 In last week's episode, we talked to our personal trainer, Chris Ty Walker, and it was a great conversation about setting goals for yourself and how to actually achieve them. This month, we're really excited because we're starting a brand new topic. And I think it's a topic that's quite timely considering what we're about to start with New Year's resolutions. Well, absolutely. And we talked to Chris on his whole point with setting goals, right? And so, how are we going to reach those goals by putting together new habits that will turn to routines that will slowly get us to those goals? And you know, someone was asking why we had our personal trainer on the show, and you and I had talked about that. We wanted to show that through all of this, we're just regular guys, right? We grumble, we're going to the gym, we're getting our ass kicked, and we thought it would be a very humanizing experience to have them here to talk to the audience about that. And I'm glad to see that people were intrigued by that interview. It was quite fun. And obviously, it's fun as coaches to be coached. We understand the importance of it, whether it's business coaching, whether it's social skills coaching, or whether it's personal training. So it's fun to get the inside the coaches' mindset, especially coaching other coaches. And we're just like you. We struggle at times. We piss off our coach from time to time. And it was a lot of fun having Chris on. Obviously, there's a lot of science around habit building, and there's some myths that we want to bust today, because I think when we think of habits, sometimes we think of monotonous, drudgery things that we don't look forward to. And we put some artificial timelines on us that science says are actually not true. But we can't talk about habits without first talking about willpower. And there's a lot of recent science that's come out around willpower, but willpower has not been classically studied for decades. Now, when it comes to starting anything, you need to push through that barrier. And that's what willpower is going to do. It's going to help you push through that barrier to get started and then keep going. And I like to think of willpower like a battery that drains itself, and we're going to talk about how if we drain our willpower too much, it's going to be not only difficult for us to instill these habits, but we're going to lose some of our other habits and routines that we've built up as well. So we want to first talk about what we mean by willpower, and science actually calls it self-regulation or self-control. And this whole idea of I'm just going to do that habit. I'm just going to January 1st. I'm going to run to the gym. I'm just going to knock this out, and I'm going to be able to keep going. Science says actually it's highly unlikely that you're just going to do it by sheer force. In fact, the University of Scranton came out with a study that said less than 10% of people who set a New Year's resolution actually reached their goals and 25% fail in the first week. I know gyms love that because they get paying members who don't show up. We want to take a look into the science behind this because those are some startling numbers. Well, this is the reason why we wanted to do the episode because if you don't understand the science, if you don't have that appreciation for human nature, you'll set out a task such as, okay, January 1st, I'm going to start going to gym two hours every time I go in or whatever this absurd goal that you put for yourself. And I say absurd because if you haven't worked up to it, then it is absurd. And then to tell yourself that you're going to do that, expect it to happen. Then when it doesn't, what tends to happen is we, of course, we're going to beat ourselves up and then stick a name to ourselves because of that. Oh, I'm a loser or I can't get it done or the one I hear all the time, I just don't have any willpower. Well, first of all, you didn't set yourself up to even succeed. You set yourself up to fail. And speaking of coaches, what do good coaches do? They put you in a position to win. They put you in a position to succeed and reframe those thoughts of I can't and to be on you to make sure that you're seeing it from the proper perspective that they're able to because they're objective and you're unable to now. And so putting that together allows us better to put ourselves in that position. And I know for myself, I think everyone has suffered from trying to put these habits together and failing miserably. They take patience, they take time, and they take some knowledge of how it works for it to stick. And this is an exciting month because we have some fascinating guests lined up all around the science of habit building. So we're going to have some great interviews. We pick some great articles next week to talk about. But getting back to this idea of willpower or conscientiousness as scientists also call it is both nature and nurture coming into play. And obviously, we've talked a lot about the impact of nature and nurture throughout this last year. And when we think about it, yes, our genes play a role in willpower, but also our upbringing plays a role in willpower. So to your point, when people say, I just don't have willpower. I just wasn't born with it. That's not true. It's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. And we want to we want to talk about this fascinating experiment. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard of this. This is the radish experiment. And this is something that we found fascinating when we actually break down. So Roy Baumaster and his team split hungry students into three groups. And the first group was brought into the room with freshly baked cookies. And of course, the researchers are a little devilish. So they bake the cookies at the lab, too. So the smell permeated. So everyone was smelling these fresh cookies and a bowl of radishes. And they let the people in the room eat whatever they wanted. The second group was led into a very similar room, but they were told to stay away from all the delicious stuff on the table and only eat fresh radishes, which sound amazing. After that, they were given a puzzle to solve. The third group didn't see any of the food. They were just led right to the puzzle starving. Now, here's the devious part about the whole story. The puzzle is unsolvable. So I could see Johnny's hanger is already percolated. Just I I can I can put all those pieces together, pun intended, and just think about that. As you're just saying that, getting angry. So and this is a standard test for perseverance that researchers use. And the funny part about this or not so funny part about this, however you look at it is when you're working on this puzzle and getting frustrated, this is what happens. The students were allowed to eat to the heart's content while they were working on the puzzle for an average of 20 minutes before they gave up. The same was true for the students that were still hungry. So apparently nothing to do with hunger in the group who had to fight the temptation to eat the delicious cookies, though they gave up after a mere eight minutes. Yeah. And why do you think that is? Well, it's it's it's been done. Willpower is finite. Yeah, it's that battery we're talking about. It was drained. They had exhausted all of their willpower trying to fight the urge to eat these delicious cookies while trying to solve this stupid puzzle that's unsolvable. Now, Bob Meister calls this the ego depletion. And when it comes to willpower, there's essentially two support systems at play. And the first one is as we talked about, already having the habits in place. You have the habits, you have the routines in place. Well, you're not draining your batteries. Nope. Your willpower is still there. It's easy for you to actually start to string new habits together, which is pretty fascinating. Now, this thing about having habits established, that's great, guys, but I want to establish new habits. Now, there's a second support system that's all based around self-compassion. We had a great interview episode seven twenty nine. If you haven't heard it with Dr. Stephen Hayes, we talk all about the impact of self-compassion on social anxiety and alleviating some of this self-doubt. And of course, understanding that it's only through self-compassion that we're going to be able to get through life's ups and downs. Now, if you're a three year old kid listening to the show, it's going to be a little different for you because you don't have these habits in place and you haven't had time to really invest into these habits either. Well, and when we talk about putting them in place, we're talking about moving them from the prefrontal cortex to the crock brain. Once they're in the crock brain, you're not depleting any thought process so that battery can stay the same. However, the more you're in your prefrontal cortex, the more decision you're making that you're doing, the more that battery gets depleted. And this is, of course, one of the biggest mistakes because when people want to start putting these new habits there, they don't think about the tiny little habits. They think about the big, the big things that they need to do. Right. I need to lose 100 pounds. OK. So then it comes. Everything that leads up to that is becomes prefrontal cortex decision making. And so you're fighting, you're fighting yourself. It's a battle and it depletes you. Now, when we've actually established some habits, it's easy to start tacking some other habits onto them. Yeah. And this is what's so fascinating is once you get the ball moving in the right direction. And as Johnny said, starting with the smaller habits, instead of starting with this giant goal in mind, you can start to string together a few of these things that build out a routine that allow you to accomplish the bigger goals. But if we're setting goals far outside of our ability to set habits for, it's going to be a struggle. And we've all felt that we've all gone through nearer's resolutions. We've all struggled to add positive habits to our lives. So understanding the second support system of self compassion if you don't have the habits is important to understand. That's how we're going to start to recharge and generate the willpower that's going to be used to actually build these habits out. And before we wrap all this up, we want to talk about the evolutionary selection of willpower, because I think this is really fascinating in the research, too. As humans, we actually evolved a strong preference for willpower in our peers and in our mates. If you think about it, it makes sense, right? We are, by nature, community based. Absolutely. We talk a lot about connection and the impact that that has not only on our social lives, but our willpower. The more connected we are through accountability, the easier it is to get this willpower that we're talking about. Now, with our peers that had a lot of willpower, well, you knew that they weren't going to run off the moment that resources were scarce, things were not going so well. Versus the people who didn't have any willpower. Well, they're not good tribe members, right? They're going to be the first to leave in those tough situations. And it's also important in mate selection, which is fascinating, right? When we think about it, knowing that your partner has willpower to give gives you some insurance that they're not going to run off with someone else the second they get tempted by those chocolate chip cookies. So it helps from an evolutionary standpoint. Obviously, we now understand the importance of willpower and building the habits, and we have to understand that when we start to build these habits, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We start to recharge the willpower and it gets easier and easier and easier from there. Well, and as we continue to do that, we build that out. Science has shown that basically for 95 percent of your day, you're in some various routine. And so if that's the case, and this took me such a long time to put together that that these habits and these routines that are set up are triggered by other habits and routines. So it's not about this one thing. It's about the whole string of them. It's about from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. And if this is all routines that have been put together, well, then, of course, the older you are, the longer you've been doing what you've been doing, the more ingrained those habits are and the more work it's going to take to change them if that is what you desire. And we're going to talk a little bit later in the episode about the timing of that and the importance of picking the right time of day to start instilling these new habits. Again, this willpower battery draining is going to be a recurring theme here when it comes to building new habits. Now, this is how willpower and self-control works and why they're necessary for building habits. Now, when it comes to building habits, we want to look at the most important factors first and the spell a few myths as well. Because I think, again, as I said, to start the show, when we think about habit building for some of us, we're like, why are we talking about this? I don't even want to think about it. The importance of picking one habit at a time. And I know coaching over the last decade, a lot of our clients coming through and their self-improvement junkies, the top performers, they want to get the most out of everything. Of course, it's easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of habits that you want to build at any given time. And it's it's very easy to figure that out. You're going to hear a bunch of stuff. You're going to read a bunch of stuff. You're going to see a bunch of things. Everyone knows they need to eat, right? Everyone knows they need to get to sleep on time, get eight hours of sleep. Everyone knows they need to be going to the gym. And these are all great habits that all of us want to instill. I don't know. It's hard for me to to think of anyone off the top of my head who don't. Want to do those things if they can easily do them. Absolutely. But trying to tackle all of those things at once. Talk about a drain of that willpower battery. It's next to impossible. So when we want to think about starting new habits, we want to first set our sights on one. This means focusing and working and putting all of your willpower towards that one habit. And remember, if it's not part of your routine already, you are going to be expending willpower to build it into your routine. Well, this is why I love science so much. I had I had spent a lot of my younger years trying to to to do things my way, right? And I think a lot of us do when we were young, we're brash, we're arrogant, we're big, ignorant to science. And we like to. And there's also because the only way we have the vision in the world, the to see the world, to store our own senses, right? That puts us in the center of everything. So there is this. Well, the side effect of that is thinking that we're special. It's very easy to think that way because you're the center of everything. And throughout mankind and history, we've always put ourselves in the center until science says, no, no, no, no. Until we have found out that not only were you not in the center of the universe, right? We're so far out in the corn god. So much like our place in the solar system is our singly. Ourselves where we're at here. And because of the side effects of seeing everything through our senses, we like to think we're special. And because of that, when we're young, we tend to think that we can do things our way. Yeah. And you don't even think about the willpower battery. Nope. And unfortunately, a lot of us may have been raised in an environment where bad habits were running rampant. Absolutely. So it's easy to pick up the wrong habits, not necessarily easy with this willpower battery to pick up the right habits through that nature nurture. Well, it's not. And to go along with that, that the science that may not have been out, that has been out later, obviously, former generations have done things differently. You know, you could watch television shows from the 70s, 60s, I mean, everyone is smoking, right? Now to see that in a movie or a television show, it's it's rare. And it's usually the anomaly like the bad guy. He's now smoking, like we're in the past. Everyone in those television shows, if you watch Dallas or any of that stuff, like that's that's all those characters did. But of course, now it's conventional wisdom that that is not a good thing to be doing. Not a healthy habit. I don't think any listeners are looking to pick up a smoking habit. Understanding this willpower battery, well, if we try to tackle learning how to cook, waking up earlier, meditating every morning, adding in journaling and getting that workout in on January 1st, we're not going to make it to lunch, but we're going to freak ourselves out. So we want to be very careful with selecting the right habits to start. And one at a time is where your focus should lie. Well, I want to just add to that, which is going to make this difficult. No matter where you are in life, you've already chosen 95 percent of your day habits. They're so you're not working from a blank slate. Right. So we have to now we're going to go pick this one habit that we're going to go change, and it's going to go stacked against everything else that we've already been doing. So in order to get this one habit ingrained, we have to break another routine that we've built up. Yes. And some of us have built it up over years, decades, even. Yes. And I know myself, I was adamant that I'm not a morning person. I was there, too. And I felt in running the company and having the late nights coaching that, you know what, I'm just not a morning person. I'm productive in the afternoon. It's totally fine. And when I met Amy, Amy's the opposite. Amy's like, no, we want to get up early. Get all the stuff done to enjoy the rest of our day versus me enjoying my sleeping in now. Fast forward five years later, I now realize the importance of getting up early and just creating that one habit had a cascade effect on getting the exercise in handling my business with the planner, getting all these other habits created. So not only do we want to pick one habit to focus on, we actually have to give ourselves enough time and room to build that one habit before we can go running to the gym and losing all that weight and kicking our smoking addiction and all the other habits that we're talking about. You know, to go along with that. I'm not I'm not a morning person thing in my household. Growing up the way we did. Sleeping in was this luxury, right? You're you're oh, it's the weekend. You can sleep in. So my dad never had this conversation with me ever about getting up early and watching him because as a child, that's what you're going to do. It when he would have to go to work into a factory, getting up met a long day of drudgery, drudgery. So he hated working up and sleeping in was this luxury. So it gets ingrained in me that if if you make it or if you have a good life, then sleeping in is luxurious. You made it. That's it. So, of course, and growing up, I'm thinking of ways that would allow me not to have to wake up early in the morning. So I would have to deal with that. And being a creative and we'll get to that card in a bit as well, letting itself to I was working in nightlife. I was playing music. And because I was working in nightlife, I didn't have to wake up in the morning and I had the luxury and and that that played a large role in my 20s and how I was going about things only to be rudely awakened later in my 20s, getting into self development and under and actually now learning why that was holding me back and why those things needed to be broken. And and what else they were that was leading into as you were saying about waking up, how it started to change everything else, of course, because I was sleeping in to whenever I wanted because I was working late nights, how that had everything else falling in line with with that habit. Right. So just starting to wake up early. Waking up with Amy early, not setting habits of working out and meditating and journaling and all this other stuff, but just a simple act of creating early mornings, early rising as a habit created all this other space for new habits to form. So understanding that we want to first start with one habit, focus on that. And much like investing in rental property, you get that first property, it starts to pay dividends. So you get that first habit, it starts to pay dividends in your willpower. You get more of that willpower back and all of a sudden the next habit becomes easier and we can start to string these things together. So we don't want to run out the door January 1st saying I'm going to tackle 17 habits, not a winning strategy. Now, the second thing we want to talk about is we got to make it easy on ourselves. We have to make it easy for you to follow through because we know consistency is key when it comes to building habits. And I love this line. Done is better than perfect. Yes. And I hate to talk about Facebook these days because obviously we've bashed on them quite a bit. The impact they're having on our social lives and now they're in the news for a bunch of other things going on with their data. But Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg ran Facebook in its early days by this exact mantra. Done is better than perfect. Yes. We talked on previous episodes about how perfectionism gets in the way. Perfectionism is going to kill your habit building potential. One thousand percent. So make it easy on yourself and realize that you stand a much better chance of going to the gym for 10 minutes to build that new habit than setting a stretch goal of I'm going to work out for two hours like I'm a bodybuilder if I haven't lifted a weight. Or I'm going to go strict vegan if I haven't actually wound myself off of meat. You can't go from one to one hundred that quickly when it comes to building habits and making it easy on yourself creates the momentum in the right direction. And to to go along with Mark. I mean, how educated is he on the science of habit? What is everyone in today's world do first thing? First thing, reach over in the morning. Reach over to your bedside table. Grab the phone and go through your email. Your social media. It's like, OK, now that I've done that and I'm up, I'll go hit the shower. I mean, why is that so great? Well, because everyone in Silicon Valley understands habit and routine to that. Absolutely. Right. You look at Mark Zuckerberg. He back in the day got pilloried for wearing the same outfit every single day. Well, let's talk about that. Why was that? Why did he do that? Mastering willpower. So you're not draining that battery confronted with all the different decisions and choices you have to make every single day. Yeah. And how much as somebody who likes to wear different things every day, I could tell you that I do burn energy sitting there wondering what the hell I'm going to wear in the morning. And I know a lot of people, and especially my friends who listen to this, like, what are you talking about? You're going to wear black. Well, yeah, but it's like black even cut, but black skinny jeans, black t-shirt, black button down. Even sitting here in studio. There's a lot. You know, we have to do the calculation. Did I wear this on last week's episode? I can't be in two weeks in a row. All these things go into play. And that's just one decision around your outfit. Yep. And we're already exhausting our willpower. And I can understand him eliminating that from his day. It must be a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, that one I'm not willing to ignore. I got too much going on. You're pretty darn close. I got as close as I can. You're a monotone. But not to mention Mark's other one year goal, where he sets out to learn one new skill, whether it's learn a language, whether it's actually farm. So he understands that building habits brick by brick lead to major results and payoffs. Now, number three here, we want to make it daily. It has to be a daily practice to become a habit. It can't be a weekday only thing. It can't be a Tuesdays and Thursdays thing. It has to be every day because, Johnny, we are building new pathways in our brain. Yeah. And and we're going to be speaking with Lisa from the author of Neuroscoping. And we're talking about neuroplasticity here and the brain's ability to change and rewire itself, which works in several different ways that we have to take responsibility for. One of all the pathways that have been already built and that we're continually building and the ones that we then the rewiring that we want to do because every time that you have a decision or you do an action, you are wiring yourself, whether you for better or for worse. And so every time, every day that you do that task, it's more ingrained that you're going to do it again the next day. Or it's going to be that much more effort in order to break that habit. And I love your mailbox in the snow analogy because this is exactly what we're trying to do here. You know, speaking of which, if I am not mistaken, to give a future guest, Charles Duhigg, who we will be speaking with very soon for this month, that's his analogy and and it's a wonderful one. So we will go ahead and give it to you, which is imagine walking outside your house. You're standing on your stoop and you see their mailbox and just as you walked out at two feet of snow has been laid down before you and you have to walk to the mailbox to pick up at the end of the rock way to get your mail. So it's going to be a difficult journey. Yeah, to fight some snow. You slowly trudged through it. Now we've all done this. How do we go back? Do we make another path? You're the easiest thing to do is going to be to use those same foot footsteps. And we do it even as children. That's how simply these things get wired up. And of course, the next day you go out to get them. Oh, you're going to use those same steps. And then after a few days, what is that pathway in the snow look like? Well, it's hardened in. It's become iced over. It's in fact some probably walking out without even getting snow on you at this point. You're true straight to the mailbox. Well, and anyone else who had came over your house or is going to use that same path to get to your door. I mean, that's how well worn it is. And and even outside people know what that is because it is so entrenched and these habits, these routines are are already that entrenched. So you can imagine choosing a new pathway to the mailbox when there's a well worn habit routine already in place. It's going to be more difficult and you're most likely going to burn a lot of willpower to do it. Yeah. In fact, you're going to be asking yourself, why am I doing this when I already have another path? And we're like every single day you walk that path and you're compressing the snow. You're making it easier for the next day. And that's why we want to make this a daily practice. You know, something I used to tell this story in class about it to go along with the mailbox is you had taken me to my first SoulCycle class here in LA. And this is this is how stupid this gets. So you had picked the bike and you said, hey, make sure you sign up, get the bike. I believe you were on 46. I think I was on 47 was the one I chose. And then for the next couple of months, I was going to SoulCycle because I enjoyed it. In fact, it's in the retail space of my building. So it was just a no brainer. It was an easy thing because I already went once and now I knew how it worked. But what bike do you think I had taken every time that I signed up? 47. That same bike. And if I couldn't get that bike, I was annoyed. And is it going to make? Any difference. Any difference. But it will make enough difference to me in that moment of frustration and anger, especially if I hadn't had breakfast. I'm going to be very angry going SoulCycle. I can attest. But that's another habit that talk about willpower we both were working on, intermittent fasting. Understanding that skipping a meal in the morning when you're used to your eggs and bacon every single day is going to be burning willpower. And talk about the hunger pains involved with willpower there, right? And understanding now having built this habit of intermittent fasting that some of those hunger pains we were listening to were simply false. Your brain was telling you, I don't want to walk that snowy path. What the hell's wrong with you? We have this well worn path to the mailbox. Why can't we just take this? You know, to go along with that on that whole breakfast thing, this is something that stuck in my head from Junko Willink. When he was talking about intermittent fasting, and somebody had a question about that was difficult for them and he says, you know, you're not hungry. You just have a habit of eating that at that time every day. And that, when I heard that, that stuck in my head. And so when I went on the intermittent fasting train, which I'm still on, which once that habit was built, I can't get out of it. I enjoy it. Probably not you. A certain times if I've been hungry, but. I'm glad you enjoy it. Yeah. It's working for you. But that stuck into my head and he was also absolutely right. It wasn't a hunger. It was, you had a habit of eating at that time. And I don't think we give our brains the credit of how these things, once they're ingrained, once that pathway is put together, how strong it is. And the societal pressures, the cultural pressures, three meals a day, there's no science behind that. That's a recent development in our evolutionary history. Most of us grew up in a situation where you eat breakfast, you eat lunch, you eat dinner. But that's not how evolution works. We originally were hunters and gatherers. We ate when we were hungry. And sometimes there was food. Sometimes there wasn't food. So we have cultural pressures. We have societal pressures. We have the nature component of this working against us when we're talking about willpower and building habits. So making it daily allows your brain to wire that new pathway, to create that new path to the mailbox. And in this habit building, let's make it even easier by preparing beforehand, laying those gym clothes out the night before, chopping the vegetables and getting the meal prep in on Sunday so that it's easy for you to make that choice that healthy habit and eat the right things every single day. When we actually prepare beforehand, it's easy for us to fall in line with that habit because we're halfway there. It's easy to get from point A to point B when you've already taken that first step. You know, to go along with this this morning, I knew that we were coming in on an earlier schedule and that things needed to be rearranged. And this morning was going to be a little bit different than usual. And knowing that and knowing how habit and routine works, last night I prepped to make sure that I was going to get things moving in the right direction because coming in here, wanting to do, be at least my sharpest for doing this podcast. Well, in understanding that when we break routines, we are going to be a little jumbled. Our mind is going to be a little scrambled. So if you're going to be breaking the routine, make it a little easier on yourself by preparing beforehand so that it's not this panic, this jumble, this burning of willpower that we only have as a finite resource. I laid out a gym clothes for berries last night before going to bed because I knew that this morning was going to be different, needed to prepare. And number five, so number four, prepare beforehand, number five that I love. And this came out in the research, mornings are best for building habits. This is one of those points where once you hear it, or, well, this is one of the science points of once you hear it, that your whole, the way you vision how things work needs to change. It needs, this science needs to be adopted into your thinking. And I wish I would have had this 10 years ago, right? Well, doesn't it? When I'm sitting there saying, oh, I'm not a morning person. Well, this goes back to exactly what I was saying as well of how I saw things working out. So, much like our iPhones, that thing is fully charged in the morning. It can handle anything we throw at it, whether we're Instagraming, Facebooking, your willpower is the same. It is fully charged when you wake up in the morning. As the day progresses and you make those decisions, whether it's, you're not Mark Zuckerberg-ing, you gotta pick out your clothes. You don't know what shade of black you're gonna wear today. And then you move through, what am I eating for lunch? Okay, now I got done with work. Now I wanna build that habit. Guess what? You've depleted your willpower. And this reason study shows that the effects of circadian cortisol on the development of a healthy habit. Meaning, when your day progresses, you're going to have cortisol drained out of your system. This is a little counterintuitive. The stress hormone cortisol is actually highest in the mornings and plays a role in learning and memory and allows us to learn new behaviors quickly. So not only do we have our willpower battery fully charged in the morning, but the cortisol is now gonna work to our advantage and allow us to learn and instill these new habits. So we have willpower and cortisol working together in synergy to get us healthy habits. Well, that morning routine is going to dictate the rest of your day. And this is what's great about this, because knowing this science, knowing how that cortisol is gonna help is, well this is why routines, the first one, the first thing you're going to do in the morning needs to start because it's going to trigger the next one and then the next one and then the next one. And for any one of us who are very structured people know that if our morning gets screwed up while we're traveling, we're at a new place, that is the time to be the most precautious because it's gonna be easier to unravel. So, Johnny and I have a little challenge for you as listeners, wake up an hour earlier each day, the next week, give it one week of just waking up an hour earlier, creating that space where we know our willpower is charged, cortisol is working together and give us that time to build a new habit and you'll be amazed having that one extra hour in the morning with no distractions, all these things working together, how easy it is to pick up that journaling habit you wanna build, pick up that meditation habit you wanna build, pick up that exercise routine that you wanna build. And that domino effect over time, you get that one morning habit and all of a sudden you have room for a second morning habit and now you've built out a morning ritual and routine. And I will tell you over a decade of interviewing top performers on this show, the one common theme that we hear over and over again outside of relationships and the impact of your network is the impact of routines and habits, especially in the morning and the evening, book ending your day. If we don't create the space for it, if we're slamming on the snooze bar in the morning, we're sleeping in and then we're rushing off to work and hoping that we're gonna instill the habit in the evening. We're gonna get that workout routine going after work. It's going to be an uphill battle. Can I bring up the two cards, the two excuses that people will tend to play here? One we discussed, which was, well, I don't have willpower. I don't have much willpower. The other card that I hear a lot is the, it goes along the same with the introverted card, which is the, I'm a creative card, right? I can't have structure. I'm a creative. I need to be free to be able to be creative. Now, are there people who do not do well with structure? Yes, there are. However, there are few in between. And if you think you're the outlier, I got news for you. You're wrong. Yeah. And how about this? You brought up a challenge, prove us wrong. Prove us wrong by, I would say, even more so than a week. Drama was on the show and drama had mentioned that he had a friend challenging him to get up early for a month and it was after that month, he was like, well, I've gotten so much, I can't go back to how things work. So let's roll that way. And what I can tell you, as someone who was kicking and screaming, bloody murder, I'm not a morning person, the feeling you get passing out early of sheer exhaustion, but having reached your goals and built these new habits. Amazing. It's incredible versus staying up, pulling all nighters, stressing out because you then didn't get the workout in because you didn't get the new habit. It's snowballs the other way. Creating that space in the morning that science shows is the best time to start building these new habits is gonna allow you the space to build routines and squeeze out extra time. And I can't tell you whether it's hitting the gym in the morning or it's tackling your journaling and getting some writing done or being creative in the morning. The space in the morning is the most sacred space we have. You're not getting inundated with calls, texts, emails, five, six in the morning. You're getting stuff done when everyone else who's claiming they're not a morning person is fast asleep. The words we've been using for that is being on offense rather than being on defense throughout the day, which has completely changed everything. And obviously I've had friends who because of my background in music had saw me as a creative and when they see me now, they wanna know had you always been a morning person or what had happened. It's just when you get up early and you're playing on offense, you just have more energy to deal with things. You're excited about dealing with things. You're getting ahead of it. When you're playing defense, you're overwhelmed. You're always playing catch up. And that's why it doesn't seem like your day is ever ending because you can't get ahead of anything. And the science backs it up. It's easier to make those decisions. It's easier to wear those new pathways in the morning. And I know anecdotally for us when we were accountability buddies working out, we'd squeeze in an afternoon workout. We'd squeeze in an evening workout. It was tough to build that habit. It was easy to say, oh, man, I gotta get to this email. We got this podcast prep. We gotta do, oh, we gotta do this coaching call. And next thing you know, there's no time for the workout. So we'll just do it tomorrow. When we carved out that time in the morning, and I mean, we're talking, waking up at 4.30 in the morning to get our asses kicked by Chris at UCLA's campus, like we're getting up now, but that space that we've allotted ourselves, we're making healthy decisions. We're building pathways that have been difficult if we tried in the evening. It would be very difficult if you tried at 10 o'clock at night. Something I want to go, I want to make sure that I clear up with the creative card that a lot of people play as an excuse. When I say that you're wrong and to challenge yourself to see if you have yourself right or not, I will also say this, for that minority, when I say minority, I'm probably less than 10% of the population. Probably closer to 1%. For the people who are the true creatives who can't be bothered by structure, the reason is because they can't function period and structure. These are people who couldn't, they could not hold down any sort of job. These are people who, when I say are creatives who are in a creative state of creating 24-7, there is, these are people, and for myself who still at this time participates in the creative space here in Hollywood, these people can't function in any other scenario. I mean, that's, and so when you play that card, are you also saying that you can't function period in any other, so that is such a small percentage of people. And that's why they are so good at that one thing that they do that they have to be doing at all times. It's funny how we build these narratives in our mind and give us the excuses we need to get out of these things. I'm an introvert, I'm a creative. I've fallen prey to it myself. We all do. And the morning thing for me was a big aha moment. And with that, being able to then string together, okay, I have a routine around making one cup of coffee. I had a bit of a health scare a few years ago, blood pressure was through the roof, saw the doctor, doctor's like, you're drinking too much coffee, we gotta alleviate caffeine, we gotta watch what we're eating, and it shook me up. I was like, oh man, I just kind of, without thinking, just down a few cups of coffee, next thing I know, I'm gonna refill my cup, have another, and six cups later, I'm jacked up, but obviously it's impacting my health. Waking up in the morning allowed me in the space to create a simple routine around making that one precious cup of coffee that I lot myself. It gave me the space to not just jump into work, but actually get some writing done, some personal journaling done. When we set ourselves up for success through science, well then, these habits that we're talking about, they can be strung together and have a huge impact on our lives. The last thing we wanna talk about here, and this one, I think, for a lot of us, when we get excited, we get like a head start, and we're like, okay, this is my fourth day in a row waking up early, you know what? I'm gonna change things up a little bit. I'm gonna add an extra layer to this, and we get a little ahead of ourselves, we get over our skis, and all of a sudden, when we've changed the plan, we burn all that willpower that we were so thankfully saving up to get through this habit-building process. Keep it simple. You have to stick to the plan. It's tempting to change things. It's tempting to be like, you know what? I wrote for 10 minutes yesterday, I felt good. I'm gonna write for an hour tomorrow, and you're stretching yourself too thin, and all of a sudden, you've exhausted that willpower, and that habit that you were working towards now feels insurmountable. These things can seem difficult, and in the past, if you haven't used science to your advantage or hadn't understood it, then, of course, you've felt a lot. These things become difficult, and then you start pulling cards like the introvert card, the creative card. However, now that you've got the science, now that you understand how these things work, actually, habit-forming can be quite simple, and keeping it simple is going to allow some of these things to set in. Why make yourself do all this work? Now, everyone listening is like, okay, great, guys. How long does it take to build these habits, right? You're telling me I can't stretch myself, I need a plan, I need to figure out exactly how I'm gonna stick to this, and this is one of the myths that we hear all the time, the 21-day myth to building a habit. It's cute. It makes for a nice, easy number to remember, oh, I just gotta do it for three weeks in a row. I have a habit. Yep. It's a complete myth that's been busted. It's actually a misinterpretation of some research. Now, in his book, Making Habits, Breaking Habits, Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick, Jeremy Dean, a psychologist, was intrigued by this concept of 21 days to form a habit. This was based on some research that Dr. Maxwell Maltz did, a plastic surgeon. Now, how are those two related? Basically, in 1960, Maltz published a book, Psycho-Cybernetics, noting that amputees took on average 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. Now, Maltz further noted that people who had surgery on their face also took about 21 days to adjust to their new features. As a plastic surgeon, you'd think that's pretty important research. All of a sudden, that 21-day rule became, okay, now we're building everything in 21 days. You're an amputee, now you can function with your prosthetic in 21 days. Great, now we know building habits takes 21 days. Well, imagine going through the work, let's just say you're trying to break a bad habit. Let's just say that drinking is doing a number on your life or smoking is... Or eating junk food or... Whatever it might be. So obviously, there is damage being done. You see it being done. You realize you need to make this change. So your thought is the conventional wisdom that you heard. Oh, 21 days are gonna do without drinking, and I'm good, I'm fine. I could go back out and hang out with my friends and not have to worry about it. And here's, so when things go down in flames and you're unable to stop because you went against what's the real science, right? Now you're gonna be frustrated. You're gonna beat yourself up. You're gonna be start looking for excuses to why it wasn't working for you and you hadn't set yourself up to succeed. You've set yourself up to fail. And psychologist Jeremy Dean says it best. When we extrapolate from Alta's work, we are being optimistic at best. The science is not there that it takes 21 days to form a habit. So what does that mean? Well, science is inconclusive on this, unfortunately. A habit takes as long as a habit takes for you to make that choice with your crock brain, meaning it's subconscious, meaning you don't even think about it, you're already doing that new pathway. And it took me longer than 21 days to build up my workout habit, I'll tell you that. So don't beat yourself up. This is what we're gonna talk about when we talk about self-compassion. When we set these hard and fast rules based on this, not based on science, well, of course, I'm at 22 days and this hasn't stuck. Oh, forget it, screw it, it's not a habit. I don't have any willpower. I'm creative, right? Then all these other excuses come in. We need to understand that these are difficult choices. We're fighting routines, we're fighting nature, we're fighting nurture. So we have to create the space, make it easy on ourselves, create it daily, and not worry about those hard and fast numbers. Well, let me, you know, let's answer this question. How many times do you know that you need to do something, you're going to set yourself up to take on this challenge, this new habit, this break habit, whatever it might be, and because you don't quite know how it's supposed to go, you're gonna roll with what you, how you think it's supposed to happen or what a friend has said, oh, you just need to stop doing that for 21 days and you'll be fine. And then you fail. How many times can you set yourself up for failure before you just give up on everything? Yeah, and it's easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. These habits have varying degrees of difficulty. Waking up early is a lot different than throwing weights around for an hour. So give yourself the amount of time necessary based on the difficulty of the habit. If you've been waking up at 7 a.m. every morning for your entire life and you're like, okay, I want to push it up to six, well, that's not much of an adjustment, but if you've been sleeping until 11 and now you're listening to the show and you're like, oh, I want to get up at 5 a.m. like AJ and Johnny, well, guess what? That's a big difference. That's gonna take longer than 21 days. So understating the science, and that's obviously what we're trying to do with the show is break down some of these myths that we have around habits so that we can build new ones based in science and give ourselves the credit when it's due. You know, a saying that I've heard a lot, but it's also one that we've adopted for years, not we've been saying it. And I've heard it in different places, which is how you do anything is how you do everything. And then another take on that is small things are indicative of larger things. And I remember upon first hearing that, it's an easy thing to think, well, I'm gonna pick this up or I'm gonna clean this up because how you do anything is how you do everything. But we are talking about out of the gate, first thing you do in the morning because as science is shown and as he sings unfold one routine and habit rolls into the next. That is the cue for the next one. And we're gonna dig into that with Charles Duhigg. We also wanna reward ourselves here, all right? We're creating a new pathway in our brain. We're walking down a new pathway to the mailbox. Your brain also functions with some reward. As much as we hate to be primates about this and be mammals, your brain functions through reward. So rewarding yourself for building new habits is a classic way to train your brain. If X happens, then I get Y. Don't skip this, even if the first few weeks went good. It's very helpful to reinforce this habit with some reward. So if you hold off on the reward too, your burning will power there. Much like the cookie analogy, right? Give yourself an opportunity to reward this new habit that you've created, this new habit that you're working on. You wanna recharge those batteries and give your brain an opportunity to feel good about the direction it's moving in. Now, how much of a reward? I'm sure the listeners are wondering, Johnny. So what do you think about rule of thumb on your reward? Go out and party all night. That's gotta be what it is, right? It's worked for you in the past. Hey, you made your bed this morning. Tonight, we party. Yeah, we're gonna eat a large pizza. I'm gonna crush a couple chicken wings. Yeah, absolutely. The rule of thumb that we love is how much would you pay someone else to do this habit for you? So let's say your habit is reading. You wanna read more. How much would you pay someone to read for 30 minutes every day? Five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks. To read for you for 30 minutes and break down, give you the cliff note. How much would you pay that person? Well, then let's add that up over seven days and let's make that the reward. That's a nice reward. So if it's 25 bucks for 30 minutes of reading, breaking it down for you, then that means at the end of the week, you're giving yourself a nice reward of $175, whether it's a new sweater or it's a nice sushi dinner or you're buying yourself a new iPad, we want to create synergy in all of these factors that underlie our psychology. When we set the time, when we do it daily, when we follow through and reward ourselves, we're actually giving ourselves more momentum in the right direction. And that's really what habit building is all about. The last one we wanna talk about is just know the why. Habits are gonna stick if you have a greater meaning attached to it. Just creating a habit to create a habit or creating a habit because you heard Johnny on the show say, oh, you should do this. If you don't have the why, you're gonna struggle. Well, to go along with this, how many of us, and I know this is certainly for me, I've seen it in you, and we hear things, we know that they're right, but we gotta learn it for ourselves. And the why is one of those things where of course you should wake up early and of course you should go to the gym and of course you should go to bed on time and regularly. Of course you should have three balanced meals a day, whatever it might be. But if you don't have an actual why, if you haven't really done any work, you're just going through the motions. And the word that you said through that is what is the meaning of it? And if you don't have any, you better figure it out because this is not going to stick otherwise. And this is something that our guest, David Goggins had mentioned, of when you're out and you're exercising and you're wondering, why am I doing this? If you don't have an answer, you will feel that. And it's not going to be the answer you want it to be. You will feel it with, hey, I don't have to do that because I'm a creative. It's easy to stick when we found the why. Now let's talk about the final piece of the puzzle. We gave you a bunch of science behind habit building. We gave you a bunch of tips and strategies to help you start instilling these new habits that we're all excited about. The final piece of the puzzle is accountability. And we've done an entire episode about this. Yes. 703, the power of accountability earlier this year. And we're actually going to be wrapping the year talking about some of those goals we had set out for ourselves and if we were able to hold ourselves accountable. So catch that end of the year show. But before we dive into accountability systems, we need to at least come back to this concept of self-control or self-regulation. We've already talked about how willpower is one crucial component of that. Now there's a second component that is the self-awareness tied to that. Yes. And self-awareness in short is the ability to correctly judge where you are and how you are doing. So obviously in regards to your goals in comparison to others and so on, we wanna make sure that we understand how important this is for self-control. If you don't know where you stand and you don't know how you can change or maintain your course correctly, well all the willpower in the world is not gonna get you there. Well, how do you get to self-awareness? It's about asking questions about where you are and then being honest with yourself about it. One, I heard it a while ago was the answer to consciousness is more consciousness. So you want your life to be better? Well, then you need to start taking stock of everything that you do and ask yourself why you are doing it. Is it leading you to get closer to where you want to be going? Or is it not? Well, what gets tracked gets changed. And the science is strong. In the 1970s, scientists Robert Wicklin and Shelley DeVall pioneered the research around self-awareness and as it turned out as soon as people were made aware of their behavior it changed and walk around any restaurant in the United States now and what do you see? You see calories listed on everything because the second you become aware of it the second you realize how much you're consuming a lot of us can't change your behavior because we don't even realize it but the second you become aware you can actually make those changes. Now people were told they were monitored or they were able to see themselves in a mirror they actually tended to change their behavior towards an ideal, holding onto their values being more honest, being more confident, et cetera. So it doesn't mean you have to carry the mirror with you wherever you go it doesn't mean you have to track every little last detail but it means in order to make use of this you need to start keeping an eye on things. You can't say well I don't wanna look at my credit card statement I don't wanna get on the scale. If you don't track these things you're gonna have a very difficult time getting control over them. I'm just gonna say I'm guilty of the credit card statement just to say. I save that just for you. Now let's say your goal is that exercise then tracking your results whether it's the time, the splits, where your weight is, what your body fat percentage is at you're going to see results. If you're not tracking if you're not quantifying these things it's gonna be very difficult for you to influence your behavior for the rest of the day. Now one of the most important reasons that quantified self movement is growing in leaps and bounds is because we have all these devices to track it. Well we're in the most tracked generation of all time. Sometimes we're tracked by corporations we don't wanna be tracked by but a lot of us have the capabilities to track everything we want. Input of calories, amount of steps taken, all of this stuff is trackable. So you're doing yourself a great disservice if you're not tracking these things. It is totally bizarre how much we're tracked. I don't, obviously we don't even know and all the ways we're being tracked. And the more we find out the more we're getting a little leery. We're being tracked far more than we'd like. You know who else we had recently? Well this year who would just seem like one of those guys who quantified everything was Jesse Itzler. He loved to quantify things. Well his whole concept of under indexing. Once you quantify and you realize that holy cow I have been giving myself a lot less credit. It's opening your eyes to a whole other potential that you didn't even know was there when you're under indexing and you're not tracking. And this is not something we need to do every hour on the hour. Johnny was laughing earlier, ripping his Apple Watch office so we could actually focus on stuff. You need focus, you need drive. So track once a day. Have a daily check in with yourself to build that self-awareness to make sure that you're working towards things. You're working in the right direction. If you're not tracking it's very difficult to know where you even are in building this habit. You know how you've been telling me, well you've deleted Facebook and Facebook Messenger off of your phone. And you had mentioned how wonderful it has made your life. You know what finally got me to do it? When the new iOS came up that was tracking your time spell. Screen time. On screen time. The minute I saw that, because I played, oh I'm not on there that much and if I am I just blip on and I check in the mouth. No, I remember seeing something like four hours. I was like, what? And the minute I saw that I was like, that's it, I'm done. No way. Say once I started tracking my sleep, you can track these things and when you track them, it builds that self-awareness you need to actually reach the goals of building that habit. Now, obviously there's a pitfall with tracking and that's our friend perfectionism. Yes. And it's not an all or nothing perspective we're looking for here. And a lot of us wrestle with this, right? Well, my goal was to eat 2,000 calories. I ate 2,001 calories so tomorrow I'm just gonna do whatever. Yep. When we chase perfection and we have this all or nothing perspective, it's inevitable that we're gonna fail from time to time so we're really gonna struggle. We want to start stringing together streaks one day after the next. Now we fit a week, now we fit a month, now we fit two months of actually building this habit and all of a sudden you're gonna see that the tracking was worth it. It's not worth it to beat yourself up. It's worth it to raise the self-awareness to actually build the habit. And we love accountability. Of course. It's been a big part of our success this past year both in business and in developing the podcast and even in our personal lives from fitness to nutrition to some of these other habits we've talked about today, holding yourself accountable by sharing it with someone else with that accountability buddy or a group of friends or even a support group, it helps you outsource that self-awareness. Yeah, and we looked at the science behind that and I'll let you go through those numbers if you remember those. But on the other side about that, there is so many different ways to get accountability and went through online friends and forums to your actual in real life friends to a simple calendar. Breaking the chain is something we talked about. That's holding accountable. And with all of the technology we have, the most important thing in tracking for myself is I need a wall hang calendar. I just, there's multiple things that just seeing it there is a visual cue that helps me a lot that as much as my iPhone can do that that simple wall calendar can do better. And there's nothing greater than grabbing that marker and drawing an X on that day. Absolutely, it's such a great feeling and you get seven. And the visual, exactly. You get 10. You're staring at a calendar with 14 Xs. I mean, that in itself is putting pressure on you to do it again that next day. And it's very simple. I have two things that technology has eradicated for a lot of people but for myself, I need the physical thing. I need my war board, which I put daily notes on, things that are stirring in my head. I write those on there. And of course, the wall hang calendar, both of those things, as I would like to replace them, but they just, the technology in my pocket does not have the same effect as seeing those things as a visual cue when I'm in my living room. And you're seeing it from the Apple Watch to the apps to, even last week Chris talked about coaching people online and checking in with them in his workout courses. Oh, he's here, he showed up, great. Holding yourself accountable through these apps and through someone who will be honest with you. And sometimes we have to pay for that honesty. Sometimes we have to pay for the trainer to be honest and hold us accountable. Sometimes we're fortunate enough to have a friend who will do it but understanding the power that accountability gives you in building these habits, it's something you can't overlook. It's something that you need to invest in. And as I said, we delve really deeply into this in episode 703. Check that out, all the science around accountability. Just understand that this is definitely going to allow us to feel good moving in the right direction. And in those moments that we might be second guessing ourselves or starting to veer off course, that accountability buddy can get us back on track. And I know for me, that added layer of committing to working out with you in the very beginning, when I was just trying to go from sedentary and overweight to actually getting moving was huge. I didn't want to let you down saying, oh, I'm not going to show up at the gym today. I didn't want to let you down saying, oh, I can't work out knowing that I was going to now screw you up. Oh yeah. So when we have that support, we can unlock that hidden potential. I just, I just, I really don't like hearing. I get this question a lot. Oh, there's no one who lives around me or no one's, I can't find an accountability buddy. There you have an animate accountability buddy in your wall hanging calendar or on your phone. You have, you have. Or join the art of charm challenge group. We have a private Facebook group, the art of charm.com slash challenge, full of people working on improving their social lives and just generally interested in personal development. So you could post on there and you'll find an accountability buddy, no problem. And when you're around other people who want to do better, though the one thing that they all understand is the more people around them doing better, the easier it is for them. So of course they're going to want to be your accountability buddy if you're willing to do the work. No one likes being accountability buddy when you're just, they tell you what to do or you say what you're going to do and then you don't do it and then you complain about it. You give me two times of that and you're done. Well, let's, let's talk about this because this is a pitfall and social media has, again, stepped in to screw up our habit building. This is some interesting research we found. Peter Golitzer and his team, when intentions go public, does social reality widen the intention behavior gap? So what these researchers were looking at was this common idea that when people make their intentions public, the chance that they change their behavior is higher. So this would be to publicly state to everyone on your Facebook wall, I'm looking to do this. And then of course, you're more likely to follow through with it. And then obviously the accountability factor, right? You want to make your intentions clear and then you don't want to let all these people down. You don't want to be judged based on all of that. Their opinion obviously matters. But what they've found was actually pretty surprising. When other people take notice of one's identity relevant behavior intentions, one's performance of the intended behaviors is compromised and other people taking notice of one's identity relevant intentions apparently engenders a premature sense of completeness of the identity goal. So let's unpack that a little bit. Yes, there's a lot of science there. Let's say you want to read more. And this is your goal, you want to read more. This is the habit you're looking at. And you go on your social media and you say, all right, I'm going to read a book a day for the next month. You order all these books and all your friends on Instagram see this pile of books and they're like, yes, that's amazing. They're celebrating you, thumbs up, commenting. Of course they're going to congratulate you. You're choosing an awesome habit. Who couldn't get behind that? Here's what happens. When you do that, your identity is already changing. You've already become an amazing reader in your social circle. And their eyes, whoa, you nailed it. This is awesome. Except at this point, you haven't even opened your first book. Nope. So you got all of the wind without actually doing any of the work. And it actually works against you. Yes, let's go ahead with that. So you publicly look like you've reached the goal. You get all that credit, all the thumbs up, all the rah, rah, you did it. But your behavior didn't really change. Now, we can use social media to our advantage, but we have to quantify things to do it. You have to give people your metrics. You can't just say, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. Hey, I bought all these books. Hey, look at all this gym equipment I just built. Great. Hey, look at my meal prep for the week. You haven't eaten a meal. You haven't lifted weight. You haven't touched a book. But all that adulation you're getting from your friends on social media is now changing your identity and working against you. And our coach, Michael, unfortunately, he broke his leg, he had a terrible accident. And in his rehab, he wanted to, after seeing this research, he wanted to set himself up for success. And instead of saying, hey, guys, I'm working out. I want to get fit. I'm rehabbing. Yes. He actually posted his entire training schedule on social media. So it's a shared Google document that all of his friends can see his hours logged every single day. And I have friends who share their meal plan and what they're eating with each other so they can track it. When we share the metrics, that's when we're holding ourselves accountable, not when you prematurely share the win. When you share the win, you actually change your identity and it makes it harder to build that. Well, and if you don't succeed in that, then you're going to try to avoid people who might ask about it, or if not, then you're going to have to lie about it. And now you've started to become slippery slope. Once exactly. I don't think we need to even get on that truck. Everyone knows what happens then. Now, we've covered a lot of ground today. We talked about all the research behind willpower and how it's really a muscle that gets tired as we go throughout our day. And we also went over all the scientifically backed ways to build these new habits. And as we said, we are very excited this month because not only have we been focusing on some new habits, but we're bringing some people who've really had a huge impact, some authors that we've loved on this exact thing. And we're going to delve into their science and their findings in these two fantastic books. So stay tuned for the rest of the month. And as we said earlier, our challenge for you this month is set your alarm clock early. Get up early every single day this month. Let us know on social media how you're doing. Take some snapshots of that alarm clock and post it at the time you actually woke up so we see the data, tag us at The Art of Charm. It's been a fantastic episode. So happy you guys tuned in. See you next week.