Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1965: How to Break Bad Habits with James Clear

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits, James Clear. The insights behind writing Atomic Habits. (1:59) Overvaluing the results and undervaluing the process. (4:34) Habits don’t restrict freedom, they CREATE it. (8:14) What is more difficult, starting or maintaining a good habit? (14:01) Three applicable steps to stay consistent. (15:12) The two-minute rule for success. (19:05) The Four Laws of Behavior Change. (24:15) At what point is a bad habit an addiction? (27:32) Align your tribe and align your habits. (29:56) Strategies for making bad habits unattractive. (34:06) The importance of positive self-talk. (38:27) What epiphanies did he come across writing the book? (44:49) What bad habit does he struggle with the most, and how did he address it? (49:03) Be patient with yourself and make things work for YOU. (57:05) When your season changes, your habits need to change. (1:02:38) Have good questions. (1:07:07) Related Links/Products Mentioned For Mind Pump Listeners, visit Integrative Health Practitioner Certification Courses for $100 off IHP L1 and $250 off L2. **Code MINDPUMP at checkout** December Promotion: At-Home Holiday Bundle (MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Suspension, MAPS PRIME, and The No BS 6-Pack Formula all for the low price of $99.99!) Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones Mind Pump #1925: How To Build A Great Physique In 15 Minutes A Day Commitment Devices for behavior change 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter - James Clear Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest James Clear (@JamesClear) Twitter Website

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk about how to break bad habits. We also talk about how to make good habits, and we're talking to the expert on habits, the author of Atomic Habits, James Clear. He's on the show today. We had a lot of fun with him.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor. This is the Cabral Institute and they have certifications for coaches and trainers and right now you can get their level one integrative health practitioner certification at $100 off or their level two certification for $250 off. Now check this out. I got some notes up here because this is how amazing the certification is. Here's what you learn in their certifications. Aurovedic medicine, bioregulatory medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and herbalism. There's Eastern philosophy, traditional naturopathy, orthomolecular medicine, and functional medicine.

That's in these certifications. Level one, they do a deep dive into is distress protocol, de-stress protocol, so diet, exercise, stress reduction, toxin removal, rest, the motion, supplement, success mindset. Level two, now you can analyze functional medicine labs in details. You can actually order labs and measure them in detail and use them to help your clients out. So here's what you gotta do if you wanna get those discounts on those certifications. Go to ihp.coach-mp and use the code MindPump to get, again, $100 off, level 1 or 250 off,

level 2. Also this month we have a sale on our at home holiday bundle. Here's what you get maps anywhere, maps suspension, maps prime and the no BS six pack formula. All of them for $99.99. You can find them at mapsdiscember.com. All right, here comes the show. James, thanks for coming on the show.

Hey, happy to talk to you. Yeah, excited to do this. Awesome. So I wanted to open by kind of asking you, because your book, Atomic Habits, first off, this is a must read. I used to actually advise clients of mine to read this book, just extremely insightful and very applicable. You can really apply what you write in the book to your life and see meaningful results. I wanted to know what led you to writing this book and what led to the insights that you

put in the book. I mean, it's sold nine million copies for a reason or more. I don't know if I'm even accurate with that, but I looked that up early this morning. What led to the insights that you put in that book? Why'd you write it? Yeah. There are a couple different answers. I think your second question about like what led to the insights is even more interesting

than what led me to habits. But to answer the first question, everybody's built in habits all the time. You know, your brain is building them whether you're thinking about it or not. My first exposure to the ideas was not as like someone who wrote about it or thought about it. It was as someone who wrote about it or thought about it. It was as someone who practiced them. I was an athlete growing up. I played a bunch of different sports and then eventually settled on baseball and played baseball through college. As any athlete can tell you, there are all kinds of habits that you're building on the practice

field or in the gym. So I kind of had to practice the ideas there. I also, as I talk about in the book, I suffered this really serious injury in high school where I was hitting the face of the baseball bat. The recovery from that injury was really long. I couldn't drive a car for nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. And so that was a moment in my life

when I was forced to start small. Like I had to just focus on little changes because I couldn't handle anything else at the time. And I did not have a language for it then. I would never would have said, hey, I'm just trying to get 1% better or anything like that. But I did have to practice some of the principles that a few years later, as I was writing in Tom and Cabot's, I started to describe. And I think that makes the writing a little better. I think it's better to be a practitioner of ideas

and not just someone with theories or opinions. Because I've failed with all the same things everybody else fails with. Like I've procrastinated, I've started something and then not been consistent with it. I've focused too much on the goal and not enough on the process. And because I've struggled with all that stuff too,

I think I can appreciate the failures that people have and maybe that comes through in the writing a little bit. Yeah, why do you think it's so hard for some people to understand the concept of making small and consistent changes? Why is it that we tend to think that that isn't effective and we tend to wait or try to have epiphanies or big grand gestures. Like what is it about our nature that keeps us from doing what has been shown consistently to work in athletics and business and when I trained clients, this was always a discussion. What is it? I mean, it's probably many things, but two of the things that came to mind is you're

asking that question. So first is the world is kind of oriented around results. And results do matter. It's not like they don't make a difference. It's just that the results of success, the outcomes are highly visible and widely discussed, and the process of success is often invisible or hidden from view. And I think that leads us to kind of overvaluing the results, the really sexy outcome, and undervaluing the process a little bit. You're never going to see a new story, whether it's major media or social media.

You're never going to see a story that's like, man eats chicken and salad for lunch today. You know, it's like only a story when it's like, man loses 100 pounds. You know, like only once it's a result, then we talk about it. Or like, you're never going to see a story that's like, James Wright's 500 words today. You know, it's only a story once it's like, atomic habits is the best seller. And so those results are highly visible, and I think that's what we tend to focus on first or value. The other part of it, actually, I think there's like a good biological reason for it, too.

Our ancestors, we grew up in what scientists would call an immediate return environment, where most of our decisions were focused on our immediate benefit. So you take shelter from a storm that's on the horizon right now, or you forage in the bush for your next meal, or you hunt for the next meal right now. And though the majority of the actions they made each day were oriented toward their immediate or very near future well-being. Modern society is kind of this weird alternate universe where a lot of the choices we make today are very delayed in their outcomes.

You save for retirement today so that you can retire decades from now or you go to school today and study so that you can get a degree in four years. Or you go to the gym today so that you can compete in this bodybuilding competition nine months from now. And so we still have the same brains. We have this like paleolithic hardware that we're walking around with, but we have this modern society where a lot of the things we want require delayed gratification rather than an immediate return like our ancestors, but a lot of the things that tempt us have

very immediate returns. So eating a donut tastes really good right now. It's only six months or two years of eating donuts that's unfavorable, or smoking a cigarette even, which is like the classic example of a bad habit. In the moment, smoking a cigarette might allow you to socialize with friends outside the office, or to reduce stress after a long day. The immediate return is favorable. It's only 10 years from now that it's unfavorable. So, there's kind of this most behaviors produced like an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. And our brains for evolutionary reasons seem to be wired toward the immediate payoff,

but a lot of the things we want require delay gratification. So I think there are many reasons for it, but those are some of the things that might cause you to focus so much on the results, on the goals, and maybe a little bit less on the habits in the process. You know, you know, something that I get challenged with often with this, because I, I mean, like I said, your book was, was almost required reading for a lot of my clients when I was a trainer. But there was this conflict that I would have, even within myself, where there's the philosophy

that says, live every day like it could be your last day, or be in the moment. And then there's this other philosophy that says, prepare for the future, sacrifice today for your future self, and they can feel conflicting at times. It can almost feel like you got a bounce between the two or can they coexist together? Are they related or are they opposing philosophies? That's a great question. I'm reminded there's this tweet I saw one time, Naval Ravikant sent it out and then

somebody replied to him. I think what he said was basically, by thinking only of the future, I sacrifice the present moment. And then the reply was by thinking only of the present, I sacrifice the future. And both of those things are true. You know, like it's just what you're asking here. It's like, man, if all you do is prepare, then you're never living in the moment and enjoying the process. And if all you do is like,

focus on having happiness today, a lot of the time that will actually put you in a worse place tomorrow. And I do think they can coexist. This is, sometimes this is one of the common criticisms that people have of habits, or it's something people raise, they think it's a criticism, where they'll say like, I don't to pigeonhole myself, you know, like I don't want to be too

robotic, like what about being spontaneous, what about having freedom and creativity and you know, being able to spend time living in the present moment. And my reply is always, you know, first of all, I don't, I don't actually know anybody that's so good with their habits or like, look, you know, if I do this, I'm just going to be so consistent. I'll just be like a robot. In reality, nobody's that perfect. But the other thing is habits don't restrict freedom. They create it.

It's often the people who have the worst habits that have the least amount of freedom. It's the people who have the worst fitness habits that feel like they don't have enough energy and they're not in the shape they want to be in. Or it's the people who have the worst financial habits that feel like they're always scrounging around for the next dollar, or the people who have the worst knowledge and learning habits that feel like they're always behind the curve. And so it's actually by getting your habits figured out, by getting the mastered, that you create the capacity to have more freedom and flexibility and adaptability. The gym is such a good analogy for all of this stuff,

but you can't just walk in on day one and be like, yeah, I'm just like trying to maintain freedom. And I'll just like get under and try to hit a PR. Like you step under the bar and you get crushed. But if you build the capacity to do work, if you show up each day and start focusing on volume before intensity, then six months later or a year later, or whatever, you throw more weight on the bar and you can handle it because you have the foundation for it. And a lot of habits are like that.

I do think you kind of have to live in this dual mental space where you can kind of oscillate between the two, you know, like you need both, but there is some nuance to it. So like, let's take the planning side of it, for example. There are a lot of people who, you know, they feel like preparation is crucial and I'm one of those people, like, but after, whenever I was getting ready to have like a big sporting event, it's natural to have nerves before a big game. And my dad would always tell me, trust your preparation.

And it's kind of like two messages hidden in that. The first is like, yeah, just trust yourself in the moment. You've done the practice like you're ready, but the other messages that I was like, listen, you better be prepared. If you didn't do the preparation, then you don't have anything to fall back on. So I do agree that being prepared and planning for the future is very important.

The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario. It's a mindset that can handle uncertainty. It's a mindset that's adaptable. Mental toughness often gets pitched as rigidity. It gets pitched as like, I'll be really stubborn in the face of this and like, I'm going to force my way through no matter what the conditions are. But I think there's a second form of mental toughness, which is adaptability, flexibility. It's something like, I can work with this or I can be happy no matter who I'm around

or what I'm doing. Or I can make this work no matter what I'm handed today. And that level of flexibility is actually very mentally tough because your mood is no longer dependent on your conditions. Your results are not dependent on what you're handed. And if your attitude or your results are very dependent on it, if things being a certain way, you're kind of being held hostage by the scenario. You're actually quite brittle rather than being tough.

And so I think this is kind of one of the core lessons of the natural world, which is the tree that bends and sways in the storm survives, and the tree that tries to resist the storm at the branch breaks and snaps. And so to resist the storm at the branch breaks and snaps. And so Evolver Die basically is kind of the ultimate like strong mindset for the future. And that I find that to be an interesting discussion for a question like this because you realize that you can both be prepared and still be in the moment. You know, like I can just I don't have to worry about every possible thing that could happen I don't spend this time in a mindset of anxiety and fear over every possible scenario I can instead just trust myself and my ability to handle uncertainty and then I can be maybe a little bit more in the present moment

So I do think they can coexist, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do James What do you what do you think is more difficult? Starting a good habit or maintaining a habit? Hmm. So I do think that those are the two big categories that you need to think about for building a habit. Can I get started? Can I make it easy to get going and can I be consistent?

There's sort of a semantic thing, we get a little game we could play here, which is in a sense, being consistent just means that you get started each day, you know, that you showed up and you started the habit that day. And so in that way, I guess I'll say getting started is the thing because if you can figure out a way to make starting easy and you can repeat that day in and day out, then you've kind of got the process down.

But in the way that we usually talk about it in conversation, I would say being consistent is the harder thing because we all know lots of people including ourselves who have started many habits and then fallen off course. You know, we all have tons of stuff that we did a couple times, but then didn't fall through on. And so ultimately consistency is the thing that I think separates people, but that doesn't mean

that getting started is not important. What are the keys to staying consistent? What are the, I guess, applicable steps or just ways that people can help themselves stay consistent with a new habit. And does it also involve how you pick the habit or how big of a habit you choose to start with? For sure, it definitely involves that. So I'll give you three things that I think could help with this. So the first is what you just mentioned. So probably the most common pitfall is choosing to happen. It's too large. And one way to think about this is every habit sort of has like this activation energy required to do it.

So you could imagine doing one push up a day doesn't require a whole lot of motivation, doesn't require very much activation energy. You can squeeze that in almost any time, even if you have an exhausting day, you could do one push up before you climb and bend at the end of the night. Doing 100 push ups a day requires a lot more activation energy to kind of get that going. It requires much more of an effort. And maybe on your good days, you can do it, but there might be a lot of days where you just slam, you're busy, or things start to interrupt the day, and it's harder to fit that in. And so I think one question that can be useful

to ask yourself is, what can I stick to even on the bad days? It seems that when people start a habit, a lot of this implicit question we are like they were all getting out, which is, man, I'm ambitious, I'm thinking about what I want to improve, I'm thinking about what I want to change, what could I do on my best days? That's kind of, it seems like that's where a lot of people start with their habits and I'm saying, let's do the opposite. What can I stick to even on the bad days? So starting too big is the first thing.

The next thing that kind of pulls people off course is they have a small habit maybe, or they have a habit that they want to build, but they don't have a clear and specific place to insert it into their daily routine. And there are a lot of strategies are built based around this. One of them I talk about in the book is called implementation intentions, which is very simple. It just says, just pick a time, date, and place to implement your new behavior. So I will go to the gym at this address at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. And that sounds so obvious, but a lot of the time we wake up each day and sort of think,

man, I hope I feel motivated to work out today, right? I hope I feel motivated to write today or whatever it is. And if you have a very specific plan for when and where the habit's going to live, you're more likely to fall through on it. And then the third thing that I think can really help with consistency for habits is the social environment. You know, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes or groups are big,

like what it means to be American or what it means to be Australian. Some of those tribes are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street. But all of those tribes, large and small, they influence the actions that we take. They influence what we consider to be normal. I think the punchline is you want to join groups to join tribes where your desired behavior

is the normal behavior. If it's normal in that group, it's going to be really motivating for you to stick to it. If it's normal for everybody that you're around to run their own business and you're hanging out with other entrepreneurs who are like all doing that thing. It doesn't seem as weird to you to do it too. If it's normal for your friends to go to the gym and spend an hour there five days a week, that doesn't seem like as big of a stretch to you. It doesn't feel like this thing that you need curcually an effort for. It's just kind of like, oh, this is what the people that I'm around do. And so the more that you're

surrounded by people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior, the more that you just kind of like, oh, this is what the people that I'm around do. And so the more that you're surrounded by people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior, the more that you can kind of rise together. Yeah, it's like when I had kids, I remember how big of an impact, a positive impact it was to hang out with other people with kids. It made such a big difference with,

how I viewed the whole process and the challenges. There's something that I observed, just listening to you. There's something that actually all of us observed working with clients and training people and running gyms. And I would love your commentary on this. So initially, when trying to help people with consistency with exercise, my approach was, hey, let's get you to the gym and let's get you to do like two 45-minute to 60-minute workouts a week.

So just two days a week show up, 45 minutes to 60 minutes. After about 10 years of training people, I realized it was way easier to help people be consistent to say, do 15 minutes every single day. Instead of coming twice a week to the gym, why don't you do 15 minutes of exercise? By the way, it all equates to the same total time exercising. It just was easier for people to be consistent just in my observations.

For them to be consistent doing a little every day versus doing a lot in comparison two days a week. What are your observations around this? Is this something that you notice or you see with just habits in general? You call it the two minute rule, observations around this? And is this something that you notice or you see with just habits in general? You call it the two minute rule, don't you? I believe that's what you call it.

Yeah, yeah, well, so that, I think the two minute rule is kind of the punchline here. So just to talk about that, and then I'll come back to the questions as well. The two minute rule is super easy. It just says, take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something and it takes two minutes or less to do.

So read 30 books a year, becomes read one page, or do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes people resist it a little bit because they're like, okay, buddy, you know, I know the real goal is to just take my yoga mat out. You know, I know I actually want to do the workout. And I get where people are coming from. But as you mentioned in the book, I've got this reader, this guy's name's Mitch. He lost a hundred pounds or over a hundred pounds, kept it off for more than a decade now.

And when he first started going to the gym, his little strategy, similar to what you just described, is he would go four days a week, but he would only go for five minutes. And so, you know, you get out of the car, get in there, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous, but what you realize

is he was mastering the art of showing up. You know, he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. I think this is actually a pretty deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, we're so focused on finding

the best workout plan, the ideal diet plan, the perfect sales strategy. We're like so focused on optimizing a lot of the time that we don't give ourselves permission to show up even if it's just in a small way. But you need to standardize before you can optimize. You know, you got to like master the art of showing up and then you have something to improve. So I think to your point, is it easier to do it for 15 minutes versus twice a week? I mean, some of this is going to depend on the habit and the person and their lifestyle. There's so many variables. But in general, I agree with the principle that you're talking about because there's a

lot of things that need to get figured out when you build a new habit that people don't think about. They might be thinking, you know, I'm going to start building this workout habit. So that's the only habit I'm going to focus on. I'll just do it two days a week. So I'll keep it pretty simple. But there's kind of a lot of questions that need to be answered along the way. What jammer are you going to go to? So where's that at? Do you go before work or after work, you're going to go in your lunch break like when is this going to fit into your day? If you're going on to or from work, is it on the way to your commute or do you have to take like a different route to get there now?

Once you get to the gym, do they have water fountains at the gym or do you need to bring your own water bottle? And stuff like that sounds like silly and almost like stupidly simple, but that's enough sometimes to get people to quit on the first in the first couple of days. It's like, oh, I always forget to bring my own water bottle and they don't have a water fountain here. Or do you have to have your clothes ready or you're gonna work out from home

or do you need to pack that the night before? And so the point that I'm getting to is that there are a lot of sub behaviors, like sub tasks that are part of that one habit of working out. And if you're focused on doing it for 15 minutes, you know, each day, you get a lot of practice with figuring those little things out. And they maybe don't seem like quite as big of a deal because the workouts so short and easy, like you're not intimidated by 15 minutes. You're like, oh, I can do that, which is the main thing that most people are thinking about when they're building that

habit for the first time. They're not thinking about all this other stuff that needs to get decided. If you're focused on doing like an hour workout and maybe you're like, oh, I don't know, like, as, you know, is the training session really hard today or it's leg day or whatever. If you're all wrapped up in some of that other stuff, then maybe you don't feel like you have the capacity to figure out some of those other questions I just mentioned. So that's kind of a long way to answer, but the point that I'm getting to is by scaling it down and mastering the art of showing up, you make it easier for yourself to do it

and figure out some of those things that maybe you weren't thinking about. And then once you're there, once you're doing it consistently, there are kind of endless opportunities to improve. So I think, master the art showing first, and then scale it up from there. Excellent, that's, I couldn't agree. I couldn't agree more. It's exactly what we observed.

You know, something that I have a challenge with personally, I don't have as big of a challenge, creating good habits, but I can sometimes get way more challenged with breaking a bad habit. And you talk about both of them and the strategy for both is, I mean, it's almost identical. Let's talk about breaking a bad habit because I think a lot of people find that to be harder than starting a new one like, okay, I, you know, I have this bad habit of eating, you know, right before bad,

or I have this bad habit of, you know, watching TV before bad, and it makes my sleep poor, or I have this bad habit of smoking cigarettes or whatever. Like, let's talk about breaking a bad habit because I feel like that's something that people, I know for me at least, that's more of a challenge. Yeah, so, in the book, I talk about what I call the Four Laws of Behavior Change. And for building a good habit, I'll just give this first and then we'll transition to

bringing a bad one. They're roughly the four things that you want to happen if you're going to build a good habit is you want it to be obvious, you want it to be attractive, you want it to be easy and you want it to be satisfying. So you want the cues to be obvious and available and visible, you want the habit to be kind of motivating and exciting to you, you want it to be easy and convenient and frictionless to do, and you want it to be enjoyable. Now, if you want to break a bad habit, then you just do the opposite of those four. So rather than making it obvious, you want to make it invisible. So unsubscribe for me, males. Don't keep junk food

in the house. If you're trying to follow a new diet, don't follow food bloggers on Instagram. You know, like reduce exposure to the queue. Rather than making it attractive, you want to make it unattractive. So we can talk about some ways to do that. Rather than making it easy, you want to make it difficult. So you want to increase friction, add steps between you and the behavior. As a little simple example of this, one interesting thing I came across when I was researching

the book was some people who, they always struggled with biting their nails, and then the way they kicked the bad habit was that, and they weren't even intending to do this, but they got in vis-a-line for their teeth. And once they had the liners on, they couldn't bite their nails anymore. And so it was like, that was the first time where they had to go through this, you know, 18 month process of getting their teeth straightened with these liners. And through that time, they stopped biting their nails. And the reason is just what I'm mentioning here, which is that kind of inversion of the

third law, make it difficult. They couldn't do it. It was high friction. And then the fourth and final thing is rather than making it satisfying, so you want your good habits to be enjoyable, you want your bad habits to be unenjoyable or to have some kind of cost or consequence to the behavior, especially if it's an immediate cost. If there's some kind of immediate cost to it, then you're likely to avoid it in the future. You know, if right now, when you take a bite of a donut,

it's really sweet and sugary and tasty and enjoyable. It's like favorable. But if every time you took a bite of a donut, someone like punched you in the face, then all of a sudden very immediately, it's unfavorable. And you're probably not gonna bite a donut that much more. You only need to get punched a few times before you're like, oh, I don't like how this is going.

So make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. That's like there are many ways to do each of those things, but that's like the 10,000 foot view for breaking a bad habit. At what point is a bad habit and addiction? Like what's the difference between the two in terms of like how you would define both? Yeah, that's a great question. So first I just want to like add the caveat that a atomic

avid is not a book about a diction. I don't claim to be an expert on addiction or have done research or anything on that. So I don't I never pitched the book that way. All I will say is I've heard from a lot of readers who either they or someone in their family or a friend has struggled with addiction that also still found the book useful. So maybe it's maybe there's something there, but I'm not pitching it. Is that kind of thing? To answer your question, though, what's the difference? And I think that the answer is the process of learning is still there when it's a bad habit. So the four steps of a habit that I like to break it into are Q craving response rewards. So you do a behavior that's kind of proceeded by this reliable Q. rewards. So you do a behavior that's kind of preceded by this reliable Q. And as an example, let's say you're driving down the road and you hear an ambulance, you hear the siren,

that's an auditory Q that starts the habit of pulling to the side of the road. And then the ambulance passes you and you feel like, okay, I did my finger, let the ambulance pass. Like that was the reward of the benefit for that behavior. I follow the law or I follow what I was supposed to do. So the more that you do that, the more ingrained that pattern becomes. And pretty soon you hear the siren and just kind of pull over the side of the road automatically. You don't even really think about it. With a bad habit, that process of learning is still happening. Maybe you're not doing what you wanted to do, but like you could still adjust it.

With an addiction, you're not learning anymore. It's like people who have addictions, they know that the behavior doesn't serve them. They know that they don't want to do it, but they still can't stop themselves from doing it. And so something about the feedback loop is kind of broken there. Like we might say, for example, that if I spend too much time on Instagram, that's a bad habit in the sense that maybe I'm doing it more than I would like to do it. But I could leave my phone in another room, or I could uninstall the app from my phone,

and it's not an addiction. I can curtail the behavior to the desired degree. But if you're addicted to social media, you can't bring yourself to do some of that stuff, even though you're on it and you feel guilty or you feel bad about yourself, but you still have to social media, you like can't bring yourself to do some of that stuff even though you're like you're on it and you feel guilty You feel bad about yourself, but you still have to be on it. So The process of learning isn't quite working the way that it normally would. I think that's one way to define the difference Gentile important do you think your your tribe or circle of people are when trying to create New habits in your life. How important are the people that we surround ourselves with with the success rate of that?

So I don't have any specific numbers on how it influences success rate, but I do think the influence is very important and that it's a dramatic element in the process of building and particularly sticking to good habits. There are a lot of strategies for getting you started this week. There are a lot of strategies for getting you started this week. There are a lot of strategies that can get you off square one or help you stop procrastinating. The book covers many of them.

But if you want to stick to a habit for like years or in some cases even decades, it's very rare that you would see a habit last for that long and you don't have some kind of social element, something that's reinforcing it. Classic example would be any religion. People go to church every year for, every Sunday for their whole life

and there's a really strong social component there. Or another example might be, if I walk outside my house and I look across the street and I see my neighbor mowing their lawn, I might think, man, I need to cut the grass too. And you'll stick to that habit of mowing your lawn for five or 10 or 25 years, like however long you live in the house. And why do you do it? Partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly you do it because you don't want to be judged by the other

people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. You know, it's like the social expectation of the group of neighbors that gets you to stick to that habit. And that is true for almost every tribe or group we belong to. They all have a set of norms, a set of standard behaviors, a set of things that are typical for that group. And the more that your habits align with the expectations of the tribes that you belong to, the more attractive they are because we don't only do habits for the results they get you individually. We do them for that reason, but we also do them because they're a signal to the

people around you. Like, hey, man, I get it. You know, like I fit in, I'm part of this group. I understand how we act here or how we behave in this business context or on this street or at this, you know, at this group or this event. And the signaling to the other people in the group is a really important part of it because it allows you to belong. And one of the deepest human needs, one of the deepest desires that we all have is the desire to bond and connect and be a part of something. Like even if it's just your little family unit, we all wanna be a part of something.

And if people have to choose between, you know, I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something, or I have the habits that I want to have But I'm cast out a master size I'm criticized I Mean most of the time people choose belonging over loneliness, you know like the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve So that's kind of the inverse of your question, which is if you don't have your tribe aligned if you're a part of a group where You're not

performing your desired habits or where it's not normal to do that thing, you're kind of asking yourself to play the game on hard mode, you know, you're like trying to go against the grain of the groups that you're in. And maybe you can do that for a week or a month or two or I don't know, but like at some point it starts to grade on you. At some point it's almost like a form of gravity where you're kind of constantly being tugged back to what the norm is in that group. So as best as possible, you want to get those two things aligned. You want to join groups where you're desired behaviors, the normal behavior.

Yeah, just to support what you're saying, you know, when I would work with somebody who wanted to make some big changes with their diet and their exercise, it was always much harder when their spouse was not involved or not trying to also make those changes. The success rate was much lower, but when their spouse was a part of it, the success rate would go through the roof. So it actually became part of the strategy

when I would work with someone to try to involve the people around them because it's just the success rate went up a lot. I wanna go back to what you said about making bad habits unattractive. Like, let's talk about maybe give me some examples of what that looks like. Let's say somebody has a bad habit of every morning

they wake up, they get coffee, but they get a pastry with it. And they're like, oh, I wanna break that bad habit of having that pastry. It's not good for me. I actually don but they get a pastry with it. And they're like, oh, I want to break that bad habit of having that pastry. It's not good for me. I actually don't feel good when I eat it. What would be a strategy of making it unattractive? Yeah.

So first I'll say, of the four things that I mentioned, make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. I think the first and the third are the best places to focus. So make it invisible by reducing exposure. So like in the pastry example, don't walk by that bakery, take a different route to work so that you're not tempted, or make it difficult. So increasing friction so that you aren't able to do that habit. Those, I think, are the two best strategies for breaking bad habits. Part of the reason, and this perhaps is what you're getting

at or why you're interested in asking this question, which is, how could you make a pastry unattractive? Like, your brain already knows that it tastes good, so that's a very difficult thing to do. Now, it can happen, for example, just to continue with a food or a bread or a carb example. Let's say you go downstairs every morning for breakfast and you make some toast. And then, you know, a couple of weeks from now, you read a book that convinces you that carbs are the devil and grain is terrible and you should never touch it again. Well, some people read books like that and they'll have this sort of like epiphany where it totally changes how they feel about it. And they go down the next morning and they don't think, I need to

make toast. I think I got to throw this bread out like we'll never buy grains again. So things like that can happen. It's just that I don't know that that process is very reliable. I don't know that you can design it very well. And so I don't recommend like having epiphany as a strategy. I do think that you can gradually change your feelings about things. And that's what I talk about with identity and habits, which we can talk more about that a little bit. But there are some things to do there. Instead, I think that for making things unattractive in the short term, you got a couple different things you could use. One thing you could do is what scientists call a commitment device. So to use another health example,

let's say that you go to bed tonight and you're like, all right, listen to this guy talk about habits today. So tomorrow's gonna be the day. I'm gonna go for a run. And you set your alarm and it's like on a 6am or something. And six rolls around and your bed is warm, it's cold outside, you're like, well, I'll press snooze and sleep in.

But if you come back to today and you text a friend and you say, hey, let's me to the park at 6.15 and go for a run. Well, now 6am rolls around and your bed is still warm and it's still cold outside, but if you don't get it up and go for a run, you're a jerk because you leave your friend at the park all alone.

So you've simultaneously made it more attractive to get up and go for a run, and less attractive to press news and sleep in. You haven't changed how hard the run is, right? Like the run's gonna suck just the same as it did before, but you have kind of changed the calculus that's going on in your mind about whether you wanna do it or not.

So that's one example of what I mean by changing how attractive a habit might be. And there are a lot of short term strategies for that. In the long run, I think the best option for this for changing how attractive something is is you need to shift your identity. You need to start looking at yourself in a new way. For example, in my case, I don't want to skip workouts because like I want to be the kind of person who doesn't

miss workouts. That's kind of part of the identity that I'm trying to build. I like myself more when I'm that person. I have a lot of evidence that I enjoy working out and that it's part of a good day for me. Now it's so much a part of my identity that it becomes easier to follow through on it. That I think is the real way that you make a habit more attractive or that you make the bad habit, in this case, of skipping unattractive, is by shifting your identity. That can take a while.

That's more of a long-term process. Some of these short-term strategies, like a commitment device, can maybe help you get going in the moment while you're trying to build that identity. Speaking into identity because we all kind of tend to wrap in a lot of our habits, like this is who I am and this is what I do, how important is it for you to talk about yourself in a different light in terms of like self-affirmation or just the way that you just talk about like the things that you do that will then lead to better habits.

I think that self-talk is really important. It probably isn't discussed enough. There's plenty of mindset stuff out there, but even still, I think people are often their own bottleneck. There are, in most areas of life, there might not be like a thousand ways to do something, but there's usually more than one way. And it's almost always the case that you stop yourself before the world actually gives you a hard stop. There's so, it's so rare in life that you come up against something and it's like,

hey, sorry, you can't be persistent anymore. There's nothing else to do. There's nobody else you could talk to. There's no small step you could take, you're out of options. It's just very rare to actually hit like a true brick wall like that. There's almost always some additional step you could take or something else you could try, some new line of attack.

And so people often stop themselves before the world actually stops you. I came across this interesting exercise this one time that I can't remember where I heard it, but the basic idea is you get out two sheets of paper and on the first sheet, the only rule of this game is that whatever you write down has to be true. So it has to be like, actually accurate or correct. On the first sheet, you're going to pick whatever time frame you want. Let's say the last year of your life or the last 10 years of your life, whatever. Let's say the last 10 years for this.

You're going to write down on this one sheet of paper the least favorable story of the last 10 years of your life. But everything you write down has to be true. On the other sheet of paper, you're going to write down the most favorable story of the last 10 years of your life. Now, if you're looking at those two pieces of paper, there are no lies. You know, like everything on here is correct. But man, how often do we tell ourselves a less favorable story? How often is the version that we're focusing on, the things that we're directing our attention toward, not the most empowering or most useful or most practical version of what's happening? And I like questions like assuming that I am going to deal with the reality of the situation, not ignoring the truth of the situation, not ignoring

the truth of the situation or what must be done, what is the most useful and empowering version of the facts that I can tell myself? And I just can't get, I don't see what telling yourself a different story gets you. If you're not ignoring reality, I think focusing on the most empowering or most useful version of the facts is almost always going to be the best option. So that form of self-talk, there are many ways to think about it, there are many ways to think about the story that we tell ourselves. But if you can do that, if you can focus on the most favorable or empowering or useful version of the facts, then I think you're in a better position to take action. I think you're in a better position to take action. I think you're in a better position to achieve the things

that you're hoping to achieve. So it certainly plays an important role in the habits that we're building and people with that kind of mindset. I think they're less likely to be their own bottleneck. They're less likely to tell themselves, no. That's something I try to remind myself of consistently. I don't always do a good job of it,

but I try as best I can to not tell myself no. I try to make the world tell me no first. And those are all just different ways of kind of thinking about that same problem. That would be such an interesting survey to do with people. I wonder how many people actually would even fail at coming up with the positive story. I would imagine that if you ask that exercise, like tell people, like give me a, that's the story that in the last 10 years it's positive, I bet you quickly,

people would come up with something negative. That's the one they always tell themselves. Right. Do you know, do you know how often that is or has your research around that? I think that'd be really good. I haven't seen any research or any studies on that little, what do we wanna call that exercise?

But I agree with you. I think what you would find is probably people on both sides are biased to the story that they tell themselves consistently. So the people who think negatively are biased or they would be able to come up with the least favorable version very quickly because their mind is just kind of stuck in that rut. And then the people who live kind of like some people might even call them overly positive or overly optimistic or whatever They would probably be able to easily come up with a favorable story and they might have to think for a little bit to come up with the negative version It also I think it's just generally true. I've noticed this for myself You know atomic habits comes out and I get a thousand positive comments on Twitter

And I just kind of read through them and don't think anything about it And then you get one negative reply and you spend the whole afternoon thinking about it. And so for some reason, the negative experiences in life, they get like marked more heavily in our brains. They occupy more space. So for the perhaps for that reason, coming up with the negative story might be easier as well. But I do think you probably would see people bias towards one of the other. But that also, I think, is the value of the exercise, is forcing yourself

to sit through it and come up with both versions and then realize, there's a different story I could be telling myself here. You know, like there, there's a different way. I don't, in a, there are kind of the most powerful choices or the things that we don't even realize we're choosing, you know, you don't even realize that you're choosing to tell yourself this negative version every day. And how is that coloring or impacting your behavior? But once you become aware of it, then maybe there's something you can do to adjust. And the process of behavior change

almost always starts with self-awareness. It's very hard to change it at least consciously or to design it if you're not aware of it. So some exercises like that can kind of help raise your level of awareness. Oh, I just, I think I can see that as a coach and trainer that we've been for so many years, I think that would be such a valuable exercise for me to do as a coach is to see how my client would respond and go, okay, I see what I'm dealing with. I'm dealing with somebody who automatically is going to default probably to the negative

story. They tell themselves versus the positive. And so that would give me a lot of insight. You know, a lot of what we've talked about so far with you is a lot of the stuff that is covering the book. But one of the things I'm always interested in when an author has a book, especially with this much success, are when you are going through all the research for this book, what were some epiphanies that you had? Or maybe things that

you thought were to be true and then you kind of disproved yourself or did you have any aha type of moments going through this? Yeah, well first I should just say basically everything that I write is like a reminder to myself first and foremost. So, you know, I obviously I try to write for the broad audience and I try to frame it in a way that can resonate with lots of people, even people, things that maybe I'm not even personally interested in, for having some not personally interested in. But at a foundational level, I need all this stuff. My publisher told me we write the books we need, and I definitely felt that way when I was working on the book. So it definitely strikes a personal chord with me in that way. So in that sense, a lot of the ideas were aha moments for me.

And that's kind of why I wrote about them in the first place is when I first heard about the distinction between systems and goals, I was like, oh, band, and that spawned all kinds of thoughts for me. And so I had to write an article about it. But the one that came to mind when you were asking your question is about self-control. This was a little surprising to me when I came across some of the studies on it and when I wrote that chapter. So, there's a chapter in a time that's called the Secret to Self-Control.

And the main takeaway is that we kind of have this story about there, you know, we look at people, elite athletes, for example, or, you know, top performers in various fields. And we think, oh, man, they just must have incredible willpower. They must have remarkable self-control. I wish I was that disciplined. But in fact, what a lot of research has found is that the people who exhibit the highest self-control are often the people who attempted the least. So the secret is not everybody's human. the secret is not, everybody's human. The secret is to design an environment where you're not going to be tempted that often,

or to design an environment where you're surrounded by forces that help keep you disciplined. And this is something I've heard from some of the professional athletes I've talked to or whoever read the book, is that after they retire, sometimes it's surprising how hard it is for them to maintain a fit in this habit, or for them to just like take care of themselves like they normally would.

Really common. Or like people would assume that they would. Because it wasn't actually their discipline exclusively that was getting them to do it. It was the trainers and the environment and their teammates and their coaches and like all of these other forces that were oriented towards helping them live this really disciplined elite athlete lifestyle. And when the environment shifted, their habits shifted as well. And that's even like a bigger picture lesson about habits, which is a habit is a behavior that's tied to a particular context. And when the context changes, your habits often change.

And so one of the first things that you can do to improve the odds that you're going to fall through on a habit or a behavior is to optimize the environment for that behavior. So let's just say you have a habit you're trying to build, keep that in the back of your mind, and then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, and look around and ask yourself, what is this room designed to encourage? What behaviors are easy here? What behaviors are obvious here?

And can I tweak the environment to make the good habits, the path of least resistance? Can I adjust some things here, reorganize some things so that what I want to do is simple and easy and frictionless and obvious. What I don't want to do is maybe hidden or a little bit more difficult. And again, fairly straightforward idea, but most people don't take the time to do it. If you can kind of stack the deck in your favor with that, it's so much easier to follow

through and appear as if you have great discipline and self-control, but in fact, you're just benefiting from the environment. I think one thing that I found as a trainer that helped me connect with people was talking about my challenges to my clients with nutrition and fitness and it kind of opened them up. So I'd like to hear from you your habits or bad habits or good habits that you find the most challenging within how you tackle this. Because obviously you're the author of this book. So you're like the guy. But does that mean that it's all easy for you? Yeah, it's a it's a one of the funny things. You know,

people kind of assume we should write a book about habits. You have like all your habits figured out. And again, like I said just a few minutes ago, all of this is stuff that's written for me. You know, like I'm struggling with all the same things. My readers and I are peers. And the only difference is that I just like write about the stuff, but we're all struggling with the same kind of stuff. In fitness terms, easily nutrition is the top one for me that I started with.

I enjoy working out and I think because I got exposed to it early in life and I was an athlete through college. I don't know, I just think I was comfortable in the gym at an early age and so I've always liked that part of it. But the nutrition part, I was able to get away with it in my 20s and just not think about it that much. But then as you get older, the margin for air becomes thinner and I had a couple different things that I tried.

So I did like the classic download my fitness pal, and then I'm like, oh, I'll go ahead and track my meals. I didn't even track it for a day. I did it for one meal, and I was like, this is a pain in the ass. There's no way I'm going to be doing it for the solid time. And anyway, I tried a couple other things too. Over the course of years, I'll just keep this short. But what ended up working for me is the last two years that have been the best two years I've had nutritionally. I hired a coach, so that was one thing that helped.

He doesn't do a ton. He gives me like a plan. I just count macros. I do have like a caloric target, but I don't worry about too much as long as I'm getting enough protein. Anyway, so he puts together a spreadsheet. For some reason, the spreadsheet worked better than an app for me. I think the thing that really made it work was that, like a lot of people, I probably have 20 or 30 meals that I eat 90% of the time. And once I got those like 20 or 30 things logged in the spreadsheet, I could just copy and paste them anytime I ate it. And so tracking became like really fast and easy. So that was one thing that helped. And then he sends me an email once a week. And just that kind of gentle nudge or knowing in the back of my mind that he's going to be

emailing me, that was enough to kind of get me on track. And what I'm getting at here is kind of where you alluded to in the question. I wrote a book about habits. It's not like I didn't know the strategies. You know, it's not like I didn't know what to do beforehand, but it just took me a while to figure out like it took years for me to figure out a process that worked for me. And I think there may be a couple lessons to take away from that. The first is you need some willingness to experiment with habits. If you're trying to build something new, like it's just very rare to get it right

on your very first try. And so if you try something and it doesn't work out, don't feel guilty about that or get depressed about it or feel like, oh, I'm destined to fail or whatever. It's just life is complicated and there is no one way to build better habits. The way that I view atomic habits the way I view the book is that there's a tool kit of strategies and my job is to lay all the tools out on the table. Your job is to say, you know what, for my situation, maybe a wrench is better, or maybe a hammer is what I need,

or maybe a screwdriver, but like, it doesn't mean that you are a failure if you picked up the wrong tool for the job the first time. You know, so just be willing to experiment and try out different things. And if you're stick with it and keep trying different lines of attack, eventually you'll settle on a version of those tools that works for the job that you have in front of you.

I have something for you, James. I think you'll like it. You talked about the donut analogy earlier and how it's hard to make it unfavorable. When we coach people around nutrition, one of the things that we tell them the mistake is, is we always value food by the taste. And nobody thinks about all the other downstream effects that you actually feel pretty quick. So one of the things that we help our clients with when it comes into making good habits and behaviors around food is teaching them how to not always just think about the taste,

but how does it make you feel two hours later? Like how's it sitting your stomach? How's your energy levels after that? How is your stool? How is your night of sleep? How it like, and start, help them connect. And a lot of times, what you find out when you have foods that are not ideal for you,

your body actually has a lot of really great signals that it tells you that that probably was an ideal for you. We've just learned to ignore them so well and stay so hyper focused on the reward of, oh, it tastes so good initially, but there's a lot of other things that can be signaled as unfavorable connected to that donut. And so we help clients make that attachment to it.

We're making it unattractive, as you would say. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's a fantastic example of what I mentioned a minute ago about how the process of behavior change often starts with self-awareness. You're right. We're like, not aware. We kind of push that stuff away. Oh, my stomach doesn't feel good two hours later,

or I didn't sleep well last night. It's that we're kind of ignoring, we're not aware of all these other signals that are happening. And once you do become aware of them, or just pay a little bit more attention to them, it becomes a little easier to shift your behavior. I know for me, one of my big kind of takeaways over the last couple of years of working

on some of this nutrition stuff, is how much having high protein, like if I get 200 to 250 grams of protein a day, a lot of other things are kind of surprisingly easy that I didn't think would be. It's much easier for my body to look the way that I wanted it to. I don't feel nearly as hungry on days when I do that, which that was a surprise to me. I'm surprised that I feel this good, even though I didn't eat an enormous amount, I'm not starving. So yeah, I think if you pay attention to some of those other signals, then that can be very helpful. And that also is probably a lesson that can be transferred to many other areas of life.

You know, like the one thing everybody talks about with business is how much money you make. But what about how much time you have, or what about how much flexibility you have on the projects you choose, what about how much you're traveling or not traveling, what about being able to choose the hours throughout the day when you work.

Like there's all kinds of things that you could focus on besides money, and we don't ask ourselves to pay attention to those things quite as much. If you can do that, a lot of the time it reinforces you to kind of check out from the typical status signals that society is kind of nudging you toward, but if you can step out from that and find different ways to measure success in that particular area, whether it's nutrition or entrepreneurship or whatever, then you can often figure out a better

way to design your days or design your habits for yourself. But that requires you to at least be willing to think about some of those alternative forms of measurement upfront. Did you have any chapters that you got pushed back on? I know authors that get to the level where you're at, where you've sell millions and millions of copies. Eventually, you get a bunch of emails too and everybody telling you, what's right, what's wrong with this?

Did you have, was there a specific chapter or topic that you covered in the book that's sinned or maybe rub people the wrong way or you get a lot of people trying to challenge you about? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Surprisingly, I haven't had one yet. The book is not that old, so we'll see how well it ages. You know, I kind of feel like the true test of like,

how true are these principles, how solid are they? Well, what's happened in 10 years from now? And what's happened in 20 years from now? You know, like, we'll see how timeless it really is. I wrote it with the intention of being as timeless as possible. So we'll see how it stands up. Also, I don't really write about that volatile of topics. So, you know, it's a pretty safe book in that sense.

You know, not writing about religion or politics or I don't know, a lot of other things that would be much more volatile. So, yeah, I haven't had to deal with it as much. We'll see, like I said, it's still early, but not too much so far. James, I want to comment on what you said about being an athlete. First off, just to not just make you feel better, but ex-athletes or people who competed in afterwards try to stay consistent with fitness and diet. They're the hardest ones. Actually, some of the hardest

clients. So really, that's just, yes, because their habits were based around this environment that's no longer there. It's always full throttle. And it's super hard. There's actually some of those challenging clients to get, you know, to be consistent afterwards because they don't know how to work out unless it's for competition or beat themselves up. And then when it comes to diet, you hit the nail on the head like when you're a kid

and you're competing at a high level, like you just need to eat. And then when you're older and you're just kind of working out a few days a week, you can't do that anymore. You can't get away with it. So it's like you got to start over. So that's, so, you know, good job to you first off because that's no joke. Those are some of the most challenging.

Actually, I will say probably ask challenging as an obese total beginner, okay? In terms of getting that person to be consistent. But I want to ask you this, through that process, what was your negative self-talk and what was your positive self-talk? So as you're trying to figure out nutrition, and you're like, man, I can do the workout part,

but the diet part sucks. And you mentioned like, in essence, you're talking about being patient with yourself. Be patient because nobody succeeds the first time, which is 100% true in my experience. What were you saying to yourself through this process as you were trying and failing? Well, I wish I had written it down because a lot of the stuff, you know, I probably don't remember exactly what I was feeling, but some of the things that are coming to me now as I'm thinking about it,

one thing I told myself a lot was, well, I guess this isn't just isn't really a priority. I'm acting like it's a priority, but clearly it's not because I'm not falling through on it. I'm not performing. So I guess I don't really care about this was maybe like some version of that. Some of it's easy for me to say stuff like that because then I feel like, oh, I'm being real with myself, but also there's probably some negative part of that because then you're devaluing it.

You're like, look, clearly you do care about this because you keep trying, but you're failing. So then you just tell yourself it's not a priority. So you feel better. So there's a, that was like one, one, probably the negative things I was saying. On the positive side, I started to, I like to play this little exercise or this little, what do I call it, thought experiment with myself. And I do this not just for like fitness stuff, but for many many areas, usually it's business related where I'll try to just be like, listen, is this even a possible like if you imagine all the possible ways this could go in the universe or in the world, is there some version of this that could work out? So to give an example, for many years the habit that kind of launched my career was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday and for the first three years that I did that they were long there like 2000 4000 words, you know took 20 or 30 hours to me to write each one.

It was like a really big effort it was a heavy lift each week and it worked really well I build a big audience but it was hard for me to sustain especially once I agreed to writing book, because then I just didn't have the hours to do the articles. And once I had kids, and you know, there's just like a lot of other things like coming into play. And so I got to this point after a time of cabbage came out where I sat down and I asked myself, is there a way to make this email newsletter easier for myself each week? And not just easier for me and like the same quality or slightly less quality, but could it even be better for the reader? Is there something that I could do right now that would be both easier for me and better for the reader? And if you try to imagine like all the possible outcomes in the universe, you're like, yeah, there has to be something in the overlap of that Venn diagram. And I sat with it for like

six months before I figured out now what I do is called 321. And so it's just this newsletter comes out each week. It's like three short ideas for me, two quotes from other people, one question to think about for the week. You know, there's millions of subscribers to it. The audience seems to like it just as much if not more than the articles I used to write. And it's much easier on me. So I did that same kind of thought experiment with the nutrition thing, where I was like, all right, I keep trying to do this stuff, and I'm busy, I have this business, I'm, you know, I come up with plenty of excuses for why I haven't been following through, but is there some version of this that can work for my current lifestyle?

And is there someone I could find who has like my body type and my lifestyle type that has stuck to this? And that was actually why I ended up reaching out to the coach I reached out to. He's very similar, he's even a little taller than I am. I'm like six, four, six, five, he's six, seven. But we have very similar body types and he runs his own business.

And I was like, you know what? He figured out how to do this for himself. So maybe like he would have a better idea how to make it work for me. And there was enough overlap there. I felt like between what I was doing and what he was dealing with that he would be able to have good advice. And whether that worked or not, I don't know. But my point is just the positive self-talk was telling myself that there were still options out there that could work for me. You have to believe that change is possible before you're willing to try it.

Like if you believe that it's already fixed, that I can't do it because of my genes or I can't do it because of my lifestyle or situation or you don't understand what I'm dealing with, it won't work for me. If that's where your mindset's at, if you're already convinced it's not going to work, well, for sure, it's not going to work then. So staying open to the possibility of change, that was probably the better thing I did. But then there's certainly plenty of negative talk that went along the way as well. James, before we started, you talked about how you put, you were putting your toddler down for an app and anybody who's got a toddler knows that that can be a huge challenge.

So you're a father, you have children. I know people sometimes they'll hear us talk about, you know, fitness and nutrition and behaviors and they'll be like, yeah, that's easy for you, but I got all these kids, I got this job, I got this. Did you have to change any of your habits or strategies because you become a father and the responsibilities of becoming a father? And what does that look like? Let's say somebody has created this strategy and it works for them, but then life circumstances change.

And things get just more challenging or complicated. You know, having kids definitely will do that. What does that look like? Yeah, that's a great question. For sure, I did have struggles with that. I was very slow on the uptake. All right, the way that I think about this is I try to, and I think this is particularly true for ambitious people.

If you have a lot of stuff you want to achieve, if you've got a lot of things you want to do personally and professionally, it's very hard to say no. And it's very easy if you sit there and start to dream about what you want to accomplish, you start to bite off more than you can chew. And once you become a parent, it becomes very clear that it's hard to squeeze all that stuff in because your time gets compressed so much.

And the way that I think about it now is life is like a series of seasons. And the question I try to ask myself is what season am I in right now? And when your seasons change, your habits often need to change. And I think at first, when I started thinking about that, it was kind of obvious that, hey, if it's a bad habit, I should like cut it out. Like, you know, there are things that won't benefit me.

I shouldn't spend time on that. And maybe I can regain some time, you know, that I was previously wasting on social media or YouTube or whatever, and I'll use that time to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. But actually, I think it's more nuanced than that. There are a lot of things, a lot of habits that maybe served you well in a previous season, but they don't serve you anymore in the new season that you're in. And there are many things that can signal a shift of seasons. Maybe it's having kids, but it could also just be getting married or taking a new job

or moving to a new city or keeping the same job but taking on a new project. There are all sorts of things that can signal a shift in seasons. And when your seasons change, your habits often need to adjust with them. And I was very slow with that once I had kids I think for the first like year and a half I was trying to force fit all these old habits for my previous lifestyle Into my new one and it wasn't working The main thing that's had to change is just the way that I work. I've I've tried to be kind of non-negotiable with my workout habit and say

I've tried to be kind of non-negotiable with my workout habit and say, this is the one thing that has to happen sometime today. Whatever it is, like I'll figure it out and it changes depending on what we're dealing with. I just had my second kid, so he's very young. And right now, usually I worked out during my first child's nap, that was like the best pocket of time each day. But now that doesn't work, because one of the two kids is always awake.

So now I work out at like 10, 30 a night, that's what I've been doing for the last like three months, I've been working out from like 10, 30 to 11, 30, and then I go upstairs and I go to bed. It's a very weird time to work out, and I don't think I'm gonna be doing that forever, but that's just like my one non-negotiable habit that has to happen,

and that's the best time for it to happen each day, so I just find a way to fit it in. But everything else is massively in flux and in chaos, and so the business habits writing, that's been a really difficult one for me. So I've had new kids, I've had a really hard time figuring out how to fit my creative habits, reading and writing into this kind of new phase. And I'll have a couple of weeks where it'll go well and I'll figure out a pocket of time

that works and then something will change. And then I got to find a new pocket of time a couple of months later. So it's been very hit or miss on that front. But anyway, the short answer to your question is yes, for sure it's been challenging. And like I said, I'm dealing with all the same stuff that every other parent's dealing with. In other words, this process never stops. In other words, it's always a process that you utilize, these are tools you can utilize

because life changes. So, the reason why I'm asking that question is I want people to understand that. It's not like you fix it and then done. It's like you got to constantly work at this and that's just kind of what life's all about. For that reason, I think that questions are more useful or more powerful than advice.

It sounds probably ironic at this point because I just spent the last hour sharing a lot of advice. But what I think is better is to have good questions. What season am I in right now? Is a good question to have. That. You know, like, what's the reason of my end right now is a good question to have. That's like part of that endless process where you kind of revisit and reevaluate

and reflect on where you're at and do your habits need to change. Another question that I really like is, what am I optimizing for? You know, sometimes people are optimizing for money. Sometimes they're optimizing for free time. Sometimes they optimize for family time. All sorts of things.

And what you optimize for will change over the years. You know, what I'm optimizing for right now is different than what I was optimizing for 10 years ago. And so you need to keep at revisiting that question and adjusting your behavior based on what's most important to you in the moment. Another question that I like is, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? So once I know what I'm optimizing for, do I have the habits that are putting me on that trajectory? Am I marching in the right direction even if it's slowly? Because if you're not on the

right path, you're not on the right trajectory, something needs to change. And then maybe the last question that I'll offer that I just think is helpful or keep revisiter, keep in the back of your mind as you show up each day. What is the work that keeps working for me once it's done? That's kind of one of the crucial ones I think about in a business context. When Atomic Habits came out, I did a bunch of interviews about the book and some of them were on radio. And I agreed to them without thinking too much about it, but now I don't really do radio interviews anymore because once it's off the air, once the segment's done,

the work that I just put in vanishes, nobody's listening to it anymore. Whereas the podcast gets recorded. And there are people right now, as we're talking here, who are listening to some other podcasts that I interview that I did. It's kind of like there are multiple versions of James out there and they're still working for me. right now, as we're talking here, who are listening to some other podcasts that I interview that I did. It's kind of like there are multiple versions of James out there and they're still working

for me. And so if you can focus on tasks that are like that, where the work that you put in is still working for you, once it's finished, once it's completed, that's a very high leverage way to spend time. And so I think if you can answer those questions well, what are my optimizing for? Figure that out, be clear about it for this season of life. Have habits that are going to carry you in that direction, and then spend your time on things that are going to continue to work for you once they're done. Now we're kind of directing our attention

and energy in a way that it's more likely you're going to get the payoffs that you want, and it's less likely that your effort is going to be wasted along the way. But all of those questions are endless. All of this is a continual process. And so it's not something that you ever have fully licked. You need to wake up again tomorrow and give it your best effort and ask yourself those questions again and then course correct as needed. Excellent.

Well, James has been a pleasure. Have you on the show? Thank you so much for giving us your time. Of course, yeah, happy to do it and appreciate the chance to talk with you guys. Thanks again. And just based off talking to you, by the way, James, you would love our podcast.

You got to check out. It's for the God. We say the same stuff just differently. And I think you would enjoy it. Very similar. Nice, yeah. Cool man, that's great. Put your shirt again.

And yeah, thanks for looking forward to seeing this one come out. Thanks James. All right, see you guys, thanks for looking forward to seeing this one come out. Thanks James. Alright James. Alright, see you guys. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump

Media dot com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com.

If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.