Join a team to tackle healthy habits

We all know New Year's Resolutions are a joke.

That's because this is the recipe:

• Lofty goal

• No execution plan

• No behavior design

• Uphill battle trying to do something you don't enjoy

• No insight into how the human mind + body work.

Experts have already mapped out how to do it right.

Scientists have devoted their entire careers to understanding how people tick-- neurobiology, human behavior and reward systems in the brain. Others have put these insights into practice and learned what works and what doesn't through trial and error. Let's use all this knowledge and experience to give ourselves a leg up!

Daily habits are something that we can actually control.

The broader world is huge and complex, and we're wise to focus on where we have agency. When we take care of the basics, we improve our ability to succeed when faced with what life serves up. We put ourselves in a good frame of mind. We have the inner resources to meet challenges. We have more innate joy so we're less tempted to seek external quick fixes.

Why I'm hosting a 2-month peer group

Healthy habits and structured routine do not come naturally to me. Over the past 9 years of founding and growing a company that managed $70M in real estate, I've learned how to be a high-output person. Rather than being a burnt-out workaholic, I've found ways to get shit done while also enjoying life, friendships, improving my health and creating depth and meaning in my life. But I haven't done this alone - I'm the product of the friendships and community that I call home.

I've experienced the power of community to facilitate personal growth.

For 7 years, I lived in a group house, sharing our days with the explicit intent of lifting one another up. Through my business, I also launched 19 other shared living properties. Now I'm excited to transfer my background in community to help build stable foundations in our lives.

Potential Focus Areas:

*We will not be tackling all of these at once!

• Exercise

• Food and nutrition

• Sleep hygiene

• Responsible spending

• Meditation + mindfulness

• Work habits + productivity

• Morning routines

Already in?

Apply to Join

Purpose:

• Learn the science behind how positive behaviors work

• Practice and design your "behavior stack" by starting small, fun and easy

• Develop lifelong skills for mastering your own behavior

• Work as a group with accountability, feedback and support

Approach:

We will be following BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits model (Stanford habits PhD), with other insights, studies and models sprinkled throughout.

• Do things the easy way (sorry masochists!)

• Custom-design new habits into your schedule + life

• Learn the process of designing, testing and adapting new behaviors for success

• Move away from being driven by shame, self-judgement and negative self-talk

• Positive psychology and integrating mindfulness into habit design

• Using your dopamine reward system to create virtuous cycles

Curriculum:

1. Pre-course reading: BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits (or at least scan summary posts / videos)

2. Science of habits + behavior

3. How to choose the right habits to focus on

4. Designing hyper-specific triggers that cue behavior

5. Making behaviors actionable by lowering the friction to action

6. Stacking behaviors into a [morning] routine

7. Adapting + re-designing when you fail

Structure:

• Private 1-1 intake meeting

• Weekly content

• Group calls every-other week (recorded if you miss)

• WhatsApp group for troubleshooting + tracking progress

• Accountability pairs for daily

• Feedback on your behavior design plans

Details:

• Jan. 1st - Feb. 10th: Signup period + pre-reading

• Feb. 15th - Apr. 15th 2023: Course runs for 2 months

• Maximum of 12 people

• $135 -- Application deadline Feb. 10th

Apply to Join

$20 off if you apply before Jan 10

Refer a friend and you both get $30 off

oh you need more inspiration, huh?

Why Your Habits are the Lynchpin of your Life

Ideas get us excited about the future, and then we create goals to get specific about how we want to achieve our ideas. But Ideas and Goals are purely conceptual- they only exist in our minds. Consistent action and daily execution are how we bring ideas into form.

We can use simple daily habits as a means of practicing being human. We learn how our unique personality, body and life circumstances tick. Then, as we unlock the blueprint of our own self, we can apply those learnings to bigger challenges, larger projects and loftier goals.

As you take better and better care of yourself, the benefits compound, and your baseline state of being yields improved focused, more patience, more positive emotions and an easier flow of creativity.

Our society is plagued with the empty pursuit immediate gratification, and you know there's a better way. Systematic self-care is a radical act that ripples out and makes a difference in the lives of people around you. We're all role models for each other. Let's write a story where good things happen, people make good choices and we help one another.

use [art] to re-wire your mind

We all find ourselves at a dead-end at some point.

I had been at the dead-end for a while but haven't noticed. But then I saw it. How I'd been repeating the same thoughts and actions to no avail. I knew I had to try something new, but I didn't know where to start. I was stagnant.

A few months ago I stumbled onto a new road.

I had a strong, excited, almost sexual urge to paint on canvas. I just wanted to do it. And there wasn't anything stopping me. No more looking for "the right answer." I just went to the store and bought a bunch of art supplies and started to move paint around on a canvas. I didn't care about whether the paintings were good or not - I was satisfied by the physical act itself.

Fast forward 5 months or so, and I've produced 40 or so paintings -- I've even sold a few. I still don't care much whether they are good. The act of making the art is itself the reward. I tripped and fell into more than just a delightful hobby. I found a window into a better way of working, a method for getting out of my own way.

Anatomy of a Dead End

It's worth casting light onto my "normal" approach to life. You may recognize it from such films as "Every Moment of Your Day" and "Repetitive, Anxious and Obsessed." Like the annoying loud person at the party, this voice still gets a lot of airtime, but I'm learning to find ways to politely exit the conversation.

Dead End (Basic Bitch Monkey Mind)	The Good Stuff
Focused on achieving an end goal.	The work itself is satisfying.
"I'm running out of time. I'm behind."	"I'm lucky to have some freedom today"
Mental, abstract, vague	Physical, practical, real
Absorbed in ideas about the future	Absorbed in present activity
Not enjoyable to experience.	One of your favorite ways to spend time
​Seeks perfection; afraid to start	Excited to jump in and learn progressively
​Wants to look good; seeks validation.	Wants to share and give
Worried about money, doesn't want to get burned again	Accepts vulnerability and takes the right risks
Takes things seriously & personally.	​Playful, feels more themselves
Spirit animal is coffee jitters	Spirit animal is post-coital bliss

The great thing is, every time I make art, I am strengthening this new approach to life. I'm learning how to move forward and not get stuck.

I'll leave you with this question:

What area of your life can you use as a safe "training ground" for uncovering a new relationship with yourself, a new attitude, and new process, or a new mindset?

Habit Design

After 3 weeks of testing a new habit tracking system, it's time to tweak and improve my approach.

I've been reading BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits, and his model is that any behavior is driven by three factors: Motivation, Ability and Trigger.

• Motivation: Do you actually want to do it or is it a struggle?

• Ability: How easy is it to do?

• Trigger: What prompts you to do it?

Via https://dribbble.com/shots/3663726-Fogg-Behavior-Model

A few learnings to incorporate:

• I'm trying to track too many habits; this makes me feel like I'm losing when I look at my habit tracking stats

• The habits need to be in smaller increments; 15min of yoga needs to come down to 5min

• I need to define specific triggers in space and time; currently it's just "exercise for 45 minutes a week" floating around, unmoored, at the mercy of the waves of emotional whims

• Habits can be chained together, whereby one habit is the trigger for the next, forming a rhythm and routine that you can follow on autopilot without burning valuable willpower

• Morning routine is the beachhead; you have more willpower, a fresh brain and personally, an uninterrupted period of time

My next iteration of Habit Design:

I'm only going to focus on 3 simple habits, and put more design into the triggers:

• Saying something positive as I get out of bed

• Drinking 16oz of water from my water bottle 8 times a day

• Doing yoga for 5 minutes twice per day

I am actually going to continue tracking my other habits loosely because I'm actually doing a pretty good job with all of this and I want to have longitudinal data. But for the next few weeks I'm going to deep dive on the precise dynamics of how I drink water and do yoga.

For the past few weeks, I've done 15m of yoga in the mornings about 70% of days. I've very rarely done a second session of yoga later in the day, maybe 5% of days.

Right now it's less about the performance or results of the behavior, and more about getting good at the underlying skill of habit formation itself.

Designing for Triggers

BJ Fogg says triggers are the low-hanging-fruit. They are the easiest part of the equation to change. Ability is the second-easiest, and Motivation the hardest.

Fogg breaks down 3 classes of triggers (or prompts):

James Clear of Atomic Habits outlines 5 types of triggers (or cues):

1. Time

2. Location

3. Preceding Event

4. Emotional State

5. Social - other people

Habit Design, v2.0

I am designing my 3 habits as a single stack or chain, with the very first thing I do each day being the full completion of a very simple habit, so I start the day out winning: saying "today is going to be great" as I pivot my legs over the edge of the bed.

Then, I'm going to peg my yoga practice to drinking water. Drinking water is easy (high ability) and I'm highly motivated to do because I've felt the visceral physical and psychological benefits of being well hydrated, so I'm very bought in.

So most of the design is all based around triggering drinking water, and that is all encapsulated in the water bottle itself as a visual cue, a physical embodiment of the habit routine.

Wakeup Routine

• Wake up (preceding event) -->

• say "Today is going to be great" (preceding event) -->

• drink 16oz from my blue water bottle (preceding event) -->

• Log this in my habit tracker (preceding event) --->

• (yoga mat is left on floor in bedroom, location) -->

• Do 5min yoga (preceding event)-->

• Do a fist pump (preceding event)-->

• Log yoga in habit tracker -->

((Then I will do the rest of my morning routine, but I am now considering bonus points.))

Mid-Day Triggers

The "WTF am I doing" Cycle:

• "I don't know what to do next" or "I just finished something" (emotional state) -->

• Drink 16oz (preceding event)-->

• Step onto yoga mat (location) -->

• Do 5min yoga -->

• Choose what I'm going to do next

The "oh, there's my water bottle" Cycle:

• Look at water bottle (location / object) -->

• Drink 16oz water -->

• Choose what I'm going to do next

The "It's Five O'clock Somewhere" Cycle:

• Reminder goes off at 5pm to drink water and do yoga (time) -->

• Drink 16oz water (preceding event -->

• Do 5min yoga

The Bedtime Ritual

This one has been the hardest for me because I'm usually tapped out of willpower and more readily fall for dopaminergic quickies, doomscrolling, eating random food, having a beer, etc.

The "It's time to get ready for bed, sweetie" Cycle:

• Reminder goes off at 8:30pm (time) -->

• Drink 16oz water (preceding event) -->

• Do 5m yoga -->

• Stare into the abyss and contemplate the futility of existence -->

• This is where I short circuit many days, but will have to leave this for future consideration

That's it! We'll see how this method goes for the next few weeks