The Power of Habit | Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg (0:00)

It's very easy to say what behavior or what routine I want. I want to, and we need to be specific, right? Like let's say I want to spend five minutes in meditation every single day, so as to develop sort of mindfulness skills.

So we know what behavior, what routine we're talking about. Now, the habit loop is a cue, a routine, a reward, and these become self-reinforcing. Basically, our brain learns to clump together that cue, the routine, the reward until it becomes more and more automatic behavior.

We know the routine, we know the behavior. I want to meditate for five minutes. But the next step is you must choose what the cue is and what the reward is to create creating this clump of behavior, this chunk. A cue can be one of five things. It's a time of day, a particular place, a certain emotion, the presence of certain other people, or a preceding behavior that's become ritualized.

Michael Gervais (1:05)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create, where Pete Carroll, the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, and I built an eight week online mindset training course. We love what we built there. But the whole idea behind this podcast, behind these conversations, is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand what it is that they are searching for. We wanna understand their psychological framework, how they organize their inner life, how they use their minds to do better in life, whether that's living in the living room or that's performing on the world stage, whatever that might be.

And we want to also understand the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft.

I wanna take a minute here to announce a really exciting event that we have coming up. As you continue to navigate the challenges and opportunities of 2024, I wanna pose a question. What are you doing right now to be great with stress? How are you working with stress on your pursuit towards your most important ambitions and goals? And I just wanna get right to the heart of the key elements, one in particular, for what it takes to excel in today's high heat, high stakes world. Because stress is not the problem that we think it is. Stress is a synonym for change. And our ability to be agile with change, that is the real opportunity at hand. So if you're wanting to unlock extraordinary results and sustainable performance in your life, it's not about avoiding or reducing stress. And as simple as that sounds, it's very tricky to do, but it is about fundamentally changing your relationship with it.

And that's why I'm so thrilled to invite you to a special event. It's a free virtual event that we're offering. And it's called The Power of Embracing Stress. It's on Wednesday, March 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific. So to sign up, just head over to findingmastery.com/training, whether it's advancing in your career or improving your health or cultivating stronger relationships, I think a new approach to stress can be one of the most powerful unlocks for you and your life. So join us for this free virtual training, The Power of Embracing Stress on Wednesday, March 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to findingmastery.com/training to sign up once again. That's findingmastery.com/training. And I'm really excited to see you there.

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