Booktube Art Markman

Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others by Art Markman 0:01 Brain creates habits 1:44 Fail Unsystematically 3:09 Goal definition 5:22 Four Actions of Habit 6:20 Go System and Stop System 8:29 Changing Behaviours 9:25 Impact of Environment on Habits 10:03 Challenges about Change 11:05 The Five Steps to Change Behaviour 12:31 Prioritise your changes - don't make them all at once 13:07 Arousal and Performance 13:51 Tips to manage arousal 15:31 Temptation and Odysseus 17:39 What the Hell Effect 19:01 Treat failure as part of the process of change and take the long view 19:22 Growth mindset applies to Stop System 20:33 Toothbrushing versus flossing 21:22 Family, Strangers and Neighbours 23:09 Similarity to Friends 24:26 Feedback to encourage sustained behaviour change in others 26:23 Outtakes Your brain wants to minimize the amount of time you spend thinking about anything, to do this the brain relies on habits, habits are not without problems. In some situations you put in too little effort and as a consequence make a bad decision and fail. This kind of failure is fine, if it helps you learn about the trade off between effort and accuracy and make changes in the future. A good way to fail is to do so unsystematically which means at different things. The bad way to fail is systematically making the same mistakes or trade-offs, such as always putting work before exercise. Goals A goal is an end state that provides a focus for your motivational energy. The goal can either be a desirable state that you would like to bring about or an undesirable state that you want to avoid. When a goal has some amount of arousal, then it can be referred to as active. Habits create a direct relationship between a state of the world and a behaviour. As a result, habits are the most efficient way for people to multitask. Habits are enabled by what the book refers to as the Go System and halted by the Stop System. The Go System is incredibly efficient at helping you achieve you goals. It focuses you on information that will enable you to succeed, and it causes you to ignore things that will distract you from success. There is a cost to that efficiency. Once a habit becomes ingrained, it can be very hard to keep yourself from carrying out the wishes of the Go System. Even if you decide that the behaviour the Go System has learned is one you no longer want to perform. The Stop System is much less effective than the Go System. The Stop System requires mental effort. You have to be able to pay attention to what is going on around you to recognize that you are doing something that you want to avoid. You also have to engage effort to stop a behaviour that you have begun. As a result, habits have an advantage over the Stop System because habits can be done without effort. Even after you start performing actions that will move you toward some kind of long-term goal, the competing short-term goal has not gone away. Existing habits that are appropriate for your environment are still engaged when you return to that environment, and so they continue to influence your actions. To change your behaviour, you have to influence all of the aspects of the motivational system. There are five points: • Optimize your goals • Tame the Go System • Harness the Stop System • Manage your environment • Engage with others If you feel like there are many changes you need to make in your life, establish priorities. Which changes are the most important? Focus on making the most important changes first. Making lots of changes at the same time is a recipe for failure. It is helpful to create distance to minimize temptation and also that people are more likely give into temptation when they are stressed. Your Stop System strength is not fixed. If you adopt an incremental (growth) mind-set when thinking about your Stop System and treat it like a skill, then you are better able to overcome temptation than if you perceive this as an entity (fixed) mind-set. If you tax the Stop System too much, eventually it will fail, however strong. Feedback – focus on process goals not outcome goals The comments you make to other people affect the way that they characterize their goals. It’s common to want to talk to people about the progress they’re making toward a goal they’re working on. However, there is a danger that if most of your discussion focuses on progress toward reaching some end state, then people may develop outcome goals rather than process goals. The only path to lasting behaviour change comes from allowing the Go System to engage a new set of goals at the expense of the old and undesired ones. #goals #artmarkman #habits #improvement #practicalwisdom #smartchange https://youtu.be/QH5xyyRAtUQ