Good Stuff!

We’re told we can change.

We’re told that a key is to write “SMART” goals. Make them specific, measurable, realistic, and focused on results. Give them a deadline. And, for heaven’s sake, put them to paper because “a goal that is not written down is just a wish.”

We’re told a key is to dream, that “whatever the mind can believe, it can achieve.”

We’re told that the key to changing our life is changing our habits, and that they way to change our habits is to stick with something for twenty-one days.

Except, well, how many habits have you been successful in establishing?

How many of those lofty goals have you achieved?

How many New Year’s resolutions have you really followed through with?

The problem is that all of the good advice on goals and habits seems to only work for other people. And I grant that there might be some AAA+++ personalities out there with megawatts of motivation who seem to be able to do whatever they set their mind to.

But that triple A plus personality passed me by. It passed a lot of us by.

So are we doomed?

B.J. Fogg, a Stanford researcher, says no. There’s hope for all of us. Because the key is not in having megawatts of motivation.

It’s not that we disregard the power of motivation. It’s just that motivation, Fogg has found, is never constant. It comes in waves. And while we certainly want to take advantage of it when it comes and do things that increase it, a much more effective way to grow habits and meet goals and change our lives is to focus on the other things that drive behavior.

Fogg has spent his career studying persuasion and habit. He works with companies to help them create products that are habit-forming. Think about Facebook, Twitter, or Candy Crush, and the habits those products form. These and similar companies have implemented the principles of habit so well that their products have become, for some, something of an addiction.

So what’s the secret?

Fogg has identified three things that must be present if we’re going to do something:

1. The motivation to do it
2. The ability to do it
3. A trigger to remind us to do it

When those three things are present, we act. And we often do so without thinking. If one of those three elements is missing, we don’t act. So if we want to start a new habit, we need to focus on these three things.

But if motivation goes up and down, then we don’t want to rely on that part of the equation. Fogg’s insight is that it’s much easier and more effective to focus on the ability and the trigger parts.

When we focus on the ability, we make the habit we want to form so tiny and small that it’s super easy to do. Such tiny behaviors require only the smallest levels of motivation. And if we’ve planted them in good ground (at a time of day where they can expand and linked to a good trigger), those tiny habits eventually grow into the full blown big habit we wanted all along.

Does this work?

Well, I started Fogg’s Tiny Habits back at the beginning of December. And I’m happy to report that starting new habits using this approach has been easy.

Like falling off a log easy.

For example, because I work on the computer, I know that to increase my health, I need to get at least forty minutes of good, heart-pumping activity each day. But did I start there? No.

Did I start at twenty minutes?

No.

Ten minutes?

No.

Five? Surely, I started at five minutes.

No.

The Tiny Habits approach suggests starting much smaller. I started with doing one push up after I used the restroom. And it was an incline pushup on the stairs, which my daughter found hilarious.

Yes, that’s how tiny you start them. Something that takes less than 30 seconds.

That tiny habit grew. And I am now doing 60 regular floor pushups each day, plus 75 curls, 75 flies, 75 squats, and 75 bicycle crunches. It’s about 25 minutes of good activity. And it’s only going to grow. Come April, I’m pretty sure I’ll be around 100 pushups every day.

And there was no twenty-one day business. Fogg has found that’s not the secret. Habits can form in just a few days.

I started the delicious habit of kissing my wife for at least five seconds each day. Along with a five-second hug. And then a little more kissing, and little more hugging, and a little more kissing (when I can steal it). Did I mention it was delicious? This is a highly-recommend habit.

I started the habit of daily morning scripture reading. I have tried to be consistent for years and couldn’t do it. But with this new approach, I think I’ve missed three times in the last two months.

I started the habit of beginning the day with a positive thought, the habit of turning off my wireless mouse when I’m done at my desk, and I’ve also made great headway against the mother of all habits for me—going to bed by 10 PM.

I can easily stay up until one a.m. reading, “researching” on the internet, wasting time watching political videos, or Facebooking. Or a million other things. This bad habit is so ingrained it is almost like someone else is controlling me. All day long I say I’ll go to bed only to find myself, yet again well past dark, screwing up my life plans. It’s like some evil villain has me on remote. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to “motivate” myself to change this. All to no avail.

But with the tiny habits approach, I finally figured out the triggers that were driving it. Then I engineered other triggers and tiny habits to replace them. And now my computer is off and behind a closed door most of the time in the evenings. I’m actually getting to bed. It’s huge progress. There are still some kinks to work out, but it’s only going to grow.

I found the Tiny Habits program through my insurance provider. They had an annual wellness check in November, and on their website they had a link to Tiny Habits. I clicked, signed up for their tiny program, and I’m so happy I did.

I’m hooked on tiny habits.

And the cool thing is that you can begin learning and developing your ability to plant and grow tiny habits too. For free.

If you want to change your life, I think you will love their free five-day, three-habit program. It’s there to teach you how to create tiny habits, triggers, and celebrate.

Let me also recommend a few videos. Here’s the best video I’ve found that explains Fogg’s model of behavior and why tiny habits work.

And here’s the best video that explains the pitfalls of relying mostly on motivation instead of bringing in the other two Musketeers.

Researchers say that between 40-70% of all we do each day is driven by habit and external triggers. We think we’re exercising our agency all day long, but it’s an illusion. We’re not. Most of the day we’re running on auto pilot and responding to triggers. But we can change those routines. That’s the promise of tiny habits. And so far, the results for me have been promising. Give it a try. I think you’ll be happy you did.

Notes

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and time-bound. SMART goals are helpful. But the key, Fogg has found, is in not trying to eat the whole SMART whale in one bite. Instead, you start with the tiniest part of the very first step. And then watch as the habit grows.

I reviewed The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg back in 2012. It provided great insight about habits, but not a tested program to actually change them. In fact, the author states himself that his book doesn’t provide a program, just a way of thinking about habits. Duhigg isn’t a behavioral scientist; he’s a reporter, trying to share what he’s found. The book was great. However, I tried to apply his insights, and, as expected, wasn’t very successful in changing things. But Fogg and his Tiny Habits fills that gap in a spectacular way. Fogg is a behavioral scientist and has taught thousands how to form habits. So read Duhigg for great stories and insights about habits in general. But go to Fogg for a tested program that will guide you step by step.

What’s your typical response when someone shares a frustration, problem, or issue with you? Or when they state an opinion or desire you disagree with?

Sometimes we get impatient, exasperated, or annoyed with them and simply don’t want to hear it.

Sometimes we get mad. Or defensive. And want to line them out.

Sometimes, however, we want to help.

And wouldn’t you know it, but we sometimes cause as many problems with that last reaction as the first two.

How can this be?

Your teenage daughter comes home and expresses disappointment about something that happened at school, and you want to help. How in the world could that be wrong?

Your spouse shares a frustration about something that happened with a friend, and you don’t want him or her to be sad. This is a bad thing?

Your coworker expresses annoyance with a program management is trying to implement, and you know exactly what will fix the problem and want to share it. This is going to cause problems?

In their fabulous book, I Don’t Have to Make Everything All Better: Six Practical Principles that Empower Others to Solve Their Own Problems While Enriching Your Relationships, Gary and Joy Lundberg show two different ways of acting on the desire to help others that have dramatically different results. If we try to help using the first method, we actually create more issues. We will make the person less willing to talk to us, introduce strain into the relationship, and create a lot of stress for ourselves. On the other hand, if we try to help using the second method, we’ll find the person more willing to talk. There will be more friendliness in the relationship. And our own stress will go way down. Furthermore, we’ll end up helping the person far more than we ever could with the first method.

Gary is a licensed marriage and family therapist. His wife Joy is a writer and lyricist, and they have held marriage retreats, firesides, and seminars throughout the country. And the six principles they share in the book for using the second method all revolve around accepting this one statement: “I do not have the power to make anything all better for anyone else. I can offer my help, but I cannot make it all better.”

Accepting this view has a dramatic impact on how we approach helping others.

So when the teenage daughter comes in and expresses disappointment, instead of trying get her to buck up or tell her she just needs to do xyz with her friends, or do 123 in sports practice, we listen, validate her emotions, leave the responsibility for the problem where it belongs—with her!—and then, when it’s all out, offer to help in a way that empowers her, not have us take over.

When the spouse shares frustration, it’s the same. When the coworker expresses annoyance, the same. When someone comes in to complain to us, it’s the same.

What the Lungbergs do in this book is show exactly what this looks like with tons and tons of examples. They even have a whole chapter (a short one) which gives a list of validating phrases and questions. The first six chapters of the book explain the principles. The last eight each apply them to a different group: young children, teenagers, adult children, spouses, parents and parents-in-law, friends, and coworkers.

Folks, this book is a gem. It’s loaded with wisdom and insight. Every time I practice what’s in here, my interactions go better. This stuff produces immediate results. I just wished I’d studied and practiced it more. But it’s never too late. And that’s why I’m rereading it now.

And why I wanted to share it here. If you want to improve your interactions with others and enrich your relationships, do yourself a favor and immediately go get this book.

Would you like to improve your relationship with your spouse or children?

Would you like to improve your experience with teachers, coaches, and administrators this coming year at school as you try to influence them and work with them for the benefit of your children?

Would you like to simply have a better time with the people in your community?

There are some books so full of practical wisdom about relationships that they deserve to be read every year or three. I want to recommend two such books to you. The first is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

This book has been in print for eighty years. And not only that, it has been, year after year, one of the bestselling books out there for almost each of those eighty years. For example, Amazon right now ranks it the #9 most read book. You’ll see other books come and go on that list. But books like this and Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People stay.

There are thousands of how-to books published each year on relationships in business and personal settings. Most are never seen again. But this one has stayed because people find it so useful they recommend it over and over again.

And I wish to heck I’d not waited ten years to pick my copy up again.

As I re-read the book this last month, I saw that if I’d been thinking about the practical guidelines Carnegie shares, I could have avoided a number of public and private arguments I’ve had over the last few years.

I could have avoided subjecting those relationships to attack, coming to my senses, and then trying to clean up the mess, large or small.

But even more important, I could have added a little more sweetness to my life and the life of others I encounter on my way. There are only so many days we have here on earth, and how much better it is to add additional drops of honey to them instead of vinegar.

One of the wonderful things about his book is that Carnegie shares the wisdom in a down-to-earth way with lots of examples and stories. He shares wisdom on building relationships, being liked, winning people to your way of thinking, and how to make your requests for change known without giving offense or rousing resentment. And he does it simply and in a way that you feel like you’re sitting down with a good-humored grandfather. There are no dry, abstract parts. Just look at a sampling of the chapter titles.

• “If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive”
• “He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He Who Cannot Walks a Lonely Way”
• “An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist”
• “If You Must Find Fault, This Is the Way to Begin”
• “Give a Dog a Good Name”

I can tell you that every time I try to approach things the way he proposes, they almost always seem to go better.

If you have an issue you want to discuss with a school teacher, coach, or administrator this year, let me suggest you first listen to what Carnegie has to say. I can promise you you’ll get much farther. And you will probably end up enjoying the interaction.

If you want to improve your time with your wife and kids, open this book and look for insights.

If you want to have a better time with your co-workers or boss, I suggest reviewing the wisdom you’ll find here.

Carnegie doesn’t possess all the wisdom there is to be had about relationships. There are many people out there with great insights. But, gee whiz, he provides a great start. If you want to add some sweetness to your life, I think you’ll find this book a great help.

Let me illustrate this Carnegie stuff with an experience I had with one of our high school coaches two years ago. I have a vast background in basketball that includes, well, nothing. I basically know how to dribble a ball. Oh, yeah, I also played church ball two or three years in a row back in the 1980s. So, as you can see, my knowledge is vast.

And not to toot my own horn, but this wasn’t just any church ball team. This was a team that improved the sport.

How? You ask.

Well, during one of those church ball years, me and the guys from my ward (“congregation” for those not familiar with the Mormon faith) thought it would be capital to make jeans and concert tee-shirts our uniforms. Back in those days concert tee-shirts looked like this.

This meant we ran up and down the church courts with drugs, sex, and rock and roll on our chests (I’m sure that’s precisely what the brethren had in mind for the program).

As you can see, we were way up there on the basketball ladder.

So back to this coach. My daughter was playing on the high school team, and the team was having a consistently hard time with one type of defense. And I thought, “Self, there’s got to be a way to break that defense.” These are the big thoughts that basketball gurus like myself have.

And so I researched and watched and talked to folks who had actually played basketball competitively (unfortunately, without concert tee shirts) and identified an offensive counter that looked like it might work.

And I sent an email to the coach sharing my idea.

Now, the coach could have reacted in many ways. Especially given the fact that (1) he had already thought of the idea I was proposing, (2) had already tried it in games that, yes, I had attended, and (3) probably knew just a teensy bit more about basketball and his team than I did even though my church ball team had vastly superior uniforms.

But this coach, whether he knew it or not, was following a number of the principles found in Carnegie’s book, including the chapter titled “Let the Other Person Save Face”. This meant that instead of rolling his eyes or ridiculing or saying something like, “Brown, are you blind?”, he explained what he was doing and then expressed his appreciation. He was happy I was so invested. He thanked me.

And here’s the thing: he meant it.

I replied that if he ever wanted someone to suggest an idea he was already trying, to just call. I’d be happy to help.

We laughed, but the important thing is that what could have been a wedge became a good experience for all. And, more than ever, I wanted to work with him to help my daughter in the program.

I will give you one more example. There’s a mother who had four of her children go through my wife’s seventh and eighth grade language arts classes. Now, Nellie is a worker. She expects her students to work. She wants to have a good time, loves having great interactions with the kids, but she also wants them to improve and learn, and knows that’s going to take some work. Sometimes the assignments, despite her best efforts, aren’t clearly understood. Sometimes they’re a bit challenging. And this sometimes creates frustration.

There are a lot of ways that parents deal with this. But this one mother took an approach that, whether she knew it or not, followed many of the principles in the book including those shared in “You Can’t Win an Argument” and “A Formula That Will Work Wonders For You”. This resulted in a fabulous working relationship. It helped the mother have less stress. Helped her kids. And helped Nellie improve her program.

The issues the mother encountered could have become wedges, but instead, because of how she handled them, they became stepping stones. And this didn’t happen with this one individual. There are many mothers and fathers who have taken a similar approach with similar results. The principles work every time.

I could go on with many more examples in other situations, but why listen to mine? Carnegie has a book full of them. If you want to improve your relationships or persuade others to your way of thinking, you’ll want to start by reading this book.

The second book I want to recommend is I Don’t Have to Make Everything All Better by Gary and Joy Lundberg. But this post is full, so stay tuned, and next time I’ll explain what awaits you in its fabulous pages.

For all of you longing for just one more season of Downton Abbey, I’ve found a new series from the BBC I think you’ll enjoy (thank you Duane Robinson for the recommendation).

It’s called Poldark and is set in the late 1700s in Cornwall, that little southwestern leg of England that juts out into the Atlantic. The dark-haired and handsome Ross Poldark returns to England after having fought in the American War of Independence and finds that his father has died, and he’s inherited the estate. Except the estate is in ruins.

The house, which is a long way from being anything grand, is a mess and being inhabited by the deceased father’s last two servants. A man and a wife who are equal parts louts and lushes. The land isn’t producing. The mine is closed. And Poldark has very little money.

By the way, when we think of British aristocracy, we most often think of dances and fine clothing and large tracts of lands. We seldom think of mines. But Cornwall has been mining tin for a very long time, and so were its lords. In fact, Cornwall was known outside of the Isles anciently, and some historians suggest that Cornwall was probably selling tin to the seafaring Greeks and Phoenicians many hundreds of years B.C.

So our young and handsome lord has come home to a mess and very little money. But he immediately sets about trying to repair things. And what unfolds is a wonderful story with love, action, humor, injustice, and villains plotting Poldark’s downfall.

We loved Downton in part for the refinement and high society (and Lady Grantham’s hilarious one-liners). However, Poldark isn’t about the top of the aristocracy. It’s about a man almost at the bottom. And many of those of the lower class who are his friends. There’s a refreshing earthiness about it even while you still have scenes of the high society and all that goes with it.

We just finished the first season and are hooked. In fact, I stood up and cheered at the end of the last episode we watched. So if you love English historicals, you’re going to enjoy Polkdark.

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The humorous detective series Monk debuted in 2002 and ran for eight seasons. It was a huge hit. But because I’m a cave dweller I didn’t get to it until now. But, boy, I’m happy I did.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat. Monk is one of those brilliant detectives like Patrick Jane in The Mentalist or Sherlock Holmes who sees all sorts of details that so many others miss. But unlike those guys, Monk has obsessive-compulsive disorder plus a number of phobias.

And so he can’t just walk in and stun everyone with his brilliance because at any moment he might get sidetracked straightening pictures or moving lamps or trying to avoid germs. In one funny scene he’s being chased on foot by someone intent on killing him, and he can’t help but touch the poles as he runs by. However, he’s not all helpless because he’s hired a female nurse, Sharona Fleming, to help him. And the interaction between the two of them adds another enjoyable dimension.

And so you get to experience all the awe of watching someone like Sherlock solve crimes plus laugh along the way. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud during a number of episodes.

If you like The Mentalist, Elementary, or Psych, I think you’ll really enjoy Monk.

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This last review is for all of you who have dragon feet.

That’s what I had until two months ago. Dry dragon feet. So dry and with such sharp and jagged calluses that I regularly wore the area on my sheets around my feet to shreds. Nellie’s side of the sheets were nice and smooth. My side, after a year or two, looked like the dog had attacked it.

The calluses were so bad I periodically sanded them off with 400 grit sandpaper.

I also got stress cracks in the winter, which I tried to heal with band-aides and Neosporin. And that worked a decade ago. But the stress cracks were just getting more frequent and longer-lasting. This last winter I had three that stayed for weeks and weeks.

And so when I went into my dermatologist for my annual skin cancer check, I asked him if there was anything to be done. He said, “Get CeraVe cream with SA, salicylic acid. It has to have SA.”

After the appointment, I promptly drove to Walmart and walked down to the cosmetic aisle and purchased a little tub of CeraVe Renewing SA Cream. And I began to use it that night, putting socks on after I applied it. I applied it every morning and night.

And, miracle of miracles, a few weeks later my feet were normal human feet again. The calluses were gone. The stress cracks gone. The pain gone. My sheets love me. My wife loves me. I’m saving money on sand paper.

Folks, if you have dragon feet and want to be human again, let me suggest CeraVe with SA.