Technology Twitter

3 Tiny Habits - reinvent yourself with motivation

New Year's resolutions, a new me, financially responsible, fit, slim and organised...  By January 20 will I be one of the 80% of resolution makers who fail, or will I make it through to September and be one of th 92%?

Thomas Pychyl's attributes this failure to us being unprepared to change habits, particularly bad habits.  He uses the beautiful description of 'cultural procrastination' to describe our annual stampede towards reinvention.

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to particpate in B.J. Fogg's research into behaviour change through the 3 Tiny Habits process. Through his work at Stanford's Persuasive Technology lab he has identified 3 factors that will cause long term behaviour change:

Option A. Have an epiphany
Option B. Change your context (what surrounds you)
Option C. Take baby steps

3 Tiny Habits

3 Tiny Habits started for me as an option C, but actually evolved into Option A.  Basically you comit to make 3 tiny changes a day with each one requiring no more than 30 seconds.  You choose a trigger in your day - may be getting up, having a coffee or cooking dinner, and then fit your new habits in after one of these regular habits.

The committment is minimal, but the experience is powerful, motivating and exciting.  Successfully doing 3 new things each day with minimal impact to the day made me feel like superwoman.  

My usual experience of motivation to change is a burst of enthusiasm, followed by failure.  It's got to the point where I expect to fail.  Using 3 Tiny Habits made me feel like I could change and inspired me to continue.  This year, my only New Year's resolution was to make 3 Tiny habits each week.  I've committed to mixing new and ongoing habits, and somehow I've started to tame my challenges with work/life balance, fitness etc. 

I feel motivated, powerful and successful, instead of bumbly, hopeless and on a highway to failure.

3 Tiny Habits at work

In my day job as a CX Designer at NAB I'm looking at how we can use 3 Tiny Habits to support change.  If it can do this for me - a serial procrastinator - what could it do to say, capability development at work, pursuit of excellence etc.  

Give it a go - it's fun and it works!

 

When only 'My Mob' rules - bewitched twittered and beleagured

Hypocrisy, or something more complex?

• It seems that since Twitter has gone mainstream (for which my references include:

The Age newspaper
The BBC
Sydney Morning Herald
Channel 9
We've heard about famous twitterers from Demi Moore to Senator Conroy (fake and real, with the fake attracting far more attention) and Malcolm Turnbull, KRudd and Stephen Fry, to mention a few.  It seems that everyone is Twittering. 

So why the hostility and animosity from the web community.  The violins are out in full.

"It's all over"

"They've taken over our Twitter"

There's an avalanche of video and blog posts predicting the end of Twitter as we know it. Ridiculing those who are 'Twitter' addicted. Why the animosity.

Surely we wanted this - we wanted people to get it - we've spent columns of text, video, print trying to convince the world that this was the way of communication in the future. "Mob Rules", "Crowd Sourcing"

I'm taking my ball and going home!

Now that the crowd has come, we're not interested any more.  We don't want to play. 

It turns out that the crowd in Twitter is just like real life.. It's mundane and sophisticated, interesting and boring. We have what we wanted, a small microcosm of life. It is uncomfortable to be woken from the illusion that we are special.

it turns out that to change the world, we will have to put up with the marketers, the ignorant and those that do just want to talk about chocolate. 

The question now is what we do in this space, are we prepared to act, to do the hard stuff?

Can we do the hard stuff:  We need leadership not cynicism!

Twitterati, I think we need to have a good hard look at ourselves.  

• Do we want people involved?
• Are we surprised that those new to Twitter are clumsy with it.
• Were we sophisticated in our Twitter usage when we started?
• Are we sophisticated now?

Does it matter so long as we continue to have the opportunity to network globally?

Are we prepared to look at this next stage and work with it, to find out where it goes, or are we going to be too busy looking for the next phenomenon?

We started it - are we prepared to finish it?  It's leadership we need now not cynicism. We don't know where it's going, so how can we possibly know that this next bit is wrong?