Maxwell Leadership Podcast: Atomic Habits with James Clear

Mark Cole:

Welcome back to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders who multiply value to others. My name is Mark Cole, and today there are two surprises for you. One, if you tune in on YouTube, you see right beside me live and quite a dashing color, John Maxwell.

John Maxwell:

It’s my golf shirt.

Mark Cole:

Let’s go play. I’m ready. It’s John Maxwell. He’s here with me in studio. Today we’ve got an afternoon of studio, but also joining us is James Clear. Sure, I said enough. That was it. But he’s the author of Atomic Habits and Leaders. If you don’t have this book, I can tell you I don’t like to say it, but you’re a step behind the rest of us. John Maxwell has read this book, marked this book. He would not let us have this podcast until he could get his book out of storage. James, because he and his wife were moving, because the book was that life changing for him. It’s life changing for you. It’s life changing for anyone who wants to make big changes in their life. And so today, if you would like to tune in, I’m going to ask you to go to our landing page because we’ve got a bonus resource for you for this episode. Go to MaxwellLeadership.com/Atomic. And if you would like to watch this episode on YouTube, just visit MaxwellLeadership.com/YouTube. Okay, John, this has been a podcast you’ve been waiting for. I’m so excited I’ll let you welcome our guest in today.

John Maxwell:

Well, James, we’re delighted to have you. The first thing I want to say is, okay, when I read the book, I was somewhere speaking, and I immediately started telling people about the book. You got to get this book. And I said to them, I said, I don’t know, James Clear. I just read his book. But I’m going to meet James Clear because I want to have a conversation with him. Because the way that you with simplicity, talk about habits, you really put the cookies on the lower shelf. I mean, this is not a hard book to grasp. And the way that you illustrate it, your chapter summaries everything about this book just attracted me to it. And I marked it all up like crazy. I applied it to my own life. So we’re honored to have you today, and we’re excited we’re going to be with you in a few days in Orlando so that we do have a little bit of one on one conversation. But I can tell you this is a terrific asset to the community. I mean, this book can change lives. And so we’re so excited to have you. We’re honored that you’re here and you have such an extensive background in helping people with habits. And just the title itself, Atomic Habits. I think you and I were talking a bit a moment ago. Mark, give us the reason you titled it Atomic Habits.

James Clear:

Yeah, well, first. Thank you both. Pleasure to chat with you. And, John, it’s very nice of you to say. I’m glad you enjoyed the book. And, yeah, I just feel lucky that people are reading it and finding it useful in terms of the content. The phrase atomic habits, it’s a little bit strange. Like before the book, you probably wouldn’t have referred to a book or a habit as an atomic habit. You might have called it small or little or something like that. But you probably wouldn’t have said atomic. And I chose the phrase for three reasons. So the first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small like an atom. And that is a big part of the book. I think you should make your habits small and easy to do and scale things down. The second meaning of the word atomic, and the one that people often overlook is the fundamental unit in a larger system. So atoms build into molecules, molecules building compounds and so on. And your habits are kind of like that. They can be these little daily routines and collectively you put them all together and they kind of make up your overall system or the day that you run and can carry you to a very different destination. And then the third and final meaning of the word atomic is the source of immense energy or power. And I think if you combine all three of those meanings you understand kind of the narrative arc of the book which is you start with changes that are small and easy to do and you leader them on top of each other like units in a larger system. And if you do that and you stick with it you can end up with some really powerful and remarkable results in the long run. And so the phrase atomic habits kind of speaks to all three of those things. And this idea of small changes making a really powerful result you kind of need all those pieces. Many people have heard something kind of like this before. Start small. Baby steps. Kaizen. Continuous improvement. These are concepts that people are familiar with. But even though the ideas are fairly straightforward, most people don’t take them seriously. And what does it mean to take it seriously? It means that you don’t just try to make one small little change. You make like 100 or 1000 of them, maybe over five or ten or 15 years. But it’s the layering of these small improvements on top of one another and the consistency and the perseverance to do it again and again that really leads to a remarkable result. So I feel like the title kind of speaks to that. And hopefully, more importantly, the concepts and the stories inside the book speak to it and give people a playbook that they can follow.

Mark Cole:

You know, in one of your books. I know you’ve got a list of questions, John, so I want to get right to it. But in one of your books, you talk about success is determined by your daily. So this book thinking for a change, this book, Today Matters, all of your work kind of drives toward this. So I would love to talk about this idea of daily agendas from your perspective, John, but then certainly to you, James. And then again, John, go for it with your questions, but let’s talk about daily agendas and their impact on long term success.

John Maxwell:

James, what Mark is talking about there is I wrote a book called Today Matters a long time ago. And basically the thesis of the book is that if I could spend a day with you, I could pretty much, at the end of the day, tell you how successful you are. Because the secret of our success is determined by what we do daily. It’s the daily habits. I’ve talked about that a lot, and I think one of the reasons your book connected so much with me is that you have a terrific way of expressing and teaching that is very practical. But every time I read one of your illustrations or your next principle, it was like, I’m thinking, I’ve thought this, but James just wrote it. It was like you clarified it. It was like, okay, inside you’re agreeing with that, but on the outside, you visually with a written word just, I think, really bring the AHA moment to the person that’s felt it but never quite expressed it as clearly as you have.

James Clear:

Yeah, thank you for saying that. I actually think that’s one of the best compliments that I can get as a writer, which is I’ve always kind of thought this or this matches up with my personal experience, but I’ve just never quite heard it put that way. And I think a lot of what I try to do, I try to hit that mark or hit that target, and I’ll have readers come up to me and they’ll know, hey, I have one guy come up. He said, I’m training for the Boston Marathon. I’ve been doing so many of the things in this book, I just never realized it or didn’t really think about it that way. And a lot of this really resonated with me because I’ve been doing this stuff for years, and I thought, wow, what a great proof of concept. That made me feel really good about the book. Like, here’s somebody who’s getting real results in the world, and they’re like, yes, this is exactly what’s worked for me. I just didn’t have a way of a language for it. I just didn’t have a way to express it. And so to a large degree, I’m not really saying anything new. I’m just trying to find maybe a different line of attack or a slightly different explanation or a story that kind of brings the concept to life. I’m just trying to take these things that have been true for a very long time and useful in many different contexts and put them in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to apply. And so my real job is the distilling of the idea or the principle into something actionable rather than coming up with something brand new.

John Maxwell:

And you did it. Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about the ice cube for a moment, okay? Because it’s such a beautiful illustration of our work is stored up before it shows up. And I think a big miss for a lot of us, James, is that in the stored up stage of our life, we get discouraged and we just, you know, I’ve been working on this. Nothing is happening, which we know things are happening, but we don’t see it. And of course, then use the same illustration, basically, as the hammering the rock and on the thousandth hit, all of a sudden it breaks or cracks in the process. So I’d like you to teach this because I just feel it is so encouraging to people that are trying to get some good habits, but sometimes the stored up stage just kind of is a little discouraging for them because they’re looking for something tangible to see.

James Clear:

Well, one of the great challenges with building better habits is that you show up and you do the right thing, and then you feel like you don’t have anything to show for it. Like, take my parents, for example. They like to swim. And one of the challenging things about swimming is their body looks exactly the same when they get out of the water as it did when they jumped in. Right? Like, they have no physical evidence that that workout was worth it. It’s only months or maybe even years later that you get kind of the physical results you were hoping for. Or we can all think of, like, work projects. Maybe you have a team meeting, you’re meeting every week to work on this feature, to ship this product, and it’s six months in, and the thing is still a mess. You haven’t shipped it yet or I’m sure, john, you’ve had this before with book manuscripts. I know that. I have this with Atomic Habits. I’ve been working on this thing for a year and a half, and it’s still like it’s very easy to get discouraged in those moments because you’re like, I thought I was doing the thing I’m supposed to do, but I still don’t have the result I was hoping for. And I like to encourage people to think about this kind of metaphor of an ice cube. Imagine you walk into a room. It’s cold, you can see your breath. Say it’s like 25, 26 degrees. The ice cube is sitting on the table, and you slowly start to heat the room up. 27, 28, 29 ice cube is still sitting there. 30, 31. And then all of a sudden, you get to 32 degrees, and it’s this one degree shift no different than the other shifts that have just come before. But suddenly you hit this phase transition and the ice cube melts. And a lot of the time working on your habits or trying to get better results in life is kind of like that. You show up and you keep making these small improvements and nothing happens. And you just have to wait until you hit the phase transition for that kind of moment to occur. And that work that you were putting in, it wasn’t wasted, it was just being stored. Kind of like complaining about running for a month and not seeing a change in your body, for example, is sort of like complaining about heating an ice cube up from 25 to 30 degrees and not melting yet. It’s like, well, you just haven’t hit the phase transition and there are a lot of things in life that are like that. And I think that doesn’t necessarily mean this is going to feel easy all the time, but knowing that that is a reality and that that work is often stored and you have to wait for it to get to that moment where it’s revealed. Just knowing that is true puts you in a slightly better mindset to handle the difficulty of showing up again and needing to continue banging on the rock before it finally survives.

John Maxwell:

Yeah, I just love the illustration. It makes all the sense of the world. And I think that, again, for many of us, the stored up stage, we have to understand that the real work is done in the stored up stage as much as it is in the showed up stage. It’s just we don’t get visually rewarded for it and so therefore we get a little bit discouraged. Another thing that you said that I would love for you to talk about where you talked about goals and systems. Sure, okay. In the goals and systems, the way you said it was better than the way I said it. But let me just give you a little background. When I started off as a young leader, I set a lot of goals. I took goal setting seminars and did goal setting practices. And then one day I began to understand that I would hit a goal and then I kind of look and say, well, what’s next? And I felt that there was a missing piece and so I kind of shifted from being goal oriented to growth oriented. I still had goals in my life, but I said I want to grow in this area, I want to grow in the leadership lane. But when I saw that you talked about the systems, which are the processes, it’s the process. I love that because I felt when you spoke of that, that this is a big miss with a lot of people, that they are kind of outside directed with the goals. And they don’t have that process. That system. That allows them to really long term sustain and continue to go beyond your because I say if you’re growth oriented, you’ll hit a goal and you’ll say, that’s nice, but you just keep on going because it’s bigger than that. If you’re goal oriented, sometimes you say, what do I do next? Okay, pick up on that one and take us to a new level.

James Clear:

James well, I mean, first of all, this is coming from someone who was very goal oriented for a long time. I think in a lot of ways, everything I write in Atomic Habits is actually a little reminder to myself I make all these same mistakes that everybody else makes. And so I kind of am coming up with these ideas because I need them. But I came across this sheet of paper a couple of years ago and it had a list of goals that I had written out to myself, like maybe ten years prior. And it was kind of interesting looking through them with that much distance from them, because maybe 30% of the list or something were things that I had accomplished and then the rest of the list were things I hadn’t. And my first thought looking at it was, well, clearly writing the goal down wasn’t the thing that made the difference. Obviously, if that would have been the secret, then I should have just hit them all. And what I realized looking at it was the ones that I made progress on were the ones that I had some kind of system around. And we often tell these stories about behavior change and habits and how hard it is to build new habits, how difficult it is to change your behavior and all that. And one of the stories that we will tell is something like, well, maybe if you really wanted it, maybe if you had better goals, maybe if you had more discipline, maybe if you had more grit. And I don’t know that that’s quite right. Certainly those are important qualities in life. But I think many people, certainly most people like listening to this conversation right now, genuinely do want to improve, genuinely do want to perform at a high level. So what I would say is if you’re struggling to improve, the problem isn’t you, the problem is your system. We don’t change, not because we don’t want to change, but because we have the wrong system for change. And I think we can even go a step further and say, listen, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So often in life, we’re told, need to be more ambitious, set a bigger goal, think bigger. Ten x your vision. And thinking big has its place. Like, I consider myself to be someone who thinks big. But the truth is, setting the goal is kind of the easy part. I’m an author, right? Like, I could set a goal to sell 100 million books. It took me 3 seconds. The goal is not the hard part. It’s building a system of behaviors that executes and carries you toward that outcome. And so what I would say is if I was going to put a little finer point on this language, what do I mean by goal and system? Your goal is your desired outcome, the target, the thing you’re shooting for, what is your system? It’s the collection of daily habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition. Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. So whatever system you’ve been running, whatever collection of habits you’ve been following for the last, say, six months or year or two years, it’s carried you almost inevitably to the outcomes that you have right now. And that’s kind of one of the great ironies of life. We also badly want better results. We also badly want to make more money or reduce stress or be more productive or get in shape. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It’s like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Design a better system, create a better collection of daily habits, and you’ll be carried kind of naturally to a different destination. And that’s why sometimes I’ll say like goals are for people who care about winning once, systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly. If you want to get results again and again, then it’s the system that drives you forward. So that’s kind of my little take on systems and goals.

John Maxwell:

I love what you just said there. That was great. I’ll write that down and give you credit somewhere. Let’s stay a little bit kind of in that same territory because one of the things I loved about atomic habits james it makes sense. It just makes sense. When you read it, you not only can understand it and apply it, it makes sense. And when you talked about the difference between becoming outcome based or identity based on goals and where you’re going, when I read that whole section I thought that is right and reasonable and I’ve got a cigarette habit, I’m trying to quit smoking can be versus I don’t smoke. I mean that I felt was just very impacting. So take us there a little bit, would you please?

James Clear:

Well, I think this is pretty natural. I certainly have done it many times before. A lot of the time when you want to change something or get a better result, you’ll sit down and first you start thinking about what do I want to achieve? So what outcome do I want? And then if you go a little bit beyond just dreaming about the outcome, you say, okay, well, I need some kind of plan. I need some sort of process for this. And so you might say, just as an example, I want to lose 40 pounds. And so my plan is I’m going to go to the gym four days a week and I’m going to eat this new diet and so on. And usually it kind of stops there. And the implicit assumption kind of behind all of this is if I can follow this plan and get that result, then I’ll be the kind of person that I want to be or I’ll be happier with who I am or I’ll be more satisfied with my results or something like that. And what I encourage in chapter two of the book is let’s maybe flip that on its head for a minute and just say, hey, why don’t we just start by asking ourselves not what do I want to achieve, but rather who do I wish to become? And then you can build your habits around that identity and let that process kind of carry you forward. And then whatever results happen to bubble up along the way are the results that come along the way. And so I sort of think of it kind of like the layers of an onion. The outermost layer is your outcomes. One layer in is your process and then the cole of the onion is your identity. And what I found is that, and I think many readers would agree with this, the concept of trying to build identity based habits, of starting with who do you wish to become? Is more resilient for them because they can kind of carry it around from situation to situation. So, for example, one reader, she had this concept of this identity of what would a healthy person do? And then whenever she walked around, she would just ask herself that question all day what would a healthy person do? Would they order the salad or order the burger and fries? What would a healthy person do? Would they walk five blocks the next meeting or would they catch a cab or whatever? And they can walk around all day long with that kind of identity in their mind. And that gives them a lens to make their daily decisions and they start to feel more aligned with becoming the kind of person they want to be. Now, my big takeaway for this, and I think the way in which it ties into all of the concepts and atomic habits and the strategies for building small habits and getting better, is that your behavior provides evidence of your identity. And so every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, doing one push up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence may not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for I am a writer and individually those actions are small things. But collectively you start to build up this body of evidence for the type of person you are and what you stand for. And ultimately, I think this is the real reason that habits matter, which is they provide evidence for who you are. We often talk about habits as mattering because of the external results they’ll get you, hey, they’ll help you make more money or reduce stress or whatever. But the real reason they matter is they shape your sense of self. They kind of shape that narrative, that story that you have about who you are and what you do. And habits are not the only things in life that influence that picture or that story. But by virtue of being repeated day in and day out, habits provide the bulk of the evidence. They play a really significant role in shaping the way you see yourself. And so once you start to believe that you’re that kind of person, you have every reason in the world to stick with the behavior, especially once you take pride in it. I always joke, like if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you never skip arm day at the gym. And once you start to take pride in a certain habit, it becomes easier to stick to it. Like the person who views themselves as I am, a runner, they don’t have to motivate themselves to go for a run in the same way that somebody who’s just getting started might. It’s kind of like, no, this is just part of what I normally do. It’s part of who I am. And so ultimately, I think that’s where we’re trying to get to now. It’s hard to flip a switch on day one and just change your identity overnight. It usually doesn’t happen that way. It’s a gradual thing. It requires the casting of many votes to continue that metaphor and building up a body of evidence. But I do think it’s possible. And a lot of the other tools and strategies in the book maybe can give you the short term motivation that you need to get to that long term place of kind of reshaping your story or shaping your identity.

Mark Cole:

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John Maxwell:

James, because we really have a desire for all of our people that are part of our podcast to get all the practice. Your book has so much in it in 35 minutes, we just can’t even do it justice. But we have to talk just for a moment about the backbone that you talk about of habits, because I want them to understand kind of what’s foundational. So could you do just a little bit on that for me, please?

James Clear:

Sure. So I like to break a habit into four different stages. And I think if you understand those four stages, you not only understand what a habit is and how it works, but you kind of have four different places where you can intervene. So I think this is the part that’s really practical and actionable. So if you break a habit into four steps, I break them down as cue, craving, response, and reward. And I go into the science of all that in the book, and there’s a much longer explanation of it. But the practical takeaway is that if you want to build a habit, there are really four things you can do. You can make it obvious. So you want the cues that prompt your habit to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. You can make it attractive. You make the habit more attractive or appealing, motivating or enticing. You can make it easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionless simple a habit is, the more likely it is to be performed. And then the fourth and final thing you can do is you can make it satisfying. More satisfying or enjoyable habit is. The more rewarding or pleasurable it is, the more likely you are to return to it in the future. So if you’re sitting there and you’re thinking, man, I have this habit I keep procrastinating on, just can’t quite seem to get started on it. Or maybe like in a team context or a business context, maybe you’re thinking, we have this behavior, keep asking our team to do it. They only do it every now and then. Wish we could get people to be more consistent on this. You can just go through those four steps and ask yourself, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And the answers to those four questions will reveal different steps you can take to increase the odds that the behavior is going to occur. So obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. Those are kind of what I call the four laws of behavior change, and there are many ways to do each of those things. But that’s kind of the 10,000 foot view.

John Maxwell:

Yeah. And I love that latter part of the book where you have those four broken down in chapters, like, even on the easy like the two minute rule.

James Clear:

Sure.

John Maxwell:

Again, that’s encouraging to a person. If I think I’m in this for 30 minutes at the beginning, it’s kind of like a little foreboding, but tell them about the two minute rule. I just feel that makes people want to lean into change better.

James Clear:

Yeah. Behavior change is a very personal thing, and obviously different things work for different habits. But if I had to recommend just one thing to start with, I probably would recommend the two minute rule. And it’s very simple. It just says, take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page, or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes when I share this with people, they resist it a little bit. They’re like, okay, buddy, I know the real goal isn’t just to take the yoga mat out and know, actually I’m trying to do the workout. So this is some kind of mental trick, and I know it’s a trick, then why would I fall for it, basically? And I get where they’re coming from. But I have this reader, his name is Mitch. I think I mentioned him in Atomic Habits, actually, and he lost over 100 pounds, kept it off for more than a decade. And he had this strange little rule for himself where he wasn’t allowed to go to the gym for longer than five minutes. So for the first, like, six weeks that he worked out, he would get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds silly, it sounds ridiculous. You’re like, clearly this is not going to work for this guy. But if you take a step back, what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. I think that’s a pretty deep truth about habits and something that people often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn into something more. But we’re so busy optimizing, we’re so worried or focused on finding the best workout program, the perfect sales strategy, the ideal business plan. We’re so focused on optimizing that we often don’t give ourselves permission to show up in a small way. But if you can’t master the art of going to the gym for five minutes four days a week, who cares how good the 45 minutes workout plan is? It’s just a theory at that point. And I’m reminded of that quote from Ed Lattimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. There are a lot of things in life that are like that. The hardest step is the first one. The heaviest move is first action. And so, I don’t know. It’s not that planning and research are not useful. It’s just that at some point, planning becomes its own form of procrastination, and when you reach that point, it’s outlived its usefulness. If your research and preparation is complementing the actions that you’re already taking, great. It’s probably useful. If it is substituting for actions you should be taking, then it’s probably just a crutch and you’re using it to avoid the difficult work of taking action. So the two minute rule encourages you to get moving, pushes back against that perfectionist tendency, and encourages you to kind of scale it down and master the art of showing up. And once you’ve done that, well, now you’re in the arena. Now you got a little foothold, and there’s all kinds of things you can optimize and improve from there.

John Maxwell:

Well, it’s like the musician. The hardest part of practice is opening up the violin case. But see, James, what makes this work in your book is it’s so simple. I mean, anybody can do the two minute rule or I loved One More thing, and then Mark, I’m sorry, I’ve hugged this whole podcast. Usually Mark does it all and I’m so sorry. Well, I’m not really sorry, but anyway, it goes back. One More thing, James, that I loved is it’s not how many people talk about timeframes for habits and you talk about no, it’s just how many times you do the habit. It’s quickly repeating the habit versus I have a six month plan. The six months don’t really count unless you’re just really on it. I thought that was a very eye opening, too, that you’ve got to get into it, and the more that you do it, the more that it’s going to become part of your life.

James Clear:

Yeah, the basic idea is just you get good at what you practice, you get good at what you train at. And if you’re expecting yourself to be able to build a habit, the time frame kind of doesn’t really matter. I mean, obviously at some point time comes into play. But how long did it take you to build the habit of checking your smartphone? You probably don’t even remember. It probably took you, I don’t know, two, three, four days. Like at some point you had already looked at it 100 times and it was automatic. You didn’t even really have to think about it. And having a six month plan or a two year plan like you said, or whatever it is, it’s kind of irrelevant. I try to remind myself of this sometimes where I’ll say something like, as long as you’re working hard, the time doesn’t really matter. If you’re not working hard, then you’re just waiting. But as long as you’re showing up and working hard, you shouldn’t worry too much about it to avoid a goal or to avoid an objective, because it’s going to take a long time. Say it’s going to take five years. Well, the next five years are going to pass either way. And either you’ll be five years older and wish you had started sooner, or you can start now and just start getting the reps in and let the time keep working for you. Time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes your ally. And every day that goes by, you kind of put yourself in a better position. And if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And every day that goes by, you dig the hole a little bit deeper. And this is another big part of the book and one of the main mindsets or lenses that I use to look at the world, which is emphasizing trajectory rather than position. There’s so much discussion about position in life. What’s the number on the scale? How much money is in the bank account? What’s the current stock price? What are the quarterly earnings? And it’s not that measurement is not useful, like it has a purpose. But what I’m trying to encourage is say, listen, just for a minute, let’s stop worrying so much about our current position and focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. Are we getting 1% better or 1% worse? Is the arrow pointed up and to the right? Or have we flatlined? Because if you’re on a good trajectory, all you need is time. And so a lot of this feeds into that idea as.

John Maxwell:

Stuff.

Mark Cole:

Yeah. Podcast listeners, there’s so much more to talk about, but podcast listeners, we’re talking to James Clear, John Maxwell James Clear we’re kind of listening in.

John Maxwell:

I hold up the book again for.

Mark Cole:

Those of you watching by YouTube. Those of you that are listening in, the book is Atomic Habits. We will put it in the show notes. It has been at the top of bestselling list for weeks and weeks and weeks. If I asked you, James, you’d probably know exactly how many weeks, but it is insane how long and how effective this book is. I do want to close with one more opportunity. But James, you talk in there that you attribute a lot of people’s failures or shortcomings to a lack of self awareness. John, you talk a lot about a self awareness and we’re listening to this podcast between two greats. Two greats. John 40 million books, thousands and thousands of people. James, you’re writing a book that has stayed at the top longer than most every other book. Let’s talk a little bit about those of us that feel like that this idea of atomic habits works for you guys, but not for the rest of us. And you attribute a lot of that, James, to self awareness. Can you talk just a moment as we close out today about self awareness and importance?

James Clear:

Well, I mean, once again, a lot of the things in the book are reminders to myself. I’m sure I’ve made a lot of these zone mistakes and errors, but the process of behavior change almost always starts with self awareness. There’s one of these myths about behavior change, which is like, it’s hard to change your behavior if it’s difficult to change your behavior. The truth is, your brain is changing your behavior all the time. It’s one of the primary functions of the brain. You change based on every room you walk in, what the weather is, the people you’re around. You’re shifting your behavior constantly. The key, though, is that a lot of the time it’s reactive. It’s a response to what’s around you. If you want your behavior change to be proactive, if you want to be designing it and in control of it, it’s very hard to do that without self awareness. You almost always need to notice the behavior or realize what’s going on in the environment for you to have a chance to shape it. And so a lot of the questions that I encourage people to ask are just about raising that level of self awareness so that we can be in a position to design things better. For example, physical environment, the things that are on your desk in your office, the items on your kitchen counter at home, the way your living room is laid out. A lot of these spaces influence the choices that we make and the habits that we build each day, but we kind of largely become blind to them. Once you walk into your office in the same office for a year straight, you kind of don’t even really notice what’s sitting on your desk or what’s over in the corner or whatever. And so one interesting question I think you can ask is walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day and then look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are easy here? What habits are obvious here? And you’ll start to notice little things that you could adjust to improve the odds that you can perform, the habits you want to build and reduce the odds that you’ll slide into maybe undesired behaviors. And there are many other ways to do all this, but that’s one example of trying to raise your self awareness.

John Maxwell:

James that’s so good. I always say that obviously you can’t grow yourself if you don’t know yourself. I don’t know how a person can improve without being self aware. That’s why we also need some really good friends that care for us. Because a lot of my self awareness didn’t come from me. It came from people who walked in my life because I had a lot of blindsided areas of my life. And they said, John, a lot of my self awareness was because somebody cared enough for me to let me know that I needed to maybe make some changes in my own life. And I think your book really allows that to happen. I think you write in such a way that it helps a person understand the value of habits and how they can do it. Your book is an encouraging book. I think habits based on just pure discipline alone get very discouraging to people. I think you’ve done it really well. I wrote a book, Mark, if you’ll remember, about a year and a half ago on the Self Aware Leader, which was again all about the fact once you can know yourself, then now we can start growing.

James Clear:

John, if I could just add one more thing to that. I found that for myself too. You don’t just become self aware and then you’re done. It’s a continuous process. And there are these questions that I like to return to that have really helped me. Like one question I like a lot is what am I optimizing for? And different people optimize for different things. Sometimes you optimize for money or for free time or creative freedom or time with family, like all kinds of things. But it’s a very personal answer. And what I found is it changes over time. What I optimized for ten years ago is very different than what I’m optimizing for now. And you need to keep revisiting questions like that so that you can remain self aware and see how have I shifted? What’s important to me now, what isn’t? Another question that I like is can my current habits carry me to my desired future? A lot of the time you’ll find that you’re still performing a habit out of inertia or out of ease because you’ve done it for a long time, but it served the old you, not the current you. And if what you’re optimizing for shifts, your habits often need to shift too. And so questions like that, I find it helpful to have a process of reflection review, whether it’s weekly or yearly, whatever cadence makes sense for you. But you need to come up against those questions again and again so that you can remain self aware and notice when things change and when your habits need to change as well.

John Maxwell:

Yeah, I often say reflection turns experience into insight. And I love that fact that once we become aware, if we’re growing, we’re constantly going to another level. What got us there today won’t take us to the next level. Many times. So that awareness has to be associated with our growth and our development. So good.

James Clear:

So I have to be the bearer.

Mark Cole:

Of bad news and bring the podcast to a close. But as you can see, we should.

John Maxwell:

Have left him out. James, next time, it’ll just be John and James.

James Clear:

John and James. Unfiltered unfiltered.

Mark Cole:

That’s exactly right. Without the guy here to close it down. Hey, podcast listeners, viewers, this is meant to always add value to you, and I can certainly say that James, you brought it. John, you always bring your friends and great content. Hey, the great news is I left you bad news. We have to stop. But the great news is that John and James will be sharing a stage on August 14. That is in Orlando. Now, that’s just right around the corner. It may be too quick for some of you to be able to get to Orlando, but we have a virtual option for you that is normally $179. You’ll get a full day. John, James, several other thought leaders, and it’s going to be a great day, as you can tell with this podcast. We’re going to give that to you because of the link in the show notes that you can use. We’re going to give you a promo code, and you can get that for $99. You can hear more from James, more from John. That’s on August the 14th. As always, Chris, podcast is about making you a leader worth following and your habits, your daily disciplines. John talks about your challenge to yourself to become better, and that’s what this podcast is for. That’s what today is about. Tune in again the next week. Become a better leader because everyone deserves to be led well.