Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life-for Good

243 Pages·2017·1.52 MB·English

by  Sean D. Young

DEDICATION
For Melody Isabelle Shira
To forever remember your Dadda-O
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: The SCIENCE of Lasting Change
How do you change behavior? . . . Change the process—not the person . . .
Seven forces behind lasting change Chapter 2: Stepladders
Start small. But how small is small? . . . Find out with the model of Steps, Goals,
and Dreams . . . Use the Power of the Incremental Chapter 3: Community
Make sure the right people are around you . . . But how do you do that? . . .
Learn from the HOPE intervention model Chapter 4: Important
People change if they’re motivated to change . . . But what if people don’t want
to change? . . . Use our short list of motivators Chapter 5: Easy
People will keep doing things if they’re easy to do . . . But how do you make
something easy? . . . Use the E-Trade test Chapter 6: Neurohacks
Conventional wisdom on behavior change is wrong . . . Use neurohacks
instead . . . Lasting change starts with action . . . Use these mental shortcuts to
reset your brain Chapter 7: Captivating
Use rewards . . . But not just any rewards . . . They have to be captivating
Chapter 8: Engrained
Get the brain on your side . . . But how do you do this? . . . Do the behavior
again and again Chapter 9: Putting It All Together
The limits of habits . . . the ABCs of behavior . . . and how to apply this book in
your life Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
P
eople have trouble making lasting changes. They quit nutrition plans, don’t
adhere to medication regimens, and can’t keep New Year’s resolutions to lose
weight or stop procrastinating.
The advice offered up by recent bestsellers?
Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and Gretchen Rubin’s Better Than
Before insist that the secret to success in both your personal and business lives is
to develop good habits. Yet they base this on just one study suggesting that
habits account for 40 percent of behaviors in life and work. So what are we
supposed to do about the other 60 percent of our behaviors?
Conventional wisdom also fails to solve the problem. It tells you the answer
is to change who you are. If you want to stick with your fitness goals, learn to
love exercising like Richard Simmons. To be a successful entrepreneur, become
a creative genius like Steve Jobs. If you want to be a good salesperson, morph
into a social butterfly like Mary Kay Ash. And the list goes on of people we’re
told to become like.
Changing your character is easier said than done: every individual has a core
personality that doesn’t change much throughout life. Fortunately, you don’t
need to change who you are as a person to make change last. You just need to
understand the science behind lasting change and how to create a process that
fits who you are. That’s what this book delivers.
Over the past fifteen years, working with some of the top minds in science, I
have identified the seven psychological forces that undergird lasting behavior
change in any context.
I’m a medical school professor at UCLA, and the executive director of the
UCLA Center for Digital Behavior and the University of California Institute for
Prediction Technology (UCIPT). My research has received more than ten
million dollars of funding from organizations such as the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), corporations like Facebook and Intel, as well as leading hospitals
and foundations. Participants in our research studies have made lasting changes
in how they eat, sleep, exercise, and manage medication and chronic pain. As a
result of our behavior-change work, participants have been able to avoid
contracting diseases like HIV, or have sought out medical treatment to save their
lives. I’ve developed interventions to help thousands of people change their
health behaviors. I’ve also helped dozens of startups and companies change
behaviors related to their businesses.
My approach is similar to what social psychologist Robert Cialdini did in
Influence: Science and Practice, one of the most successful business books of all
time. Cialdini reviewed three decades of research, integrated it with his own
fieldwork, and distilled it into a set of universal principles. Like Cialdini’s
principles, my forces are additive: using one may be effective, but using two,
three, or more will be even more effective.
By using the methods I describe in this book, I have repeatedly achieved
almost a 300 percent increase in lasting change for both individuals and groups.
This means that people who used these methods were nearly three times as likely
to change their behavior as people who did not.
You can harness the forces I present here in your personal life or your
business. They transformed the life of Josh Nava, who hated never being able to
follow through on projects, whether a daily assignment for school or a book he
wanted to complete for pleasure, and who is now a successful business owner
who sticks with his work and hobbies. They transformed the life of Rishi Desai,
so anxious and shy that he couldn’t talk to a stranger, now a successful doctor
and creator of the world-renowned Khan Academy medical school curriculum.
And they were used by Joseph Coulombe to help Trader Joe’s go down in
history as a company that effectively made lasting changes in consumer grocery
buying behavior.
Stick with It offers scientifically proven ideas that will help you achieve your
goals—no matter how big or how small—by applying them to your life and
work as they fit your needs.
CHAPTER 1
THE SCIENCE OF LASTING CHANGE
H
ellhole Bend is a deep gorge in the Grand Canyon, smack in the middle of
Navajo country. Despite its name, it’s ravishingly beautiful, with majestic pink,
brown, white, and gold-colored rock formations rising above the Little Colorado
River. But Nik Wallenda isn’t enjoying the view. He’s holding his breath as he
balances on top of a wire as wide as one of his toes. The wire is held taut
between two rocky promontories and is the only thing between Nik and the hard
ground 1,500 feet below. The wind is gusting at thirty miles an hour. That’s
enough to snap tree limbs and cause telephone lines to whistle. It’s certainly
enough to make Nik’s legs shake.
Nik is attempting to walk more than a quarter of a mile across the Grand
Canyon under these less than ideal conditions. He concentrates on breathing. In.
Out. In. Out. Nik refused to wear a safety harness, or to spread a safety net
below him. His only prop is a thirty-foot-long, forty-three-pound balancing pole
that he holds at a precise 90-degree angle to his body.
Nik knows that the stakes are as high as they can get. Numerous family
members have died or been paralyzed attempting stunts similar to this. Born into
a family of circus performers brought to the United States from Germany in
1936 by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Nik can look back on
generations of acclaimed tightrope walkers, including his father and
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grandfather. In 1978, Nik’s great-grandfather Karl Wallenda, arguably the most
talented high-wire artist in the family, fell and died during a tightrope
performance much like Nik’s current one.
With extraordinary concentration, Nik picks up his right foot and edges it
forward until it is positioned directly in front of his left foot. Step thirteen. Done.
One thousand three hundred eighty-four more to go. He tries to block the
background noise, and to ignore the reminders from the loudspeaker below that
13 million viewers are tuned into the Discovery Channel from around the globe
to view this stunt live. They can hear him praying out loud through the headset
and microphone he’s wearing. “Dear Jesus,” Nik whispers.
He knows a certain number of observers—it’s inevitable—are hoping he’ll
fail. For the drama. For the spectacle. I was there when . . . Nik pushes that
thought from his head. He tries not to remember that his wife and his three kids,
Yanni, Amadaos, and Evita, are watching below. He does remember being
twelve years old and emphatically telling a reporter that he would not follow in
the footsteps of his family. Never, ever would he become a high-wire artist. “It’s
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just not worth it,” he’d said.
What made Nik change his mind? And, more incredibly, how had he
managed to stick with his training over the years despite daily reminders that his
chosen vocation could kill him at any moment? Although Nik might not have the
answer to that question, scientists do. And although Nik’s story might not seem
to have much relevance for you personally, stay tuned. You’ll soon see that you
have more in common with him than you thought.
According to current science, Nik Wallenda’s path through life was actually
quite predictable. Although not aware of it, Nik had intuitively done everything
right to “stick with it” and succeed with a plan of action. (By the way, Nik’s
walk across the Grand Canyon was successful. Next on his list: walking across
the twelve-hundred-foot wide Tallulah Gorge, Georgia, while making time for
three headstands on the wire.)
Recent research shows that seven psychological forces support the ability of
people to stick with their plans—in both life and work. The more of these forces
people incorporate in their behaviors, the more likely they are to stick with
something until they reach a goal. Nik harnessed all seven during his training.
This new science is also capable of helping millions around the world. Forty
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percent of dieters quit within one week and more than 50 percent end up
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weighing more than they did before they started their diets. Businesses shut
down because they can’t get customers to keep buying their products or services.
Health departments and health insurance companies fail because they can’t get
people to take their meds or change their lifestyles or otherwise competently
manage their health. These failures cost society hundreds of billions of dollars a
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year.
On the surface, these may seem like completely different problems with
completely different causes. After all, don’t people have very different
motivations for failing to achieve personal goals like daily exercise than for
ceasing to buy a particular brand of cereal or to stop using a certain mobile app?
Yes . . . but no. Personal resolutions might fail and product sales may flounder
for different reasons, but the problem at their core is the same: People have
stopped doing something. If we know the psychology behind how to get people
to stick with things, we can address all of these challenges.
So how do you get people to keep doing things?
Conventional wisdom comes down to: change your personality. Become like
those people with extraordinary willpower, develop your presence, or fire
yourself up to want something so passionately that you will overcome all
difficulties in your path. This kind of advice attempts to change the person, not
their process. But different people are, well, different. Every person has a core
*
personality. This personality doesn’t change much throughout life.
Fortunately, you don’t need to change who you are to make lasting changes.
You just need to understand the science behind change and create a process that
fits who you are. That’s what this book delivers: the seven forces behind lasting
change, and how to use my framework—called SCIENCE, which stands for
Stepladders, Community, Important, Easy, Neurohacks, Captivating, Engrained
—to adapt them to meet your particular needs.
Nik Wallenda harnessed all seven of these forces to keep himself disciplined
and on track with his training year after year so he could perform death-defying
tightrope acts. But most people have more modest goals. While Nik’s story is
thrilling, most people have more mundane things they’re trying to stick with.
Most of us aren’t trying to stay motivated to walk across skyscrapers like a
superhero. For most of us, just remembering to floss our teeth or rubber-tip our
gums every day next week is a big feat. So let’s step back and recalibrate from
Nik’s story to a more typical story, like that of suburban dad Josh Nava.
Josh Nava hated the fact that he never followed through. As a student he
couldn’t get himself to do his homework even when he liked the topic. In later
years, he collected shelves full of books but would drop one book midway to
start reading a new one. Married with two children, he now found it harder than
ever to stick with things. He had gone through a string of jobs and struggled to
find balance between his wife, kids, and work. Having attention deficit