Perhaps more helpful than the tiny habits themselves is the success momentum they build. When participants in Fogg’s Tiny Habits online program were asked whether the strategies affected their confidence in creating good habits in the future, a whopping 91 percent said it increased or greatly increased. When participants were polled on whether the Tiny Habits had rippled out to create other positive changes in their lives during the week of the program, 65 percent said yes. There’s a snowball effect: When you achieve a goal by integrating simple daily habits into your life, no matter how small, you gain a confidence that helps pave the way to reach bigger goals. The success momentum you gain from creating positive habits is the method’s secret sauce. “Every time a company convinces you to try its new health platform and you don’t succeed, I believe your ability to change in the future decreases. In other words, they are stealing away from you the ability to change,” Fogg says. “We’ve all been there and experienced it. If you set somebody up on a path where they’re likely not to succeed, or you set yourself up to ‘run two hours every day, no matter what,’ when you stop, it’s not a neutral event—you come back worse. That’s one of the problems in our culture—we overreach.” Overreaching and falling short is the antithesis of Fogg’s Tiny Habits method. Unless your environment or social circle drastically changes, it’s almost impossible to implement radical changes or big leaps. The only way to make behavior changes that actually work is through tiny steps, performed patiently and methodically. “One thing we have to move away from is this idea of big and brittle—I’m going to do this big thing and if I fail once, it’s over,” Fogg says. “It’s not that [high achievers] are necessarily in better condition, it’s their routine that makes the behavior easier to follow. This is true of virtually all behaviors that are simple. They’re easier the more you do them.”
ReplyDeletePerhaps more helpful than the tiny habits themselves is the success momentum they build. When participants in Fogg’s Tiny Habits online program were asked whether the strategies affected their confidence in creating good habits in the future, a whopping 91 percent said it increased or greatly increased. When participants were polled on whether the Tiny Habits had rippled out to create other positive changes in their lives during the week of the program, 65 percent said yes. There’s a snowball effect: When you achieve a goal by integrating simple daily habits into your life, no matter how small, you gain a confidence that helps pave the way to reach bigger goals. The success momentum you gain from creating positive habits is the method’s secret sauce. “Every time a company convinces you to try its new health platform and you don’t succeed, I believe your ability to change in the future decreases. In other words, they are stealing away from you the ability to change,” Fogg says. “We’ve all been there and experienced it. If you set somebody up on a path where they’re likely not to succeed, or you set yourself up to ‘run two hours every day, no matter what,’ when you stop, it’s not a neutral event—you come back worse. That’s one of the problems in our culture—we overreach.” Overreaching and falling short is the antithesis of Fogg’s Tiny Habits method. Unless your environment or social circle drastically changes, it’s almost impossible to implement radical changes or big leaps. The only way to make behavior changes that actually work is through tiny steps, performed patiently and methodically. “One thing we have to move away from is this idea of big and brittle—I’m going to do this big thing and if I fail once, it’s over,” Fogg says. “It’s not that [high achievers] are necessarily in better condition, it’s their routine that makes the behavior easier to follow. This is true of virtually all behaviors that are simple. They’re easier the more you do them.”