The Power of Habit: Setting Up "Triggers" to Sustain Habits
Brendan (a high-performance coach) explains that sustaining habits requires deliberately created "trigger moments" that activate desired behaviors throughout the day. He argues that intention alone fails and gives concrete, repeatable strategies: scheduled phone alarms with labels (e.g., reminders to breathe), action-linked timers (e.g., 50-minute work timer to prompt movement and hydration), contextual door-frame triggers (three-word cues when entering rooms), and environmental/action pairings (stop for produce after dropping kids off, put on shoes immediately after waking). He notes he's taught these techniques to executives and many participants report dramatic improvements. The video closes with CTAs to subscribe, get his book, and sign up for his newsletter.
Chapters
Hey, guys, it's Brendan. In this video, I'm going to talk about the power of habits and the number one thing you must do if you're ever going to maintain your habits. Now, I know you all have big goals, big dreams, big aspirations, just like I do. You've got ambitions to become an amazing person, to build your career, to create, contribute, to give, to be an awesome human being. But all of that is impossible without great habits set up. If you don't have routine and structure set up in a way that will keep you on track, then you'll fall off. And having new goals without new habits is kind of like, you know, having a new car without wheels. You know, the habits are the wheels. They're the things that make you able to achieve the goals. So you got to have good habits. But the challenge for most people isn't that knowledge. I mean, you know, you need to have good habits. It's you can't keep the habit going. Right? Have you ever started at the new year? You're gonna get healthier, and you start that habit of working out more on a more regular basis, and then it goes away. Or you say, you know, I'm more kind and more patient and more awesome to my partner, my lover, and you start being nice for two or three days, and then on the fourth day you're a jerk, you know, and you're like, what happened? I said I was gonna be nicer. It's that you didn't set up the most important thing you needed to maintain a habit. And I spent my entire career helping high performers basically set up better habits in their lives. Better routines, better strategies that they could run on a continual basis to keep them energized, to keep them in a good space, to keep them engaged, to keep them enthusiastic. Right? If we can't have the right habits in our daily life, we'll never reach high performance. And that's my job as a high performance coach, is get you to your top level. So what's the biggest secret I've Learned in almost 20 years in this field? It's so simple, but most people don't have it. It's called trigger moments. You have to set up trigger moments to activate your habits. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say you want to become a better person. You know, you want to become more kind, more patient, more loving with people. Now, you can just set that intention or write that down in your vision or your journal or set up on a vision board that you look at once in a while. But in day to day life, it's not enough. You need things to trigger you to remind you to be that particular kind of person. Right. It's almost like if you could have a little angel speaking in your ear all day long to tell you what to do and how to be, you'd obviously become better. Well, that makes sense. Well, let's use that idea. Let's use that idea by setting up alarms on our phones that trigger us to do the very things we need to do. This can be so basic you're going to laugh. And then also tell you how I've literally taught this to Fortune 50 CEOs and they said it was the one thing that changed their life the most dramatically. So let's start with this. Let's have a goal in mind. Let's say you want to become more present and calm throughout the day. Again, you could write that down on a journal. I'm gonna be more present and calm. You could meditate in the morning, say, today I'll be more present and calm. And you can start out with good intentions. But those fall apart without a trigger moment. Set up throughout the day to remind you that, so what if you did this? What if you just set up on your phone three alarms during the day with a label that said, close your eyes, take 10 deep breaths in, remind yourself to be calm. So let's say you're going through your day. It's crazy, right? It's 10am and all of a sudden, bing, your phone goes off. You look down and it says, close your eyes, take 10 deep breaths. And then again it happens at 2o'. Clock, and again it happens at 6pm and again it happens at 8pm what's going to happen? You always look at your phone, don't you? It's going to go throughout the day, you're going to forget. And the funniest thing is, I've had so many people do this worldwide. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people I've taught to do this. Hundreds of thousands. And they tell me all the time that changed everything. And you'll think once you set it up that the next day you'll forget about it. No, that alarm will go off. You forgot. You set the dang alarm there. It goes off in your face and you're like, alright, I'm trying to be calmer, more present, close my eyes, take 10 deep breaths, reground myself. Here we go. You can't do it once a day. You have to have moments throughout the day that trigger you to Enact the new behavior. I know this makes sense to you, but it's a challenge for a lot of people because they never set those things up. So what if you did it with an alarm? So, for example, for me, on the opposite spectrum, I don't want to just be calmer and more present. I want more energy throughout the day. So here's what I do. One of my big trigger moments is every time my butt hits a chair, I don't care if I'm on a plane or I was like, where we're shooting here. I wrote a lot of my books here, I wrote the motivation manifesto here, I wrote the charge here. And if I'm going to write, my butt hits the chair, I grab my phone, I open the timer and I set 50 minutes. Now at 50 minutes, the timer goes bzzz. It starts buzzing. And I look at that and I go, oh, that's my trigger to get energy. So I stand up, I go get some water, I take a glass of water, drink it down, I do some stretches and I do some exercise, just really briefly or I'll go for a walk, whatever it is. But I'll do something that usually takes just two to five minutes. Then I'll sit back down, I'll set that 50 minute alarm and I'll work. And what that does is every 50 minutes, it triggers me to change how I'm physically moving. It changes my attention so that throughout the day I'm continually refreshed. So I never have that 2, 3, 4 o' clock time where I'm like, ah, you know why? Because I've triggered my day so that my energy is maintained throughout the day. Makes sense, right? This could be as simple as let's say you want to be healthier in your life. Okay, let's set up some trigger moments for you. In this way. Let's say every time you drop off the kids on the way back to the house, you stop at the grocery store and get some fresh produce. That's just a trigger. It's like, okay, did one thing drop kids off? Now tied to that, triggered from that action, drop kids off is go to health food store. Or let's say you want to get healthier in the morning. One of the easiest ways to help people maintain a better exercise program is this. Set a trigger. You wake up in the morning, your first action is to drink water, put your exercise shoes on, might get dressed if you were naked. Just saying. So you get dressed, put your shoes on, you go downstairs, or you go to the gym. And that's the trigger. You woke up, you do these actions. Nothing interrupts those actions. That's the action. And you have to have those set up. One of my other favorite trigger moments to set up is door frame triggers. What do you mean by that? When you walk into a new room to have a psychological trigger go off in your mind that you've associated with that door frame. So let me give you an example. If I walk into my house at night, if I've been working all day, and I'm gonna walk in, I'm gonna see my lady, I have it. So when I ever walk through the doors of my house, three words repeat off immediately in my mind. Because I've done it so many times consciously. I went to the door, I said the three words, said the three words, said the 3 words. And I did this so many times that now when I walk through a door, my mind automatically triggers those three words. And I remember to be those three words. So what words would you love to have describe you as a person, that you would be happy if that was how people described you? What would those words be? Have those and now set them up in your life. I teach executives to do this as well. I have them have a door frame trigger when they walk into their office in the morning. As soon as they walk through that door frame, they have, boom, three words go through their mind about how they want to be perceived as a leader. I have them set up another door frame. Every time they walk into a meeting, into the conference room, when they walk through the doors of the conference room, they have another three words that trigger off for them. And it just reminds them how to be so these aren't big, crazy things. A lot of people think they have to completely change their life. What would change your life completely is setting up more trigger moments and associations that when you see something, you do this. That when this action is taken, then that happens. That when you have the opportunity to set up alarms on your phone, you set them up so that you're interrupted in your everyday life to remind yourself to stick to the habits, to stick to the. The intention. You do that enough on a continual basis, you'll find yourself in so many ways, completely rejuvenated. And I promise you'll stick to your habits even more. And once you do that, you know that everything changes. I hope that serves as you think about your next set of habits, I challenge you to sit and think, what are the trigger moments I could set up during the day to keep me on track, share some of them here. Beneath this video. I would love to hear about your own trigger moments. I can't wait to hear some of your stories and your successes. I promise you, if you set up these trigger moments in your life, you'll start to feel much more energized, engaged, on track, and you'll experience what we call the charged life. Hey guys, it's Brendan. Did you like this episode? If you did, you can do three things right now to continue your journey. First, you can subscribe right here to my channel, which I hope you will, so I can keep sending you videos on a weekly basis to change your life. Second, you can get my brand new book for free by clicking the link right here. And third, you can also go to my website, sign up for my newsletter so I can send you free offers, free products, free programs, updates on my events, new podcasts, and everything else that we don't do on this channel here. If you like to do that, just go ahead and click any of these buttons you see right here. Look forward to seeing you on the next video. Until then, go out there every single day of your life. Live fully, love openly, and make your difference today.
