I recently sat down with Marta Johnson, publisher of Tree Shrugger where she is working on a fresh approach to tackling environmental issues.
She asked me about how we can apply behavior design to build habits that help you help the environment.
Our conversation was published on Tree Shrugger in four parts:
Here’s a selection from our conversation on celebrating wins:
Marta: Let’s wrap up this series with a chat about celebration. Why is it so important for building habits?
Glen: Everything comes back to our emotions — emotions underlies all our habits and how we create them.
Celebration helps wire our brain for wanting to stick with a behavior change.
That’s why it’s so important to celebrate every win — so when you take out the compost, do a boogie dance or just smile and think of your why.
M: I love that! What about when you forget to do your habit or just can’t do it someday?
G: One of the things I come back to is that you don’t have to wait for Jan 1 for a sense of renewal. The key to successful behavior change is that you can renew yourself at any time.
M: Yes! You are in charge of your renewal, not a calendar. That’s great!
For environmental habits like taking the bus or biking to work, often times I think one of the challenges to even getting started is the newness of the experience or the worry about the unexpected.
G: That’s understandable. But one of the mindsets I encourage people to have with building habits is as an experimenter. Think of every new step or action as an experiment. It’s ok if something doesn’t work out one time or over time. It’s a part of learning what works well for you and what doesn’t.
M: That’s amazing! Thinking of it as an experiment really lifts some of the heaviness of “behavior change” or “new habit” off of our shoulders.
