1. Change your environment,
Change your behavior
Nishant Jacob
nishantj@stanford.edu

2. What do you wish for?
manjachevera.blogspot.com
• Wish you exercised more
• Wish you ate better
• Wish you managed your time

3. What do you do about it?
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• Beat yourself up about it
• Motivate yourself more
• Put in MORE EFFORT

4. Try doing the OPPOSITE
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• Put in LESS effort
• Don't worry so much about motivation
• Push yourself less

5. Do MORE by doing LESS
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Build tiny habits
Break behaviors into baby steps
Just make it easier to do things you already want to do

6. Drinking More Water
(Level 1)
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Sometimes you get really excited about doing something?
k
- “damn, I should really drink more water”
- a moment of inspiration during your week
Perfect, that’s a motivation wave
- right now you're on a crest
- use it cause it’s gonna go away quick
Get a big bottle
- fill it, place it in a prominent space in your room as a water station
- it should be the first thing you see when you walk in
Put up a big poster in your room
- it could say “Water is Life”
- it acts as a trigger or reminder

7. Watch the magic happen
magicbritejanitorial.com
Instead of pushing yourself harder to drink water
- used a motivation wave
- changed your environment to make that behavior EASIER to do in the future
Instead of reminding yourself to drink water all the time
- created a system that automatically TRIGGERED you every time you walked into
your room
– already have way too many things to remember in your life

8. Gyming more
(Level 2)
downtothebasement.com
Target a specific behavior
- "gymming more" is a fuzzy, vague behavior to design for
- "getting to the gym on wed after 2pm class" is a lot crisper - easy to breakdown
When you hit a motivation wave in your week
- set up a space in the corner of your room that's your gym corner
- make sure it's in plain sight
- have all your gym stuff there - bags, shoes, clothes
Think of an anchor behavior
- this will remind you to go to the gym, something you do on a regular basis
- when I come back to the room after 2pm class on wed, I will grab my stuff from my gym
corner and head to the gym
- you should also set an alarm on your phone

9. Watch the magic happen
magicbritejanitorial.com
But first, what's the point of just getting to the gym?
- the rest of the behaviors that lead to you working out cascade
automatically from there
- you feel kinda stupid ditching the gym once you get there
By using motivation waves
- we structured future behavior when we were pumped up
We used an anchor behavior
- a regular behavior we already have
- triggers this new behavior
We changed our environment
- to reinforce the behavior
- act as another trigger

10. Creating time to reflect
(Level 3)
Start small with an easy target behavior
americanthinker.com - Once a week, on the bike ride home from class take a 5 min detour
Celebrate every time you do the tiny habit
- Pat yourself on the back, do a victory dance, jump for joy
Change up your environment
- Virtual environments are environments too!
- Switch your iphone background to a peaceful scene
- Take a deep breath at least once a day when you see the scene
Shape your behavior
- slowly increase the frequency and duration of the bike ride detours
- watch the tiny habit build into a strong rhythm
- share your wins with friends for social accountability

11. Starting to see some patterns?
bittbox.com Motivation is useful but not the whole story
- motivation waves are useful for doing hard things that make future behaviors
easier - changing the environment
Make things EASIER to do, increase ability
- start with a crispy target behavior and then break
it into tiny steps
Have triggers or reminders to do the tiny steps
- triggers can be external - alarm
- triggers can be internal - anchor behavior
Slow and steady is the key
- celebrate every step of the way
- shape your behavior by increasing frequency and durations of the tiny steps