Jay Papasan:
So, the number one challenge we often see with high achievers is not that they don’t know what to do, they don’t have the skills or the knowledge they need. They know exactly what they need to do, but they can’t find consistency. They can do it for a week, maybe two weeks, but then it falls apart, and then they start beating themselves up and it becomes this whole cycle of, “Well, maybe I just can’t do it,” and it gets into this bad head space.
So, this week, we’re gonna tackle how to break that cycle to find your consistency by doing something that takes a little science. We’re gonna go into the art and science of building habits and breaking bad ones. And my guest this week will be our very own Kim Zuroff, our Director of Growth and Executive Coach in The ONE Thing organization. She’s a specialist in building habits as a part of her practice, and it’s a great fun conversation. Enjoy.
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
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Jay Papasan:
Welcome back to the show, Kim.
Kim Zuroff:
Thank you so much. It’s an honor.
Jay Papasan:
One of the things we’ve learned together is that most people, a lot of high achievers, aren’t gonna fail because they’ve got a capacity issue. It’s usually a consistency issue. And the key to, kind of, taming consistency, like, “I know what I need to do, but I just can’t make myself do it often enough,” is habits. And that’s, like, one of your areas of specialty.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely, and that’s what we find, right, is it’s not a problem of being smart enough or, you know, disciplined enough. It’s consistent enough. And that’s where habits come into play.
Jay Papasan:
I love that chapter in the book, you know, um, Discipline Is a Lie, and people wanna be disciplined. Like, “Oh, if I could just be like Kim. She’s done all these endurance races. She’s this great coach. She does all the things.” But they’re kind of mistaking everything that’s going on. And we wrote about that, we just need to be selected discipline to build the habit that leads to our success.
So, you’ve taught Habit Labs all over. You’ve made it a feature of your executive coaching. Why don’t we just kick it off? Like, does everybody know what an actual habit is and why it’s important?
Kim Zuroff:
So, a habit is a behavior that’s done regularly enough that it becomes subconscious. So, it’s something that we repeat whether we know it or we don’t know it.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, I think I’ve read research, I think it was – trying to think – Gretchen Rubin in one of her books, I think it was Better Than Before, talked about as much as 60 to 70% of everything we do is kind of automatic. We’re just working our routines, our habits, and there’s not a lot of conscious thoughts that go into that. Is that what you’ve seen?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. Depending on what research we look at, it’s above 50% of our habits aren’t really designed by us. And so, when we think about the depth of habits, it’s a design problem, not a discipline problem.
Jay Papasan:
How do we become more aware of those patterns, I guess, for starters?
Kim Zuroff:
So, it’s really about stopping the blaming yourself, blaming your mom, blaming whoever, and it’s really looking at and auditing the habit loop.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So the habit loop. James Clear kind of dubbed it the habit loop. I know that it goes backwards in time from Atomic Habits. I know he was a student of BJ Fogg. Also, Charles Duhigg, who’s been on this podcast as well, The Power of Habit, he had a smaller loop. Walk us through the habit loop because that’s the key to behavior change. If we want to have more habits by design instead of by default, so habits that serve us instead of undermine us, we’ve got to understand this. Let’s walk through the loop real quick.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, the first part of the habit loop is the cue. So, this is the trigger that really initiates the habit. After the cue, you have the craving. And a lot of times with habits, it’s not the actual craving or the thing that we want, it’s the state that we desire to feel. And then, it’s the response. So, the response is the actual behavior with-
Jay Papasan:
What you do.
Kim Zuroff:
What you do.
Jay Papasan:
Something happens, we feel a craving, we act to get the emotion. That’s the craving. There’s something we’re wanting from the act.
Kim Zuroff:
That’s correct. And then, after the response, after the behavior, you get the reward.
Jay Papasan:
Is that usually what we expected from the craving?
Kim Zuroff:
That’s correct.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
All right. So cue, craving, response, reward.
Kim Zuroff:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
Give me an example of what that looks like.
Kim Zuroff:
There’s so many we could go from, and I’m gonna just start with the classic example of checking our phones. And because a lot of times, what we’ve seen in coaching is checking our phones, diving into our email inbox are some of the key areas where people fall off track with their goals.
Jay Papasan:
Right. They’re distracting themselves.
Kim Zuroff:
100%. And so, with phone checking, so the cue is the notification.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. Ding, vibration, you see a little icon pop up.
Kim Zuroff:
And then, the next thing is the craving is the relief from fear of missing out potentially. So, you don’t wanna miss a response, you want to be helpful. You know, in my case, when my phone goes off, I wanna make sure that somebody doesn’t need something ’cause I wanna help them. So, it’s the fear of missing out, it’s the relief, the feeling that you get from picking up and checking in the phone.
Jay Papasan:
Like, my sister’s got all kinds of weather alerts on there. Like, I know, like most of the people listening to this, it’s gonna be text alerts, email alerts, maybe social media alerts. So, those will drive you batty if you have too many of those on. But I’ve seen other people with news alerts, weather alerts. Like, you name it, our phone is, by default, set to notify us what’s happening inside the bounds of that little phone.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely. So, then, the response is actually checking the phone. And then, the reward is the sense of connection, the feeling that you get when you feel like you’re not missing out.
Jay Papasan:
So, that’s definitely on the social loop. Like it’s a text thread. What’s happening? Is that a funny meme? Whatever. You go through that loop. I think a lot of people don’t realize, when we look at multitasking. So for me, when you talk about the picking up the phone or looking at the phone being a distractor from our one thing, people don’t realize that once they pick it up, they didn’t just look at the text. They look at the text, and looking at the text becomes a cue to maybe look at their email, which might become a cue to, “Well, I wonder what’s happening on LinkedIn right now.” Like, these things are designed to be like a little daisy chain of cues to drag us deeper and deeper into the ecosystem because their reward is the longer we’re there, the more money they make.
So, like, amazing tool, our phones, but I was shocked the first time we walked our students through this. You can go into your settings, you can go into screen time on the Mac, and if you go through the apps and just scroll down, it’ll tell you how many times you pick up your phone every day. That’s how many times you’re getting distracted by your phone, intentionally or not, and I think the average is 87 times a day. And we’ve seen people, like in our groups, that have had more than 150.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely. And I think we’ve all been there from time to time where we pick up our phone because we get a notification, and then we look at the clock and 45 minutes have gone by. And so, it’s not an uncommon thing, where it’s just one thing leads to the next. And so, that’s an example of-
Jay Papasan:
Now, your one thing time, you just lost not 30 seconds, but 30 minutes.
Kim Zuroff:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
And if you do it 87 times a day, you’ll get back to work for about an average of 14 minutes, I can’t remember the math, and then it’ll happen again.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, we’re spending more time distracted than we are on our one thing. How does this show up for you when you’re working with your one-on-one clients? What does this look like in a coaching situation, like where habits become the center of the conversation?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, where habits become the center of the conversation is when people have a goal that they’re chasing after, and then they consistently hit the same ceiling of achievement, and they are not breaking through it. And so, it’s like we can’t get just to where we desire to go by staying exactly the same. And so-
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So, the pattern of behaviors that we’re doing right now, we’ve hit a wall with that. So, we’ve gotta go to a redesign phase.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, then, it’s looking at and auditing of what are the things in my life that are serving me? And what are the things that potentially aren’t serving me anymore? And what do I have to remove in order to create space so that I can focus on the exact things I need to do to get where I desire to go?
Jay Papasan:
From a client perspective, I’m imagining someone out there is listening to us, and they’re listing off more likely the bad habits that they’re aware of than the good habits. Are people more aware of the bad habits than the good habits?
Kim Zuroff:
I would say it’s a really good balance.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. I just kind of feel like a lot of high achievers don’t give themselves credit. Like, yeah, you did get out of bed, you made your bed, you had a healthy breakfast, and you did go to the gym. Like, they do a bunch of things. And then, instead of looking at their goals and planning out their day, they get caught in the inbox or social media. They had, like, five positive check marks before they got that little X on the ledger. So, I guess maybe that’s me projecting, but I do feel like there is maybe an over… If they’re aware of them, they focus on the negative. And then, I shot myself in the foot again. So, like, if there’s more of an awareness on the one mistake in the list of 10 good things they did, that’s kind of where their focus goes.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, their focus goes typically to that because our brains have a natural tendency to focus on the negative. So, if I’m teaching a class and I get 99 good reviews, and then I get one negative review, where does my brain go? To the negative. And yet, with habits, it’s the way we do it in coaching is we recognize the good before we really lean in to identify what the potential bad is because-
Jay Papasan:
I love that.
Kim Zuroff:
Because it’s looking at what is going well? What are some things that are not going well? What are some things that might be getting in the way? And the way that they identify that is by tracking their behaviors.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. What does tracking look like?
Kim Zuroff:
Relative to planning and identifying their perfect week. We start off by tracking every 15 minutes. Every-
Jay Papasan:
Wow.
Kim Zuroff:
Every 30 minutes.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
You know, set a timer, write down what you’re doing.
Jay Papasan:
So, you do that. I feel like Jordan walked me through this once. Like, set a couple timers for the day, and then while it’s still fresh on your memory, like before you break for lunch, kind of write down, break down your morning.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So you’re just kind of journaling in stages to get a sense of how you’re actually spending your time.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, absolutely. And just by doing an exercise like that creates so much awareness around the micro things that we might be doing, and stopping and doing that we don’t really realize from a bigger picture of how we spend our time throughout the day.
Jay Papasan:
Well, I mean, as you said before, I think a lot of what the habits, these ingrained behaviors, we’re not super conscious of them. Like, we’re not deciding to pick up the phone, we’re reacting and picking up the phone. So, it’s probably not something that sticks in our memory very hard anyway. So, that makes total sense. So, we’re gonna do an audit of, kind of, the activities. Then, what’s the next step?
Kim Zuroff:
Once they do an audit, then we work backwards to pick their first domino of what’s the first habit. And that’s largely because when we set a goal and we identify all the things, all the opportunities, all the habits that we’d like to build, a lot of times, what I see is people say, “Okay, I’m gonna stack them all on top of each other. I’m gonna do them all at the same time,” and that rarely works. I’ve seen people fail so many times because they try to do too much too fast and all at the same time.
Jay Papasan:
I mean, there is a thing called habit stacking, and we’ll get to that. But I like what you’re saying. I’ve seen this too. This is especially, like, the entrepreneurs and business owners that listen to this podcast, they’re very ambitious. And so, they’ve done a lot of things. They’ve been very good at a lot of things they’ve done. Nobody is great at behavior change in the beginning. So, like, trying to tackle multiple behavior changes at once is a recipe for failure, but I see it all the time.
They’re like, “Great. I’m gonna start eating differently, and I’m gonna start going to the gym, and I’m gonna start a reading practice and a meditation practice, and that’s gonna be my new morning.” It’s like, wow, that’s like seven habits wrapped up in one.
Kim Zuroff:
So, that’s one of the mistakes that my coaching clients often make, is they try to do too much too fast. They stack them all on top of each other instead of sequencing them out.
Jay Papasan:
How do they pick the right one?
Kim Zuroff:
We use really almost a question that’s very close to the focusing question of, you know, what’s the one habit that would make everything else easier or necessary? So, we keep working it backwards until it’s small enough. And how do you identify what’s small enough in terms of a habit is it’s gotta be something that you can do even on your worst days. Think about the days that you don’t feel like doing anything. It’s gotta be so easy that you can just do it without it taking up any brain power.
Jay Papasan:
And that’s like tapping into the power of momentum, right? You wanna keep the streak going. We told the story of Jerry Seinfeld and the X’s. So, like, a lot of high achievers, you’re like, “Yes, I want to…” You’re wanting to do 100 pushups or whatever a day. But, like, in the beginning, the first domino is to do one pushup. They’re like, “What are you talking about? I can already do 50.”
The goal is, like, even if you’re right before bedtime, you can hop down, knock out that one thing. Most of the time if you start, you’re gonna keep going. But you can still keep your streak running. And that streak represents momentum, which is a very powerful impact. I think people underestimate the impact of just showing up every day, even with a really small input towards their goals, versus these heroic days where they just grind themselves into the ground trying to do it all at once. Those little days add up faster than people think.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, it’s the little days, it’s the little moments. And a lot of times, the smallest habits that we start with, they don’t seem like a really big deal starting off, and yet the long-term impact is insurmountable.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. We’ll have to dive into that deeper. I just wanna go back to something you said earlier. They’re making the mistake. They’re biting off too much, too fast. And then, inevitably, I think you said it, it’s not that they don’t have the discipline, right? It’s the design. I see them, they’ll start judging themselves. So, that’s where you get into the design. You’re trying to go to the small habit. And then, we have to design the habit itself. Is that where we go back to the cue craving? We can actually design that activity?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. I wanna walk through a couple of examples, ’cause I think intellectually I get it. I know BJ Fogg got 10,000 people to floss their teeth, but with a simple formula. After I brush my teeth, cue, I will floss one tooth. So super tiny. And everybody kinda cracks up, like, “What do you mean one tooth?” Look, if you grab the dental floss, the odds are you’re gonna do more than one. And he knew that, and that was the thing. What they really needed was to control the cue and to make it small enough that they could immediately get started, ’cause once we start, we tend to keep going.
So, you got a client, they know what their one thing is, you’re working them backwards to what we call the first domino. It’s that small action often that’s very doable, that gets them on the path to doing the bigger thing. How can we design that habit loop for something that… Can you give us an example that maybe our listeners will recognize?
Kim Zuroff:
An example that will resonate with many people is checking our email first. There was a thing, there was something you said on a podcast a while ago about goals before phones because, a lot of times, if we pick up our phones, if we check our email first, it gets in the way of our goals. And so, the example of checking our inbox first is, a lot of times, the cue of that is people get to work and they sit at their desk. And the first thing they do is they open up their email, and then they just dive right in. So, the cue is sitting at their desk, and the craving is the desire to feel oriented to just get everything off their plate before they dive into the rest of their day.
Jay Papasan:
I mean, I can’t think of anybody … Like, it’s so usual for me to see someone, wherever they’re sitting or not, just, to me, the cue is I open up my laptop. Like, after I log in, if you have to log into yours, like, that’s almost always the first thing that people look at.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
It might be the thing that popped up ’cause it was the last thing they were looking at too.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. And then, what happens is if we check our email first, what typically happens, and I’ve seen it with myself and with my clients, is that other people’s priorities become our priorities. And so, in terms of the desire to feel oriented, the desire to feel caught up, what it’s actually doing is you’re checking the email, which is the behavior, and then you have the sense of being caught up, and yet you’re actually potentially getting derailed into other-
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, you’re falling behind
Kim Zuroff:
You’re falling behind.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. I like to call the inbox like a little tiny time machine. You never know when you’re coming out when you go in because depending on what your discipline is, like, I sometimes will literally set an alarm on my watch if I’m consciously going into my inbox ’cause I know I can get caught up thinking about my responses and lose track of time. And now, you’ve lost the most important hours of the day.
So, if that’s maybe the reflex, the default behavior, is I get to the office, I open my laptop, I dive into email, how do we, like, in a coaching relationship, design it to go the other way?
Kim Zuroff:
It just really depends on the person. And yet, what I know is that when I open up my laptop or get to my computer the first time, I typically leave all of my browsers up, I leave email up, I leave everything up just so it’s ready to go for the next day. And yet if I’m challenged in the email is my first thing that I go to, well, what’s one thing I can do is to make that invisible, is to close out all your browsers. And so, you don’t-
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
So, you’re making the cue invisible of it’s not there first thing right when you open your laptop.
Jay Papasan:
That goes back to you used this language I associate with James Clear. Like, if you’re trying to undo a habit, you wanna… instead of the cue being obvious for a good habit, like I want my first habit to be to look at my goals, I’m gonna have my goals in a very obvious place, so that there’s this cue or you’re gonna try to make it invisible. The craving, do you wanna make it unattractive? I’m trying to remember how he phrased that.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, you wanna make it unattractive. And so, relative to the email inbox being unattractive is it’s somebody else’s agenda potentially that’s getting in the way of your agenda.
Jay Papasan:
Right. It’s just an awareness that this is a distraction. I’m gonna get caught up answering urgent things that aren’t necessarily important. So, then now, if you’ve got an invisible cue, you’ve got a craving that’s maybe been underwind, hopefully we’re not doing the response, which is going and doing the activity for the reward. That might be enough. If the invisible cue’s not enough, a bad awareness craving could be enough to short-circuit the bad behavior.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. And what James Clear talks about, he says, “Make the behavior difficult.” And so, relative to well, how could that happen, how could that work, I mean, there’s so many things with technology today where you can put blockers on certain sites until certain times, you know. So, it’s like how could you make it so difficult to where you wouldn’t want to do it?
If it’s on your phone, delete the app from your phone. Like, I know a lot of people who have deleted social media apps from their phone just for that reason is they don’t wanna spend so much time on it, and it’s too difficult to re-download the app every time.
Jay Papasan:
Right. Or go into the browser and log in. I know some people, there’s a setting, I don’t know where it lives, but you can turn your full-color iPhone or Android phone into a black and white phone.
Kim Zuroff:
Grayscale, yep.
Jay Papasan:
And I’ve heard that is incredibly how unattractive it makes interacting. Like, we underestimate how much the color factor makes everything more attractive to our brains.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
All right. With that, now that we’ve kinda covered how to break down bad habits and get them out of the way, let’s take a quick break and on the other side we can look at the design of good habits.
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Jay Papasan:
So, you’re walking someone through this. We’ve now kind of helped someone undo a bad habit. What if the thing that they need to do is, like, just a good, brand-new habit? How could we maybe identify and design, like, what’s a … Getting up early, is that one that we could maybe play with?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, and it’s not about setting your alarm earlier. It starts way further back than that. And-
Jay Papasan:
Oh, so this is the going upstream thing.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Where does it start?
Kim Zuroff:
It starts the night before.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
So, a lot of times… and this is a thing that a lot of clients ask me because they know I wake up early. I wake up around 5:00 a.m. every day, and I’ve always kind of been a morning person; and yet, at the same time, for me to wake up at 5:00, the night before has to go a certain way for me to be able to wake up at 5:00. And so, a lot of times, people say, “Well, I’m just gonna set my alarm 30 minutes earlier,” or an hour earlier,” and then they fail to wake up at the time they desire. They just, “Oh, I didn’t make it happen.”
Jay Papasan:
Or they hit snooze seven times.
Kim Zuroff:
They hit snooze a ton of times. And it really starts the night before because we do need a certain amount of sleep every night. So, it’s looking at what does your evening routine, what does your wind-down routine look like that will set you up for success the next morning?
Jay Papasan:
So, like, we were talking about this before we got on there, and this is an example we could go through. Like, it might even start earlier. Like, if you work in an office and you like to have an afternoon coffee-
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
… as I sit here, if you’re watching this on YouTube, with a coffee, but it’s not that late. It’s not 2:00 yet. But that’s my cutoff time. There’s this certain point where you have to think, “I can’t have caffeine now ’cause that’s gonna impact my ability to fall asleep.” And I’ve heard, like, screens. Like, what are some things that people can do, or maybe even a cue to start doing the things at night to set themselves up for success?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, the examples I’m gonna share are just my own examples ’cause I’ve lived this journey of really desiring a certain morning routine, and it didn’t really work effectively or to its potential until I fixed the night before. And I had a challenge particularly with my phone of, you know, I would sleep with my phone in my room, and then I’d wake up in the middle of the night, I’d check my phone, and then all of a sudden, my 5:00 a.m. time to wake up became 6:00 a.m. or 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. because I couldn’t get out of bed ’cause I looked at my phone in the middle of the night.
So, starting the night before, some of the things people could do is they could put their phone on do not disturb and/or they could shelve it at a certain time. You know, if you don’t wanna put it on do not disturb, I understand. People have family, they have kids, they have parents, they’ve got people that might be trying to reach them. The cool thing, though, is that even if you put your phone on do not disturb, you can make exceptions.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Kim Zuroff:
And-
Jay Papasan:
Well, I think on the iPhone, I don’t know Android, if I have my phone, like you can set it up. Mine goes on do not disturb I think at 10:00 by default. It might wanna do that earlier, now that I think about it. But if someone’s on my favorite list, I will still get a notification after that time. So, if my son’s in college and needs help, like I won’t miss that notification.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
And that is one of the biggest reasons why people tell me they can’t do it, and it’s like, well, you can still do it, and you can make the exception.
Jay Papasan:
Got it.
Kim Zuroff:
And so, you can shelve your phone at a certain time, put it on do not disturb. You can stop drinking caffeine at a certain time throughout the day. You can do different things. I like removing all screens at least an hour before I go to bed.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. And what time do you go to bed?
Kim Zuroff:
I go to bed at, like, 9:30.
Jay Papasan:
9:30.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So around 8:30, is there a cue? Like, it’s a habit now for you. You’ve been doing it. In the beginning, did you set an alarm? Was there an awareness like, “It’s time for me to start my nighttime routine”? How would you coach someone to start this routine?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, initially I started off by setting an alarm at 8:30. And at 8:30, then, I would take my phone and I would just go put it on my counter and plug it in. And that was kinda how I started the habit.
Jay Papasan:
I love that because, like, I’ve done a whole episode on rituals. The moment that becomes the standard behavior, like you get this cue, it’s 8:30, 9:00, some people are going, “That’s 10:00 for me,” whatever, whatever your goals are, now, the phone gets out of sight, right? I’m taking the phone out of the environment where it can continue to keep me in these loops. That in itself can be the thing that starts the whole process of your autonomic system starting to slow down. And I feel like I’ve read that even in some stuff where that cue over time will start to make everything after it easier because the craving now is for a good night’s rest, which you now are aware of. You’ll get a great reward, you’ll have great energy and clarity the next morning.
Kim Zuroff:
Yep.
Jay Papasan:
Cool. All right. Thanks for walking me through that. So, we’ve kind of looked at good and bad habits, like how to make the cues invisible for the bad ones, how to make them visible. We’ve walked through some of the architecture of habit design. The journey of habit. In the book we wrote, the best research we could find, it’s not 21 days, it’s not 30 days to form a habit. On average, it’s 66. And I know that you know this stuff by heart, but I’ll remind our listeners because they may not have read the book as closely lately, 66 is an average which doesn’t always serve us. Like, inside that research, some people were forming habits as early as 18, some people took over 250 days. So, at least, we’re indexing at two to three times what the norm, 21 days or 30 days, would be. 66 days feels pretty safe. When you’re working with someone or working on yourself, do you kind of anchor around the 66-day journey to form a habit?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, we definitely anchor around the 66 days because it’s like it’s a journey. And it’s not that 21 days is too short, it’s just we need to keep doing it consistently over time. And what happens with the 66-day journey is that people start off with a new habit and they’re super excited about it. And it’s super easy. They check off the box. They did it, awesome. And yet, what we often see is midway through the 66-day challenge, it starts to become a little bit of part of their routine that they start to get a little bit bored.
Jay Papasan:
And is that when they want to start tacking on new things or distracting themselves, like, “This is done, I want to start a new habit”?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. It’s either they fall off the habit because they just get bored. And it’s being able to push through boredom is a superpower. And so, they get bored and they stop doing it, and they replace it with something else and/or they try to stack on other things before they’re ready to add more onto their plate.
Jay Papasan:
I think that kind of no man’s land in the middle, like if it’s… It’s roughly 10 weeks. It’s 66 days. So, somewhere after the first month, it’s too early for it to reliably be ingrained in your behavior, but it also means that you probably haven’t gotten the rewards yet. So, I feel like that’s that place. Like, if you’re on a diet, right? And so, you’re doing the hard work of meal planning and shopping differently and cooking differently, and you’re like, “Ugh, this is boring food. I just want a margarita,” whatever it is, right? So, it feels hard, even if it’s novel, but you’re engaged ’cause this is a new thing.
You get to that part where it’s kinda boring, but nobody’s come up yet and gone, “Wow, you look great. What are you doing?” Like, you haven’t gotten the distance reward for it, which is the reinforcing behavior that usually keeps people going. Like, I actually think that’s the test. Like, if you can make it, not through 66 days, but for the two to three weeks where you’re in the no-person’s land, like, that’s where you learn the discipline, the selected discipline, just to make it through that little valley, and that’s usually where the rewards start piling up.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
How do you coach someone who’s wanting to, “I wanna do the next thing. Like, I’ve got this beat, Kim. I know it’s only been 35 days, but I am no longer a smoker”?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, I think it is person to person. I mean, I’ve had people that have added the habits on around that midway point, and it’s worked out okay. And I’ve had others that they’ve added it on, and all of a sudden it’s just like something falls because what we also know from The ONE Thing is that everything, uh, we say yes to, we’re saying no to something else. And so, are we saying yes too soon? And I think that’s a legitimate question of, you know, before somebody integrates something new, if they say, “Kim, I’m ready to add a new habit,” we kind of rewind and slow down before we speed up, and we say, “Okay, great. What’s the next habit you’re looking to add?” And then we just ask questions of “What’s the best case here? And what’s the worst case? What’s gonna get in the way of you not doing this or that?”
And so, we face reality of where they’re at today, and based off the amount of time you have, are you confident that you can integrate that without letting this slip? And so, we go backwards to go forwards.
Jay Papasan:
I recently had an interaction with one of my clients, and they were wanting to do the new thing. And so, they were very indexing on the cost of not being able to do the new thing, and I just said, “Can we flip the question?” It’s like, “I hear you. Like, you wanna do it now. You’ve got this wonderful awareness that this is exactly what the next thing is, and you’re ready to start today, and it’s exciting, it’s novel, all of the things.” I said, “But what is the cost of abandoning the last thing? Like, what happens if it falls apart? What happens if you’re not there? How will you feel if you have to start that one over?”
And that conversation just kind of brought some clarity because they hadn’t even considered the possibility that launching the new thing might unwind the last thing they were focused on. They just made the assumption. And literally, within 30 seconds of me texting that question, they came back and said, “I want to wait,” because they realized that they were not willing to risk the progress they had made to get the next win. They were willing to stick it out a little longer. But like, I love it. Like, coaching is often just asking the right question at the right time, so that people are making, at least, a conscious decision about where they’re going.
Kim Zuroff:
And honestly, even though I coach people on habits, I kind of can sometimes get in the same trap. And an example is I work with an endurance coach. And he creates all of my training for me for all of my upcoming events. And with the training, he designs it in a certain way. He’s so brilliant in what he does. And the other week I sent him a text and I said, “Hey, can I add on Pilates on top of the training schedule you’re sending me?”
Jay Papasan:
Can you just give us a snapshot ’cause like you’re biking, you’re doing weights. Are you training for a triathlon or something? What are you doing?
Kim Zuroff:
I’m training for a couple big events this year. Yeah, a big cycling event and also a big trail running event. So, three-mountain marathons and-
Jay Papasan:
It’s already pretty complicated is my point.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah, it’s-
Jay Papasan:
I see you on Instagram. So, I can kind of see the pieces.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, it’s complicated, it’s intense. It’s endurance events that go on for 72 hours. And to keep our bodies moving for 72 hours at a time, it’s a different life. And yet-
Jay Papasan:
I just love how you just dropped 72 hours on us right there. Like, nice subtle flex. Yeah. But, like, I’m amazed. Keep going. Keep going.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, you asked, “I want to add Pilates. What does that look like?”
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So, I sent him a text and I said, “Hey, would it be okay for me to add Pilates on top of the training plan that you sent me?” I was like, “I’m feeling strong. I’m feeling great.” And his response to me was, “We’re not even in training season yet.” And then, I was just like, “Well, when does it start? Are we in pre-season?” Like, I was like, “”Cause this is, like, this is a lot.” And when I say it’s a lot, I mean, last month in March, I think I ran 130 miles and cycled 160. And we’re not in training season yet. And so, then, I questioned him a little bit more. And then, he was like, “Okay. Well, go ahead and add on Pilates, but just beware.” And then, I actually text him back and I said, “Hey, I thought about it, and I’m not gonna add on Pilates.”
Jay Papasan:
There you go.
Kim Zuroff:
So, even though we do this stuff, we can still get in the trap of wanting to add on too much.
Jay Papasan:
I’m gonna take it out of the realm of fitness because I think we have this idea that we’re gonna be doing this really big thing. Like, I remember my marathon journey. And on the path to running a marathon, I didn’t even give myself credit when I ran a half marathon, which is the goal for a bunch of people.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
And I think a lot of people are trying to build positive habits around their business too.
Kim Zuroff:
100%.
Jay Papasan:
And they forget that where they are today versus where they wanna go, right? They have this goal, “I’m gonna get to a million in revenue. I’m gonna be number one in market share in my market,” whatever that is. And where they are today, that last quarter, right? You get 70-80% through the journey, getting that last bit to get to where you wanna go, we have no idea what’s gonna be thrown at us to get to that last mile between us and the actual goal.
Like right now, it feels good, and I see this all the time. Business for this wonderful 45-day period, nobody quits, no clients fire us, like nothing goes wrong, and we’re like, “Hey, it’s clear sailing. I can add to my plate.” And we have to look ahead. Like he said, we’re not even training yet. Like, no, I think the time to decide whether you should add to your plate is when that thing happens, because it is going to happen. In my experience with business, it’s just a matter of time. You’re gonna face a challenge. The market will shift, the competitive landscape will shift, you will have to reinvent your product. Like something is coming. And how do we just have this like collective amnesia about that?
So, I think for business and for health, take it in stages. You work hard to build the habit. We stick the course through that sloppy middle part. When the habit is ingrained, the effort goes way down.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
Now, you’re going to bed at 9:30, you’re popping out of bed at 5:30. Like when that becomes ingrained, now we have permission to add to the next thing, which kinda gets me where I wanted to go early on. How do we habit stack, and what does that mean?
Kim Zuroff:
Habit stacking is simply once you have that habit ingrained, then it’s picking the next habit and stacking it right on top of it. So, an example is when we’re waking up in the morning, if the first thing I do is make coffee, which I don’t make coffee anymore, I make tea, then I added on journaling. I journal for five minutes, a gratitude journal. However, I didn’t start off by doing all these series of things. I started by doing one thing. And so, habit stacking is the art of adding one habit onto the next.
Jay Papasan:
And that’s where you use the completion of one habit as the cue for the next. So, to call back, that’s the BJ Fogg, after I brush my teeth, which hopefully everybody listening already does, I will floss one tooth. So, you have like after I make my tea, I will journal for 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Like that becomes the cue to do the next thing?
Kim Zuroff:
That’s correct.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So, our friend, Hal Elrod, he’s been on this show, he’s got Miracle Morning. That’s kind of a pre-built habit stack of six things. I’m always curious that that works when people try to do all six at once ’cause they’re treating it as one behavior. I tend to find when I talk to people that one or maybe two of those things really did work, and the others were kinda casual. But like, that is a pre-built habit stack. I kinda would follow your cue. If I was working with someone that wanted to do that, I’d say start with the first. When that’s ingrained, add the second, and so on.
I wonder if people audited their morning, how much of their morning is absolute routine. Like, I think about me. I get up, I do, like, my morning rituals, brush my teeth. I start the coffee. While the coffee’s brewing, I take my supplements. Like, there is kind of a high predictability rate. If an alien was beaming down to watch me in the morning, they could place bets on what my next move would be. And I have a feeling most of the people, that is their morning, right? We’re very predictable. So, how do we go from default to design and build a habit stack? What’s the habit stack that you have that you’re most proud of?
Kim Zuroff:
Ooh, that’s a fantastic question. I think it’s one that’s taken a lot of work, and I think it is probably gonna be my wind-down routine at night because I used to get trapped in the late-night scroll, and I would sit on my couch, and I would scroll, and then all of a sudden it’d be 10:00, 10:30. And then, I know I’m not waking up when I desire to wake up. And then, it was affecting my sleep. It was affecting everything else.
And so, one of my coaches really looked me in the face and was just like, “Look, you know, you are overworked and chronically underrecovered. And if you keep doing this compounded over time, you’re gonna die young. Are you okay with that?” And so, then, that really had me looking at, well, what does my nighttime routine look like? And then, I got really serious about stacking the habits from a nighttime perspective versus the morning ’cause in the morning, like, I’m pretty good to go. Like you said, I am very predictable in the mornings. And yet, the evening has taken the most amount of work. And so, that’s what I’m most proud of.
Jay Papasan:
I love that ’cause even in our journey together, for those who don’t know, Kim’s the Director of Growth, she’s one of our executive coaches, so we do a 411 together.
Kim Zuroff:
We do.
Jay Papasan:
Like, in your 411, you have your yellow and green recoveries. Like, you track it on your WHOOP band. And your sleep quality. So, like, you were actually tracking it so that you could have awareness of how to tweak it on the journey. And, like, we’ve had a million conversations around that. So, I love that. When we ask our students, like, if you got magically one hour added back to your day that nobody else got, how would you spend it, what do they always say?
Kim Zuroff:
Sleep.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. So, it’s probably something that everybody needs. I think a lot of high achievers, the thing that they will do is they’ll give up their sleep for their goals, and if you do it long enough, you’re gonna be in a bad trap. So, we could keep going, ’cause I know you teach classes, you work on this with lots and lots of folks. Let’s give people a challenge. What’s one challenge? We’ve covered a lot of ground, like how to build a good habit, how to break a bad habit, how to think about the 66-day journey. What would be one challenge we could give them that they could take on this week?
Kim Zuroff:
So, I think a simple challenge is to really just pick one habit. And identify the cue
Jay Papasan:
This is an existing behavior I have or one that I want.
Kim Zuroff:
One that you desire.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So I want to start a new habit. Got it.
Kim Zuroff:
Yep.
Jay Papasan:
Pick the cue.
Kim Zuroff:
So, pick the cue. Understand the feeling that you’re looking for it to produce, like what’s the craving? And identify what the response is, what’s the behavior that you’re looking to integrate, and what’s the reward. So, simply pick a habit.
Jay Papasan:
Love that. And based on how we finished with habit stacking, like if you really want to be successful, just pick up after an existing habit. “So, after I brew my coffee or my tea, I will…” So, like the cue becomes something that you’re already automatically doing. Love that. Thanks, Kim.
Kim Zuroff:
My pleasure.
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