How do you hack your motivation? Redesign your habits Part 3

Habits are like fundamental building blocks that can support or block you from what you want in life. Conscious and unconscious habits — from social media to who you spend time with — heavily influence your belief system and vice versa. Tara Brach recently talked about how our beliefs become our thoughts and emotions which influence our behavior. Our behavior creates our character and then that determines our destiny. In other words, our habits of thought and behavior are key to shaping our life experience. But as you age your habits harden and become more difficult to change unless you start practicing how to intentionally design your habits now. In my first post I talked about selecting the right habit for you. My second post focused on defining the right size and timing for your new habit. Now I’ll get into some nuts and bolts tactics you can use to increase your motivation to form a habit. Hopefully these tips encourage you to experiment with how you approach your new behavior goals — whether it’s to learn how to DJ or make a career leap.

Clear space for growth

When you clear space in your garden or trim back your plants, it’s remarkable how things grow back stronger and more beautiful. Similarly when we clear space in our lives and cut things back that aren’t serving us, we can become healthier too. As you embark on forming a new habit, audit your existing habits and pick some things to trim. For example, I’ve still continued to play soccer at a relatively high level with the Olympic Club after playing Division 1 at Stanford. Last year I realized, I’m not going to get much better at soccer — it’s going to be a slow downhill descent as I get older. So rather than just maintain the habit of playing soccer a couple times a week, I decided to talk to my coach and let him know that I won’t make some practices and games in order to free up time for other things like surfing. Communicating that up front before the season began was a big relief because it prevented me from letting my team down and breaking an expectation that I didn’t want to keep. What can you let go of to free up bandwidth for your new behavior?

Hack your core motivators

According to Dr BJ Fogg, there are core motivators that are central to the human experience and universal: pleasure / pain, hope / fear, and social acceptance / rejection. In other words, we’re motivated by sensation, anticipation, and belonging. Since motivating yourself and sustaining motivation is very challenging and variable, Dr Fogg mostly focuses on techniques to increase your ability through methods like Tiny Habits. While I agree with him, it’s still possible to hack your motivation. Below are some tactics that worked for me.

Use social media to kickstart your habit

When I was first considering to surf last year I posted on Facebook asking for recommendations. I was hesitant because it’s vulnerable to be a beginner and ask for help. To my surprise, many of my friends offered to help and shared useful resources with me. Note I didn’t make a big claim I couldn’t fulfill but my public intention began attracting what I needed (including getting gifted two boards by Dave). My community gave me hope that I could learn how to surf and overcome my fears. Then I eventually posted my goal of surfing once a week publicly and shared status updates along the way before and after I surfed. All the social acceptance in the form of likes and comments helped motivate me to continue. I don’t recommend doing your new behavior for public approval, do it for yourself. But you can use things like social media to keep yourself accountable and feel occasional dopamine hits. If that’s too daunting, at least share your goal with a smaller group that encourages you. What can you share on social media about your new behavior over time to help motivate yourself?

Find belonging in your new behavior

We all want to belong to something, whether it’s a social group, team, company or religion. If you look closely, more behavior than you think is driven by the desire to belong. It’s a natural part of our evolution and why we’ve been able to thrive as a species. As you’re developing a new behavior, make a short list of all the people you know who have more experience than you and newbies who are interested in learning too. For example, whenever someone would tell me they surf or want to surf I’d add them to a note on my phone. Then I’d message people whenever I was planning to go like, “I’m going to Bolinas on Saturday morning, meet at 2mile,” and they’d join if available, so it didn’t require a lot of coordination. Sometimes when I was wavering about going, a friend would nudge me to come and vice versa. In addition, I’ve enjoyed getting to know friends more intimately through conversations in and outside of the water. I also feel a sense of tribal belonging when we go surfing together and look out for each out other’s safety. There are many more benefits to doing a new behavior with other people, especially when you’re a beginner. Who can you recruit to be part of your team to support your behavior goal?

Track your progress and celebrate little wins

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he talks about how we’re motivated by Mastery, or the itch to keep improving at something that’s important to us. The key is to start small and as you gain confidence, incrementally increase challenging yourself. For example, after I read that one of the SF legends “Doc” Renneker kept a journal of his surf sessions, I started one here. I began noting when, where and what happened; especially any breakthroughs like recently catching the longest wave of my life. It feels really good to look back and see what you’ve accomplished in one place. Note I didn’t become fixated or attached to hitting specific numbers — the process of documenting my progress was more important to my motivation (when I did a tally at the end of the year it turned out that I exceeded my goal and surfed 53 times ;). But I’m nowhere near being an expert surfer, so I would be demoralized at this point if I didn’t stop to celebrate little wins along the way. Highlighting progress is critical to sustaining momentum and morale through any creative endeavor, not just your hobbies (read Scott Belsky’s Messy Middle to learn more). Also my simple spreadsheet is pretty low tech but you can automate a lot of tracking with apps like Streaks, which you can connect to your Apple watch. How can you record your progress and frequently give yourself positive feedback?

Make your new habit part of your identity

We don’t like to have cognitive dissonance or feel discomfort with conflicting ideas, beliefs or values. People strive for consistency and harmony between their attitudes and behaviors. You can hack your cognitive dissonance defense mechanism to help motivate your new behavior. For example, I updated my Facebook profile photo to a picture of me surfing as I was beginning to form the habit. However, it would be inauthentic to continue using that photo if I didn’t surf. Every time I log into Facebook it’s a reminder of my intention and I subconsciously want to avoid cognitive dissonance. In addition, whenever I talked with someone last year I usually mentioned I was learning to surf. Since I often told people my goal, I wanted to be consistent with my words and keep surfing. Also, there are other things you can do to help motivate yourself and identify with your new behavior like altering your appearance. I often wear a surf hat during the week which I’m proud of because it’s been with me on many adventures. Note if you make your new behavior time bound, that can help you feel more comfortable associating your new habit with your identity because you’re free to change yourself back. What else can you do to identify with your new behavior?

Find inspiration and meaning to fuel you

One of the fun parts of learning a new behavior is that it’s an excuse geek out. Find books, videos, movies, events, and anyone that gives you more context on the past, present and future of what you want to do. For example, I appreciated the historic, socio economic and cultural observations weaved into the memoir Barbarian Days. I’m inspired by the indigenous roots of surfing that were almost stamped out by colonizing missionaries. Native Hawaiian surfing originated approximately one thousand years ago and these stories made me want to reconnect with my lineage and learn more about my grandfather who’s from Hawaii. In addition, I’ve visited exhibits like the evolution of surfboards at SFO and have been studying all the factors that miraculously come together to form a wave, like tides. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface and the deeper I go I realize how much I don’t know.

In addition, I’ve been amazed the by elegant and graceful footwork in movies like The Art of Longboarding and of course classics like Endless Summer. I have experienced the power of visualization and watching these pros gives my mind aspirational images to mimic. I’m also moved by organizations like the Water Institute and Surfrider Foundation, that are fighting for clean water, healthy oceans, and beaches for everyone to enjoy. After spending so much time in the water, I have much deeper compassion and awareness of our water world. Instead of doom and gloom, I feel more of a joyous responsibility to take care of living ecosystems like our coral reefs that are at the brink of extinction. Watching Patagonia’s documentary Fishpeople was an uplifting portrait about how we can leave our limitations behind to find meaning in the saltwater that’s all around us. I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me and all this content is like fuel that stokes my hope and anticipation for what’s possible. What inspires you to change your behavior and gives you new found meaning in life?

Soak up any pleasure you can find

When you’re first getting started with a new behavior it’s probably going to hurt. It’s going to be painful, people are going to try to stop you and you’re going to have every reason to quit. When I first started surfing it was brutal. I would get “caught inside” and get pounded by waves that would break on top of my head. My parents were scared and warned me not to go after hearing stories of people dying at Ocean Beach (not to mention shark attacks). So in the beginning, I had to savor the small moments of bliss like watching seabirds flying close by, admiring a mother otter playing with her baby on her chest, watching the sunrise glisten on water, and even swimming a few feet away from to a family of dolphins. Each time I would go out I would find some pleasurable moment, regardless of whether I caught a wave and would talk about it when I returned home with an “ocean glow” on my face. Slowly but surely I started to make progress and get my first taste of “dropping in” and harnessing the power of a wave while gently caressing her face. But every time I stretched for a new level of difficulty, it felt like I was getting tested by nature — from falling on my face and bruising my mouth, to getting my leash snapped off and board cracked. It’s true: no pain, not gain. However, the important part is that you have fun and enjoy the process of whatever you’re doing because that helps you overcome the inevitable setbacks. How might you amplify and find more of what gives you pleasure about your new habit?

Understanding how to hack your motivation is key to kickstarting and sustaining your new behavior, especially as you get tempted to quit. You can use tools like social media and apps to track your progress to motivate yourself extrinsically and intrinsically. Habits shape who you are and learning how to change your own habits can be empowering, liberating and increase your self-efficacy to attain anything you want in life. In my next post I’ll share some tips on increasing your ability to do a new behavior.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
―Gandhi*

Thank you Majo Molfino, Raphael Schaad, and Kayvon Tehranian for the encouraging feedback.