BREAKING THE HABIT | The BEST Strategy for Changing Your Habits | Gretchen Rubin
BREAKING THE HABIT | The BEST Strategy for Changing Habits | Gretchen Rubin
Gretchen Rubin breaks down habit formation into her "Strategy of the Four Tendencies" and explains what we need to do in order to form healthy, long-lasting habits easily.
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Speaker: Gretchen Rubin
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Transcript:
Now the thing,
the overwhelming conclusion that I reached about habits
is that if we wanna change our habits,
we first have to understand ourselves.
Because when we understand ourselves,
we can figure out how to change our habits in the way that's gonna suit us.
Because if you try to
form a habit in a way that doesn't suit you,
your interests, your nature, your values,
it's not gonna stick,
but when we understand ourselves,
we can
shape the habits to suit us
and then we get a lot better success.
And as I was studying habits,
it just seemed more and more clear to me
that people were really different.
It seemed like all the research was treating everybody as if they were exactly the same.
That they had the same affinity for habits.
The same attitude for forming habits,
the same desire to form habits.
Which seemed obvious to me that there was a huge range among people
in how they formed habits.
I wanted to figure out
how can you measure people against each other,
how can you understand these differences,
were there patterns that people were falling into.
And I came up with this framework called
"The Four Tendencies Framework."
And it divides people into four categories.
And this is a little dry at the beginning,
but stay with me because it's really, really helpful
in understanding yourself generally,
other people generally and also how habits conform.
So, "The Four Tendencies Framework"
has to do with how you respond to an idea of an expectation.
Now, there are two kinds of expectations.
There's outer expectations
and that's things like a work deadline
or a request from a sweetheart.
And then there's inner expectations,
your own desire to
write a blog,
your own desire to get back into meditation.
And here are the four categories.
The first category are upholders.
Upholders readily respond to outer expectations and inner expectations alike.
They readily meet a work deadline without a lot of supervision or deadlines
and they're gonna keep a new year's resolution without much fuss.
I am an upholder
and it turns out that upholder is a very tiny category
and so many things were clear to me when I realised that
I thought I was pretty average,
but I'm kind of on the freaky fringe.
Hermione Granger is a great example of an upholder.
Next are questioners.
Questioners question all expectations,
but they'll do it if they think it makes sense.
It's very important for them to think that something is rational,
that there are sound justifications for it,
that it's not arbitrary.
In a sense, they make everything an inner expectation
because they have to endorse it.
So they readily meet inner expectations,
but they're gonna disregard outer expectations if they don't accept them.
Next, obligers.
Obligers readily meet outer expectations,
but they have a lot of trouble meeting inner expectations.
So they do really well when there's supervision,
when there's deadlines,
when there's late fees,
when there's their own
duty as a role model to someone else.
They hate to let other people down.
But they often struggle with letting themselves down.
Like one obliger said to me,
"when I was in high school,
I was on the track team
and I've never missed a practice
but I can't go running now."
Because when she was on a team,
when she had a coach,
when she had her,
her team members counting on her,
she had no trouble going.
But she can't go running.
Or someone who said,
"well, if I've got something on the calendar
where I'm committed to somebody else,
I never miss it,
but if I make a commitment only to myself, I might skip it.”
And so, for obligers, the key
is external accountability.
If there's a habit that they want to stick to, that they're struggling with,
they need to build in that form of external accountability.
Whether that's using a coach or a trainer or signing up for a class
where the teacher's gonna know that you're not there
or having some kind of accountability partner
or thinking about your duty to be a good role model for your children
or for somebody else.
