 wake up in the morning I say I will say today's gonna be a great day yes after I walk into a meeting room I straighten my spine nailed it after I put on my construction hard hat at the power plant site I will touch my ears and after I take a sip the first sip of my morning hot tea I will take one deep meditative breath so these are tiny habits that I've had and basically they're quick self-designed behaviors that I've paired with something that I already do I wake up in the morning I walk through doors for a meeting room when I was working at a power plant I was really good about automatically putting that hard hat on for my health and safety and I love my hot tea in the morning white tea especially so the thing about this is the creation of habits is a superpower it's a superpower that I think everyone can have because it's self-designed and is applied improv practitioners that's part of what we do we are creating curriculums and giving people the experience of developing skills competencies and habits are part of being able to form that we help people to also create habits that express their identity I mean often we're you know we're the people who like love the authenticity to shine from those that we help times we create new habits to kind of crush the bad habits that we've had so what's the key to having this habit superpower well here's what it is I am a behavior designer and an applied improv practitioner and I believe that in this first-of-a-kind approach is bringing behavior design and applied improv together and what I'll share with you is how I see that they pair very nicely with each other as well as what behavior design is and what's this tiny habits that I was talking about so for those of us who are applied improvisers those of us who've had the benefit of an applied improv experience and whatever setting I would say inherently we are providing behavior based training coaching teaching and the like right and what we do is we're bringing these curriculums into a specific environment where people get to interact we're giving them different types of exercises and tools where they can also make a variety of choices and of course in every applied improv experience there's just so much joy and celebration so what happens after that improv experience you just every experiencing that joy right as an instructor as a coach as a teacher you see and you do that it's just what we're all about but people leave this environment that they were in with a certain group of folks afterwards they go home to their regular routines their daily lives and maybe something that they were taught in this improv experience was to navigate the workplace so now what do you do are they going into this new workspace their workspace area and being like all right I learned this thing what do I got to do so some of the stuff that happened and people can do that they can figure it out you know depending on how the curriculum is but one of the things I realized as a behavior designer as well as hey there's a way to to bring behavior design into applied improv to help people sustain and retain what they've learned in these really quick simple little ways and so going tiny by practicing make an improv skills stick better I think we all do a job of you know delivering the improv lessons and I think this really kind of neat little tool looking at behavior and looking at tiny habits is sort of a really neat thing to try out so I will share with you about behavior design tiny habits and about where this is being applied this this fall in San Francisco at untold improv so what I'm curious is has anybody heard of behavior design just clap your hands above your head great and how many have heard of BJ fog the behavior scientist professor at Stanford University oh this is great and who has heard of tiny habits before my mentioning it today all right that's that's great that's great that's great here so for the two people who know this might be a repeat for you that so BJ fog he basically shares that behavior happens when three things come together motivation ability and a prompt so if any of those elements do not come together a behavior doesn't happen and he calls that the fog behavior model so again behavior happens when motivation ability and a prompt happen in the same moment another thing about behavior is that it has three components and the three components are this behavior is a type of person doing in action in a specific context so if you're a person pouring water at home at the dinner table it's different from you being the person who's a restaurant server pouring water for a customer same person same action different context so that's kind of the basis of BJ's elements of behavior design so what does tiny habits have to do with this where does tiny habits live in this world of behavior well you remember behavior is motivation ability and prompt B map as it's also referred to in shorthand so this graph is basically the fog behavior model in more than four letters so what you have is motivation where this is a low motivation this is high motivation and it relates to ability where this is hard to do and this is easy to do and all in here are the prompts and you can see that there's an action line that's green and those prompts that you have this space after there that's where motivation ability and prompts come together and that's where behavior happens so the thing about tiny habits is that it lives over here it lives where it's easy to do and where there's like little to no motivation in fact sometimes there's not a lot of willpower there's some mornings I get up in the morning I'm like oh I need willpower but sometimes I just you know step out I'm like today's gonna be a great day it's that kind of experience so about a tiny habit the way I structured it's very specific and we like to call it a tiny habits recipe so you remember after I put on my construction hard hat I will touch my ears and celebrating the heck out of that the thing about that is it's really simple a tiny habit actually just has one and maybe two extra pieces after I do a thing I already do so you already have these things in your life and we call that an anchor you get up in the morning you know you turn the ignition on your car you open your door I will do a new habit so if you have a habit that you're looking at for me it was health and safety for ear protection I have a habit where I wanted to start drinking water same thing I figured out like oh I will touch my water glass and the idea of celebrating is also really important because it helps where you wire the brain to have that positive emotion to this new habit that you're looking to create so again tiny habit lives in this little space here where it's easy to do it's basically where the superpower is so this is where the superpower in the sweet spot is for a tiny habit and my thought about this is realizing hey this little area where I'm doing my health and safety stuff or trying to drink more water this is not too different from bringing behavior design into applied improv we're already doing behavior based work past the 50 percent mark and we work with people who are coming in for their own self-improvement they we can help them self-design their habits with this really simple simple little recipe it's quick it's simple I don't know if you notice but the habits that I mentioned they are like not more than 30 seconds I mean a few of them are like not even I don't know 10 seconds maybe I will say that I do let my hot tea deep meditative breath go on for a little bit longer and I'm okay with that so the point though is imagine we are looking at developing improv mindsets and I suggest let's also look at developing improv habits mindset and have that superpower who's going to have the superpower it's untold improv so I am a community catalyst for untold improv and untold improv is in San Francisco it's a nonprofit improv community that serves improv for people of color and one of the things about our organization is that we are looking to bring this vision of also having improv for social change we have monthly free workshops and we have at this point a seven week cohort that's going on we have two seven week cohorts throughout the year so I'm excited that when I leave here I'll get to share with them my experience here sharing with you about untold improv and the way that we're looking at bringing behavior design and applied improv together it's pretty straightforward and you're probably already doing it you just didn't know that there's this taxonomy of the behavior design language around it so in the in-class and in person experience we're looking at making sure that curriculum development and the cohort engagement and participation is really taken advantage of the motivation the ability and prompts that we could give folks and we give them the space that they need you know maybe they want to opt in maybe they want to opt out it's part of us you know realizing that we're creating this space for our community another way that we're also doing and this is a little bit paired more directly with tiny habits is for the two people that know about tiny habits BJ does have a five-day email free online program where you could just learn how to what a tiny habit is you tiny habits dot com and you can see it and the thing about that is imagine doing the exercise you know go ahead and walk and lead with your chest you know walk like a penguin you know we do these kind of really fun exercises it's like okay how does that translate into my real life well if somebody's looking at confidence or there's a workspace thing after I enter a meeting room I will straighten my spine a little things like that I won't go through the whole list of them I could and you can find me because if you can't see the color of this dress then we'll talk later so but basically the idea is creating these tiny habits for a daily practice now what does this look like in our untold improv community so there's some traditional ones like the ones I was telling you there's a lot of fun exercises and games that we do that can translate the simple types of activities into something that we're already doing into some new habit you know listening is one of them I'll go on so I want to share with you a couple things that are precious to me about untold improv and I came to them because I just love their mission so sorry about that I created my own technical difficulty let me do this okay so I'm gonna have to speed through to the end so basically what I do love about there we go the untold improv that's a little bit different that's sort of this added piece because as people of color there are different kinds of experiences that we have in the world so I'm gonna share with you a couple of tiny habits that actually are habits that we'll kind of explore and untold improv so one of them is after I feel a microaggression toward me I will take two deep breaths I know I use that because I used to just get angry when somebody would do that or call them out and it just helps to be able to realize there's this mindfulness aspect of that there's a lot of great improv applied improv to help that another one is after I feel the need to code switch I will put my hand to my chest just to feel my heart because sometimes it's tough and maybe it's just something that happens having to experience feeling like I'm gonna do this thing I don't even know I'm code switching but I just do it that's what happens I'm like you know what I want to go ahead and be part of learning that so I'm not saying we're doing this necessarily within the context of the untold improv curriculum but what I am saying is you know those are some special ways that you can see where where can we bring improv for social change and find these really simple tiny habits to do where things that happen to us already that we're already experiencing or routines that we have we can just tack on this really fun little you know or helpful or self-improvement moment to see where we can celebrate that we're being mindful and we're being the people we want in the world so I want to say to you I hope I'm getting very emotional I hope you realize this is joyful tears I wanted to say kind of as a tiny habits inspired gratitude for you after I finish this last slide I will thank you for sitting here listening to this presentation thank you very much for giving me the honor to share with you about my experience with bringing behavior design and applied improv and discovering it through untold improv about the power of how habits and applied improv can make the world make each person be the better people that they want to be in the world thank you very much