Tiny Habits, The Small Changes that Change Everything, by BJ Fogg, PhD, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020

 A simple recipe for starting out each day in the best way using the Tiny Habits Method.

            Think of it all in terms of The Maui Habit:

            After I: 

            wake up and put my feet on the floor

            I will:

            say, "Its going to be a great day"  

            To wire the habit into my brain I will immediately SMILE.

That's it.  My mother used to slow me down with, "Step by step.  Little steps."  But now, self-help has gotten to be a big business and it all seems pretty complicated.  But Dr. Fogg - please excuse me - has swept away the fog!

With a simple behavior change model, he has gifted us an approachable method that works. PLUS, he offers us that wonderful reinforcer - rewards!  For me it's a dish of Eddy's chocolate ice cream, a trip to Downriver Ice Cream (in season), or another practice session in my new Mini.  Rewards work.

So here we go on the Fogg Behavior Model.  First, recognize that some changes are easy to do - putting the used coffee cup in the dishwasher for instance, while others are unthinkably hard - writing a 350-page book in 4 months, for example.  Although both have been done, really, its so clear that coffee cups are easier, non-intimidating, and can be done alone.  A big complicated task like speed-writing a successful book involves more than simple moves - writing is a grind, sitting at a computer for 8 hours makes your ankles swell, and there are other powers - editors, readers, sources - that intrude on the purity of the writer's thought.  Makes sense, therefore, to stick to Fogg's Tiny Habits approach.  Do the coffee cups.  Or start with the easiest chapter; by the time you've reached the hardest one, the answer will be clear.

Not all our habits, of course are good ones.  We may find it hard to stop eating potato chips.  Or we may realize that Facebook check-ins are addictive time-wasters.  But it's just so hard to stop!  For these challenges, Fogg offers us practice exercises!  Accept that he tells us for every bad habit there is a trigger; think about that and see if you can identify the specific trigger that launches the undesirable behavior.  Potato chips are irresistible at 4pm, as are chocolate chip cookies.   In fact, he urges us to make that trigger harder to do, then pick a best solution and do it, and repeat.  Don't buy the chips or cookies, and substitute tea time with a couple slices of Machengo cheese.  

One further challenge he offers to engrave this new habit into our being is to teach someone else the Behavior Model.  In fact the Appendix contains a script to use while teaching someone else and reinforcing our own learning. Once we have thoroughly  mastered the new habit ourselves we ought to be able to verbalize the steps and demonstrate it to someone else.  

Love this book - persuasive and simple.  Scattered through the exploration of the author's model you will find illustrative stories that exemplify the right and wrong ways to approach change.  For all of us undergoing forced change - lock-down, quarantine, masks, Zooms - this book could not have come at a better time.  We're stuck, and we know it, but we can still work hard at being humans. We can take advantage of this time to clear out the junk habits and teach ourselves new ones, become better people.   And that's a great thing.

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com