How behavior change experts work on their own difficult habits

[0:00] Do you ever wonder how people who teach behavior change for a living change their own behavior?
Well, today we are spilling the tea. Kurt Houlihan and Tim Nelson of the Behavioral Grooves podcast join me to talk about how we apply the things that we teach in our own lives.
And plus, we've got some ideas on who you might or might not want to have on your behavior change team.

[0:25] All right. All right. If you want to take your seats or lace up your sneaks.
We're about to get started. Welcome to the Change Academy podcast.
I'm your host, Monica Reinagle, and in this show, we talk about what it takes to create healthier mindsets and habits in our own lives, as well as how we can create healthier communities and workplaces.
Whether you're working on your own health and well-being, or promoting healthy behaviors is your job, we're going to talk about what works, what's hard, what's needed, and what's next.
Let's jump in. In today's show, I'm talking with Kurt Nelson and Tim Houlihan, who are co-hosts of a great podcast called Behavioral Grooves.
Their podcast has a lot in common with The Change Academy. Both of our shows focus on the art and science of behavior change.
And you know, if you enjoy The Change Academy podcast, which I trust that you do, I think you would also enjoy Behavioral Grooves.
But I also thought it would be fun to invite the guys onto the podcast to talk about talking about behavior change, what it's like for us to spend all our time marinating in this stuff and how it impacts our own behavior.

[1:34] Kurt and Tim are both heavy hitters in this field.
Tim is the founder of Behavior Alchemy, a consultancy focusing on strategy, training, and design through a behavioral lens.
And Kurt has a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology and has has spent the last 20 or so years applying behavioral science principles in various global organizations, specifically focusing on the factors that drive motivation.
And the conversation I'm going to share with you today touches on the intersections between our work on our podcasts and the applied work that we do with individuals and organizations.
We talk a little bit about our responsibility to vet the information that we're sharing with our listeners, but also our desire to help you integrate all of these tools and points of view and research into a coherent strategy.

[2:34] We talk about what it's like to put the stuff that you create out into the world

[2:39] where people can critique it.
And finally, how we apply the things that we talk about in our own lives.
I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation and get some helpful insights.
In particular, I hope you'll think a bit more about your personal behavior change team, who you want in that coach role, who you want as your referee, who you want as your cheerleader.
And are those folks clear on what their role is? For that matter, are you?
Okay, let me bring in the guys and I will be back again at the end with a couple of takeaways for you.
So welcome to the Change Academy, Kurt and Tim.
Thank you. Yeah, we appreciate being here. This is going to be fun.
And before we kick it off, I have to also just give you big kudos for the recent project, the five-part series that you did called They Thought We Were Ridiculous on the History of Behavioral Economics.
We have a mutual friend, Dr. Michelle Seeger, who is a frequent guest on the Change Academy podcast.
I know she's also been with you on Behavioral Grooves. She was with me recently.
We were actually talking about the limitations of behavioral economics as applied to health behaviors, and your series had just come out.
So I mentioned it just as essential listening. listening.

[3:56] But as a podcaster, I can also tell how many hours of research and planning and recording and editing and producing went into that. Nice job, you guys.
Oh, thank you. We have to do a shout out. We co-did that with Andy Luttrell from Opinion Sciences.
And so it was a mutual effort, but lots of work.
So thank you. I'm glad you pushed through because it was well worth it.
But as a podcaster, I can also tell how many hours of research and planning

[4:33] and recording and editing and producing went into that. Nice job, you guys.
Oh, thank you. I know it's going to be just a durable asset that we can refer folks to who just want to get up to speed on where this whole behavioral economics, how it all started.
So on your show, you interview a lot of researchers and academics and lately, Nobel laureates.
And these people have usually built their careers around one or two big ideas or a methodology that they have come up with.
So naturally, to people like that, a lot of the problems in the world look like nails that would be best dealt with by the specific hammer that they've built. So-

[5:13] Do you see your role in behavioral grooves as being to present a lot of different points of view, a lot of angles of vision on behavioral science, or maybe more to try to synthesize these many perspectives and many approaches into some sort of cohesive approach to behavior change?
So when we think of ourselves as being science communicators, and so part of our role that that we want to take on is to ensure that these researchers.

[5:47] Who, again, have a big idea, they've spent their life looking at sometimes very narrow pieces of research around behavior, around psychology, around sociology, whatever that would be.
And they're fascinating and really insightful elements, but they're published in academic research journals. And occasionally there's a book associated with it that's more popular press.
But part of what we're trying to do is ensure that those insights get to a larger audience in a manner that is understandable, that isn't always in academic speech.
Right. And so part of that is there.
You bring up a really good point, though, is are we just relaying what they're saying and we get the breadth of things out there? or is there a narrative, is there an arc around this that we're trying to do?
I would say that we tend to be on the former. However, we set up our podcast so that we, you know, have an introduction that we do in post-production.
We do our interview where hopefully we're asking some fun and good questions and we get some insightful answers.
But then Tim and I have what we call our grooving session at the end.

[7:00] And the grooving session is intended if it's a researcher, we try to maybe translate some of the more academic speak into layman's terms, but also how do you apply this?
How do you take this concept that is, you know, focused from lab studies that people have done around, you know, confirmation bias or whatever else it would be, or however that academic, you know, is their specialty.
How do you take that then and apply that into leadership or into your daily life in working with your kids or your spouse or whatever that would be?

[7:37] So that's where we try to bring it in. Yeah.
And to integrate some of these many different insights into something that feels like a more coherent worldview because you are both also practitioners, right? right?

[7:49] Yeah. And we do have this tendency to continue to look for nails that are going to match our hammer.
And one of the things that we like to do with behavior grooves is try to introduce new hammers to people so that, as Kurt said, our grooving sessions are, it's the two of us, but we often do a literature review to try to prepare for them and try to understand a little little bit more about both the raw research in the topic, but then also reflect on how it applies and to try to provide some shape.
So if we're doing our job well, then we're hopefully providing more alternatives for our listeners to act on living a better life, finding their groove.
Here's to a well-stocked toolkit.

[8:37] Right.

[8:40] Yeah. And oftentimes, hopefully it's not just hammers. It's some other tools. Right.
Screwdrivers, pliers. Not just the big hammer and the little hammer. Right. Yeah. Sure.
So as podcast hosts, our job is to be receptive, to draw people out, show their thinking in its best, most lucid light.

[8:57] But of course, I'm sure you also have a critical lens that you are bringing to these things too.
So how do you balance trying to remain open-minded and, you know, hospitable with maybe also being in a position to see some of the flaws, maybe some of the gaps.
How do you walk that line? We are naturally curious. The great news is that nearly anyone that sits on the other side of our recording tool here is going to be of interest to us.
We're going to take interest into them just because Kurt and I are just naturally wired to be curious.
So we don't have to worry about When we find things that are controversial or provocative, then we rely on our good old diplomacy.
We are a couple of Midwestern boys who grew up in big families and figured out how to deal with diplomatically with a whole variety of things.
But that raises this question of, so what is our role?
How much research do we have to do in order to ensure that what we're sharing with people is valid, trustworthy research?
We've depended upon this idea that if it's in a peer-reviewed journal that is reputable.

[10:19] Then we should be able to count for that. Part of the issue, again, in the past number of years has been, at what point do we have to be investigators into all of those facets of that versus being.

[10:38] As Tim said, curious aficionados of, just tell us about this stuff because it's really fascinating and we want to be able to apply it in our lives and work. work. Right.
Because I think that our listeners rely on us to some extent to be that critical filter about what's getting through.
But we all share that responsibility to take the information that we are confronted with, whether it's on a podcast that we're listening to or a podcast that we're creating, and filter it through. What do we know?
Let me check this against my life experience.
What are other points of view on that? That's just the basics of scientific literacy, right? Right.
And I think that it's something that we we can all share, because as soon as we just offload, outsource that responsibility to somebody else, whether it's a podcast host or the editor of a journal, we're abdicating a little bit.

[11:29] I think we all need to stay a little bit more engaged in that process.
Yeah. And Monica, one thing on that. So you bring up a really good point.
We do tend to often outsource that. But there have been guests where we haven't published the interview.

[11:47] I was going to ask you. And then there have been other pieces where, as we talked about, we have the grooving session afterwards where we raise up those questions.
It's like, hey, this is what they said.
However, we have other aspects of this that maybe literature is kind of controversial on, that there are other points of view.
And so don't just take this one point of view, let's take a look at what else the literature is saying, or maybe some of the pushback on some of this.

[12:19] It's always enlightening to just see what the opposition has to say or think about it. Right.

[12:25] So we talked a minute ago about being practitioners.
So in addition to this role that we play on our podcasts of sharing information and giving a platform to people who have done interesting work, we all also work with individuals, with organizations to implement various aspects of behavior change.
It's really a different skill set, isn't it?

[12:46] So how do you experience the differences between those two ways of working?
I think it's actually pretty easy to differentiate the two.
As science communicators, I think that it's a mode or it's a way of existing that's really just about taking that information and repackaging it with the lens that we have from our experience.
Experience it's a still it's a a separate bridge you know to another island to get to the practitioner part to actually say okay now let's take this this scholarship that we have behind us and apply that in this specific situation and and that's one of the things that kurt and i both dearly love is what could we do in this particular situation what what is the problem that the company is trying to solve?
You know, what are the people issues that we could help resolve?
And then what are we going to bring to bear on that to try to solve that?
Right. Do we need a hammer? Do we need a pliers? Do we need a screwdriver?

[13:49] Right. And the great news is, wow, in a big way, all like a weekly show for the last seven and a half years has driven home the fact that there are a lot of tools in the toolbox.
And whatever we're doing with applying our behavioral science in the world is going to be done with the tools that we really believe are most appropriate rather than just the hammer that's most readily available.

[14:17] Yeah. And at this point, you guys have an entire hardware store, right? Yeah.

[14:22] And I think that's a really interesting piece.
And part of the other aspect of the application of this is, so we talk with researchers who are very, very concerned about making sure they understand the mechanisms of why something is happening.
And so you do your lab experiments to take all of the confounding variables out of the equation to understand here is my is my dependent variable and here's my you know the factors that I am modulating in application you can't remove all of those confounding factors and you don't actually want to all of the time it's it's the world we live in and part of what is wonderful about that is that but you're just looking to get to what makes a difference.
And so bringing a behavioral science lens into this allows us to be better at looking at the behavior change that needs to drive and understand what are some of those factors that could.
So looking at that toolbox and saying, hammer, screwdriver, saw, whatever else that we have in that toolbox, which of those tools is best applied in this situation?

[15:41] We don't always know because we can't always run a randomized control trial inside those organizations, but at least we have a better understanding of the tool set that we can bring.
Right, and we're not limited to a single tool, right? We can also bring a collection.

[15:55] So, Kurt, you and I have also dabbled a little bit with creating products that we saw as ways to solve problems that we saw happening in the world.
So you have the Brain Shift Journal that rolled out a couple of years ago.
And on my side, I created a smartphone app that I needed to help support some of the programming that I was doing called the Nutrition GPA. GPA.
And I imagine, as with me, that you were just looking, how can I provide a concrete solution to some of these behavioral issues that we are talking so much about?
But for me, it has been an interesting process to see what happens when you translate an idea into a product and then put it out into the world where it gets to have a life of its own.
And where the inevitable limitations will emerge or flaws that we may be all too aware of, but we had reasons.

[16:55] What's that been like for you? It's interesting because once you start to create that product that isn't just specific to this client and this situation and this instance and context, and it has to take on a little bit larger perspective and then you're like, what do we include? What don't we include?
And now how do we bring all of those together into something that an individual can use?
And every iteration, hopefully we're learning and we're doing different things.
Yeah, it is really fun and it is very gratifying to take something and put it out into a wider audience, uh, distribution where it can touch more people, but then you also get more feedback and, you know, it can be a little painful to have people who, um, have no idea what you went through to bring something across the finish line, reach out to you to tell you all this stuff you could have done.
I love it. Like, well, why didn't you, why'd you use that font?
It's like, oh my gosh, really? I mean, as we, we have graphic designers that are designing this, you know, it's experts.

[17:57] But then there's also that feedback that you get where a person you have no connection with, who has bought your product and they all of a sudden come back and go i've been trying to write this book for years and you know being able to use your journal and to to help with that and have these daily practices i i've written this book right um all of these factors that you kind of go and it's like oh it made a difference and that there's a there's a part that is just like Like, it feels really, really good.
Of course, you're so right, Kurt.
And, you know, and I've gotten those emails too, and they can make my day or my week or my month.
But look at that with our negativity bias, which are the ones that we remember?
You know, we remember even the valid complaints, much less the invalid criticisms.
Those are the ones that we carry around more presently than the kudos.
But it's absolutely right.

[18:59] On a more personal level, for both of you, I'm curious about how spending all of your time thinking about, talking about, working with people on behavior change influences your own personal development.
I want to know, has this made you any more skilled at working with your own behavior and your own impulses than, say, the average Joe?
I'm going to go to Danny Kahneman was once asked with all of his work, for those who don't know, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, interestingly enough, because of his work in behavior change.
And he said, I still have all the same biases that I had.
I'm just as biased as I was.

[19:44] But what he did was he knows how to make changes in his life to help deal with those biases.
And if there's anything that I've been been able to do in my life is to, once I become aware, and it's going to sound like, oh, I see the bias and then I just make an instant change and snip, snap, zippity zap, it's all better. But that's not the case.

[20:09] It's actually, it takes time and effort to readjust my surroundings and the context in which I'm making decisions to limit the impact of the biases that I'm not going to shake i'm just not going to shake them but i am much more aware of them and my wife is certainly much more aware of them which is a great accountability partner you know in in my world so as like uh we've talked about you know the what the gi joe fallacy right that knowing knowing is not half the battle it's not even a quarter of the battle it's it's it's it's there and it does help i'm not don't get me wrong i mean i think having that knowledge and understanding of the biases and our tendency and behaviors and some of the science behind this definitely impacts how we go about even from the perspective as tim said you can change the context you can change different things i tell the story of you know uh my oreo addiction right so uh i have a couple kids um but but every day I walk us out of the house.
So about three or four, I usually get kind of hungry or bored and I go downstairs and I open up the cabinet and I look for something to eat. And if there's Oreos in that cabinet.

[21:30] They're hard. I have to exert a lot of willpower in order to not eat the Oreos, which I know are not necessarily the best thing to have a snack every day of Oreos. But you have an unlimited amount of willpower, don't you, Kurt?

[21:43] Which we know. See, this is one of the things you learn, right? Right. Yeah.
Yeah, you don't. But we still keep Oreos in the house because our kids like it. My wife likes them.
They're a nice treat every now and again. in.
So we have made the choice where we move, or I've moved the Oreos from the kitchen cupboard down into the basement. And so they're still there.
But now when I come down, I don't go down to the basement. We have our food shelves down there that we keep extra stuff on.
But I go into the cupboard and I open up the cupboard and the Oreos aren't there.
And so I don't get that immediate, like I have to do willpower.
I see something else. I see something that might be more healthy for me.
And I am much more likely to do that. Now, if I really want an Oreo, I can go downstairs and get that Oreo, but I'm much less likely to have that, have to face that challenge every single day.
And I'm much less likely to have those on a regular basis.
Yeah. And one of my programs, we call that hacking our habitat.
Perfect. And, but I think that it all comes back to what you said, Tim, and that is awareness.
So we don't remove our biases. We don't overcome all of our behavioral challenges or weaknesses.
We don't solve these things once and for all. But if we're lucky, we grow in awareness, in self-awareness.
Or if we have an accountability partner, we have someone else that can help reflect back, or a.

[23:12] And help amplify our own or augment our own awareness with more.
Because I think that that is really where so much of it happens, that when we can see more clearly what is happening, not just the behavior or even just the consequence of the behavior, but what's driving the behavior, whether it is a trigger or a habit or any of the other things that might be driving that that behavior, that is where I think we have the most leverage to start to rummage through the toolbox and think about, you know, what is the shape of this nail?
What is the best hammer for this?
And apply that. Monica, I have a question for you. So you talked about accountability partner and or coach.

[24:00] In your world, are those often the same person? Are they separate?
How do you, and is there a better way from your perspective and how you look at that? Should the coach be the accountability partner?
Should they be separate or does it matter at all? There's probably a number of ways to put those tools together.
When I am in the role of coach, I prefer not to be an accountability partner.
I really don't wanna be the one that my client has to succeed in order to please or in order to not disappoint point or in order to, you know, show up with something good to say.
So I try when possible to avoid being the accountability partner.
I like to help people figure out how they can become more accountable to their own goals and their own objectives and what it takes to kind of connect the dots between what they think they want to accomplish and what their behaviors are along the way.
So I try to build sort of self-accountability. But I've softened on this a little bit over the years to recognize that it really can be useful to have other people in your world know what you're working on, know what you are trying to implement.
I think we all want to choose those people carefully and let them know how we want to be supported.

[25:23] And how we might not want to be supported. But I do see a lot of value in this.
Most of the coaching that I do is in a group environment.
And I see how valuable the relationships between the members of that cohort are. And some of that is accountability.
Some of that is being seen. Some of that is just a place to work through what they're thinking, what they're working about, reflect back for each other.
So I think that having those supports around us is terrific. Perfect.
I would prefer not to be a coach and accountability partner. How about you?

[25:56] Well, it's interesting. I asked the question very specifically because in a lot of the work that I've done around change and various different things, I talk about, you know, this idea of having somebody who is a coach kind of help you through, understand what you're going through, give you tools, you know, help you process things.
Maybe it's gone through this before, right?
But then there's also, and I use these sports analogies, so I apologize on this in advance for people, you know, the referee who is that accountability person, right?
So various different pieces of that. But then there's also the cheerleader.
There's that person who is that rah-rah, like keep, you know, gives you that motivation going.
And all three, and again, I always talk about you can be, sometimes they can be the same person, sometimes they're different, and you can have multitudes of them as you're going forward with that.
But you need to pick them carefully. And I use the example very often of when I was getting my PhD, I asked my wife, I go, can you help me with this? Can you be this?
And she actually turned me down.
So she said, I can be your cheerleader.
I can cheerlead, but I am not going to, I haven't done a PhD and I'm not, I'm sure I probably can't help you process that.
So I can't help you be that coach for that part. and I definitely don't want to be that referee or that accountability partner because I don't want to be that nagging person who is there. And I was just like, oh.

[27:21] That was really insightful. And I was super appreciative of it afterwards.
But at first, it's like, no, it struck me as really interesting.
And so I appreciate that perspective.
Yeah. I like that little cast of characters that you're starting to build out, you know, the cheerleader, the coach, the trainer, the referee, the team member, you know, we could probably keep going.
My listeners know I'm a sucker for a good metaphor. for.

[27:46] And I will stretch them until they are so broken.
But I like that idea of all the different roles that the people in our lives who care about us and our success can play for us or different roles that the same people can play at different times.
And just to bring it full circle, I think it does go back to awareness about what we need and how people can best support us and then communication.

[28:11] Well, and to be open to what might happen when we have that conversation.
Conversation the wonderful thing about asking a question of how did i do on this or what do you think about this is that we're going to get an opinion if we've if we've done our our work up front to be selective about who's going to be the coach and who's going to be the trainer and who's going to be the cheerleader that we ought to be open and really receive that information uh in in a positive way well this has been just as much fun as i thought it would be i want to thank you you both for taking time to share some thoughts, to talk about talking about behavior change with me. Thanks, Monica. It's our pleasure. Thank you.

[28:53] Okay, so what did you take away from this conversation? It probably does not come as a surprise to learn that while being steeped in behavioral science certainly does give you a well-stocked toolkit, it doesn't necessarily make personal change inevitable or automatic or easy, it still takes awareness and a commitment to doing the work.
And perhaps that can serve as a gentle reminder for anyone who needs to hear it that listening to the podcast won't take the place of those things in your life either.
We need to apply these things. We need to see how they work.
We need to learn from our mistakes.

[29:32] Also, I hope you're taking another look at your team roster.
Have you got the right people in those key roles of coach, referee, trainer, or cheerleader?
Who else might you want to add? dad, an equipment manager maybe, or a record keeper.
And these don't all need to be humans, by the way. They can be tools or systems, but I think it's a fun way to think about it.
And if you could use a little more inspiration on that front, there are a couple of episodes in the archives that might be good listening.
So I'll put links to those in the show notes for you.
And if I can be of service in one of those roles as you work toward becoming your best self, I hope you'll reach out. I'd love to have a conversation with you about that.
Thanks for joining me today. I look forward to next time.
All right. Thanks, everyone. This has been the Change Academy podcast with Monica Reinagle.
Our show is produced by me, Brock Armstrong.
You'll find links to everything Monica mentioned in today's episode in our show notes, as well as on our website at changeacademypodcast.com, where you can also send us an email or leave us a voicemail.
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Now here's to the changes we choose.