Dr. BJ Fogg
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. BJ Fogg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So the goal setting, people don't get super upset with me. I break it into aspirations and outcomes. So there's a type of goal that's an aspiration. There's a type of goal that's an outcome. So rather than using an ambiguous word, because I'm really big on precision, let's use, when it's an aspiration, like earlier, Mark, you said you wanted to get stronger. That's an aspiration.
And then you find behaviors, specific behaviors that will take you there. An outcome might be somebody might say, wow, I want to lose 20 pounds. That's an outcome. Then you find specific behaviors that will take you there. So in either case, you start with what you want to achieve. This is part of the system in the book.
And then you figure out what behaviors are the right ones for you to take you there. So you don't guess at the behaviors. There's a way to figure out one of the best behaviors for you. You go to that aspiration or the outcome. And I'll go to a slightly different spot. Another one of the misleading ideas is that repetition creates the habit.
So if you can just keep yourself doing the behavior, it'll become a habit. And that's not true at all when you look at what the research. So the people that are advocating this, and there are very popular books, and there's a lot of the culture that's saying repetition creates habits. That's not true. You're being misled by those books and that thing.
When you look at the research that most people cite, It shows that repetition correlates the strength of habit. It gives no evidence whatsoever that repetition causes the habit to form. So the correction in my book, what I try to make very clear is it's emotions that create the habits. So that's one of the myths, myth busters in the book. Other things include like you have to set a goal.
Well, I have quite a long, so I'm training the tiny habits coach as we go through this thoroughly. And the reason, I mean, the question really is why do people think it creates habit change, right? That's really the question. Why do people think that? Well, because they've been told that for years. So when you look at the research, it does not say that.
Um, so I gave you the example, like for me, just to be a little devil's advocate.
And I don't have that mental resistance that I have. Yeah. And the way to think about that, it wasn't a function of repetition. It was a function of your feeling successful. You're seeing progress, right? Okay. So notice it resulted, like if you, had to do the swimming, and you never felt successful, you would not have, eventually once you failed, you would not have created a habit out of that.
Okay, all right. So people are, first they're misleading you in these books and blogs, but when people think that repetition is the key to creating habits, They think, oh, I've got a, and one of the memes is that 66 days, not true, but that's what's out there. So they think, okay, in order to create an exercise habit, I have to repeat it 66 days. Oh, I don't have time for that.
I'm going to wait till I have fun. They look at behavior changes, something to dread, something to endure, something that might be painful. And none of this is helpful. Instead, you can change your behavior by feeling like happy and joyous. Now, when you look at what has worked, Like your example is a great one, Mark.
When it has worked well, it will always be true that there was an emotional component where you felt more successful or it relieved some negative emotion. Yeah, or pain or whatever. That's what it is. And so in Tiny Habits, we don't leave that to chance. I mean, I have a chapter that's like, emotion's great habits. And then we give...
In the book, specific techniques and the coaches that coach people in tiny habits help you find exactly what techniques do you use so you can feel that emotion at exactly the right times to wire in habits really, really quickly. And the better you are at feeling that emotion, that positive emotion on demand, the better you will be at wiring and habits. So that's an interesting piece.
Yeah. Yeah, well, let me sketch it out. So when I say behavior, I mean all types of behavior. Habit is a subset. So within, like if I were drawing a diagram, within the big circle, that is behavior. Motivational ability prompt applies to all behavior types. It applies to habits. It applies to stopping behaviors. It applies to one-time behaviors.
It applies to temporary behaviors like taking an antibiotic. Then when you get down to the subset of habits, those are behaviors you do quite automatically. Those are different than the other types of behaviors. What creates the automaticity in the emotion, the positive feedback, the emotion. I have people focus on the emotion of success, the feeling of success.
That's what makes that behavior automatic and posted in the category of what we call habit. Powerful.
Tell us more how that happens. I can't say this is the magic, because I'm a scientist, but this is awesome. What happens, and we see this in our data week after week, is when people do something small and feel successful about it, like they're flossing one tooth or doing two push-ups or steaming broccoli for dinner, that feeling of success also changes how they think about themselves.
Oh, I'm the kind of person who can take care of my teeth. I'm the kind of person that eats steamed vegetables. So when they don't change their identity by like going and listen to a motivational talk, at least in tiny habits, they change because they see evidence. That they are changing and seeing the effects of that. And that identity shift can happen really quickly.
We see a lot of evidence of that within five days. And it seems to be a function of people seeing evidence and feeling successful in their quest to change. So it's And it doesn't have to be like running a marathon. So it's like a feedback loop. It's a positive feedback loop.
Yeah, and when people acknowledge that and see that, and part of the program and part of the book is like, hey, look, recognize you are succeeding. I might be tiny, but you're still changing. That then shifts people away from the self-trash talk, the thinking that they don't have enough willpower to seeing themselves in a whole new light.
And the phrase that come back to us is like, now see I'm the kind of person you can change, I can follow through, I can achieve whatever goal I have, and it goes on and on. So it's the positive feedback loop. Yeah, yeah. And I don't talk about it exactly in those words as positive feedback, but that's exactly what it is. I mean, we talk about it as emotions.
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