Tag Archives: motivation

Working toward Goals with “Implementation Intentions”

People are motivated by goals that enable:

Relatedness to others,
Competence in skillful performance,
Autonomy in directing effort, according to Columbia’s Heidi Grant Halvorson.
Heidi Grant Halvorson

Juliana Breines
- She advocated working toward “better” performance rather than focusing on achieving the goal.
This can be accomplished by acknowledging mistakes and practicing self-compassion, suggested by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, and University of Texas‘s Kristin Neff.

The Relatedness-Competence-Autonomy model aligns with Daniel Pink’s suggestion that meaningful goals enable two similar features and one different element:

Daniel Pink

Autonomy (same): Controlling work content and context,
Mastery (like Competence): Improving skill over time through persistence, effort, corrective feedback,
Purpose (in contrast to Relatedness): Being part of an inspiring goal.

Halvorson suggested ways to move closer toward goals:

Serena Chen

-Consider the larger context of specific productive actions,

-Define reasons for doing what needs to be done – the “why,”

-Use “implementation intentions” to prepare responses for challenging situations:

–If “x” occurs (specify time, place, circumstance),
-Then I will respond by doing, thinking, saying “y.”

Kristin Neff

-Apply implementation intention routines (habits) for “strategic automation” to reduce decision-overload that may undermine self-control,

-Focus on something interesting for five minutes to evoke positive feelings,

-Review “small wins” and progress toward goals.

Goal persistence can be increased, reported Stanford’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in a study of employees at seven companies.

Teresa Amabile

They found that “catalysts” and “nourishers” continue movement toward goals:

- Capitalise on preferred motivational style:
  -“Promotion-focused” (maximise gains, avoid missed opportunities, powered by optimism),
  -“Prevention-focused” (minimise losses, variance, powered by cautious pessimism),
- Build willpower by committing to one specific, positively-stated behavior change (“walking for 10 minutes a day every day”)
- Apply “implementation intentions,”
- Focus on a limited number of achievable goals,
- Enlist “mental contrasting” to think about the satisfaction of achieving the goal.

Carol Dweck

Halvorson collaborated with Stanford’s Carol Dweck and quoted Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right” to underscore the value of optimistic engagement with goals.

Henry Ford

They synthesized Dweck’s work on “mindsets” with Halvorson’s recommendations for setting, monitoring, protecting, executing, and celebrating goals.

An earlier post outlined Dweck’s definitions of mindsets:

• Fixed Mindset: Belief that personal capabilities are given, fixed, limited to present capacities, associated with fear, anxiety,

• Growth Mindset: View that personal capabilities can expand based on commitment, effort, practice, instruction, correcting mistakes, collaboration.

Peter Gollwitzer

Columbia’s Peter Gollwitzer refined “mindsets” by distinguishing the Deliberative Mindset of evaluating which goals to pursue from the Implementation Mindset of planning goal execution.

His team found that the Deliberative Mindset is associated with:

- Accurate, impartial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
- Open-mindedness.

In contrast, the Implementation Mindset is linked to:

- Optimistic, partial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
- Closed-mindedness.

Halvorson, Dweck and Gollwitzer translated their research on self-determination and motivation into practical recommendations for goal seekers:

- Adopt a supportive “mindset,”
- Practice “self-compassion” when encountering setbacks to achieving goals,
- Design effective responses to anticipated challenging situations,
- Use “implementation intentions” and “strategic automation” toward goals,
- Consider incremental progress toward goals.

-*What approaches help you work toward goals?

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©Kathryn Welds

Positive Thinking+Mental Contrasting+WOOP Improve Performance

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Gabriele Oettingen

Positive thinking without an implementation strategy is ineffective wishful thinking, found NYU’s Gabriele Oettingen.
She advocated using “Mental Contrast” by identifying obstacles and ways to manage them, using a mnemonic, WOOP:

Wish,
Outcome,
Obstacle,
Plan.
Mental Contrast alone was effective when perceived probability of success was average or high.
Mental Contrast combined with Implementation Intentions (MCII), was associated with improved self-regulation and performance.

Andreas Kappes

Oettingen and University of London colleague Andreas Kappas reported two less effective approaches to goal engagement:

– Indulging – Thinking about the desired future state without considering obstacles and ways to overcome them,

– Dwelling – Thinking about the present reality without identifying future goals and ways to achieve them.

People who used these approaches were less committed to their goals than those who used Mental Contrast.
This was true even when success probabilities were high in interpersonal relations, academic achievement, professional achievement, health, life management experiences.

Volunteers who spent more time imagining working in a “dream job,” but had lower expectations of success, received fewer job offers and lower starting salaries, found Oettingen and Doris Mayer of University of Hamburg.

The research team differentiated the motivational impact of:

Positive expectations for future success->high effort->successful performance,
Positive fantasies when the probability of success is low->no increased effort.

Mental Contrast helped people disengage from unfeasible goals like reviving an ended relationship or achieving an unattainable professional identity.
When chances of success are low, people can use Mental Contrast to move on to more feasible goals.

When facing controllable and escapable tasks, people benefitted from Mental Contrast of fantasy vs reality.
However, when facing tasks that cannot be mastered such as terminal illness, Indulging in positive fantasies enabled people to maintain a positive outlook.

Volunteers increased performance when they linked a negative personal attribute (“impulsivity”) with its positive element (“creativity”).

Timur Sevincer

Participants showed greater effort-based creativity than those who were given no information or told that there’s no association between impulsivity and creativity.

This “silver lining theory” increased performance and enabled people to manage perceived negative attributes.

Mental Contrast between a desired future with a present reality also increased physiological activation measured by systolic blood pressure and grip strength.

This energy activation from mental processes can increase performance effort, concluded University of Hamburg’s A. Timur Sevincer and P. Daniel Busatta collaborating with Oettingen.

Philip Daniel Busatta

Coupling Mental Contrast with Implementation Intentions (MCII) helped economically-disadvantaged children convert positive thoughts about future outcomes into effective action, found University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri A. Kirby of University of Washington with NYU’s Peter Gollwitzer and Oettingen.

Teri Kirby

Volunteers compared a desired future with potential obstacles, and developed if–then implementation intentions to mitigate obstacles.

More than 75 U.S. urban middle school 10 year olds were randomly assigned to learn either Mental Contrast with Implementation Intentions or a Positive Thinking strategy as a comparison.

Student volunteers who applied Mental Contrast with Implementation Intentions to their academic goals significantly improved their report card grades, attendance, and conduct.

Mental Contrast can increase motivation when used with Implementation Intentions.
An exception occurs when there is low probability of achieving goals.
In those cases, Indulging or Dwelling strategies are more effective in maintaining goal motivation.

How have you seen Mental Contrast affect your motivation and performance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Asking Yourself Questions Enhances Performance More Than Self-Encouragement

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-*Do affirmative self-statements actually help people perform better?

Joanne Wood

It depends, found University of Waterloo’s Joanne Wood and John W. Lee with Wei Qi “Elaine” (Xun) Perunovic of University of New Brunswick confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective.

However, two experiments demonstrate that the value of positive self-statements depends on the individual’s level of self-esteem.

Participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) felt worse than people who used no positive self-statement.
They also felt worse than the comparison group when they focused on how the statement was only true.

William Swann

Wood’s teamed referred to William Swann’s Self-Verification Theory, which suggests that people prefer that others see them as they see themselves as an explanation of these results.

Swann, of University of Texas at Austin posited that if someone has low self-esteem, a positive self-statement is inconsistent with the person’s experience and self-assessment.
As a result, it would not have “the ring of truth”, and would not have the intended bolstering effect on self-confidence and self-esteem.

This view was validated when participants with high self-esteem felt better when they repeated the positive self-statement statement and when they focused on how it was true.

Ibrahim Senay

Ibrahim Senay of Istanbul Sehir Universitesi, Penn’s Dolores Albarracin, and Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi investigated the relative impact of “declarative” self-talk, such as “positive thinking” or affirmations (“I will prevail!”) espoused by Maxwell Maltz, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Anthony Robbins.
They compared this well-known self-improvement practice with “interrogative” self-talk, such as introspective self-inquiry (“Can I prevail?”).

Dolores Albarracín

Half the participants spent one minute asking themselves whether they would complete a series of anagrams before that actually began to work on the anagrams, whereas the other half to told themselves that they would complete the task.
Surprisingly to advocates of self-affirmation, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

Kenji Noguchi

The researchers extended and replicated the finding by asking one group of volunteers to write “Will I” 20 times before attempting to solve the anagrams.
Another group wrote “I will” 20 times, and the third group wrote “Will” 20 times.
Those were “primed” with the self-questioning “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other groups.

Albarracin suggested that “asking questions forces you to define if you really want something…even in the presence of obstacles,” so is more effective than possibly unrealistically-positive self-affirmations.
The researchers suggest that interrogative self-talk, like interrogative discussions in behavioral counseling, persuasive messages in advertising, editorials, or legal settings, and culturally “polite” behavioral requests, may elicit more intrinsically-motivated action and goal-directed behavior.

Mark Lepper

Routinely predictable extrinsic rewards can extinguish intrinsic motivation, found Stanford’s Mark Lepper and David Greene collaborated with Richard Nisbett of University of Michigan.

Richard Nisbett

In fact, interrogative self-talk may counteract suppressors to intrinsic motivation and seems to be a learnable practice that may be transferred or “generalized” from individualized learning in counseling settings.

Robert Burnkrant

This form of inquiry can be persuasive because it focuses the listener’s attention to the argument itself if the question isn’t especially relevant to the listener, or to the message’s source if is more pertinent, reported Rohini Ahluwalia of University of Minnesota, Ohio State’s Robert Burnkrant, and Southern Methodist University’s Daniel Howard.

Min Basadur

Subjunctive interrogative self-talk, rather than its rhetorical counterpart, can ignite innovation and creativity in organizational settings.
Min Basadur suggested that asking oneself and other How Might We (HMW) ….? enables innovators to defer judgment and create more options without self-conscious limitations.

Tim Brown

Embracing the uncertainty of “might” enables innovators to propose ideas “that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas,” said Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown.

This type of self-interrogatory, sometimes presented in group innovation “sprints” at Google Ventures, IDEO, Frog Design or other thought-leading organizations has been effectively been combined with structured innovative problem-solving:

Understand by analyzing problems and requirements through process evaluation,
Diverge by applying constraints to “think differently,”
Decide by selecting solution to develop,
Prototype by “storyboarding” the user experience, process, obstacles,
Validate by testing prototypes with potential solution users.

-*Under what circumstances have you found ‘interrogative’ self-talk to enhance performance more than affirmative self-talk?

©Kathryn Welds

Measuring and Increasing Hope to Improve Performance, Health

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Hope shifts focus from the present moment to action paths (“pathways”) required to achieve future goals and motivation to follow these goal routes (“agency”).

Some advocates of mindful attention to the present moment question cultivating hope because it focuses on the future instead of the present, despite abundant empirical evidence that hope is positively associated with academic achievement, health outcomes, and more.

Benjamn Franklin

Buddhist thinkers argued that hope is illusory and prolongs human suffering and even America’s sage, Benjamin Franklin, noted that one who lives on hope will die fasting.

C. RIck Snyder

In contrast, hope investigator University of Kansas’s Charles “Rick” Snyder substantiated the health and performance benefits of hope and distinguished hope from learned optimism, self-efficacy, and self-esteem.

He developed and validated measures of hope as a trait and as a state, evaluating “pathways” and “agency” beliefs, with collaborators Cheri Harris, John R Anderson, Sharon A. Holleran, Lori M Irving, Sandra T. Sigmon, Lauren Yoshinobu, June Gibb, Charyle Langelle, and Pat Harney.

Snyder and team reported that children and adults across ethnic and gender groups who scored higher in hope demonstrated:

Better coping with injuries, diseases and physical pain
Greater self-reported satisfaction, self-esteem, optimism, meaning in life and happiness
Superior sports performance, even when controlled for natural athletic talent
Higher academic performance from elementary to graduate school, even when controlling for measured intelligence
Decreased depression among older adults and survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

He offered tips for setting goals and enhancing “pathways” and “agency” toward goals, including:

Prioritizing self-selected goals
Developing multiple paths for each goal
Expecting positive outcomes while designing ways to remove potential obstacles.

Pam Omidyar

One practical application of Snyder’s Hope Theory is Re-Mission, a video game for cancer patients, developed by HopeLab’s Pam Omidyar, Pam Kato, and UCLA’s Steven Cole.

Pam Kato

Adolescent patients in remission with acute leukemia, lymphoma, and soft-tissue sarcoma are required to continue daily chemotherapy treatments for up to several years.
Those who miss even 20% of their daily treatments increase their mortality risk by 200%.

Steve Cole

Kato collaborated with Cole, West Virginia University’s Andrew Bradlyn and Brad Pollock of University of Texas to evaluate video-game interventions to improve young people’s medication adherence.

They conducted a randomized trial with baseline and 1 month and 3 month assessments at 34 medical centers in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Brad Pollock

Volunteers were 375 males and females between 13 to 29 years old undergoing chemotherapy for at least 4 months.
Participants in the video game tailored to young cancer patient increased adherence to chemotherapy by 50%, and showed increased self-efficacy and knowledge, compared with those who played commercial video games or no video games.

fMRI studies showed that their brains were most active when they played the game instead of observing the game interface.
Most active areas were:

Limbic structures including caudate, putamen, and nucleus accumbens, measuring anticipatory excitement before securing a reward
Thalamus, “the internet of the brain”
Hippocampus, the link between experience and long-term memory

Cole further evaluated Re-Mission and Zamzee, a motivational system to promote physical activity among young people, and now leads HopeLab’s Re-Mission 2 to further amplify positive health behavior and resilience.

-*How do you leverage hope to improve your work performance and health behaviors?

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Evidence-Based Stress Management – Physical Exercise – Part 5 of 5

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Michael Hopkins-David Bucci

“The positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” argue Michael Hopkins, FC Davis, Michelle VanTieghem, Paul Whalen and David Bucci of Dartmouth.

Michelle VanTieghem

They compared effects of a single exercise session or repeated sessions on non-exercising volunteers who were genotyped to determine brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a nerve growth factor important in long-term memory.

Paul Whalen

Participants were measured on novel object recognition (NOR) memory and mental health dimensions before and after engaging in a 4-week exercise program or a single exercise session.

More frequent exercisers performed better on object recognition memory and said they experienced less stress, but only when their 4 week program included a final test.
In contrast, a single exercise session did not affect recognition memory and resulted in increased perceived stress levels.

This study found no relationship between exercise-induced cognitive benefits and changes in mood and anxiety, suggesting that perceived stress is controlled by a different neural system.

Timothy Schoenfeld

In contrast, Princeton’s Timothy Schoenfeld, Pedro Rada, Pedro Pieruzzini, Brian Hsueh, and Elizabeth Gould, reported different results with mice.
They investigated the paradox of exercise: It promotes new, excitable brain cells that can aid learning and memory, yet exercise can induce calm in various brain areas.

Elizabeth Gould

Schoenfeld and team controlled for pre-existing nervousness in adult mice and allowed half to exercise and half to remain sedentary over a six week period.

Exercisers were more willing to cautiously explore and spend time in open areas, suggesting they were more confident and less anxious than their sedentary counterparts.

Brian Hsueh

The runners’ brains developed new, excitable neurons in the hippocampus’ ventral region, associated with processing emotions and releasing GABA, which inhibits brain activity such as the subjective experience of anxiety.

All animals encountered the physical stress of cold water for five minutes, and showed many immediate early genes indicating neuron firing.
However, the runner rats calmed more rapidly due to their release of GABA after this physical stress.

Though this study was conducted with animals, the findings suggest that physical exercise builds capacity to recover more rapidly from stress by regulating anxiety through ventral hippocampus inhibition.

Brett Klika

Like other stress management recommendations, regular exercise is difficult for many to adopt as an habit.
For reluctant exercisers, Brett Klika and Chris Jordan of Human Performance Institute offer a rapid but challenging solution: “Seven Minutes of Steady Discomfort.”

Chris Jordan

Their Scientific 7-Minute Workout includes 12 exercises using a chair, wall and body weight, for interval training alternating large muscles in the upper and lower body.
Each exercise is performed for 30 seconds, at a discomfort rating of 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, with a 10 second rest between.
Though quick, this routine may not be easy, and further willpower may be needed to adopt this approach.

Kirsten Burgomaster

McMaster University’s Kirsten Burgomaster, Krista Howarth, Stuart Phillips, Maureen MacDonald, SL McGee , Martin Gibala with Mark Rakobowchuk now of Brunel University validated Klika and Jordan’s proposed Seven Minutes of Discomfort.

Stuart Phillips

They noted that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of endurance training like running or bike riding.

John Salamone

Motivational help may be available by activating nucleus accumbens dopamine, which can regulate motivation and lead to goal initiation and persistence, according to University of Connecticut’s John Salamone and Mercè Correa of Universitat Jaume I of Castellón.

Mercè Correa

They refined the common assumption that dopamine is associated with reward systems and noted that nucleus accumbens dopamine, involved in appetitive and aversive motivational processes, may provide a biochemical approach to managing motivation and task persistence.

Though it may be difficult to muster the motivation to exercise regularly, these research findings suggest that regular exercise can lead to increased coping and cognitive abilities.

-*To what extent should workplaces promote exercise to reduce stress and increase cognitive performance?

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Productivity and Work Motivation Affected by Meaning, Challenge, Mastery, Ownership

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Small gestures and verbalizations by managers and organizations can have a large impact on employee productivity, motivation, engagement, and retention – for better or worse.

Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely’s research at Duke University showed the small changes in task design dramatically increase or diminish persistence, satisfaction, and commitment to tasks.

The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying ‘uh huh,’ [you] dramatically improve people’s motivations…. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. …,” according to Ariely.

Ariely’s lab experiments found that volunteers valued and liked their work product more when they worked hard and managed obstacles to produce it.
In addition, most people believed, often inaccurately, that other observers shared their positive view of their work product,

His research concluded that people seek meaning, challenge, and ownership in their work, and that these elements can increase work motivation and persistence.

Viktor Frankl

Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankel articulated this existential perspective in his examination of the critical role that meaning played in the enabling survivors of concentration camp prisoners in Man’s Search for Meaning.

In the less extreme circumstances of the workplace, finding and assigning meaning to work efforts enables people to persist in complex tasks to achieve satisfaction in mastering challenges.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter concurred that both meaning and mastery are productivity drivers, and to these she added a social dimension, membership, and a distant runner-up, money.

Frederick Herzberg

In contrast, one of the early though leaders in business management, psychologist Frederick Herzberg, developed a classic formulation of motivational factors contrasted with “hygiene factors.”

His two-factor theory of motivation did not include meaning or money as driving job satisfaction or productivity.

Shawn Achor, formerly of Harvard, argues that happiness is the most important work productivity lever.

Shawn Achor

To support his contention, he cited research findings that happy workforces increase an organization’s sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent.

Whether you work for mainly for meaning, money, or other motivations, you may agree that an ideal workplace and manager would foster all of these contributors to employee engagement and productivity.

-*What is the most important work motivator for you?
-*How have you seen managers increase employee engagement and performance through words and actions?

Career Navigation by Embracing Uncertainty

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John Krumboltz

John Krumboltz of Stanford echoes the message in an earlier blog post, Is Career “Planning” Actually Career “Improvisation”? in his book, Luck is No Accident: Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life and Career

He notes that people can’t control outcomes of unpredictable life and career situations, but he advocates paying attention to thoughts and actions that hinder progress toward goals — and to modify them with small steps.

Increased mindful attention to habitual patterns can set the conditions for desired outcomes by planning contingencies for undesirable eventualities.

Part of this process is being:

Open to possibilities that diverge from an original plan
Willing to consider unexpected opportunities
Able to risk mistakes and rejection.

This may see demanding and undesirable for goal-directed people with a plan, but Krumboltz’s research demonstrates the effectiveness of these guidelines and other familiar recommendations:

Research areas of interest
Network
Ask for what you want
Keep learning

Daniel Pink

Similarly, Daniel Pink advises flexibility in career “planning” in his anime-like The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need and questions whether there can be a career “plan”, given many unpredictable possibilities.

Like Peter Drucker and Donald Clifton before him, Pink urges building on existing strengths and finding ways to compensate for less strong areas, rather than investing effort in remedying them.

Donalid Clifton

In addition to familiar suggestions – persist in taking on ambitious challenges while learning from them – he recommends focusing on solving problems for others, and finding a niche to deliver valuable results. Now Discover Your Strengths

This service-orientation pays dividends as a career development strategy and in “making a difference” in the community and one’s family.

Drive Pink’s later book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us , draws on Frederick Herzberg’s delineation of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

Frederick Herzberg

People are motivated, Pink says, by career roles that provide opportunities for:

Autonomy, exerting control over work content and context
Mastery, improving skill in work over time through persistence, effort, corrective feedback
Purpose, participating in an inspiring goal

Pink’s TED Talk demonstrates his passionate advocacy for replacing traditional rewards and recognition with “Motivation 2.0” that provides opportunities for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Edward Deci – Richard Ryan

Draw on strengths

Pink cites Edward Deci’s and Richard Ryan‘s Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) that investigated variability in intrinsic motivation, and Deci’s Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation which advised managers to adopt “autonomy-supportive” behaviors to encourage employees’ intrinsic motivation.

These varied studies suggest the value of flexibility in career “planning” to capitalize on serendipitous opportunities, and seeking work roles that:

Draw on strengths
Enable intrinsic motivators like autonomy, purpose, mastery, and affiliation, instead of focusing primarily on monetary or status rewards.

-*How do you navigate your career in the face of incomplete information about future outcomes?

Finding Work You Love, Measuring Your Life

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Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor, acclaimed for his ground-breaking work on innovation.
His recent book, How Will You Measure Your Life links his years of research in business strategy and innovation, to identifying values and priorities in work-life.

Although this new focus may seem unexpected, Christensen may have pointed to a source of inspiration when he revealed in 2010 that he had been diagnosed with follicular lymphoma and had suffered an ischemic stroke.
In addition, he has been highly visible in his decades of service to The Church of Latter Day Saints.

He reviews “powerful anomalies” in popular conceptions of workforce motivation and incentives designed to drive performance.

He notes that “some of the hardest working people on the planet are employed in charitable organizations. They work in the most difficult conditions imaginable; they earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated. The same goes for the military.”

He points out that incentives are not the same as motivation, and that true motivation involves moving people to do something because they want to.
Hertzberg’s classic article in the Harvard Business Review, introduced the distinction between hygiene factors (if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied) and motivation factors (challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth).

Frederick Herzberg

Christensen concludes that Herzberg’sHerzberg theory of motivation suggests such questions as:

• Is this work meaningful to me?
• Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement?
• Am I going to learn new things?

Evaluating the place of personal motivation factors in relation to the priority of hygiene factors is the foundation of career and life satisfaction.

-*What elements of your “work contract” are motivating?-*What helps you determine value and meaning in your work life and personal life?

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Hacking Human Behavior with “Tiny Habits”

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BJ Fogg directs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, leads Persuasion Boot Camps and wrote Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

He defines behavior change targets according to :

Type of change:
• Initiate new behavior
• Maintain existing behavior
• Increase behavior
• Decrease behavior
• Stop behavior

Frequency of change:
• Dot – One time behavior
• Span – Time-limited behavior
• Path – Continuing behavior

From this matrix, he identifies 15 ways to change behavior, and recommends designing behavior change as a “span” for time-limited behavior, like the Alcoholic Anonymous “One Day at a Time” credo.

He evaluates behavior for ease vs. difficulty and motivation as high vs. low, and designs behaviors for ease and to capture moments of high motivation, to align with his assertion that “Behavior occurs in response to trigger at the same time as motivation + ability.”

Fogg notes that motivation is experienced in “waves”, and recommends seizing moments of high motivation to do “difficult” behaviors, and to capitalize on low motivation to do routine activities.

To enable the co-occurrence of motivation and ability, Fogg links behavior change to a reminder (also known as a “prompt”, “cue”, “call-to-action” or “trigger”) to “exceed the activation threshold.”

He suggests designing behavior change to existing behaviors according to the formula: “After xxx, I will yyyy”, such as “After I walk in the door, I will hang my keys on the hook.”

Fogg recommends reinforcing behavior change by celebrating successful behavior execution, and cited examples of people who tell themselves “I’m awesome” or actually pat themselves on the back.

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: motivation

Working toward Goals with “Implementation Intentions”

Positive Thinking+Mental Contrasting+WOOP Improve Performance

Asking Yourself Questions Enhances Performance More Than Self-Encouragement

Measuring and Increasing Hope to Improve Performance, Health

Evidence-Based Stress Management – Physical Exercise – Part 5 of 5

Productivity and Work Motivation Affected by Meaning, Challenge, Mastery, Ownership

Career Navigation by Embracing Uncertainty

Finding Work You Love, Measuring Your Life

Hacking Human Behavior with “Tiny Habits”

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