Having been recently certified as a Tiny Habits® Coach, someone asked me why I did it, and why now? Establishing a consulting/coaching business, running a tech incubator, and facilitating a small business growth program should be enough. The answer is because of these activities not in addition to these activities. Let me explain.
My work is like a puzzle, where each piece fits together around my overall design. That design is my personal mission statement. I work to help people discover and develop their God-given talents and abilities. This leads me to always looking for ways to help people grow. Until Tiny Habits® came along, I too often felt like I was missing that one little piece to complete the puzzle.
Tiny Habits® is a program that emerged from 25 years of research by Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. His Fogg Behavior Model®, B=MAP, led him on a personal journey to determine how to develop behaviors that lead to personal growth and happiness. After 40,000 experiments with people and his own personal trial and error research, Tiny Habits® was born.
Tiny Habits® follows two maxims Dr. Fogg discovered in his research:
1) Help people do what they already want to do.
2) Help people FEEL successful.
Behavior (B) happens when motivation (M) and ability (A) receive a prompt (P). While motivation ebbs and flows, ability is always there. When you make the ability to do a new behavior easy enough, a new behavior can be started. Tiny actions are the easy way to do something new that leads to new behaviors.
When I read the book, I found my missing piece. While helping people and teams grow is my mission, too many times the client never reached their goals. And more times than not, the problem was not the goal or aspirations. The problem was getting started and overcoming the existing behaviors or obstacles. Too many starts and stops and restarts eventually leads to abandoning the goal.
Tiny Habits showed me a way to get everyone, myself especially, started and build positive momentum. Everything great starts out small, and too often we fall into the “Go Big or Go Home” trap. The Tiny Habits® method provides the tools to get started and stay started. Thank you BJ and Linda Fogg-Phillips for helping me find the missing piece to the puzzle.
As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago; the second best time is today. And that is the answer to my friend’s original question.
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