How to Quickly Create New Habits in Your Life
A friend of mine mentioned that she was having trouble getting in the habit of going to the gym every morning, so I promised an explanation of how I have created so many beneficial habits in my life in the past year. I thought that the email that I sent her might actually be useful for others who are having the same type of issue. Not that anybody out there has trouble creating habits that improve their life at all.
My email is below…
My reading of the latest research says that forming a habit comes down to three things (with an optional fourth):
- Turning that habit in to a precise behavior (instead of “I want to get in shape”, “I want to go to the gym 3x per week”).
- Deciding on an “anchor” for that behavior within your life. The anchor point determines the behavior that immediately precedes the new behavior: “After I brush my teeth upon waking on M/W/F I will put on my gym clothes and walk to the front door to leave”)
- Repeatedly be triggered to perform that behavior at the right anchor point
- (Optional) To really make it stick, it helps to create (social) accountability around that behavior
There are a bunch of tools to do this. If the habit is small, start with BJ Fogg’s latest research project, called “Tiny Habits” (http://tinyhabits.com/). Joining BJ’s project is the easiest and best way for you to get a really solid understanding of how to form interesting habits in your own life and perform the first two steps.
- Decide what the target behavior is. (I like the one I chose above, but it could be anything: “”)
- Decide on the anchor point in your life. An example could be: “When I get in my car to leave the office, I will drive to the gym and walk in the front door”. (Notice that your goal doesn’t have to be related to actually working out: if you walk in the front door, you’re likely to, but you may just walk right out again. This is what BJ Fogg calls “baby steps” – we don’t have to do the entire behavior, just the part of it that is cognitively easy enough to create the habit)
- Set a trigger to remind you at that time where you’re going. Could be one of the services above (that work by email), a calendar reminder, or a sticky note on your steering wheel. As long as you’re reminded close to the time that you actually leave the office.
- If you want to make it even more likely, find something to hold you accountable: it could be a workout buddy or someone else who you want to impress, it could be your entire Facebook friend list, or it could be one of the services above.
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Life Management | 
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Posted by mmurray
Matching and Mirroring (or: Cybernetic Issues in NLP)
One of the fundamental tenets of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is the idea of “matching and mirroring” – the idea that we create rapport between individuals by mirroring aspects of their physiology in ourselves and, because they see someone who looks like them, they’re more likely to enter in to a rapportive state with us.
This effect does have some amount of basis and has been studied quite significantly – psychologists tend to call it the “chameleon effect”, based on the landmark 1999 study by Chartrand and Bargh. Their definition:
"The chameleon effect refers to nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one's interaction partners, such that one's behavior passively and unintentionally changes to match that of others in one's current social environment."
The studies have shown that the effect of mirroring is present across most studies that have been performed – in particular, the Chartrand/Bargh study found significant impacts of mimicry on the rapport set of those studied. (Although, as Chartrand & Bargh note, some studies (LaFrance) have noted that the effect doesn’t exist or depends on other aspects of a relationship between those being studied)
The problem comes when we consider the reason for rapport from an evolutionary perspective – we have evolved rapport and mimicry to facilitate social interaction between humans, not as a one-way process. That is, when I mirror you, I am unconsciously reproducing your state within me – this is facilitated by the “mirror neurons” (the posterior inferior frontal gyrus and adjacent ventral premotor cortex, as well as the rostral inferior parietal lobule as described by Iacoboni) – we are able to mimic another because we perceive their behavior and, in so doing it, represent it within ourselves.
Note that this is the other half of the cybernetic loop that is edited out in the studies (and much traditional teaching of NLP) – in mimicing another successfully, we unconsciously represent their state within ourselves. While the Chartrand/Bargh study talked about the target of the mirroring liking the study confederate more when mirrored, there wasn’t a corresponding questionaire filled out by said confederate to determine whether they had increased liking for the person being mirrored. Obviously, this would have had some methodological concerns. (Note that Chartrand and Bargh noticed the potential issue that this half of the cybernetic loop wasn’t being respected, and attempted to control for other behaviors – however, the question of the subtlety of mirroring behaviors on the behalf of the confederate is still open – I’d love to see a FACS coding of some of the samples of the confederates against those of the participants and note facial / micro-expression similarities.)
The state being mimiced is, in effect, dual-sided – that is, the more precisely we replicate the state of the other person, the more effectively we display the chameleon effect. It is this behavior that Chartrand & Bargh noted in their third experimental condition – that, at an unconscious level, those of us who tend to take other’s perspective (which can correlate to but isn’t the same as the traditional emotional definition of empathy) more often have a better developed set of strategies for adopting mirrored positions with others.
This, in my opinion, leads to a lot of the problems with the traditional NLP model for learning matching and mirroring. As Grinder said in “Whispering in the Wind“, there are two criteria for the evaluation of a model:
- Is it learnable?
- Does it lead to the learner producing results congruent with the original source of the model?
While any six-year old can learn the NLP version of matching and mirroring (i.e. “monkey see, monkey do”), it’s the second condition that is much more problematic. Many who attempt to learn to create rapport through traditional means end up with matching/mirroring processes that, rather than create rapport more often, come off with the subtlety of a bad used car salesman. The reason for this is that we aren’t effectively attempting to teach the student of NLP how to mirror states, but only to broadly mirror large parts of behavior – we’re not respecting that rapport is a cybernetic process with multiple sides to the loop. And anybody teaching it from the perspective of behavior/posture isn’t respecting the other side of the loop (at least consciously).
In fact, in my own modeling of those who are excellent at creating rapport, it’s not their ability to mirror posture or breathing pattern or eye blinks that is most effective – it’s the ability to mirror and represent within themselves the state of those around them and to effectively convey that mirrored state (usually at a completely unconscious level).
Grinder also noted this in Whispering, when he stated that calibration is “the most fundamental of all NLP processes”. The person who is most effective at creating rapport with others is the one who most precisely calibrates the state of the other person and, upon representing that state within themselves, unconsciously adopts whatever behaviors are appropriate, regardless of whether they precisely “mimic” the other person.
The student who attempts to learn to create matching and mirroring without understanding how to effectively calibrate (which, using NLP terminology, is akin to an unconscious shift in to second position) doesn’t become (in the Chartrand/Bargh terminology) a “high perspective taker”, which is one of the fundamental bases of being effective when it comes to matching and mirroring.
That is, the goal in matching and mirroring isn’t to replicate behavior – replication of behavior comes naturally when we effectively can adopt and replicate the state of the other person within the interaction. To attempt to mimic the behavior generally works only in so far as that adopting a matched physiology can assist in replicating state.
2 Comments| Hypnosis, NLP, social engineering | Tagged: chameleon effect, matching, mirroring, NLP | Permalink Posted by mmurray
My Newest Experiment – The Kindle Book
A few months ago, my friend Drawk Kwast released his first ebook on the Kindle store. And he’s been having some great success (mostly because the book is awesome). Shortly after, I got my first Kindle and was fascinated by all of the low-cost and interesting self-published books on there that I wouldn’t have found physical access to in the average book store. It piqued my interest around the Kindle as a publishing platform.
But it wasn’t until I read this story on Slashdot that I really got fascinated. From the story:
‘These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It’s not an automatic sale,’ says Locke. ‘And the reason it’s not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.’
It was fascinating to me that we could be seeing a sea change in the world of books.
While I’ve been a great consumer of books on the Kindle, I hadn’t yet explored the seller’s side of this new world.
So, I took the ebook I wrote a few years ago (called “Forget the Parachute, Let Me Fly the Plane“) and re-formatted it for the Kindle. In the process, I updated the content and added in some new material.
And it’s selling in the Kindle store for $2.99. As of this writing, it’s in the Top 25 in the “Job Hunting” sales list.
My thought: would you trade a cup of coffee for some solid career advice? I hope to find out.
2 Comments| Career Skills, Personal | Tagged: career advice, forget the parachute, kindle | Permalink Posted by mmurray
Maturity and Business
I wrote recently on Maturity and the way I’ve been trying to view my life lately.
The place that I’ve found this thinking most interesting is in conceiving of my businesses (esp. THA). It’s easiest to try to solve most of our business problems in the frame of “what’s best for us right now?”. Especially in technology, which is so driven by quick-return venture capital (where we expect an exit in no longer than 3-5 years), this type of thinking is endemic. We live and die by the quarterly numbers. The most forward-thinking of us try to think 9-12 months out. Sometimes, our roadmaps extend a whopping 18-24 months. But that’s it.
And that’s a sure way to make decisions that are bad. My experience with venture capital driven businesses has been almost universally bad – the decisions that the VCs (or their hand-picked executive teams) made were almost universally oriented toward a quick exit, and, most often, in diametric opposition to what would have been done if the company had been managed with an eye toward building a long-term sustainable and profitable business. I’m not the only one with this experience - Inc published a great article about this a few years ago on Friendster that was eye-opening to me when I first read it.
Lately, I’ve been trying to conceive of our businesses in a more long-term way. I’ve been trying to think about it the way that (I imagine) we conceived of businesses 100 years ago – not as something with a quick exit, but as something that would have to feed our family for the rest of our lives. The questions I’ve been asking myself are oriented toward that sort of thinking:
- What would we be doing if our goal was to be most profitable 10 years from now?
- What is single thing that we can do as a business to make our customers’ lives better in 36 months?
- How can we best reinvest profits today to triple or quadruple them down the road?
The thing is, this wasn’t the type of business thinking that I’ve been taught how to do. Nor do I know anybody else who is. Every time I read the typical business book, they’re like reading diet books: GET RICH NOW WITH NO EFFORT AND NO ENERGY! And I love that kind of business book. But nowhere are they trying to teach you how to create something sustainable that adds real value over the long term.
If anybody out there reading this one has any advice on building a company that’s sustainable and profitable on a 50-year time scale, I’m all ears. Because, other than some of the old articles about how the Japanese created 100 year plans, I can’t really find anything that gives good advice on this one.
No Comments »| Business, Life Management | Tagged: 100 year plan, 50 year plan, Business, long-term plan, maturity, patience, sustainable business | Permalink Posted by mmurray
What is it to be Mature?
I was having a conversation with a friend the other night about maturity and social connection. We tossed around the question of what it is to be “mature”. According to Wikipedia, maturity is “how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner…. Maturity also encompasses being aware of the correct time and place to behave and knowing when to act appropriately, according to the situation”.
I have trouble with that definition, as I don’t believe that maturity is driven by the results of one’s decisions but by the cause. As I get older, I look around and I see striking differences between what drives the actions of those around me. A lot of my friends act in a way that would be considered incredibly mature – they’re stable, responsible, and stoic. They pay their bills on time, they manage to raise their kids not to become sociopaths, and they go to work every day. They have faithful long-term relationships and they save for retirement and for a rainy day.
Yet I see a difference in what’s creating that behavior. Some of those friends are driven to their “mature” behavior by personal insecurities and fears that aren’t much more sophisticated than the six-year-old who is terrified of the monsters under his bed. They save money (for example) not because they want to be profitable and well taken care of in their old age, but because they’re terrified that tomorrow, someone’s going to take it all away from them. They’re faithful to their wives not because they’re building a relationship that will be fulfilling in the long-term, but because they’re afraid of the horrors that will befall them if they cheat.
And I have a problem with the idea that maturity is all about social norms of behavior… because some of the most mature and wise people I know are ones who defy conventional definitions of “being a grown-up” at every turn.
So, I’ve been playing around with a different definition in my life and trying to see how that definition affects the way that I live. Maturity, in this working definition, is a sliding scale – not a state to be achieved. The scale is simple: maturity is directly proportional the timescale that we consider in making the decisions of our day-to-day lives.
If we think about the least mature among us (e.g. the above-mentioned six-year-old), it should be obvious that most of his/her decisions/thoughts are made on a short time-scale. I’m hungry now, so I eat. I’m not happy with you because you won’t give me ice cream, so I hate you forever. (The psychologists call this an inability to delay gratification.)
If we look at those who we consider the most wise and the most mature, we see a different time-scale in action in their behavior. As an example, I looked up some quotes from the Dalai Lama (who I would think most would agree to be a pretty mature guy). What amazed me about that page is the number of quotes about the future – and not just his own personal future, but the future of our species. He thinks about the world not in terms only of “when I grow up”, but “when I’m no longer here”. As an example:
“If you must be selfish, then be wise and not narrow-minded in your selfishness. The key point lies in the sense of universal responsibility. That is the real source of strength, the real source of happiness. If we exploit everything available, such as trees, water and minerals, and if we don´t plan for our next generation, for the future, then we´re at fault, aren´t we? However, if we have a genuine sense of universal responsibility as our central motivation, then our relations with the environment, and with all our neighbours, will be well balanced.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – how would my life be different if, in each moment, I was making decisions with an eye not toward what feels good now, but what would be the best for me in 10 years. Or 20 years. Or what would be best for those around me on the day of my death. Or 100 years after I’m dead. How would each decision I make be different?
And I’ve been finding that it leads to a different way of looking at my life. One that I’m beginning to quite like. (Although, I have to say, it starts to make most US political debates look pretty ridiculous, given that the time scale of their thinking is never more than about 2 years long… which probably maps pretty well to the time scale of the “average” American these days…)
As a reader, do you think about what time scale you make decisions on? How do you make decisions around your finances, your relationships, your health and your career?
No Comments »| Life Management, Personal | Tagged: delay gratification, maturation, maturity, time scale, wisdom | Permalink Posted by mmurray
A Branding MAD Lib
As a new year begins, I always spend a bunch of time pondering my past, my future, and where I’m going. A big part of that is branding and positioning – who am I, and what problem do I want the people in my life to have when they think of only of me.
This year, I have a different situation – in all of my endeavours (MAD Security, The Hacker Aacademy, Information Security Leaders), I have partners. I can’t just think of where I want to go all by myself – I’m reliant on other minds to co-develop and agree to the direction we’re taking.
So, I came up with a rather simple way of thinking about positioning, direction and vision: a simple MAD lib:
(I / {name of entity}) am/is/are the best (name of primary activity) in the (geographic region / location / entity) . (I / {name of entity}) am/is/are also quite good at (name of secondary activity) .
You’ll know that you have a real brand statement when you can have an independent third-party read the statement that you have prepared and agree that it is (or could be) true.
The key to the exercise is to resist the temptation to have more than one primary activities (or to make the activity overly broad) – a brand statement is about your unique differentiator. You may truly be good at multiple things, but you can only really be known as the best at one thing. And the more precise and specific you are about your brand statement, the more likely it is to reflect some amount of truth.
(As a note: the second “is also quite good at” is optional, but left there because lots of people have secondary skills that they are known for as well)
An example… a not-so-good brand-madlib:
Michael Vick is the best quarterback in the NFL . Michael Vick is also quite good at being contrite for his past wrongs. .
It’s not so good because there’s some amount of argument whether Michael Vick is the best quarterback in the NFL. At the very least, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady might have something to say about it. Now, this one, I don’t think anybody could disagree with:
Michael Vick is the best dual-threat running/passing quarterback in the NFL . Michael Vick is also quite good at raising pit-bull puppies. . (Yes, that was a low blow…)
In fact, that one’s so good that if you removed Michael Vick’s name, most people would still know who the statement referred to.
So… what’s the brand MAD lib for your company? How about your own personal MAD lib?
4 Comments| Marketing | Tagged: branding, mad lib, madlib, personal branding | Permalink Posted by mmurray
Suppressing Dissent
I once heard it said (and I can’t find the quote) that a society’s level of freedom isn’t determined by how it treats its normal citizens – it’s determined by how it treats those who dissent and don’t adhere to society’s norms.
Nowhere do I find this more evident than in the Byron case.
Look, let’s be blunt: from everything we know about what Byron was doing, it was kind of stupid. He was acting as an agitator to the G20 security establishment. He wasn’t being particularly subtle. He was trying to stir up a response, and he did.
I think it’s clear that he’s guilty of mischief. He’s certainly an agent provocateur (def: “a person or group that seeks to discredit or harm another by provoking them to commit a wrong or rash action.”)
Joshua Errett over at NOW Toronto described it best:
“What Sonne was actually trying to do is expose security inadequacies of the G20, as is the role of the hacker. His intent was never to harm, and any crimes he allegedly committed were entirely victimless.
That the justice system can’t see the deep shades of difference between Sonne detailing security lapses and petty vandalism is an outright shame. And, in some ways, discrimination. If Sonne had been a cowardly Blac Blocker, bail would have already been set. There certainly seems a different set of rules for hacking.”
With the ruling yesterday that Byron will remain in jail until his trial and be unable to have any contact with his wife during that time (unless in the presence of lawyers), there’s little question that he got the “rash action”.
And it’s clear that Canadian society has made its statement on how it intends to deal with dissent – zero tolerance.
In contrast to Byron’s crimes, those who steal $30-$50 million, dangerous offenders, those who kill while drinking and driving and crack dealers all go free on bail.
This is one of the more disturbing issues with the case – not that Byron wasn’t guilty of being annoying, but that the treatment he is receiving at the hands of the justice system in Canada is far more harsh than those who commit far more significant crimes that leave people hurt, dead or destitute.
No Comments »| Personal, Security | Tagged: byron sonne, canada, dissent, free byron, overreaction, politics, stupidity, supression | Permalink Posted by mmurray
Byron (and influence through the media)
If you’re following the Toronto news today, one of the main stories out there is about a former team member of mine, Byron Sonne. The news coverage (CNN, Yahoo) paints Byron to be one step this side of Timothy McVeigh… explosives, threatening police, etc.
And that doesn’t even mention that the picture that they’re using makes him look that way. (As an aside: in my 11th grade journalism class, we spent a lot of time talking about how pictures frame the news story that you’re reading. Before you ever even start the Globe and Mail coverage of this story, you’re greeted with a blurry, grainy picture of Byron looking like he’s about to blow up a building. Regardless of whether the facts support the charge, our minds are primed with all of the times that we’ve seen a terrifying looking psychopath looking very similarly to this picture… and we read the story with that bent.)
Unfortunately, the reality seems a little less glamorous. If you read Byron’s Twitter account, you’ll find that Byron was being little more than the opinionated activist that he is. “An agent provocateur”, as someone told The Star. He talked about investigating the fences and posted video of the fences. He talked about how the cameras were being set up in locations that were likely to be used by activists. And he was pointing out that the amount of money spent on “security” for this conference was a little out of range.
One of the things that Byron has been most pilloried for in the news was the talk he gave a few months back on radio surveillance (a decent account can be found here).
Amazingly, Byron even posted the slides to that supposedly “provocative” talk on his Twitter feed. (I’ve put the same slides here for the BitTorrent challenged). Read them… there’s nothing in there that suggests anything but a security professional talking about insecure radio transmission.
Let’s give a different picture of the guy that used to work for me. Byron’s a very smart and well-rounded engineer. While he wasn’t the top producer on the team, he was someone who I valued a great deal from a management perspective. He was vocal and would push others to come to the table with their best (even when he wasn’t up to their level). He was the member of the team most willing to call out others in a meeting. It wasn’t just internal… he was even willing to call out a vendor in a blog post. (Note that since I wrote this, nCircle took the orginal post down)
Above all, Byron Sonne was always an ethical person and someone who I trusted a great deal. And I agree with the assessment that Jesse Hirsh made in an interview with The Toronto Star:
“I suspect that this may just be a stunt and perhaps a stunt that got out of hand,” Hirsh said.
Regardless, it’s a shock to me that this would lead to an arrest and incarceration. None of the posts made threats or suggested potential for harm. His talk is innocuous. And this all looks like a very large over-reaction from a police service that felt somewhat embarrassed that someone was publicly calling them out on their failure to encrypt their communications and poor placement of security cameras.
No Comments »| Personal, Security | Tagged: arrest, byron sonne, inappropriate pictures, influence | Permalink Posted by mmurray
Influence and Failing Kindergarten
Had a great chat with my friend Drawk Kwast recently that he recorded for his list of users (which was an honor given the people he usually interviews). As expected, we rambled all over the map and talked about a million different topics around influence, living an adventurous and successful life, and always being willing to have fun and do the things that most people won’t do.
The thought that stuck out to both of us during the chat was the idea that we’d fail kindergarten if we were subjected to another year – that the things that has made each of us successful to this point would have caused utter failure in the current school system. We both have a nearly chronic inability to follow the rules, stay in single-file lines, refrain from asking “why?” about a million times too often and ensure that we always make the sky blue when we color.
As Drawk said: “we’d in the corner eating the paste.”
I realized later that I should have corrected him… so I will now… “we’d be in the corner figuring out how to take the paste, turn it in to some crazy 5-star dish involving liquid nitrogen and debating about how to market a nationwide line of “frozen paste” shops.“.
It’s a trait that a lot of my friends seem to share.
The MP3 is worth a listen – Drawk had some great stories on there and I talked about random stuff that some people might find interesting.
(Aside: if you haven’t picked up Drawk’s “Domination Basics” ebook, you need to – it’s free and one of the better reads of the last year. The last person who I convinced to read it immediately sent me the message that “OMG! Drawk Kwast is the UberMan!!!!”. All I can say is that you should read it yourself and find out what all the exclamation points are all about.)
1 Comment| Security | Permalink Posted by mmurray
Return-to-Barry-White Human Exploitation
Spent a weekend in early October hanging out with Tom and Kim at their rapport and anchoring bootcamp. And I was talking in email with my friend Cris Neckar afterward where we were talking about the large number of pre-existing anchors that exist within someone’s already vast consciousness.
Cris’s comment was that using pre-existing material for anchors is “sort of like exploiting around DEP” – basically, the idea of a "Return-to-libc” exploit. You have pre-existing functions that perform the task that you’re hoping to do.
This reminded me of something that Tom did to me during the weekend. Tom walked up to me this weekend and said:
"So, you’re a hypnotist right? You’ve been in trance before, you know what that feels like, don’t you?" And, as soon as I think about it (which I have to do to understand his question), he achors it.
Tom then proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend enjoying firing off the trance anchor at opportune times.
So, in our email conversation, Cris and I were talking about some good elicitations to anchor that many people would already have:
“Hey… remember that scene from Say Anything where John Cusack was standing outside with the boom-box on his head? How romantic was that? What was the most romantic movie scene you remember… one that just made your heart melt?"
Or: "As you wish" (for anyone who has seen the Princess Bride).
Or: "What’s the song that gets you most in the mood?”
In other words, the "Return-to-Barry-White" exploit.
Note: I’m well aware that this isn’t at all new. Neither’s ret2libc, really. But it’s a great example that hopefully drives some new ideas and new thinking.
No Comments »| Security | Permalink Posted by mmurray