The One You Feed - How to Create Elastic Habits that Adapt to Your Day with Stephen Guise

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Stephen Guise is a leading expert in habit formation, renowned for his practical and adaptable approach to building positive behaviors. As the author of “Mini Habits” and “Elastic Habits,” he has revolutionized the way we view and implement habits, emphasizing the power of flexibility and resilience. With a deep understanding of the complexities of behavior change and a knack for relatable storytelling, Stephen effortlessly combines practical strategies with real-life experiences, making his insights both actionable and enjoyable. His work is a testament to the idea that small changes can lead to remarkable transformations, and his expertise is invaluable for anyone seeking sustainable habit formation in the midst of a busy, ever-changing world. In this episode, you will be able to: Master the art of elastic habits for adaptable positive behaviors Discover the power of flexibility in forming lasting habits Learn to adjust habits based on motivation and changing circumstances Unlock the importance of cues in developing strong habits Learn how to track and evaluate your habit performance effectively To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I've tried habit tracking on my phone and it has not ever worked. Maybe I've done like a week or two, but it just doesn't work because that's a place of distraction for me. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. We hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen guys, an international bestselling author, blogger, and entrepreneur. His books have been translated into 17 languages, and he's the author of many of them, including the one him and Eric discuss here, elastic habits, how to create smarterits that Adapt to Your Day. Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me. As I was telling you in the pre-show conversation, I'm really excited to talk with you. Your book is called Elastic Habits, How to Create Smarter Habits that Adapt to Your Day,

and I was saying that so much of what you have so well articulated in this book, I've sort of learned over my coaching years, but never put it together as concisely as I think you have. So I think this is going to be a great conversation. But before we get to that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.

He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, being that I've written about habits for the last decade, that's where my mind instantly goes because you can definitely think about good habits and bad habits being two metaphorical wolves inside of you. Think about good habits and bad habits being two metaphorical wolves inside of you. Because when you feed a habit, it grows.

And like the parable says, you feed the good wolf, that grows. You feed the bad wolf, that grows. And every single person in this world has both good and bad habits. And every day we are tasked with the choice of which of those we're going to feed. tasked with the choice of which of those we're going to feed. And I think something that a lot of people miss is that bad habits also serve us in some way. There's a benefit or else we wouldn't ever do a bad habit because it would just be bad. But bad habits do serve certain needs or at least wants. So it's actually a more difficult choice than it should be. Most of your writing, at least in this book, and I think in the many habits before that, is on positive habits that we can do. But while we're on the subject of bad habits, say a little bit more about if somebody wants to look at, you know, breaking a bad habit, whether it be something

like too much time on their iPhone or playing video games too long or biting their nails or any number of things, where's the place to start? You know, what's kind of the entry point? That's a great and difficult question. One of the reasons I've written primarily about good habits is because they're a lot simpler than bad habits. Like, it's hard to give just broad bad habit advice because, I mean, some bad habits you could say are like life threatening addictions and those require clinical care. So, that's one reason why I hesitate to give specific but general advice. Yeah. However, my approach is first to establish good habits that especially ones that can substitute for bad habits in areas that you struggle with.

that you struggle with. Because I think a lot of people, their instinct is to just try to cut something out of their lives. And just like that sounds like they're cutting something out of their lives and leaving a big hole there. Because as I said, in the beginning of the podcast, bad habits do fill some needs. So, in my first book, Many Habits, that was kind of my approach to say, if we can form a lot of good habits that fulfill a lot of our needs, they will naturally push out a lot of the bad habits, especially passive ones such as, you know, laziness or inactivity, maybe watching TV. Yep. Yep. That all makes total sense. I have a history in addiction, as many listeners will know, and I'll go on podcasts and somebody will be like, well, if somebody wants to get over their

addiction, what do they need to do? And I'm like, well, that's a pretty complex conversation. Like, you know, and you're right, because bad habits are on the spectrum of something that is a minor challenge to, as you said, life-threatening addiction. Everything gets summed up in that bad habit. But I also agree very much with what you said about they're serving some need. So we've got to figure out, if we're going to take them away, what is the need that at least they want served? They often don't anymore, that they want served. And how do we meet that? But let's move into your latest book, Elastic Habits, because I think what you've written in this book is really valuable. And I said to you before the show, I often say to clients,

if you want to maintain something over the long term, you have to have a curious mix of stubbornness and flexibility. The stubbornness is like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to stick with it. The flexibility is, all right, life throws a lot of different things at us. And so we've got to be flexible. But you take this to a different level and you get us into both vertical and lateral flexibility with habits, which allows us to really accommodate for the changing things in life, our time, how much time we have, where we are, our locations. But you also, in your vertical,

talk about how we handle movements and motivation. And I think this is a really powerful idea that I'd like to explore. But let's start by sort of talking about what do you mean by elastic habits? resilient habits. Typically, people do what? They'll say, I'm going to do 100 push-ups a day for 30 days or whatever. They generally pick a static target and they try to hit that target every single day. And if something goes wrong, if they're not able to hit that specific target, what happens? They fail, the habit's gone and they, you know, they'll try again a month later or maybe next year for a new year's resolution. So, an elastic habits kind of ditches that whole mindset of we have to pick this one habit and even one cue, but that's more technical. I don't know if we want to get into that.

Elastic habits say, instead of having one win condition, why don't we have nine? Like, why are we limiting ourselves to this one specific point of progress as if it's magical? Like, it's generally just an arbitrary number that people have picked for no other reason than it's like an even number, like 10 or 50 or 100. Yeah. You talk about flexibility being so important. You say flexibility is strength. So, in what ways is flexibility strength? One of the main ways is it enables improvisation, which is absolutely key in life, because whose life goes exactly according to plan? And yet we'd still plan, which is fine, but I think it's better to plan to be flexible, if that makes sense, to plan to have different, like, oh, if this happens, this is what I'm going to do. If this happens, this is what I'm going to do. So in that way, flexibility is strength because you're not

easily stopped if you're prepared for the different types and levels of obstacles that you're going to face. So when we talk about flexibility, let's talk about the first type of flexibility, which you call lateral flexibility. Explain to us what lateral flexibility means. Well, I have a really good story. It's a short story, but it's a good story about lateral flexibility. Please. I was on a cruise ship one time, and I went into the gym.

Cruise ships are like miniature cities, so they have gyms and basically anything you could need. You can even get a haircut. Yeah. So, I went into the gym and, you know, I'm there working out and I look over, I see a girl with her entire leg is in a cast and she's over there working out harder than I am. And I'm like, oh my gosh, she's incredible. Like, who works out with their leg in a cast? But it makes sense because, you know, she still has her upper body. She can work out with that. In a nutshell, that's what lateral flexibility is. She broke her leg. So, she said, okay, I was going to do

squats today, but clearly that's not happening. So, I'm going to work out my upper body. Lateral flexibility is giving yourself several different options to achieve the same general goal, which in that case is exercise. I've shared this before, I think on the show, but an example of lateral flexibility in my own life was I used to travel for work and the places I worked, I did software, but we implemented the software in these huge warehouses. And so, you know, my goal or my habit is movement, right? So if I could, I'd go to the gym in the morning. And if they had a pool, I'd swim. If they had a workout room, I might get on the treadmill. As sort of my other option was, I would just walk as much as I could in this giant

warehouse all day. You know, so I had different ways to meet that goal because my conditions were always changing, right? What hotel am I at? It's a different hotel. What do they have? What time does the workday start when you're on site? Sometimes it starts at nine. Sometimes it starts at six. So that was the lateral flexibility for me was, all right, I'm committed to moving my body today, but I've got lots of different ways I can do it. A lot of habits are naturally great for lateral flexibility anyway. Like if you think about trying to learn an instrument, you have the actual practicing of the instrument, say guitar, but then you also have things like learning music theory and I'm not very musical, but you know,

there's the whole study aspect of it as well. So on days where your fingers are bleeding because you played too much yesterday, then you can use that day to study. And if you plan ahead for that, it's not like, oh, no, my fingers are bleeding, so I'm not going to make any guitar progress. You're ready for it. You just, okay, it's time to study. Yeah, and I think what you said there is important. It's some degree of the planning ahead. And I think lateral flexibility is also really important, as you said, for injury. Lots of clients I've had over the years and myself, you know, you're committed to physical

movement, but your knee's bad today. Your shoulder's bad today. What else can you do? Or weather. I'd prefer to run outside, but if it's pouring down rain, I have a fallback plan. To use your terminology, I have a lateral move I can make here. Absolutely. So that's lateral flexibility, which is really, really important and really valuable. What really kind of blew me away about your work was you take

this to the next level, which is vertical flexibility. So talk to me about what is vertical flexibility and why do we need it? Yeah, so vertical flexibility gives us the option to move that intensity meter up or down. And in a dynamic life where we get sick and injured and distracted, you name it, that's really useful. you name it, that's really useful. Again, people typically just pick that one level of intensity and regardless of what happens in their life, they're just trying to hit that same point. It's like, what if you have an excess of energy? Why can't you go higher than that point? Or what if you're having the worst day of your life? Why can't you do a little bit lower? Yes. easy to accomplish. The downside is you don't accomplish that much in results, at least for

that day. Consistently, obviously, over time, it's still a massive result, which is why we have so many small habit books out there. Let me cover the elite level, as I call it, the top level. That's obviously amazing if you accomplish it. It's super satisfying if you can reach that high level. But the downside is it's difficult to do. So, in the book, I make a case that by having three levels, small, medium, large, you could say, you actually leverage the pros and cons of each level. So if you are, say, tired and having the worst day of your life, you can leverage the appeal of the small level. If you're ready to do a lot, then you can leverage the appeal of the big goal. So regardless of what you need for the day,

there's something appealing there. Yeah. This really solves a lot of different issues that you kind of pointed to. And there's two big ones I think of with this. One is it's the time and how I feel issue, right? So if my goal is to walk for 30 minutes and I get tied up coming out of a meeting and I only have 15 minutes, one inclination is just to say, give up, right? So I have always said a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing, right? You had another quote in your book. I don't quite remember, but it was something similar to that that was said very well. So what you're saying is I could be, if we're talking about walking, I could say, all right, I could walk 10 minutes. I could walk 30 minutes. I could walk an hour, right? So it

solves that for the time. But the other thing that it solves for, and this is why I'm kind of gushing about it, is that it solves for what you just said, which is motivation. And as somebody who is promoted, you've got many habits, BJ Fogg has tiny habits, the concept is the same. Do one push up, meditate for one minute. That's a great strategy for establishing consistency. But as anybody who does that for a little while will then go, and then who cares? Right? Like my life did not change from doing a single push up, right? So what you were, I think you call it small, medium, large, actually, that's not the terms you use. Mini plus elite. Mini plus an elite. These different levels for the habit means that

I can look at what my what my motivation is. And if I can go, okay, I'm not motivated at all day. Matter of fact, I don't care about this I'm not motivated at all today. Matter of fact, I don't care about this habit, this goal at all today. So I've got a mini minimum level I can do. Or conversely, I am feeling really inspired about meditation. So instead of doing my mini, which would be say 10 minutes or my standard, which would be 30, I'm going to sit for an hour because I'm really into it. I just heard this talk about how all the benefits of meditation, I want to go for it today. And I just love this ability for our motivation to be honored. And you talk about this in the book where you talk about

feelings, the role that our feelings play in this. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah. I mean, feelings are basically what determine our motivation. If you're not motivated to do something, you don't feel like doing it. Well, if you rely upon that, you're just not going to get anywhere consistently. You'll have good days and you'll have bad days. So, the idea of any good habit system is to kind of eliminate that issue and figure out ways to stay consistent on those days that you're not feeling it. The mini level is obviously the least impressive, but it's the glue that holds this system together. It's why this is an expansion of my first book, Many Habits. Many Habits is super successful in practice with just the mini level. Like one push-up a day actually did change my life.

I could say I work out all the time easily without resistance nine years later because I did one push-up in 2012 and kind of parlayed that down the line. Yep. But the mini level serves as the safety net. That's basically its role. And each of the levels does have a role. You have the safety net at the mini level. At the higher level, that's your dreams. That's your inspiration, you could say say that's the level you hope to be at consistently if you keep at it. And then the mid level is in the middle. Yeah, right. And actually I should have been a little bit clearer because I agree with you doing one pushup can change your life in that it is a place to build from for dramatic change.

What I meant was doing one pushup a day is not going to make a huge difference to your physical well-being if that's where you just stay. But I've talked on this show all the time about I was a on-again, off-again meditator for 20 years. I fought this thing on, off, on, off, because I was trying to do 30 minutes. I heard 30 minutes is what you should do. So I would try 30 minutes and I could gut it out for a few days, a week, maybe a month. But it was really hard for me when I went to saying, all right, I'm going to only do three minutes, but I So I totally agree with you that that mini habit, that consistency is the springboard to many other things. What I meant was that for a lot of us, if we just stay there, after a while, we go, well, the value I'm getting is is not as high. And I love the way you kind of break that out in the book, you say, well, you know, you've got sort of this almost inverse, maybe it's not an inverse.

I'm terrible with my algebraic functions. There's a relationship between how easy something is and how much value you get out of it, right? The easier it is to do, that's positive. You get less value. You describe this in different pies in the book, but that's the power of this vertical flexibility is that I can adjust based on my goal at the time. I definitely understand where you're coming from. I would say that whereas you do have that easiness to value relationship, I think people vastly underestimate what even one push of a day can do. And the very early days of the one pushup challenge, as I called it, I was actually surprised because I was coming from basically a place of zero.

Yeah. When you're starting at zero and you do even just a little bit of something, like I actually noticed I got stronger and at least I got better at doing pushups. Like the first pushup, I think I heard like my bones creaking and, you know, things popping. And I was like, oh gosh. Right. Well, that is what happens, right? When you start really small like that, before long, you're able to do just a little bit more with the same amount of output, right? Because you are building at every level. I do want to also say a key part of this and the mini habit system is that part of

the reason you aim for say one pushup instead of a hundred is one pushup is not an end point. It's, it's a beginning. Whereas a hundred pushups, you hit that, you're done. When you do one push-up, it's more like, well, I guess I'm already in push-up position. I could do more. That more often than not, I did more than one push-up, even in the early days. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think Mini Habits is a brilliant place to start, and I just love the way you've expanded on it for where we go next. So what we end up with, in essence, based on what we're talking about, is basically a nine by nine grid, if we were to fill in all aspects of it, and we might not for everything. And this will be hard for listeners to see. But you might see, you know, going across the top would be different ways that I could fulfill a movement goal. So say my lateral might be to walk one block to do two push ups or dance to one song. Yes, there you go. People who are watching on the show, or watching on YouTube will see it most of our listeners will not. But so I've got three different ways that I can do it. And I've got three different levels that I can do it at, giving me essentially nine choices for

how I do that that day. I want to ask you a question, though, about that, because choice, while a wonderful thing, sometimes is a paralyzing thing. sometimes is a paralyzing thing. I can see myself someday looking at this grid and going, hmm, well, I could do 20 push-ups, but maybe I should just walk one block. The weather's not that great. Maybe I should dance. But if I put on one song, I can see myself getting lost in that, particularly in my struggles with depression. And one of the things that goes for me with depression or low mood is an inability to decide. So talk about how this grid serves us versus becomes paralyzing to us. Well, one time at the grocery store, I spent 20 minutes picking out rice. So I'm very familiar

with the concepts you're talking about. It can be difficult to decide. That's one reason why if you're going to go with elastic habits, it's very important to display it in a very clear way. For one, like just having, like if you're pursuing three habits and each of them has nine different wind conditions, that's 27 things to keep in your mind. That's a bit much, and it kind of defeats the purpose of the system. But as far as getting to a decision,

there are a few techniques you can use that will overcome the downside of that, if that makes sense. One is you either start with an intensity or you start with a task. So, don't try to solve both lateral and vertical flexibility at the same time. You can go based on what you feel, like how much energy do I have? If it's an exercise habit, do I have? If it's an exercise habit, you can say, I'm feeling like I could do the middle level. So, then you just look at the middle row and then you pick one of those three options. And the other thing is you don't have to use all nine slots. Like the posters I showed, some of them only had one slot. You can just do one, one, one and have no lateral

flexibility, which would make sense in something like meditation, I think, because there's really only one way to meditate, right? You could maybe do yoga or meditation. But that's the first thing I'd recommend. Try to pick lateral or vertical option first. Maybe you're saying if you're a writer, that involves writing, editing, marketing. You could say, I want to write today. And at that point, then you pick your intensity. Or you don't even have to do that. You can just start and see what intensity you end up achieving. Yep. And I think this speaks to the elastic nature of it, which is that knowing ourselves is helpful and knowing, okay, do I need a little bit more constraint and a little bit more rigid structure? Or can I do with a broader constraint, less structure? And knowing yourself can be very

important. And, you know, I often find in the early days of starting something new, more constraint tends to often be helpful because it can often just make it very clear what to do. And as we become a little bit more established, we can broaden. That's not a hard and fast rule. Again, everybody's a little bit different. I often use this quote from the spiritual teacher Ajahn Chah. He said, if I see somebody walking down the road about to fall in the road to the ditch on the left, I push them into the center of the road. If they're walking down the road and they're about to fall into the ditch to the right, I push them to the left. Right. fall into the ditch to the right, I push them to the left, right? So depending on where you are,

you may need to adjust this, which is again, what's so powerful about your system. So I think in the same way that if we're talking about, can I handle 27 choices? Maybe not. Maybe not right now. I think it's a really important thing to know about ourselves. Yeah. The system itself is flexible because everyone is different. I had to write this book with type A people in mind. I'm not a type A person that plans their whole life out. I'm more of the, what am I going to do today kind of person. But type A people can do extremely well with this system as well because if they write it down, they can have a very clear plan and you can simplify it. You can make it really complicated. I guess listeners can't see this, but this one has actually 12 different options.

Something I call modular habits where you can combine different. But, you know, for some people, they'll like that. Other people will prefer simpler stuff. You said that it might be a little bit too detailed or technical to talk about cues, but I would, I would like to talk about them because I think it's another important and nuanced discussion. So by cue, what we really mean is when you do it, right? Is that how you define a cue? A cue or a trigger is whatever prompts you to do the behavior. So you've got a few different kinds here, right? You've got one that everybody's familiar with, right? Which is the time-based prompt, time-based cue, right? Which is you do the behavior at the

same time every day. Your examples, I garden at 3 p.m. Mine for a long time was I sit with my Zen group at 9 a.m. Like it's just that's what time I do it. I have a little thing that goes off on my phone. I take medicine at a certain time. A little alarm goes off on my phone. I take it. Very simple prompter cue. What are some other types? So besides that, you have the activity-based cue, which is simply beginning a habit directly after a different behavior, likely another habit. My friend Steve Scott calls this habit stacking, where one habit leads to the next habit. And it works very well because if you're introducing a new habit, that can rely on the old

habit to be a cue. Because if the old habit is already established say brushing your teeth which most of us have down right after you do that you can do push-ups or whatever and that can be very useful the third one that i think i introduced that i i've never seen anyone else talk about is not having a specific cue and I sometimes call that like a daily cue where you don't have a specific time or place or activity, but you just commit to getting it done at some point during the day. And aside from the freedom and flexibility that that offers, I think one of the biggest benefits is that it more resembles a bad habit structure than the typical good habit structure. Because most people, when they develop a good habit, they do pick a cue. Because we learned about how habits work with the cue behavior reward.

We know that cycle. So, everyone is like, okay, I got to pick my cue. Bad habits don't work that way. We just do them. Like, think about a smoker. How many cues do they have? If they're smoking a pack a day, I don't know how many cigarettes are in a pack. But that's possibly 10 different cues in a day.

They probably have hundreds or dozens at least. And there's a huge advantage of that for the habit as far as staying power, because it's like a tree having one root versus a tree having a sprawling root system. All these different roots can lead to this habit. That just makes the habit so much stronger, in my opinion, because let me see if I can give an example. If your cue is based on where you live or something in your home and you move, you just removed your cue. So, is your habit going to die?

Maybe, maybe not, but you're certainly going to have to make a big effort to adjust to your new environment. If you do a multi-cue daily habit where you're just learning to do this behavior after various different cues, it's going to be more resilient to change. Yeah. And so the daily cue is essentially, I'm going to do the behavior sometime before I go to bed tonight. You know, sometime in this day, I'm going to do it. Yeah, it's interesting. You talk about the cues that a smoker has, you know, in spiritual habits program that I developed,

we talk about different types of cues and triggers. And the one that I would refer to this is, and again, it's mostly now in our lives tied to bad habits, is it's the emotional-based cue. There's something inside of me that happens that usually cues us towards a bad behavior. I'm bored. I grab my phone. I'm stressed. I smoke a cigarette. But if we can learn to flip that and use those emotional-based cues to trigger good habits, that becomes incredibly powerful. And I think that's kind of what you're speaking to here,

is you let your internal motivation to want to do this thing surface. Yeah, that's a beautiful phrase you pulled out, emotional cue, because honestly, that probably deserves its own chapter in a book somewhere. Like, if we could figure out a way to generate good habits based on emotional cues, that just seems genius to me. Well, it's incredibly powerful. Its challenge is you need a lot of self-awareness to do it. Yeah, yeah, true. Which can be developed, right? I mean, you know, I think that's one of the benefits of mindfulness practice in general. And by that, I don't just mean meditation, but mindfulness practice in general is becoming more aware of my internal states because then I have more flexibility and choice. So the daily cue, again, I think can be

really powerful. And for some people, for me, tends to be a difficult one because I will debate all day long whether I'm going to, should I do it now? Should I do guitar now? But maybe I should go to the gym now. That's just kind of my internal state. You've got another type of cue that I really like, though, which you call a window cue. Describe the window cue to us. Yeah, so the window cue is the time-based cue just with a bit more flexibility. Instead of saying, I'm going to garden at three, you're going to say, I'm going to garden between three and five. So the advantage of that is it's not as restrictive if you're the type like me who kind of resists very specific hard like that's that's why i write these books is because i i can't

operate in the like just you know strict discipline i'm gonna get up at 4 a.m every day and do this this this that like i that's not me i wouldn't enjoy that even if i could force myself to do it so the window cue is kind of a a compromise between the strict time base cue and and the full daily cue yeah it's saying i'm gonna do this in this window yeah you get a little bit of the best of each, I think. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free and listeners have told me that these texts really help to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text from me during your day-to-day life, it's one more

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It's interesting. I have done over the years a fair amount of coaching with people who have recently retired because they retire and they're like, I've got all these things I want to do, all these interests, all these goals, and then they go, and all I'm doing is sitting around all day,

semi-paralyzed, not knowing what to do. There's an interesting challenge with them because after a lifetime of working and being on a beach, be here at this time, be here at that time, be here at that time, they do not want that in retirement. And they're like, I don't want to have to do something every day at 9 a.m. And yet the daily cue isn't working for them. And so I do think the window cue is really great for that because it gives you some degree of flexibility. If I'm moving a little bit slower

today, yeah, okay, I'll get to it in a little while, but it just doesn't have the chance to sort of just spread out all day. And so I found the window cue to be a pretty helpful cue for a lot of people that are in that sort of situation. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I did come up with that idea. I think I'm a little bit blind to it because I do very well with the daily cue myself. But I will admit, on some days, the daily cue when I was doing the daily push-up, sometimes I would do that in bed at the end of the day. I just do my one push up in my bed and sleep. So, you know, which is fine. Like I kept the streak alive and obviously it worked, but with the window cue, I think I would have gotten it done earlier.

Well, I was the same way. There was a period when I was doing a smaller amount of meditation and it was a more nascent habit. I was really like every day without exception. I've gotten a little bit more flexible with that because I'm like, oh, now I know after about eight years of it, if I miss a day or two, the world's not going to end. But back then I was so focused on consistency. Same thing. I'm like laying in bed going, oh, well, I guess it's time to meditate, you know, which again is better than not doing it. But the reason I'm going into these cues is back to our point before everybody's a little bit different. And so this gives you some different ways. You know, if you're the person who goes, I don't need a lot of structure to do this. Like, I just am going to commit to doing it. If I commit to doing it, I'll do it sometime today. I'll figure it out. There are people that are like that. And then there are other people who really need like, I need to know that I do it at 7am. And so I think it gets back to this knowing yourself or having someone who can help you know yourself well enough to sort of figure these things out. I want to talk about some of the principles that Elastic Habits abides by. I don't think we need to go through all nine of them. We've hit a few of them already,

but I'd love to talk about a couple of them. And one of them is intelligent tracking. Talk to me about intelligent tracking and then talk to me about if I've got 27 different options, actually, let's just keep it to one habit. If I've got nine different options, what's the way I track that? Yeah. So, I actually showed the habit posters I created earlier. And I also created like a tracking calendar with stickers. I think either stickers or markings are the best way to track an elastic habit. And the main concept there is you have three different levels of success, right?

I call them mini plus elite. You could say bronze, silver, gold if you want. So, if you use a sticker to track it, say you start out, you do five push-ups and that's your mini. Good job. But then later in the day, you're like, no, I can do more and you do 20 more. Then you can actually upgrade that by placing another sticker over top of it. Silver sticker. That works. You can also use like a triangle for the first one and then you color in the triangle for the next level. And then maybe you color in the whole square if you do the elite top level.

Why is tracking important? Tracking is important for, one, it reinforces that you're succeeding. You see that you're having success. And when we see a streak of wins, we generally try to keep that up. It tells you that the habit is important to you. That's a big one. Because if you're taking the time or spending money on a calendar to put something on your wall, that says I'm serious about this. Because if you're not very serious about something, you might be like, oh, maybe I'll do this.

And you'll just have it in your head and probably not do it. Tracking keeps you accountable to that goal of actually wanting to get it done. For you in your life, does a point come where something is so embedded that you don't need to track it anymore? Yep. I'm there now. I don't track my habits anymore. Not the ones I started with. You know, working out is a part of my life now. This was 10 years ago. Well, let's say 20 years ago, I had wanted to do it. And then for the next 10 years, I couldn't get it done. And then many habits kind of changed my relationship with exercise over the last decade.

And elastic habits helped even more. And yeah, I have no need to track it. It's like, would you track brushing your teeth? Probably not. Because why would you do that? It does get to that level. And that's, it's really exciting and fulfilling because basically you've made it at that point. Your brain has accepted this new behavior as a part of it. Yep. Yep. There are certain habits for me that I don't really track anymore. And if I'm trying to do something new, I might track it. Or if I'm trying to upgrade one of them in a way that's somewhat significant, I may go back to tracking.

Movement and exercise is just a part of my life. It just happens. But if I am trying to do something that's a little bit more challenging, for example, I was doing these Peloton Power Zone rides, and the challenge was certainly an upgrade above where I was. So, I found tracking for that was good to go back to because I was like, all right, I'm kind of trying to upgrade this. Yeah, that makes sense. And I could also say that while I stopped tracking exercise and writing, I also stopped tracking reading and I wasn't ready for that one because I kind of stopped reading. So, you have to be careful. You have to look for the signs that it's truly habit. You don't have to worry about it falling off like my reading did.

Yep. Another of the principles you talk about, you say goal and intention tangibility. Habit formation is typically lacking in one area, the senses. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah. So I think that that's referring to like the habit posters where usually if you're tracking your habits, which is good, usually it's just this little thing on a line in a journal or something. You have to open the journal and then focus on that little line and, oh, there's my habit. With something like a habit poster, it's like, bam, it's on your wall. It's very visible and it's more tangible than just an idea. And I think that's just very valuable, especially in today's world where the digital space is so crowded. How many apps do you have on your phone? 100, 200?

Too many. So if you, if you put your habit in there, it can absolutely get lost. And I've tried, I've tried habit tracking on my phone and it has not ever worked. Maybe I've done like a week or two, but it just doesn't work because that's a place of distraction for me. Right. Absolutely. Although there was a website that I used for a lot of years. It was called Joe's Goals. And very simple. And I loved it because you could give different habits different point values. And it gamified it in a kind of fun way for me.

And it was a very, very simple app. So that was the one digital version of tracking that actually did work for me. But I agree with you. I tried countless ones on my phone and it just never sticks. There's something about also just like writing a check mark or an X or even placing a sticker. That's a lot more satisfying than tapping your phone in a spot because it's more tangible. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So let's talk about the overall approach here. You list a variety of different steps. So maybe I'll just sort of

lay out each step and then you can add a little comment if you want to it. You say, you know, start by choosing about, I love the about because everything's flexible and elastic. First, you choose up to three habits. I like three habits in particular. You can succeed with one. I started with one push-up and that changed my life. That was the only habit I had for like a year. And then I added writing in later. Some people have told me they've had success with like six, but it's just so risky to have that many things at once, I think, especially with elastic habits, which is more complex than a mini habit system. So, I recommend three maximum for elastic habits. For mini habits, four is fine. And less is always fine, too. Yeah, I think some of it also just depends on time. You know, one of the things that when

I'm working with somebody, and we're going to start adding new things in, I go, okay, well, what aren't you going to do that you have been doing? Because that time is going to come from somewhere. Now, it may come from a place that you've got too much of, like four hours of screen time, you might go, it's easy, I'm going to grab 15 minutes back from my phone. But for other people, we really do need to think about like the limit to what we can do. You eventually hit a time limit. You just hit a point where you're like, well, any more than that. And I can't reasonably do it. You kind of have to think about having like a hundred points to spend. If you pick one habit, you can allocate all those points to that one habit. If you have three, they each get 33 and a third points. It's a matter of how important each habit is to you.

Yep. For you, Stephen, and for listeners, there is outside my window, my least favorite thing on the planet, a gas powered leaf blower is going. So I can barely hear it. Well, that's good. That's good. Chris is editing it right now, probably with blood running out of his ears because he's so frustrated by it. But anyway, I can't do anything about it right now. And we're nearly at the end. So we've chosen our up to three habits. You say choose about three lateral options per habit. So describe the lateral option, what you mean by that. Give us an example.

So yeah, with exercise, the most common habit people try to form, you can go to the gym, you can do a home workout. And then within each of those, you also have additional lateral options. So you're going to look at your favorite ways to exercise and pick three, four. You can maybe add another one for this one if you do yoga, strength training, running, walking. Walking is a good one. Walking is a great one. Especially for rest days.

That's what I do is I say, okay, I'm going to walk. Like I'll go to a theme park and just walk around. Yeah. And then some of them won't have lateral options. I think we discussed meditation. There's one way to meditate that I know of. Maybe there's more. Maybe different types. Yeah.

There's actually countless types, but you may not mix them. So, yeah. Right. Right. Yep. Drinking water is another one you're not gonna say okay i'll drink milk today is it is it through the ear through the mouth i can't decide which which orifice am i gonna pour the water into yeah exactly yeah yeah reading you could do either

i'm gonna read a book or i'm gonna research what book to buy. I mean, that's, it's kind of a stretch, but. Yeah. Or fiction or nonfiction, I suppose. Yeah. But music is a really good one. Study music versus practicing. So I think there are a few there. Yeah. I liked you had an example in the book of like a salesperson. They could cold call, they could do online networking, they could improve their sales script. I thought that was a useful way to kind of think through it. Yeah, most business related stuff has a lot of lateral options. Yep. So then choose our cues and commit. We kind of talked about the cues before we talked

about daily window time based action based. Actually, we did not talk about one of them, which we could hit really quick, which I love i love actually i think it's oftentimes the best of many different worlds is the morning plan queue we did skip the vertical options though oh did we we did thank you for keeping me on track you know your system uh let's go back to vertical we don't have to spend a lot of time here. It's basically setting each level for each of the lateral options you've chosen. So for fitness, instead of giving specific examples, let me just generally suggest what to set each level at. The mini level, the lowest level, that's your safety net. To set this, think, what could I do on the worst day of my life? That's the standard.

If you can do it on the worst day of your life, you can do it every single day. And that's the purpose it serves. So don't make this one too high. And if you do size these incorrectly, they're going to kind of mesh into the other's territory. And it's just not going to work as well so many worst day of your life what can you do plus that's something that you would be okay with satisfied with like oh that's decent it's it's right in the middle and then elite that's what you're aiming for like Like that's where you want to be.

It's something where if you do this, you're going to be really happy with yourself. Satisfied. Got it. So for each of my lateral options, I choose vertical targets for each one, if it makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Then I move on to cues and commit, and we can circle back to my question for you about what the morning plan cue is.

So, yeah, for the morning cue, every morning, set your elastic habit plans for the day. Choose a lateral option for each habit and optionally choose what level of success to achieve. So, for example, I'm going to the gym at 7.30 a.m. before work. I'll do at least one mini upgrade at lunch. That's like a weight loss or food habit where you upgrade to a slightly healthier option. And I'll clean the kitchen tonight. That will satisfy all three of my elastic habits for the day. I just read that from the book. I don't know if you can tell. Yeah. I love it though, because what it does is I think it brings together a little of the specificity of having a window or a time-based cue perhaps,

but it's flexible enough that you can pick it each day. A lot of people, if they're trying to do something like, well, I'll do it every day at 9 a.m., well, that may not work because Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I take the kids to school at 7.30, and so it won't work then. But Tuesday and Thursday, I do this, and some days I have a meeting at that time so that you just take a moment in the morning and go, what's my day actually look like? Okay, now let me think a little bit about where these things might fit. I think it's a great, great choice. Yeah, you can design it based on the texture of your day. That's right. That's right. I love this book so much. And I'm loving this conversation because you're right, most of the writings on habits, talk about assuming that somebody is going to feel the same every day is going to have the same schedule every day. And that is not reality. That is simply not

reality for most people. You know, most people, there's too much variability in life. And so, so this elasticity or flexibility is really critical. So now we've chosen our cues and commit. Now we display our habits. We talked a little bit about that, but this is a little different than tracking. This is actually getting them out in front of us where we see them, right? Yeah, this is pretty unique to this particular way of going about habits because most habit systems, you have just the one habit. Like, I'm going to run a mile every day. That's it. You don't necessarily have to display that. Certainly not prominently, maybe just a line on your tracker. But when you have nine different ways to complete a habit,

you're going to want to be able to see all of those nine options. You can't just have them in your head. Got it. Yep. So, you know, a whiteboard works perfectly fine. I sell these habit posters. I had to make them because obviously no one else did. So I was like, okay, I might as well sell them too if I'm going to have them designed and whatnot. Right, right. And then we talked about tracking your habits. Your last one is score and evaluate your performance. And you put optional after that.

Say a little bit more about what that might look like and why I might want to do it or not want to do it given that it's optional. Yeah. So, this isn't for me personally, but I know that it will be a good thing for some other people who I'm very analytical, but I don't want to put in the work to have to track this as well. I like to keep it simple. But since you do have three different levels of success, that opens up a lot of new data for you to look at. You can compare your habit performance month to month. Overall, you compare individual habits from month to month. So the scoring is like mini is one point plus is two points. Elite is three points.

So you can give yourself a score and, you know, for some people it's going to motivate them to beat their score from the previous month. And that can be a very good thing. Yep. Yeah. We know that for some people, that sort of thing is really motivating, you know, the fitness tracker on your wrist and, you know, getting a certain number of steps. Again, that's kind of what I liked about that Joe's goals thing was I could have a whole suite of different things. Each one has a different value and I could click in the box one, two or three times. I wouldn't have called it in the same way you did, but I sort of knew intuitively there was sort of like, okay, I kept it going. I did it at its minimum level. Okay, I did pretty good, sort of average two or three, and it changed the score.

And I found that helpful. What I did was I realized that I had, it was, I used it sort of as a depression support tool. I realized there were a suite of activities that contributed to my well-being. But I wasn't going to do all of them every day yeah right that's just not the way it was going to work so what i wanted was a way of knowing am i doing enough of it so i could put them in something like exercise would get three points because it was critical and i did want to do it pretty much every day but other ones might be less you know walking in nature it's you know want to do, but I'd get a total score for the day and I could just kind of look and go.

And I just, over time kind of went, as long as I'm sort of above 10 points, I tend to do pretty well, you know? So I haven't used this in years, but it was something I sort of cobbled together years ago that, that I found really helpful. So I like that. That's pretty cool. It's a cool system. Like going for a certain point level per day with, yeah, that's clever. Thanks. All right. Well, Stephen, we are at the end of our time here. Again, I really love the book. I love the work that you're doing on habits. You've got a whole bunch of other aspects of your life that are also fascinating that we simply don't have time for.

But thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Eric. That was fun. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join.

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