Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 345: How to Change Your Habits | Katy Milkman

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

To state the blazingly obvious, creating healthy habits can be infernally difficult. But why? And what are the best strategies for getting around this? My guest today has spent nearly two decades researching these questions. Her name is Katy Milkman. She is a behavioral scientist and professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She hosts a podcast called Choiceology and has written a new book called, How to Change. In this conversation, we talk about why willpower is such an unreliable inner resource, why making habit change fun is such a powerful technique, and key strategies such as “the fresh start effect,” “temptation bundling,” “commitment devices,” “piggybacking,” and giving yourself a Mulligan. We also talk about the potentially sensitive subject of getting other people to change.  Are you interested in teaching mindfulness to teens? Looking to carve your own path and share this practice in a way that feels real, authentic, and relevant in today’s world? Our friends at iBme are accepting applications for their Mindfulness Teacher Training program - catered towards working with teens and young adults. The last round of applications are due May 15th and scholarships are available. For more information and to apply, check out: https://ibme.com/mindfulness-teacher-training/. We also want to deeply thank and recognize mental health professionals for your support. For a year's FREE access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources visit: https://www.tenpercent.com/mentalhealth. We have one final item of business, and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we’ll be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety – something I’m sure we’re all too familiar with. In this series, you’ll become intimately familiar with the mechanics of anxiety: how and why it shows up and what you may be doing to feed it.  And this is where you come in. We’d love to hear from you with your questions about anxiety that experts will answer during our anxiety series on the podcast. So whether you’re struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about re-entering the world post-Covid, or have any other questions about anxiety - we want to hear from you. To submit a question or share a reflection call [phone] and leave us a voicemail. If you’re outside the United States, you can email us a voice memo file in mp3 format to [e-mail]. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, May 12th.  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/katy-milkman-345 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, two state, the blazingly obvious, creating healthy habits can be infernally difficult, but why? And what are the best strategies for getting around this?

My guest today has spent nearly two decades researching these questions. Her name is Katie Milkman. She's a behavioral scientist and professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She hosts a podcast called Choiceology and has written a new book called How to Change. In this conversation, we talk about why willpower is such an unreliable inner resource, why making habit change fun is such a powerful technique, and key strategies from her quiver, such as the fresh start effect, temptation bundling, commitment devices, piggybacking, and giving

yourself a mulligan. We also talk about the potentially sensitive subject of getting other people to change their habits. Before we dive in though, two quick items of business. First, do you have any interest in teaching mindfulness to teenagers? If so, our friends at IBME are accepting applications for their mindfulness teacher training program, which is catered toward teenagers and young adults.

The final deadline for applications, it's coming up on May 15th, scholarships are available, their mindfulness teacher training program, which is catered toward teenagers and young adults. The final deadline for applications, it's coming up on May 15th, scholarships are available. For more information and to apply, check out ibm.com slash teacher training. We'll of course put a link in the show notes. Second item, as many of you may know, may is mental health awareness month.

Over the past year, mental health professionals have been doing heroic work helping people in the midst of so much upheaval and a huge uptick in anxiety and depression and addiction. And so we want to recognize all these mental health professionals and thank them for what they're doing. It also to offer some support. So if you fit into the category of mental health

professional and you want a year's free access to the 10% happier app where there are hundreds of meditations and other resources, go ahead and visit 10% dot com slash mental health. Okay, here we go now with Katie Milkman. Katie Milkman, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I'm excited.

Let me ask you a question that I get a lot from people, which is why is human behavior change so infernally difficult? I get that question a lot too. I guess I'm glad to hear that you also get it all the time. So I've been studying this for about 20 years and I still don't have a succinct answer for you. But what I will say is that there are a bunch of different things working against change and there are deep rooted instincts

that we have to overcome, including the tendency to want instant gratification, which tends to work against our long-term goals and our long-term change objectives. The tendency to be forgetful, because again, we're so focused on the present that we're not as good at planning for the future. The tendency to take the path of least resistance, which also makes a lot of sense for so many reasons if you think about our evolution, but can be a challenge when you wanna pivot. The issue that we often have low self-efficacy

can be a challenge for change as well. And that our social networks may not have been constructed with change in mind and maybe holding us where we are. So all of those things plus needing the motivation to actually get started because it does take work all those things accumulate and work against us That makes a lot of sense

Which leads me to my next question just on a personal tip Why are you so you said 20 years you've been looking at this question? What is driving you? I mean in having interviewed a lot of researchers on this show, I often hear from people the old saw about research is me search. So for you, is this driven by some things in your own personal life? It absolutely started as me search as so much research does. Just being intrigued by quirky patterns and my own behavior and the behavior of my friends and family that I couldn't explain with the models that already existed for human nature, and being interested in fixing some of the things that were making life

harder for me. The very first study I really did on behavior change was motivated by some of my own experiences in graduate school, finding it really difficult to motivate myself at the end of a long day of attending classes in the computer science department and economics and just being exhausted from all of this sort of quantitative thinking. All I wanted to do was just curl up on my couch with some fun entertainment and I didn't want to go to the gym even though I knew it would be good for me.

I didn't want to do my homework, even though I knew that needed to get done. And I needed a solution. So I ended up coming up with a solution for myself that I now call temptation bundling. I only let myself enjoy indulgent entertainment while I was exercising at the gym. And specifically got really into tempting audio novels, like think the Twilight series and Hunger Games style books and James Patterson. I was only allowed to listen while I was at the gym. And that suddenly motivated me at the end of the long day to head to the gym.

I was looking forward to finding out what happened next. And I'd get there. I have a great workout time would fly while I was at the gym. I'd come home motivated and ready to study because I'd already gotten my entertainment fix in. And so this was so useful to me that I thought, oh, maybe I should study it. And that was one of the first research projects I ended up doing around behavior change was on this topic of temptation, bundling, and proving it wasn't just me that other people can benefit from linking temptations with whatever it is they know they should do more. But then a little while

after I got going on that kind of project, I learned how hugely beneficial it would be if we could basically crack the code on behavior change. When I started, I was sort of interested in these quirky things that people were doing. I wanted to solve my own problems, but I saw this graph when I was at a seminar at the Penn Medical School as an assistant professor here. I'm a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. And this graph showed a breakdown of the percentage of all premature deaths due to different causes.

And it showed that 40% of premature deaths are due to behaviors that could be changed. And that just like completely blew my mind. I had no idea that so many people were living shorter lives than they could have if they just adjusted their diet and exercise and intake of alcohol and cigarettes and made better decisions about vehicle safety and so on. And so it was really that that supercharged my interest in behavior change, not just in health domain, but also in other walks of life where it was clear if it accumulates so much in health, then if you think about savings and education, and all of these other places where we're making

daily decisions that accumulate, the impact could be a lot bigger than I'd ever appreciated before. So went from personal curiosity to a more societal, altruistic impulse? Yeah. And like a realization that this thing that I just found intriguing exactly and personally curious could have a real meaningful impact. And that's where so much of our motivation to do more and be better comes from as the search for meaning. And I found it meaningful when I realized what a big impact this could have. So you talked about temptation bundling as your first big research initiative. Is there more to

say there in terms of how those of us out here in the wild can apply what you've learned about temptation bundling and then we'll get on to the other things you've learned. The insight at the heart of it is really that if we are fighting an uphill battle to change a behavior because it's inherently unpleasant and we dread it, we have to find a way to make it more fun. We can't just push our way through and so many of us have

that sort of Nike theme in our heads of just do it. And it's just wrong. It's not effective. We tend to think that if we just really have big goals and we're ambitious and we try to pursue the most effective way, we're going to get far. And in reality, people who try to make it fun to pursue their goals get farther because they persist. So if you're trying to create a new exercise routine or a new healthy eating lifestyle or even to study more effectively, if you can find ways to make it more enjoyable to do those things, right? You pick Zumba for your workout instead of the maximally efficient stairmaster.

Are you drink smoothies instead of eating only kale, right, or you find ways to make it fun to do your homework because you play music you like and you do it in a relaxing environment. Those things actually turn out to really matter and help us persist because we won't find it unpleasant to be doing the thing that's good for us. we won't find it unpleasant to be doing the thing that's good for us. There's research by ILL at Fishbok and Caitlin Wolley to really brilliant psychologist showing we've got the wrong intuition on this, and if we can get it right, we can make so much more progress. Intemptation bundling is really just a way that I've studied that fits into this literature

that they have expanded since suggesting a way we can make it more fun. It's just by linking something alluring with whatever it is you're dreading doing, but that's good for your change goals. So this idea of gutting it out, doing it with maximal efficiency, you're saying it's less effective than making it fun. So what does that say about this notion we have around willpower? Will power is overrated. And I think that one of the really interesting studies that my friend and collaborator Angela Duckworth did with one of her former PhD students, Brian Gala, showed that the people who we think of as having the most self-control

actually aren't exerting self-control often when they're making the kinds of decisions that make us look up to them. They've built habits and routines that actually put those good behaviors on autopilots and they've used systems, sort of like the one I just described for temptation bundling,

willpower is hard to use, it's unpleasant to use, and the less we rely on it, the better, the better thing to do is actually just design choices so that the thing that's going to be good for you in the long run doesn't require willpower at all because you're looking forward to it. So I have always kind of just motivated myself. I mean, I'm getting, you know, just to be honest, I'm getting way closer to your view of the world in my own personal life. But a lot of the way I've motivated myself,

historically has been fear. If I don't get this stuff done, I'll live under a bridge, et cetera, et cetera. And I feel like that, I mean, didn't make me happy, but it worked on some level for much of my life. Yeah, well, there's really two ways that you can change the equation when it comes to achieving long-term goals that aren't instantly gratifying. But that, you know, produced the

most long-term benefit, and that's the carrot on the stick. And we've been focused on the carrot, which I find more fun to talk about it than to pursue. But the stick works as well, and that is basically creating an incentive structure for yourself. And that can be through, you know, self-talk and fear, mongering, or it can be literally through more formal structures, like setting up what economists call a commitment device, a tool that will restrict your choices in the future so that you can't make bad decisions and find yourself. For instance, you can put money on the line that you'll forfeit if you fail to achieve a goal and have a referee who will make sure that that money is forfeit if you don't achieve the goal.

So there are these stick approaches we can take, and they can also be really, really effective. And I'm happy to talk about some of the research on that as well. Both toolkits are available and both really do the same thing. They change the equation so that those things that are good for you in the long run. If you don't take the action now in the short term, that is aligned with those long term goals, you either feel the pinch of the stick, you get a fine or there's some sort of restriction that prevents you from moving forward, or they're more fun. So you get greater gain now along with the gain later.

On the stick, if I'm here, you correctly, you're saying setting up a system where you have to pay a fine, if you don't do the thing, you tell yourself you want to do, you didn't say this directly, but I'm inferring from what you said that that's more effective than just having a running dialogue of anxiety around nameless dread about the things that will happen if you don't, you know, get your work done. Well, it's harder to study the nameless dread approach. It's hard to randomly assign people to a nameless dread condition. So honestly, I don't think there's a really fair test, but there is strong evidence that when you put

specific stakes down, you can achieve more than if you just, for instance, say I commit to do this out loud or to another person. So sort of first best is, this just aligns with, you know, all of economics, the higher the cost penalty in terms of money or shame or whatever it is you could impose on yourself if you fail, the better. And so stakes get higher when you involve other people, when you put money on the line and so on,

rather than just having that dialogue in your head. That's interesting. You reference other people because, so I'll just give an example, just a sort of random example from my life over the last couple of days. I've I've known that I need to prepare coming into today and tomorrow because I on each of these days, I have three podcast interviews. So the folks on my team who are like amazing sent me what we call prep docs or preparation documents for you and all of these other guests.

And my job is to read through them and then come up with a list of questions. And there's just a lot of reading. I didn't want to do it. And I'm as I told you before we started recording here, I just got my second vaccine shot. I'm super happy. I got it, but I don't feel great. And so I really didn't want to do this work. But I did it because of fear really. Like I didn't want to let my team down

and I didn't want to go, I didn't want to do crappy interviews. Yeah, exactly. So you have stakes there. That's absolutely one version of stakes. But you could of course have emptied up even more by putting $1,000 on the line and having a member of your team, then make sure that you sent it to a charity you disliked. If you showed up and they didn't feel you were sufficiently prepared, you could have had them grade you in advance.

So that's an example of a way you could amp up the cost of making a decision that wouldn't be good for you in the long run. If you felt you needed the extra incentive. And so your research shows that these commitment structures, I believe that's the phrase you use, they really do work. Well, it's not just, it's not really my research. It's research by lots of my peers. They do, there's wonderful evidence of this. So let me tell you a couple examples that I think are interesting and compelling. One that I like a lot is a study that looked at people who are trying to quit smoking, which is one of the toughest things someone can try to do, especially when it comes to willpower and there's literally right addiction, you're

fighting against there. And people were randomly assigned either to a traditional smoking cessation program with all of the traditional trappings of that, all the tools and techniques, or that program plus the opportunity to put money on the line that would go into a savings account for six months that they'd have to forfeit if six months later they didn't pass a urine test for nicotine or cotenine in their urine. And just the presence of that extra opportunity to put that money on the line significantly increase the rate at which people manage to quit.

So that's one example of the sort of commitment device technique and how powerful it can be. There's lots of other wonderful research on this as well. The one of my favorite studies actually looks at savings commitments. And it's a different way of doing it. It's inviting people who wanted to save to either put money in a standard savings account, which we're all used to, or a commitment account where you can't take money out until you've reached a predetermined date that you choose or predetermined savings goal you choose. And people had access to those two accounts. They have the same interest rate. The only difference between these accounts

is one of them is a liquid, right? You can't take your money in and out, which might sound crazy. Like why would anyone do that? That's like letting the bank basically steal your money. But if you recognize that it could help you not dip into savings when you face temptation, you might be interested in this.

And in a randomized controlled trial where one group of people who wanted to save was offered only a standard account and the other group had access to both your standard savings account and this commitment account, the people with the commitment account saved 80% more year over year

just because they had a way to tie their hands. So there's lots and lots of evidence that these kinds of techniques can be really valuable when it comes to challenges of well power. And again, you, am I correct in assuming you would recommend this approach rather than just tell your friend. No, no, sorry, doing what I've historically done of the shame.

Yes, that kind of thing. I would, again, you can use both if you really want to. Right, you can have both the shame in your head, but also that external way of motivating yourself and that can be more powerful. There's some research on accountability to other people and that certainly matters too, by the way. But basically, the more forces you bring to bear,

the better seems to be, you know, naturally true. If you can make it fun as well as having a commitment device, right? Like they've just got everything working towards your goal and nothing tugging you in the wrong direction. So the more of this, we can muster the better. Something we've talked about a lot on the show that's been really helpful to me in terms of meeting my long-term goals, whether it's, whether it's getting the work done I need to get done for the show or I'm writing a book or any number of things that I'm working on has been around self-compassion. I didn't inherit a lot of take it easy on yourself, but I have found that actually taking it easy on myself improves my moment of honor, experience of doing my work

and the work itself. And I understand from past guests that there's quite a bit of evidence here. Is that something that you've looked at too around how self-compassion can help us make change as opposed to being driven by an inner drill sergeant or a shame monger? Yeah, it's absolutely the case that change requires us to be able to get up when we have setbacks

because they're inevitable. And I think one of the things that gets in the way of changes when we let those setbacks discourage us to the point where we don't believe in ourselves anymore, we throw up our hands and give up because we said, you know, I fell down on the job on this one occasion, I must not be able to do this. So I think there's huge amounts of evidence on how important resilience is to change. And also, you can plan to be resilient, which probably sounds a little bit funny, but just as there are these tricks that we've been talking about for dealing with the challenge of, okay, how are you going to restructure

your incentives? If you will, to do the thing that's not instantly gratifying, so it actually becomes a dominant choice in the moment. You can also think about restructuring choice in a way that makes it more likely you won't give up on yourself when you fall down, because again, that always happens. So I'm happy to get into some of the research on that. I think it's really fascinating. And by the way, when I think about what I want to do for the next 20 years and what I think the most important topic is that's still not as well understood as I'd like it to be

around behavior change, I think this is it. Figuring out more tactics, more strategies, more that we can do because falling down is absolutely always part of any change journey, right? Only 10% of New Year's resolutions are achieved. Okay, maybe we can make that higher when we use all the best science, but there's always going to be a lot of people who are facing challenges. They can't surmount on the first try. And so, you know, what is it that we can do to help ensure that their structure of the way they're approaching their goals supports getting back on the horse and trying again? You had offered up a second ago something like, oh, I could tell you more about the research

you want to. So go ahead, I'd love to hear it. Yeah, okay, great. Okay, well, let me tell you about one really simple study that I love by one of my colleagues at Wharton, Merissa Sharif that she did as part of her dissertation work, actually at UCLA with Suzanne Shu. She was really interested in the idea of basically acknowledging that you are going to have some slip ups when you have a big ambitious goal, but you don't want to have a wimpy goal. You still want to keep that ambitious goal. So how can you sort of do those two things,

keep the ambitious goal, but be prepared for slip ups? And it turns out there's this term in marketing called the What the Hell Effect that I think is beautifully named, where if you are pursuing a big goal and you do make a mistake, like you're trying to eat healthily today and you end up seeing a doughnut out at breakfast and you eat it. Then you say, oh, what the hell? And you have steak and potatoes and apple pie for lunch and

you know, pizza for dinner and the whole thing's out the window. So how can we basically avoid that kind of reaction to these slip ups? That was what she was interested in. So she came up with this idea that we could create what she calls emergency reserves whenever we're pursuing an ambitious school, which basically are like a mulligan and golf. You give yourself a limited number of these and you can sort of pull them out and say, I'm still on track, even when you have to declare a couple of emergency reserves, it doesn't throw you off track. So here's a study she ran to prove this could be effective. She had people who were trying to do a task seven days a week.

That was, and they'd get paid every time they did it. That was ideal, the more they did it, the more they got paid. And she randomly assigned them to three different groups. One group was just told, try to do it seven days a week. And if you do, then you achieve your goal. Another group was given an easier goal, which was just try to do it five days a week, and you'll achieve your goal. And a third group was told, try to do it seven days a week, but I'll give you two emergency reserves. And if you have to use them, you can, and you'll still be on track with your goal.

And it turned out that emergency reserve group did vastly better than the other two, even though actually they're identical from a goal perspective to the five-day week goal. They get sort of the best of both worlds. They have the seven days a week as what they're striving for, so they have this big, ambitious goal that they're trying to achieve, but they had a backup a way out when something went wrong and they didn't throw up their hands and give up. So that's just one micro example of a way that we can plan and set ourselves up. But I think the psychology of it is really beautiful. And we can think about it in all sorts of ways whenever we're trying to achieve something ambitious.

This rhymes nicely with what I often tell people about starting a meditation habit, which is to shoot for daily-ish. Yeah, that's very nice. I like that. So, when you say daily-ish, you, that's very nice. I like that. So when you say daily-ish, you're saying, try to do it every day, but if you're too rigid about daily, you'll sort of give up on yourself when you have those slip-ups. Is that why you're, you add the-ish?

Yes, because it gives you sort of elasticity or flexibility that reduces the odds that you're, you know, the voice in your head will swoop in and tell you that you're a failed meditator if you miss a day. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I love that you use the term elasticity too because you're making me think of some other research that I've actually done that I think is closely related and yet distinct showing how important one we're forming habits it is not to be too rigid in the way we structure them. So this is different

than sort of you might miss a day and then give up on yourself. It's actually within the framework of what you're trying to do on a given day, having more flexibility. So in this experiment we ran with Google, we were trying to help people build exercise habits and we tested two ideas, one where we were encouraging people to try to come to the gym within the same two-hour window that they told us was best for them every single day. And another group was encouraged with reminders to come during that window, but basically got credit and payment no matter when they exercised.

And we did this for a month, and then we sort of let go and said, well, who has formed a stickier, more stable habit? And we thought that the more rigid habit would be better because we were thinking of it as a routine, and it would be sort of more on autopilot, and we were completely wrong because that habit, as I said, was rigid. So people would aim to go say at 7am, and if they made it at 7am, and great, but if they didn't make it at 7am, they didn't go at all. And net net, that led to actually a less robust habit than the folks who were aiming for

7am, but also had sort of a noon thing that could work out for them or a 5pm. And if they missed the 7am, they still got there at noon or at 5pm. So all these fallback plans in case the first best didn't work out proved really important to that robust lasting habit. So, there's all these different ways within the way we structure our, or build our routines, within the way we think about what we're trying to accomplish, that we can be more flexible with ourselves and more prepared to get back up when we fall down.

If I'm hearing you correctly, the lesson there is not that routines don't matter. It's that routines can really help and flexibility can make whatever you're trying to do the habits stickier. Absolutely, that's right. That's exactly right. So all the people we were studying had found sort of an optimal time and were at least half of their visits were at that optimal time. And it was that there was this important variable we hadn't appreciated was you need a fallback plan when that first best routine doesn't work out. And that's what forms the stickiest habit.

I want to go back to Carrot for a second because earlier, like way earlier in this interview you were talking about making things fun. And there was one aspect of making things fun that I don't think I steer due towards, and I just want to give you a chance to talk about it. And that is gamification. Yes, gamification, which is such an interesting,

you know, 10 years ago was really in vogue companies thinking about like, how can we gamify work so that these tasks that people need to do, maybe, you, maybe any kind of drudgery associated with a job, how can we make it more fun? Can we add all the bells and whistles of leaderboards and moving up levels and winning small prizes to try to motivate people to find more joy at work and therefore be better performers. And the evidence on this is actually really mixed. So what I think is so interesting is that it does seem like it can work to game a fire work in one of my favorite studies on this was looking actually

at Wikipedia volunteers and new volunteers, the same performance levels, somewhere randomly assigned to get a little accolade next to their name and others weren't, and they weren't visible to each other. So there's no ability to compare. It's this more private signal. And what they found is that people who were getting that

sort of bell and whistle persisted longer. They kept working more for Wikipedia. They were more likely to be active even a year later, just for that small reward. So that's one example of how a little bit of gamification people got that praise and felt better about the work and that made it more compelling to stick with it. There's also a nice study of families that we're trying to walk more as a family and somewhere randomly assigned to play a game with their family members for something like 12 weeks where they could advance to new levels and they could win a mug if their family

had the most steps. And another just sort of got daily feedback. And the gamification there really worked wonders as well. So note that those are both situations where people are really volunteering or opting in and they're aligned with whatever the goal is, right, the volunteers at Wikipedia are raising their hand. It's like, oh, I wanna try to help this website

that maintains the world's biggest encyclopedia. The families are interested in getting fit and that's why they sign up for this program where it seems like it backfires, is when it feels like forced fun from an employer. So really interesting study of sales people who were put into a game setting, where they're calling every sale like a score,

or a dunk, or a layup, and they can win a champagne bottle if they get the most prizes, and there's leaderboards on their floors at work, and so on, this did not work. And the big variable seemed to be that a lot of people felt like it was being imposed on them by management, and they thought it was lame.

And it wasn't fun for them at all. It didn't have the desired effect. People who actually felt like it was fun, and said, you know, actually liked this, the subset of people for whom that was the case. So they enjoyed work a little bit more and they felt a little better about their work, but on average that wasn't the reaction.

And so all of these studies together when I take them together, I think the key finding to me is, okay, gamification can have a magic. It can make whatever goal you're pursuing more fun when it clicks, but it's a little bit of an art to figure out what it does. And it seems like the safest bet is that we don't impose it on other people, but invite them to volunteer.

If they think this sounds fun to them, right? If you opt in to something you're not going to feel like it's imposed on you, if people are given ways that they can enjoy these sorts of techniques, like there's this app I keep getting told about called Zombie Run by people who hear about temptation bundling where you put it on and it tells you how to run. It tells you like a story of zombies chasing you. And this is when you just speed up and slow down

and quick dodge. And obviously that is not gonna be fun for everyone. If you're not a zombie fan, it's gonna sound weird. And if I am posted on you, I'm not sure it would help with your fitness, but for the people who love zombies, this is great. So I do think there's this matching that's necessary in the sense that you're not coerced. So if I want to make the process of starting a new habit, fun, but I want to take the carrot approach and I'm looking at gamification, it has to be a game I want to play. Exactly.

And I think it's by the way much safer for the story you just told. Like the I want to change, I'm looking for tactics, I'm electing, and it becomes more dangerous when you're thinking, this person who I manage or coach, I'd like to see them change. And I'm going to design a gamified system that I am confident will make it more fun,

because I think one of the things that they're struggling with is they don't enjoy the job. So I'm going to make it fun for them to do the thing that's in the long-term best interest of the company. That is when I think we see more issues with gamification, whereas when it's a self-directed goal, I'm less worried about it. What do you recommend if we want to change the behavior of others? It really depends, I think, on what the challenge is that's standing in the way, and that's probably the biggest lesson of all the research I've done in my career on changes that

if we want to change ourselves or other people, there's not like a one-size-fits-all solution. Those some of the things we've talked about are really generalizable, like a lot of us struggle with finding the willpower to do the things that are not so fun in the moment. So that's a big one, but some of the things that are required for change aren't willpower problems. Sometimes it's a challenge of confidence or a challenge of habit or a challenge of even forgetting. Like I keep meaning to start that 401k plan, but I actually never get around to it.

And it's not so much willpower that's holding me back as my poor memory and poor planning processes. So it depends on what the barrier is, and then figuring out how do we set up structures and solutions that are suited to that barrier, whether it's finding ways to make it fun, trying to be more flexible in terms of the kinds of habits we build so that they're more resilient. There's lots of other things I share in the book and in my research, depending on that barrier. I do wanna stick with this idea of changing other people

because it can be from the perspective of an employer, but it's also, you might wanna encourage your spouse to get more sleep or to exercise more to start a meditation habit. You might wanna encourage your kid to do their homework. Absolutely. There are lots of situations in which we want to encourage change in the folks around us.

So this seems like a fraught endeavor. And well, this is what I think I'm picking up from the foregoing from you is you got to think about what is the change you're trying to get somebody else to make. What are the barriers you perceive and then be creative from there? Yeah, I think that's a really nice summary and hopefully we can even do better than be creative and look to science for techniques that are useful in helping with those specific barriers.

And I'm happy to talk about some more of the characters. Well, let me talk about one that we haven't covered at all that I think can be particularly important when it comes to encouraging someone else that you care about to make a positive change. And that is getting started, which is a big barrier, right? When is the moment right to try to encourage someone else to change or to change yourself? And this is a question that I have been interested in for a while because I actually got a great question when I was presenting some of my early research at an event at Google, actually,

I mentioned Google earlier, I've done some research with them and I was there presenting about a decade ago, some of my work on nudging change and employee populations trying to nudge towards better health and wellness, more savings for retirement, more productivity, and so on. And I got this absolutely fantastic question that really shifted my own research career after I presented this work. And the question was, is there some ideal time

to nudge change? So the human resources director I was talking to was completely sold. Okay, these are great tools, but he said, you know, Katie, when should we deploy them? When should we be encouraging our employees? Is there some ideal time? And I vividly remember like the light bulb going off in my head when I got that question because I was like, wow, that's such a great question. I don't think that has been explored thoroughly.

And I immediately had some ideas and wanted to go start collecting data. A lot of people I talk to immediately have the same reaction I did, which is like, well, one date might be New Year's. We know that there's this tendency at the New Year for 40% actually it turns out of Americans to set resolutions and then try to pursue them. This is like a goal setting time of year. But what I was interested in is what was the psychology of New Year's and whether there were other moments that might have that same psychology and motivate us to change. So my amazing former student now UCLA professor

Heng Chen Die and I started talking about this with another colleague Jason Reese and Heng Chen went and sort of chased down all of this literature on the nature of the way we think about time and the way we structure our time and our memories and found that there are all these moments in our lives that actually can feel like new beginnings, just like New Year's, because of the way we organize our memories. And we think about our lives more like chapters than a novel. Then sort of you might expect, and every time we open a new chapter, it's not linear, right? You don't open a new chapter every two and a half months. You open a new chapter when something meaningful happens on the calendar

in your life, whether it's the celebration of a birthday or a new year or the start of a new semester if you're a student or a new week even, or maybe something more momentous, like you start a new job or get a promotion or become a parent or move to a new community. All of those moments help us open these new chapters and they have a similar psychology to New Year so it hadn't been studied before, which is that they feel like a fresh start.

You feel like, you know, I'm the new me, I'm opening a new chapter, the old me who couldn't quit smoking or start exercising regularly or whatever it was that would have been maybe better for me. They're behind me and that's the old me and this is the new me and the new me can do it. And you're also more likely to step back and think big picture about your goals at these chapter breaks because they sort of disrupt the minutiae of life that everyday stuff gets disrupted. And finally, if you actually literally have some kind of a clean slate like you're in a new job or a new city, you can have some of the habits wiped away

and a blank slate to work with literally. You don't have your burrito place, that's not so good that you go to every day at work because you're in a new job and a new place, so you get to form a routine from that. So, that is all to say, we've now studied fresh starts and shown that these moments do actually have two properties. One, people are more likely to set goals. If you look at goal setting on a popular website around health and finances do actually have two properties. One, people are more likely to set goals. If you look at goal setting on a popular website around health

and finances and education and even the environment on these fresh start dates, like the start of a new week, month year, following birthdays, following holidays that feel like fresh starts like Labor Day. They're more likely to search for the term diet on Google, more likely to go to the gym at these dates than on other dates. And if we highlight fresh start dates for people

and invite them to begin change on those dates, we also see that they're particularly attractive. So we've studied this both in the lab and in sort of real workplace settings, inviting people, for instance, to start saving for retirement and either inviting them to save. If their birthday is in three months, we'd say, you want to start saving for retirement and either inviting them to save, if their birthday is in three months, we'd say, you want to start saving in three months or

we'd say, you want to start saving after your birthday, which is the same offer. But if we frame it in terms of after your birthday, a date that feels like a fresh starter after the start of spring, as opposed to in however many months away, the start of of spring is we see about a 30% increase in how much people save over the next nine months because that moment feels ripe for making a change. And so people are more likely to reach out and say yes. If fresh starts are so powerful, why do only 10% of New Year's resolutions succeed? Because all they do is get us started. And then as we've talked about, right, falling down as the dominant experience, and so you

have to have more structures in place beyond just, okay, I'm motivated. I'm going to create a goal. Let's go. And now I'm going to use my willpower to push through. So it needs to be more than that in most cases to get all the way to the finish line. And that's really, you know, one of the key learnings of my work is a lot of the time we need more than one thing, we need the motivation to start,

then we need to figure out, okay, what's going to hold us back? Is it going to be because it's not fun? And it's brutal to do the thing that's good for us, then we need to find ways to actually make it enjoyable or create incentive systems, right? Commitment devices so that it's so costly not to follow through that we can't stand to fail.

Or habits, we could build the right kinds of habits and make sure they're resilient habits, elastic habits and so on. So it's often that we need a suite of things to overcome all these different barriers that might stand in our way. And getting started is almost never the only thing. There's a few cases where it is, right? Like, all you do have to do is get started if it comes to sort of setting up an auto,

deduct from your paycheck to a savings account, and then from there on it's taking care of or like you need to have a colonoscopy to make sure that you're in good health for the next 10 years if that's a big risk factor for you. Like you just have to be motivated for one minute to make that appointment and then follow through. But most things that's more big risk factor for you. You just have to be motivated for one minute to make that appointment and then follow through. But most things that's more than a single choice

you can make in the throws of a fresh start. And for those, then we have to figure out what the other obstacles are. So the follow through will happen. I want to go back to motivating other people aside from yourself. So I can see how fresh starts would be if you're working with a large population of people, if you're an employer and you want to get people to think about

saving or starting meditation or exercise that you can create a fresh start effect by starting a new initiative at New Year's or whatever. But what are your thoughts about encouraging your intimates, your spouse or your kid or a friend to try to change something about themselves. I mean, I am often tempted to recommend that people just don't try that at all. Right. Those can be the wrong people to have those conversations with if they really aren't ready to hear it, but if it's really important, if it's something that's really standing

in the way of their happiness and well-being, then obviously you can't avoid it. One thing that I think is a little easier to do than, like, bluntly recommending, hey, like I think you should change in the following way. And that uses a tool of change that's really powerful is thinking about your social network. And sometimes if it's a spouse or a child, you know, a loved one, you have some control over the role models and social exposure that they get. And one of the big things that changes our ambitions and how possible we think it is to achieve something and actually how feasible It is to do it in a certain

way is who we're exposed to. So if we have a peer group that's role modeling, say, you know, great environmental behavior or great studiousness, we're more likely to follow suit and start to think, hey, that's a really attractive way to be. If we see everybody else is doing it, there's sort of two things that happen. One is there's the information where like, oh, this is like a normal thing to do. It's not weird at all. And like, in fact, here's how to do it. You can literally watch someone else role modeling it. And the second is there's peer pressure. You don't want to be the odd person out. And so you often follow along just to fit in. So to the extent that we can expose the people in our lives to role models in those domains through social interactions that we

construct and that can be a way to encourage change that's a little bit less blunt. And I think can be a helpful tool as well. So I think we also underappreciate how useful and important it is to see other people doing something. So I'll give you an example. A study I really love just shows that which roommate you're randomly assigned to in college has an impact on your grades. So if you end up with a roommate who did better on the verbal SAT, you're significantly more likely to get better grades than if you ended up with a roommate who did worse on the verbal SAT. So that just shows, right, even not everyone's even friends with their roommates. Some people decide not to ever talk with their roommates, but just that proximity effect,

seeing someone else say, oh, look, they're studying. And like, oh, I see that they're actually going to all their classes that can change your mentality about how to behave yourself. I love this. I said this on the show before, but you know, in the Buddhist tradition, out of which I come this idea of, I mean, I guess the term that that gets used in the Buddhist tradition is spiritual friends. This is a really powerful idea. You know, in Buddhism, they talk about the, or we, I guess I should say, talk about the three jewels, the Buddha, or we, I guess I should say, talk about the three jewels, the Buddha, the fact that there is a or was a living example of really remaking your own mind and freeing yourself from suffering, the Dharma, which is the stuff that the Buddha taught, the techniques for doing that, and the Sangha,

which is the community of practitioners. There's a reason why Sangha is right up there because There's a reason why Sangha is right up there because having other people around who are modeling or normalizing this pursuit of training your mind in this way. Really, I've just seen in my own life how important that is and I have the great good fortune of being able to just constantly interview meditation teachers, et cetera, et cetera on this show, but also I have now a lot of a lot of these people right friends. And so there is, I have found a real positive peer pressure that has been beneficial for me. Peer pressure can absolutely, I mean, you know, it's a double-edged sword, so it can go both ways, but when it's working towards goals, it's incredibly powerful.

Much more of my conversation with Katie Milkman right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell,

where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynnins lack of public support.

It angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. There are a bunch of other tactical ideas

that you have in your book. I wanna get to streaks tracking your streaks. Can you say why that is important or can be important or helpful for some people in habit change? Yeah, there's this really, I think, well-described tendency to form habits in a very specific way. It's been talked about in a number of best-selling books before and well-documented by psychologists, books like Power of Habit and Atomic Habits that talk about this beautifully, I think, which is just a really simple model that says, if you want to form a habit, you take a behavior,

you do it, you associate a reward with it, and then you repeat. And you do that as many times in a row basically as possible. And if you keep it up, then that starts to become innate. It becomes automatic. You don't even necessarily need the reward. If the reward goes away, you'll still do it because you've become so accustomed to doing it. It's like second nature rate.

So brewing your coffee is an example, right? Like the first time you get a new coffee maker, if you're a coffee drinker, you have to like fumble with it and it's like worked and you have to think through it. And then there's of course learning going on there too. But then you get that reward for making the cup and it starts to go on autopilot and that you can just sort of do it unthinkingly and will do it unthinkingly. You get that reward of the smell and the taste and the buzz that comes with it. So lots of habits are similar and recording streaks is basically a way

of rewarding yourself for that repeated behavior. So if you try to do a behavior in a streak, and by the way, you're gonna wanna make sure that you have probably some emergency reserves when you're trying for streaks because there's research showing if you break a streak that can be highly demotivating and lead to the what the hell effects. So you wanna be, you know, but if you break a streak, that can be highly demotivating and lead to the what the hell of back.

So you want to be, you know, but if you're tracking streaks and lots of creative apps are doing this, right? So Duelingo, I think does a particularly good job with people who are trying to learn a new language of highlighting a streak that you don't want to break. It's like a reward in and of itself. It's sort of a form of gamification that every time you achieve another chit in your streak, you can tap yourself

on the back. And if you accumulate enough and you're tracking enough, it starts to become second nature and that's when habit can take over. So that's really, it's a really simple way of applying this very basic principle of habit formation that repeating and having rewards is important. And here the reward is the satisfaction of the streak and the tracking is sort of like a mechanism for giving yourself accountability. But with the caveat that you need some flexibility, you need some Mulligan's in there.

Exactly. That it can be dangerous when there's a slip up that that can lead you to throw up your hands and walk away completely. So there needs to be some safeguards to make sure that you don't give up after a streak is broken. Another tactic that I think might be worth mentioning here and this has to do with routines,

the notion of piggybacking. Yeah, this is a really nice idea from the literature that suggests if you have one routine that's really well established, a simple way to build a second one is to piggyback it right on top of the first, right? So I'll give you an example for my own life that I think illustrates this. I have a really robust routine of brushing my teeth and taking a shower in the morning. It'll be glad to know I have good hygiene.

And for a while actually during the pandemic, my son, who was five years old, was at home and he was doing Zoom school here. And we had a great exercise habit built around that, and we would go for a walk when he had a 30-minute break in the middle of his morning routine, and that was how I was getting a lot of my exercise, was that 30-minute walk we did one after dinner, too, because we had all this time as a family together.

But then he went back to school, and I knew I needed a new way to get my work out in. So I realized, okay, I need to build us and structure a habit into something. I already have a piggyback. And now I do a workout with an app literally in my, I have a big bathroom. I do it in my bathroom between brushing my teeth and showering. So I brush my teeth. I do the workout, then I get in the shower and I, you know, the sweat's gone and I'm just doing extra shower that day. And you know, it almost immediately became a habit. I've literally not missed a day since he went back to school because it was so simple

to just slip that right into a routine I already had rather than trying to figure out another time and, you know, how was I going to remember and what would trigger it. It was piggybacked right on something that was never missed. Keep him going here with this sort of rat attack list of tactics here, although it kind of made sense on some level. I was surprised to see that giving advice can be helpful in terms of habit formation.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite insights. And it's really, this one has a lot to do with motivation and self-efficacy. And it's an insight that comes from Lauren Eskis-Winkler, a really brilliant former PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania and postdoc who's starting a faculty job at the Kellogg School at Northwestern. Lauren had this insight that really frequently when we see someone who isn't achieving as much as they'd like and is struggling to hit a goal. We sort of put our arm around them and we give them advice

and that we think we're doing the right thing when we see that like a student who wants to do better in school, we put our arm around them and we say, you know, like, you really need to find time to study, carve it out in your schedule and focus more on the big picture and you know, why don't you form a study group, whatever it is.

And that actually can be super demotivating, she realized, because actually in her interviews with people who are trying to achieve goals, she discovered that most of them already have a pretty good sense of what it is they need to do. They just aren't doing it. So it's not, you know, it's not like calculus. If someone's struggling with calculus, that's different.

But if they're struggling to achieve a goal, like study harder or get to the gym more regularly or be more productive at work, normally it's not rocket science to figure it out and you don't need an explainer. So people have these good insights and she thought, what if we're sort of getting it all wrong by putting our arm around them and giving them advice

because we're demotivating them. It makes them feel like we think they can't do it. What if we flip the script and actually made them feel really motivated and put them in the position of advice givers and said, you know, I'm putting it on a pedestal. Let me ask you to give your wisdom to other people. And in so doing, she realized, you know, not only would we put them on a pedestal and boost their self-efficacy, but you could also see people would introspect more than they might have otherwise about how to achieve a goal. Because now, oh, I have to mentor someone, coach them, I have to actually articulate this. Let me think it through more deeply. And then once you've said something to someone else, you've given them the advice, it's going to feel hypocritical not to

take it yourself. So we actually, I got to do a study with her on this, with a couple of other collaborators, too, with about 2,000 high school students at the start of their second semester. We randomly assigned half of them to the role of giving advice to some of their peers about how to study more effectively and the other half or a control group

where they just had sort of a usual day. And they spent in this treatment, the group that was giving advice, they spent about 10 minutes answering some questions online, what they've been told, you know, we're going to give this to some of your younger peers who are struggling to achieve more in school, what are some of your best tips for studying more effectively? We ask them all these different questions about that. 10 minutes of work. And at the end of the third quarter, we then looked at their grades in the class that all

of the students had told us they most wanted to improve in and in math, which is a class that most high school students are struggling with and particularly hate. They apparently like eating broccoli more than doing their math homework, which is pretty depressing. So, what we found is that this 10 minutes of being put on a pedestal and giving advice to others significantly improved the grade point averages of these students in these two classes. It wasn't turning C students into valedictorians,

but it was moving them up about one point on a 50 to 100 point grading scale, which was significant. Again, 10 minutes of mentoring others. And I think this is just so powerful. Lauren's done other work showing not just with students, but with people who are trying to achieve other kinds of goals that this advice giving tactic is really effective.

And I think it's no accident that programs like Alcoholics and Onom is a sign. You a sponsor and the sponsor is someone else in the program too, right? So you have both, you're getting advice, you solicit, but that person is now an advice giver and a role model that's helping them with their own goals. And all these kinds of mentoring programs

have this two-way street to them that I think we underappreciate, not only are you doing good, and by the way, that feels great, which is nice, because feeling great is important, but you dredge up these insights about yourself that you might not have otherwise, you believe in yourself more

and you don't want to be a hypocrite when you're giving that advice to others. So, I think advice giving is this really potent tool we can use when the barrier we see is a confidence barrier to achieving more, not a knowledge barrier or a willpower barrier necessarily, but a barrier where maybe I don't believe I can or I have what it takes. This can be a great way to help overcome that. Yeah, I've found that writing books about meditation is a great way to stay motivated to do the thing because I'm just not comfortable with the level of hypocrisy that would be involved

in not meditating anymore. Totally. I think this is related to this question. I think it is. I was having a conversation. I have these, I've mentioned them a few times on the show before. I have these communications coaches that have really helped me sort of improve the way I communicate it to personally and they'll often have me sort of retell stories of, you know,

if I've done, if a conversation has gone well and then I'll tell them about it. And their view is that the retelling, the reconsolidation of the memory can boost my ability and my confidence going forward that I can do this thing. Am I on to something here? Yeah, I really like that. That after something goes well, you are basically by rehearsing it,

you are preparing yourself to use those insights in the future. And there is a chapter of my book where I focus on building memories and plans more effectively so that when we need to execute, we will recall what we need to do, we will have a script that we can follow that will set us up for success. And I think that's I think that's part of what you're getting at with that strategy of the rehearsal. There's also the I love you know, it pulls these different ideas together,

because it also is about advice giving, right? You are now articulating and sort of walking through and maybe in a sense, it may feel almost like coaching when you're telling people post-talk about what went well, because you're articulating it for them and hoping maybe they'll have an insight and maybe help these other people too,

just because it's a social exchange as you're sharing the information. But you're also making a plan for the future and planning is so important. Planning with detail and thinking through actual execution, what will trigger what kind of response is something we underappreciate rather than sort of making vague plans. Like, I will communicate better. It's so important to say like, well, what worked well was when they said this, then I responded in this positive way. And so, you know, whenever I encounter another situation that involves someone saying something

insulting, I will have a positive response rather than nasty response, right? I'm making it up. I don't know exactly what you're talking about, but that kind of planning that what will be the trigger, or the cue, and how I react is so important to setting yourself up for success. That and I think what I'm trying to articulate is that when I rearticular when I tell somebody the story of how a behavior change endeavor succeeded in any given moments. I understand it better. And I'm talking, I'm realizing this may be why I write books. So I, even though it writing books sucks. And so I wrote 10% happier when, yes, I'm sure you understand this.

When I wrote 10% happier, like I know, but no publisher wanted to buy it. I, nobody was, you know, Barbara Walters said, don't quit your day job. And I had all these signs in my life that like this was probably not a good idea. But I was hell bent on writing it. I think in part that was because I had had

powerful experiences in meditation, both on retreat and in my daily life. And I knew that if I could synthesize it all into a story that I would really understand it. And the same thing is happening now as I'm writing a book about love that I understand that I have really understand it. And the same thing is happening now as I'm writing a book about love that I understand that I have all these powerful experiences as I'm doing the work, you know, personal development work,

but I won't really understand it until I'm finished writing the book. Does any of what I just said land with you? Totally, yeah. And, you know, I think Senica is the philosopher's often attributed to saying like, by teaching we learn and I don't think it's an accident right that the way scholarship is produced by and large and knowledge is produced is at research universities where not only are faculty members trying to

figure out the answers to life's most important questions and the most important open questions and science, but they're also teaching students and in teaching, they're learning the things they need to advance the science. One of the biggest barriers I've found, or one of the biggest obstacles I've found in my own attempts to change my own behavior or habits, is taking on too much at once. I'll get very, very ambitious and start doing communications work and have an executive coach and a shrink and do and I have a meditation teacher and try to practice gratitude more and blah, blah, blah. I just can't remember it's shoving too many things into the funnel. Is this something you've looked at at all?

Is this a problem? Yeah, it is a problem. It's not something I specifically have studied, but it is something that colleagues have studied. So Steven Spiller at UCLA has some really great work showing that while planning, making these detailed plans for how exactly we'll achieve our goals is absolutely critical

to success. It helps us embed things more firmly in memory. It makes us feel like hypocrites if we don't fall through and so on. So these kinds of Cubase plans are critical. If we form too many of them, it's actually worse than not forming plans at all, because it's overwhelming. It demotivates us. We feel like, oh my goodness, there's 100 steps that I have to do this week to achieve my three goals. I can't do it.

And so it can be the case that setting yourself up to achieve is not the right thing to do if you set yourself up to achieve too many things. Well, I have made this mistake many, many times. So it's a good company then. So it's about sort of, you know, as we go about thinking about how we want to change ourselves, really be strategic and picking one or two clear goals instead of 15. Absolutely. Prioritization is key.

And that doesn't mean like you can't have 15 goals in the back of your mind that you eventually want to work on and be ambitious. It's rather that we need to take them one or two at a time. What am I going to focus on this month? And let's see, I'll check in at the end of the month and make sure there's how am I doing. Am I feeling good about this? Is this on autopilot? Is this sort of solved or is it in a place where I feel good about it? I can turn to focusing on what's next. So I don't mean to say that you can't in your life try to change in lots of different ways. It's just that simultaneously pursuing lots of things

with your utmost attention isn't feasible. Can you describe, and this seems really important, what a growth mindset is and why that is, that mindset is so helpful as we go about this as I described it earlier, infernally difficult process of change. Yeah, this work is so interesting. Carol Dwack at Stanford as a person who's done the research on growth mindset and all of the scholars who really are most respected in this field came from her tradition or her

research lab. And the insight is really simple that when we go through life and pursue our goals, we're likely to encounter failure. We've talked about this before. It's an inevitable part of goal pursuit. And there's a couple ways that we can think about that one way to say like, oh, that's some feedback.

Like this isn't working so well. And I guess I'm not that good at this. And that would be sort of a fixed mindset. Like, there's something broken in me. And that's why this broke. But you can also have a growth mindset, which is to say, oh, like failure just taught me something. And I'm going to learn from that failure.

And I think I can grow from it. And recognizing that we're not who we're destined to be right now, IQ and other traits that we often think of as traits are actually flexible and can grow. And when we have setbacks, it's not a diagnostic about what we're capable of, but rather feedback that we can learn from and grow from. So when we think about all of these walks of life we're trying to achieve more as places where we can show growth and development and interpret failures through that lens, people seem to accomplish more. In fact, there's really neat research showing that when students are taught a growth mindset that it can

improve their outcomes. Your friend and former guest on this show, Dali Chug, who's at NYU, friend and former guest on this show, Dali Chug, who's at NYU, and does a lot of work in the area of diversity and bias has what I consider to be quite a brilliant application of the growth mindset to our work in terms of being better human beings in a diverse culture. And that is, her advice is to think of yourself not as either a good or a bad person, but as a good-ish person.

Dali is brilliant. And I have learned so much from her over the years. And when I'm not studying behavior change around personal goals, I've spent maybe the other 25% of my time is spent studying issues of diversity and inclusion and how to achieve more there. And I think Dali's just really hit the nail on the head with her concept of good-ish. And I think it's so important for diversity and inclusion, but it's important to goals as well.

More broadly, anything we're trying to do if we think of ourselves as good-ish and recognize that we're all works in progress, that we have more opportunity to get further faster. We've arrived right where I wanted us to arrive in terms of the final question I had, which is around this issue of diversity, because you'll correct me if I'm wrong,

but to me, I kind of think of as somebody who participates in diversity work, I kind of think of it as being part of change, of somebody who participates in diversity work. I kind of think of it as being part of change. You know, well, can you reduce your biases or be more aware of your biases so that you're not so owned by them? And you wrote an article does diversity training work the way it's supposed to?

I haven't read the article, but I'm hoping you'll talk about it now. And I guess you can talk about the article and or we can talk about what I really want to get at here is what does the evidence say about whether we can get better at managing our own biases? This is a tough topic because the evidence really does not suggest that a lot of the things that are most often prescribed are terribly useful. So what my takeaway is from the research on this topic is the most important thing to do if we want to promote diversity and inclusion is change systems and processes so that they

were more likely to be promoting people who might not raise their hand for instance, right a default program where you don't have to apply for promotion But you'll be considered for promotion at the end of the year is going to make it so that more women and minorities might get promoted Because they're actually less likely to raise their hand when it's an opt-in system That's an example of a kind of structural change. That's really powerful. It seems By the way, it's so hard to study all of this stuff, but the evidence I've seen suggest things like that are much more effective than training programs or lunches and so on where we try to increase awareness. Okay, so I understand what you're saying there that if you want to make change within

an organization, diversity training may not be the best way to do it or may not have the effects that we want. But what if you're an individual, and I think this is true of a lot of our listeners, you're an individual who wants to be less owned by your culturally injected biases. That seems like a really important field of human behavior change. Is there any evidence that that work is even doable? I think the number one thing that I recommend is find ways that you can change systems and structures to make them more fair, right?

So look for opportunities where you can advocate to make changes in hiring processes and promotion processes in training programs that will support underrepresented groups. Try to be a mentor and a coach and a champion of members of those groups. Those are the kinds of rules we can apply that can help much more so than taking an implicit bias training or reading a book and trying to have a different attitude. Because attitude is hard to change, but behavior is more straightforward. And once we have a set of rules and things that we recognize, oh, this works. We can become champions for them and work on them.

Super interesting. Let's just see if I can restate this just so that I've got it because it's something I think about and try to do better at my own life. If you want to be less owned by your biases, fine, you can try to do some, make some personal efforts toward change, changing your own mind, changing your own attitudes, but really the best move from what you can tell you, Katie, can tell is that it's about changing your behaviors in the world so that you're shaving down the more prenicious aspects of the structural issues. Absolutely.

Changing your behavior and changing the kinds of policies you advocate for as well, I would say, because that's another way we have a voice is by trying to create better systems. And sort of saying, like, no, I don't think that the implicit bias training day is the only thing our organization should do, for instance. This has been so fascinating. Before I go, I'm encouraging you, hopefully you'll take the bait here to shamelessly plug the book and anything else That you think is plugable or where we can find you on social media on the internet, etc., etc Almost all of the ideas we talked about today were were Described in this book that I wrote summarizing my life's work on behavior change and the work of the people I'd most admire in the field

It's called how to change the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. The book came out me forth and I hope people will read it and find it really useful. I wrote it to be fun and engaging, but also practical because I really wanted to help people make change in their lives and in the lives of others. And for anyone who wants to find out more, my website is probably the best place to find out more about my research, run the Behavior Change for Good Initiative as an initiative at Penn that I co-founded and co-direct with Angela Duckworth, where we're trying to advance the science of Behavior Change. So there's lots of research articles there.

And I host a podcast called Choiceology that's about improving daily decisions to be less biased. And even have a newsletter called Milkman Delivers. So my website is katymilkman.com, katy with a Y like katy parry not i.e. and it's got all that stuff there. Thank you so much, really appreciate it and great job. Thanks again to katy, I really enjoyed that conversation. One more item of business,

and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we're gonna be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety, something I'm sure many of us are way too familiar with. In this series, you'll become intimately familiar with the mechanics of anxiety, how and why it shows up, and what you may be doing to feed it unconsciously. We're going to teach you how to have a realistic view of your anxiety and to increase your

ability to cope with challenging situations. You're going to learn tools for examining and overcoming your own particular anxiety feedback loops while building the skills of mindfulness compassion and bravery along the way. And this is where you come in. We'd love to hear from you with your questions about anxiety that experts will answer during our series on the podcast. So whether you're struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about sort of re-entering the

world post-COVID or you have any other questions about about anxiety we want to hear from you to submit a question or share a reflection just dial 646 8883 8326 that's 646 8883 2 6 the deadline for submission is Wednesday May 12th if you're outside the United States we put details in the show notes on how to submit a question via an alternate method. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you. In advance. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poipoy Poient with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. As always, a big shout out to my guys from ABC News, Ryan Kessner and Josh Kohan.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey Prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.