Meaningful Motivation Principle 3: Boost Awareness to Support Change

TLDR: Three Key Experience Strategy Takeaways. If you’re being hired to support change:

1. Help raise awareness of habits
2. Design for moments of reflection
3. Reinforce self-awareness?

When people hire you for an Aspirational Job to be Done, they’re hiring you to help them create change. While it’s likely they’ll understand the outcome they’re looking to change, it's less likely they know how to change it (or they probably wouldn’t be hiring you.) Guiding and supporting change requires you to help boost awareness of what’s already happening. So, in part 3 of our 8-part series on Meaningful Motivation, we’re talking about the importance of designing moments of reflection that build awareness.

Since habits are the building blocks of life, In order to look at how that happens, let’s take a look at the role of habits in behavior change.

Habits: we all have them. They have a massive influence on every area of our lives. They form the patterns not just of how we eat and drink, but also how we work, how we think, how we relate to other people. Everything we do repeatedly, with little or no thought or effort, is a habit.?

Without habits, we’d have to spend our entire lives figuring out how to do even the simplest tasks and our ability to learn anything new would be drastically limited.?

But, because habits are automated, we are unaware of almost all of them. So, when our habits are working against us, it can be pretty tricky to even begin to figure out what is going on and why it isn’t working.??

That’s where awareness comes in. Whether you’re building a slick AI or providing deep Coaching, if you’re tasked with guiding and supporting meaningful change, you will have to help your clients or customers boost awareness of their habits.?

But, what do you need to build awareness of? To answer that, we have to look at the anatomy of a habit.?

Every habit is made up of three components that are often referred to as a Habit Loop:?

The first part, the Cue, kicks off the cycle. It is the alarm that wakes up each habit, and it’s usually completely unconscious.? Cues can be anything: A physical feeling, an emotion, an action, a sight, a smell. When that alarm goes off, it triggers a behavior.

The Behavior is the action in response to the Cue.

The third part, the Reward, is the effect of the action. Our brains are hard-wired for reward. If something feels good, we are going to go after more of it. Even if the reward is only short-term.?

What are you doing right now? Stop reading for a minute and see if you can identify one of the Habit Loops you’re in at this very moment.? You may find it tricky to identify one or all of the parts of the loop you’re in. That’s because it’s been so perfectly automated through hundreds or thousands of repetitions. To form or change habits, we have to become aware of them.?

While we sometimes know what our cues are, we often miss them. Discovering them usually takes a bit of sleuthing, working backward from our behaviors and paying attention to what happens immediately before them. For example, as I’m writing this, I’ve checked my email about 47 times. Why? A tiny, disruptive haptic notification on my Apple Watch, like a Greek Siren, has butted into my focus and guided me back to Gmail. It’s so good at its job that I’ve responded the same way over and over despite getting the same frustrating results each time. My emails have all been read, but this article still isn’t finished. That doesn’t sound very rewarding, does it??

Here’s the thing, even though my big goal is to finish this article, my impressionable brain seeks immediate reward. So, what could the reward be for responding to these prompts? For me, it’s a hit of dopamine I get every time I satisfy my curiosity about what’s in these messages. It’s quick, it’s frequent, and it works pretty much every time. Pow!

So, let’s put this back in the context of awareness: I can look back and realize that this article, which I could’ve written in a solid hour of focus, has taken the better part of a day, because I’ve succumbed to distractions over and over. Without a moment to reflect, I likely wouldn’t have been aware of the trigger and the reward. Now that I know what’s going on, the solution is pretty simple: take the dang watch off and fling it across the room. The emails will wait.?

This intentionally oversimplified example doesn’t explain how to address the most pervasive and challenging habits, like overspending, smoking, overeating, etc. But, it is the beginning of the process. While GI Joe probably overestimated the value of knowledge when he described it as “Half the battle”, he was right that change can’t begin without awareness. And once you’ve helped your client or customer identify their habits, and understand the rewards they’ve been getting from them, they can begin the deeper work of investigating how those behaviors relate to their thoughts, feelings, needs and values.

So, what does all of this mean for your experience strategy?

Our research shows that building self-awareness is highly valued by people looking for support in making change. In three separate studies, each with over 500 respondents, “Improving my self-awareness” was one of the most valuable services a product could provide. We also see that people who reflect daily, rate all of their life systems more highly.?

In order to successfully guide and support your clients toward the changes that matter to them, a big part of your responsibility is to design for moments of reflection. Whether through journaling or tracking behaviors, or mindfulness practices like meditation, triggering awareness is essential to supporting Meaningful Motivation.?

In summary, awareness is powerful. Well, it can be if it’s used wisely anyway. In our next article in the series, we’ll look at how to translate awareness into sustainable action.?

Excuse me while I go check all of those emails that have been waiting for me.