just shared in that story is that you’ve crescendoed from a single story and the breakdown of the success, and you’ve ended with the point, “And if you can do this, your whole life is open to you. You will conquer everything.”
Leo Babauta:
It’s a little moment.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, I love it. You’re connecting a huge thing to a small thing, a tiny thing, and it seems tiny, but that’s a really important connection to draw. The tension between whatever the habit is you’re trying to form or break and the relationship between that and everything else that you want, you would like to accomplish, or that you would like to become. It’s all the same process. That’s sort of the heart of it. And so if you can do this, if you can learn to do this, even that last idea, you call it urge surfing, that’s impulse control. If you can learn impulse control around something that’s extremely difficult and embedded in an old habit, then, my goodness, what else can be done? What else could be evolved and changed in your life? So it’s a big promise to what you’re suggesting.
Leo Babauta:
That’s right, it’s such a tiny moment, but it happens throughout the day, actually, and in a lot of different ways. We’ve talked about some of them phone opening your phone, checking your email, reaching for soda, biting your nails, all of it. It’s a way to relieve the discomfort, the stress, the overwhelm that we’re feeling in a moment that, again, is unseen and invisible, and if you can make it visible and stay with it, learn, develop the capacity to stay with it for like I said a minute. Often it’s 30 seconds. If you can, stay with it for 30 seconds. It’s not an easy capacity to develop by any means because, first of all, we’re not aware of it.
It’s a little bit uncomfortable. It’s easier than a cold shower and when people are doing cold showers left and right these days but it’s easier. It’s less uncomfortable than a cold shower. It’s just a little bit of tightness, a slight amount of stress in your body. Sometimes, it’s a lot If it’s the kind of anxiety that’s going to have you curled up in a ball on the floor. Don’t do that. That’s too much. What we’re talking about is like, “Ooh, I really need to smoke right now. Ooh, I want to grab a bunch of cookies.” Or something like that. I need to have my afternoon Starbucks. These are not that hard. You can actually stay with that, and it will change your whole life.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, okay. So again, it’s back to that like, “And it will change your whole life.” It will do this nominal thing, which I think I just love it, and I think it’s really important to express that, that you’re not fighting just for this habit, you’re not just fighting, in this case, smoking, or you’re not just fighting that impulse to check a phone. You think that’s what you’re fighting, you think that’s what this is about, but really it’s about the discipline required for your whole life, the disciplined pursuit of a life of meaning and value and contribution and goodness, and that’s what’s really at stake, and so I love the connection to that.
Okay, so I want to summarize the process that you have outlined. The first thing non-trivial, essentialist thing, I would even say, is pick one. You said priority. You don’t, the moment you hear this conversation, think, “Oh, yes, I’ve got three different habits, I’ve got five different habits, I’ve got 10 that I need to work on now.”
No, it won’t work for you. Pick one: priority. What is the most important, essential habit you’d like to either stop or start?
Okay, that was the first thing. The second thing you said was you scheduled a time in the future to make the change, and I thought that was really just a simple point, but so different than spontaneously saying, okay, I’m not going to eat this food anymore, I’m done with it. Because if you schedule it, even two weeks in advance, you’ve given your brain an instruction, “Prepare for this.”
So, it starts navigating the world. Well, what would you have to do to make that less difficult? What would you have to do to make that less painful? Or how would you make it easy to do it? What do you have to get rid of? What do you have? Who do you have to be involved in it? You start to coordinate. Your brain starts to coordinate a plan to bring you to that moment. I thought that was really helpful.
The third is that you kept this piece of paper with your urges on it when you felt the urge, in this case, to smoke, or, we could say, check your phone, whatever the habit is, and then a second piece of paper to say, well, what happened right before? So now you’re bringing a height. You could do that in that two-week period. You’re bringing a heightened awareness to that invisible thing that is completely controlling you and keeping you from acting. It’s acting on you rather than you acting for yourself.
Okay, then the fourth thing was. I mean, this is, I think, sort of now more into system building, which is like, what do I do instead to meet the need underlying it? So, how do I meet the real need?
Going on, and the fifth, maybe it’s the final thing, is to kind of build a moat so that when you hit that moment, you can urge, surf your way through it. 30 seconds of just living with that discomfort, letting it rise up, letting it try to have its way with you, try to scream at you, “You have to go and do that. You just gotta be terrible if you don’t.”
Like that, the threat of pain, and let it go. I like the idea of saying, “Oh, there you are; I see you screaming at me, you know, welcome. It’s nice to see you again this morning.” You’re becoming really aware. Letting yourself surf through the urge for even 30 seconds to discover, oh, that threat I’m feeling is not really real, it’s nothing terrible happens if I don’t go and do this thing for the next 30 seconds. And though that seems to be a pattern unless I’m assuming it and if you can understand that pattern.
Leo Babauta:
Could I add a couple more things? I feel like I’m leaving out a couple of really important things.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, what did we miss?
Leo Babauta:
So one is some kind of reward, something that you know. Phones, like you said, are self-rewarding, and we want habits that tend to be self-reinforcing.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Leo Babauta:
You know the Starbucks idea, the phones they all like give you some kind of reward, and so if you’re, you know, forming meditation, if you’re trying to change your habits, you wanna like build rewards into it, and so that could be if I go for a run every day this week, I’m gonna get a massage, and it could be something like that. It could be after every run, I get to hang out with my running friends and, like you know, socialize afterward. It could be every time I meditate. I just really enjoy the peace of that little space. It’s the one little sanctuary in my life, and so, whatever it is, it could be while you’re doing it, it could be right afterward. It could be more longer-term rewards. We want this to be something that is rewarding, and you wanna be also just acknowledging yourself. It’s like, “Damn, I did a great job there. That was amazing.”
Because if you’re just forcing yourself to face discomfort without the reward part of it, it’s actually less. It’s not rewarding; you’re not reinforcing it. We wanna have something that’s gonna be like feeling good about it, Like if you had a habit app and you got to like check it off. That’s also a reward. What’s a good use of the phone, by the way. You know, giving high fives to each other after, like, going for a walk after work.
You know that’s a reward. So rewards would be one, and then I have one more. The other one is grace for yourself. We are very hard on ourselves when we fail at a habit. So if I said, “I’m never, I’m not gonna eat sweets at all this month.”
And then you, you know, like give in and you eat a sweet, you will start to have, we tend to have harshness towards ourselves, which and judgment and which is, we think, is gonna. The theory behind that is it’s gonna help us to do better, but it actually doesn’t. It makes us feel worse about ourselves, it deteriorates our self-esteem, confidence, and trust, and it has us wanting to quit, quit the attempt. And so we wanna stop doing that and have grace for ourselves so that every time we fall off, we’re just like okay, this is a part of the process, this is. It’s hard, it’s, you know, what can I learn from? That Would be another thing to take from that. And how do I encourage myself to keep going and acknowledge even the little bit that I was able to do? Like, did I not have sweets all day today until this moment? That was actually pretty great, and acknowledge even any success that we can.
Greg McKeown:
I love those additions, and it reminds me of something that a friend of mine, Larry Gellwitz, said is featured in the Forever Strong movie. He said he believes there’s no such thing as negative motivation, which is an interesting take on the world. But he’s just found that this is true, and it’s consistent, so….
Leo Babauta:
It doesn’t work
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, that he just so, and this self-flagellation that you’re describing.
Leo Babauta:
Yeah, it’s a broken model.
Greg McKeown:
Look, it’s a broken model, and if it worked like, we’d all be doing really, really well on everything Because we’ve all tried that habit, We’ve all tried that strategy, and so I appreciate that. That’s a very nice high-end for us to think about this. Leo, thank you for being on this podcast with me. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Leo Babauta:
It’s a pleasure.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you for sharing your story and what you tangibly learned along the way. These, like these tactics that were hard won, you know like, learned them in the trenches of doing it, and then all of the rest of us can now pick one habit. One thing we want to work on, follow this process that we’ve been discussing, to be able to not just make a new habit and break a bad one but also be able to shift towards a greater confidence in life that we can repeat that process and design something and then live something that really matters. Thank you again,
