4 (More) Tricks to Help You Change

The other day, my son Dave and I reviewed three useful techniques from Katy Milkman’s book, How to Change: The science of getting from where you are to where you want to be.

We noted that the book contains many useful suggestions, and here are four more:

1. Sometimes people simply forget to do something they really intended to do. Milkman gives the example of a colleague who really wanted to cast a vote on Election Day, but only remembered her good intention after boarding a train from Philadelphia (where she was registered to vote) to New York. If you can’t relate to that, you’re a more disciplined human being than I am. Just the other day, I remembered (for the fourth time) that I should have brought a hat from my home to my office. I remembered this not as I was leaving my house (when I could have done something about it), but as I was about to leave my office to go out into the blinding Arizona sun (when it was, of course, too late). As an antidote for this common malady, Milkman advocates a classic technique from behavioral psychology called cue-based planning. It involves developing a plan of the following sort: “When x happens, I will do y.” In my case, it was “When I get home tonight, I will place a hat in my bike bag.” To make it likely I would not forget that good intention, I imagined myself entering the door of my house at the end of the day, just after I locked my bike, and asking myself, “Doug, wasn’t there something you wanted to put in your bike bag as you walked through this door?” The classic supplement to this program is to tie a string around your finger. If you don’t have a string, you could put a little sticky note in a place where you’ll be forced to encounter it (in my case, I could have put it on the bike bag, where I’d see it just as I took the bag off the bike at the end of the day, when I was in a perfect position to get the hat and put it in the bag for tomorrow). Even without the string, the vividly imagined plan worked, and as soon as I arrived home I put the hat into my bike bag, where it was ready and waiting for my walk across campus the next day.
2. Sometimes laziness can be put to work, if you make desirable behaviors your default settings. My son Dave and I both enforced a little daily exercise by letting our parking passes lapse, making it costly to drive up to work (where daily parking fees are now $15), and more efficient to bike in (initial inconvenience, long-term benefit—better fitness). In most cases, you need some effort to develop a new habit. In the beginning, you might use supplemental rewards to get you started (maybe buy yourself a new electronic gadget or pair of running shoes after you have exercised at least five times a week for a month). I once went a year without drinking any alcohol, using the money I saved for a vacation to beautiful San Miguel de Allende at the end of the year. Once you have a good habit, Milkman suggests you try not to break your streak, but she also reviews research suggesting you’ll be more likely to persist if you allow yourself a small number of emergency passes (two weekly passes for a daily exercise program, for example). It’s especially important not to fall into the “what the hell” trap—as happened to me this summer, when after four months of keeping myself to one beer or glass of wine a day, and only a tiny dose daily dose of high-cacao chocolate, I went with good friends to a fancy tasting-menu dinner with an irresistible wine-pairing and multiple desserts. Since I’d broken my Spartan streak, I let myself completely off the hook, and started eating sweets and drinking like a Roman for the rest of the summer. I’m back on my clean-living streak, but should probably permit myself one pass per month.
3. Watch what you say to yourself. For some difficult tasks, such as keeping up with your class assignments or tasks at work, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Milkman discusses Claude Steele’s research on self-affirmation. Remembering times when you managed to succeed at difficult tasks increases your persistence and decreases self-defeating thoughts and behaviors. You can supplement this with cue-based planning, developing the intentional habit of saying: “As soon as I hear myself thinking any negative and self-defeating thought, I’ll remember that time I accomplished something tough.” Milkman also talks about research on “growth mindset”—kids (and adults) persist more when they think about their performance not as a sign of natural ability, but as feedback about how hard they are trying (e.g., Yeager & Dweck, 2012). It’s useful for us all to remind ourselves daily that we are works in progress, not final products polished at the factory.
4. Milkman reviews research on the strong inclination to follow social norms, especially to copy people similar to us (e.g., Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008, see encouraging conservation, one towel at a time). She describes how she and her colleague Angela Duckworth have developed a practice she calls copy and paste—observing someone else who does something right and mimicking the way they do it. It’s what people do when they watch slow-motion tapes of Tiger Woods’ golf swing, and then try to imitate his moves. It can be used for any everyday habit (most of which come more naturally than Tiger Woods’ moves with a golf club).

As Dave and I noted in our earlier post on Milkman’s book (3 useful techniques to make self-improvement easier), reaching any healthy goal is rarely a one-shot deal, but usually requires frequent tune-ups and minor adjustments. It also helps to combine several of these techniques, and to tell yourself that getting there is half the fun.