Don’t make new year's promises - Engineer behaviors instead

tl;dr (too long, didn’t read) Instead of making new year’s promises, benefit from the vast research of behavioral science & economics and engineer your behaviors in order to make whatever changes you want to make in life for 2023 (read more in Tiny Habits )

Do you want to make any changes to how you live your life in 2023 or is your life already perfect? If you’re like most people, for example like me, your life is not perfect, and will never be. That said, if we get to live another day I believe we owe it to ourselves and other people to try to improve our lives and the lives of others.

First, how do you know what changes you should make in your life for 2023? Well, it depends on what you want to achieve. Since we haven’t agreed in society what to optimize society for, that is sometimes hard to define. I personally believe we should optimize society for Sustainable Wellbeing, so that’s what I also optimize my life for, but I won’t dwell deeper into that here. Either way, decide for yourself what you want to optimize your life and the society around you for. With this starting point, consider what values you want to strive to live your life by. This article is not about discovering values, and there are many ways to do that. My short advice would be to think about What you want to do with your life and How you want to live your life. For example, in terms of What I want to do with my life, one of my values is that I want to Build a better society. In terms of How I want to live my life, one of my values is to Be thankful. Values focus on Direction rather than Destination which makes them more actionable here and now. So when you consider how to invest your energy in 2023, take the time to define your values.

In terms of making the changes, don’t leave it to chance, but design the change instead by engineering behaviors. Think about what behaviors you want to change, for example adding new ones or getting rid of existing ones. Behavioral engineering is a quite well researched field, and the book Tiny Habits summarizes quite a bit of it, so I recommend you read that to get a solid base. After many years of behavioral engineering I will try to summarize some of the things I believe are most important based on my learnings.

In terms of behavior change, it happens when there are three things in place:

Motivation: You can’t rely on consistently high motivation for e.g. starting to exercise more. That said, you’re going to have to want to make the change.

Ability: You need to have the knowledge of what to do to change the behavior. For example, if you want to write a book you need to learn a bit about how to write a book. Or if you want to become less judgmental towards other people you need to learn a bit about how that works.

Trigger: There needs to be something reminding you of the new behavior at the time when it needs to happen.

Worth knowing is two of the biggest reasons people fail to engineer new behaviors (and consequently keeping new year’s promises):

Too high ambition: This is probably the biggest reason. People go from not exercising to wanting to exercise 6 days/week overnight. The likelihood of that working is very small. So if you fail to engineer your new behavior, simply lower your threshold until it’s so low that you do it, even if it means doing just one push-up per week.

Not linking your new behavior to an existing behavior: You cannot add stuff on top of your life, because you already live a 100% filled life. Instead you need to wedge in new behaviors by linking them to existing ones.

So if you want to create a new behavior, for example exercise more, then this is a framework you can use:

Trigger: After I… (existing behavior)

Behavior: Then I will… (new behavior)

Reward: Then I will… (something pleasurable and/or purposeful to celebrate)

This could for exercise look like:

Trigger: After I brush my teeth on Saturday morning

Behavior: I will go out for a 5k run

Reward: Then I will call my best friend

This method can be used on everything, for example to live a healthier life, have better conversations, manage your email better, spend more time on things you find purposeful etc etc etc. There are no limits to the usability of behavioral engineering.

Three of the learnings I’ve picked up after doing this for many years:

Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing - This boils down to basic behavioral economics / nudging. For example, by having a great audiobook that you really look forward to listening to when you go out running you make it easier to go out for a run. You can make it further easy by ensuring that you have running gear for all weather conditions so that the weather never becomes an excuse, and that you know exactly when you plan to run each week so you don’t need to invest energy deciding that all the time. Likewise you can make it harder to do what you don’t want to do, for example prevent unhealthy eating by not buying things that are unhealthy and that will only sit there in the fridge and tempt you to eat them.

Experiment a lot - You seldom get everything right the first time. I don’t. But I do enjoy tweaking, changing, learning and pivoting in different directions to become better and better at something. So if you set out to for example start exercising, experiment with lots of different ways to exercise so that you increase the likelihood of finding something you really enjoy. If exercise becomes lots of fun the likelihood of successfully engineering a new behavior increases.

Be honest with yourself - Sometimes I set out to do things that I for one reason or another actually won’t prioritize to do. It can be that you say to yourself that you want to learn how to swim better in the coming year, but in light of other priorities you’re actually not being honest with yourself since you won’t make it a priority. If you’re not honest with yourself your so-called priorities will likely give you a bad conscience, and that’s not helpful for anyone. So be honest with what you want to do now, and what you perhaps are not ready to make a priority yet.

With this I hope that you will set out to make 2023 an amazing year, and that instead of making new year’s promises that may or may not work, that you won’t leave it to chance, but to design, by engineering the behaviors you want in your life.

I hope you are where you want to be, and do what you want to do. If not, change it. Let me know if I can help in any way.

Thank you ??

Johan

#2023planning #newyear2023 #behavioraldesign #selfleadership