A Fail-Safe Tip to Creating a Habit with Ryan Leveque | Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Here's your question of the day: How do you use micro-commitments to change your life? If you're listening or watching this episode right now, it's probably because you want to create a change in your life. You either want to stop doing something or you want to start doing something. You want to create a new result, and I'm excited about this conversation. We're here with Ryan Levesque.

Jim, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for being here. I love this conversation because As the author of Ask and now your new book Choose, this is right in your wheelhouse. And so I love geeking out over the topic of behavioral change. Why do we do what we do and, you know, why do we buy what we buy? Or why, if you're a seller, why do you sell? You know, how do we get people to buy or to stay and serve other individuals? Or how do you make changes with your kids? Where do we start with this?

You know, I think it's first important to start with with how the brain responds to change. Now the brain, whenever it's faced with any sort of change in life, perceives that change as a threat. Now what's interesting is the change can be negative, it can be also positive, and the brain's job is to keep us safe and it wants to preserve the state that we're in. And so that's why whenever we're presented with an opportunity to make some sort of change in our life, we oftentimes— it elicits the fight-or-flight response in the limbic system, in the amygdala in our brain. Our brain says, wait, time out a second, that's dangerous, we're not gonna let you do anything. So we either freeze or we flee. Sometimes we fight for us to do something.

Sure.

We kind of feel combative. But this shows up in all sorts of areas of our life. It shows up in ourselves, it shows up if you sell to anybody online, it shows up with your consumers. If you buy anything, it shows up in your own behavior when you're buying things. If you're a parent, it shows up with your children. And what I think would be really interesting to talk about is how you actually hack that fight-or-flight response to make any sort of change you want to make in your life, to get people around you to do what you want them to do, and to improve your life.

And especially influence not only the people around you, whether it's your family, your friends, for positivity, for a positive result or your customers, but also influence yourself.

Yes, totally.

It's like, man, I want to work out today, but I can't get myself— it's like this big giant thing.

So the hack, spoiler alert, is using the power of micro-commitments. Now I first learned about the power of micro-commitments studying the work of Dr. Robert Maurer, who's a researcher out of California. He's published multiple books. My academic background, undergrad, I studied neuroscience. And I became really fascinated with the psychology of fear because I'm one of these people, like a lot of people I know, who earlier in my life, a lot of my decisions were driven by fear. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of, you know, not having a job. I did a lot of things in my life on the basis of fear. So I became fascinated with the psychology. And what's interesting about it is the way in which you can hack your fight or flight response is actually pretty simple. ask yourself a very simple question. The question is, what is a step toward this change I'd like to take that is so small it's impossible to fail?

Okay, you have to say that one more time for people listening.

What is something I can do right now in the direction I want to go that is so small it's literally impossible to fail? I'll give you an example. Let's say, for example, the change you want to make in your life is you want to work out. You wanna go for a run. The idea, if you present your brain with the idea of, let's go for a 10-mile run, immediately your brain, the amygdala is on high alert, right? The fight-or-flight response is warning, warning, danger, danger, right? Your brain's not gonna let you do it. It's gonna come up with all sorts of excuses. You're gonna find yourself doing all sorts of things other than running these 10 miles. So the way you hack that fight-or-flight response is ask yourself that question, what's a step I could take? That's so small it's literally impossible for me to fail. And an example of an impossible-to-fail step would be something like taking one step toward your running shoes. It's laughable, right? But you hear me say it and it's like, of course I can do that, right? Of course I can take that step. Well, that's an example of what we call a micro-commitment. Whenever you're facing resistance in your life from yourself, someone around you, your children, a loved one, your spouse, spouse, your partner, you can ask yourself the same question. Well, if I want to make this change in this person's life or I want to influence this person to move in this direction, how can I shrink the size of the step? How can I ask them to do this micro-commitment? Now what's fascinating is you can extend this same principle to selling online. So if you have any products or services that you sell online, when someone gets to your website, if you're asking them to do something, maybe provide their name and email address in exchange for some free download that you offer. That's actually a threatening step. You're causing the amygdala, the fight-or-flight response, the warning bells to fire off in that person's brain. They're saying, hang on a second, I don't know if I want to do this. But you can hack that response by simply asking them to take a smaller step. Instead of when they get to your website asking them to enter their name and email address, you can begin by asking them a simple, binary multiple choice question. You might say, for example, if you help people improve their tennis game, you might say simply, question number 1, do you predominantly play doubles or singles or both? Or you might say—

Are you left-handed or right-handed?

Yes. If you help people launch and grow their business online, which is one of the things that we do in our company, we might ask a simple question. Question number 1, So we can better serve you, are you launching a new business or growing an existing business? A simple, easy-to-answer, non-threatening binary choice question that creates action-taking momentum.

Hmm.

When you take that one step towards your running shoes, it's hard to take one step. You take one step, you want to take 2. Take 2, you want to take 3. Before you know it, you put your running shoes on, you're standing at the edge of your doorstep, and you're saying, you know what, I actually can do this thing. That's how I trick myself into exercising. I'm gonna hop on the bike, I'm just gonna do a 5-minute ride.

And you could apply this towards whether it's running or it's reading. For a lot of our listeners and our watchers, we do a one book, it's literally hashtag the number one book a week, and people post a picture of the book, they hashtag it, and we give out books to our, some Amazon gift cards to some of our favorites. But what would be the equivalent of a micro-commitment? Some people look at a book like, they look at a book like your new book and like, wow, 200-something pages, that leaves— that's so— that's— that my amygdala is firing off. It's freezing.

It's really simple. I pick up the book, maybe the first, depending on where you're at, right? That impossible-to-fail step, it's— for some people, taking one step toward their running shoes is actually too small. I can put my running shoes on, that's easy. In the context of a book, I might say you open the first page and just read one paragraph. That's it. You can read one paragraph and 10 seconds, 30 seconds, just read one paragraph. And you get to the end of that paragraph and you kind of say, you know what, I'm gonna read this next paragraph. That's it. Writing, it's the same thing. If you feel the daunting task of having to write an email or a social media post or, you know, a white paper or something, just step to your keyboard and just type one keystroke.

Right.

You can all do that. You can all open up your laptop, type one keystroke, and then sometimes I'll go to the keyboard when I'm feeling this way and I say, I can just type Nonsense, and I kind of create this muscle memory connection where I say, I know how to do this thing called writing. I can type some real words in here. One word becomes 2, becomes a paragraph, becomes a page. Before you know it, you're halfway done the thing that you were dreading—

Exactly.

For so long. So the key idea is this: it's to use the psychology of micro-commitments to make change in your life and to influence your market to do the things you want them to do when they land on your website. Ask them to take micro-commitment steps instead of these big threatening steps.

That make them abandon and just freeze and—

They freeze or flee. They either bounce off your website, they look at it and they say, ah, I'm going to do this later. They leave it in an open tab and later never comes.

This is very true.

So, the question to ask yourself if you're listening to this or watching this right now is number one, what's an area of your life right now that you felt this resistance? And what's an example of a step that's so small that you would be impossible to fail?

And I would love everyone to share this. This is your quick challenge, is to take a screenshot of this video or this episode, tag Ryan. What is your, your social handles?

Just @RyanLevesque. Ask for the title of my first book, Ask Ryan Ryan Levesque, and on Facebook and Insta.

And myself, @JimKwik. And what I want you to do is share exactly that. What— what you have— everyone knows the question is to list their, their micro-commitment. And so if someone's a parent, you could tell your child to, to clean their room, but that might be too big of a daunting—

Pick one toy. Pick one toy and just pick the toy up. That's it. All right, you've picked the toy up. Just throw it in the Can you do 2 toys?

Yeah.

Before you know it, the whole room's cleaned up. So I use this trick on my kids as well.

So this works whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a parent, whether you're looking to hack your own self. So micro-commitments, the key to changing your life. Thanks for being on, Ryan.

Thanks, Jim.

Appreciate it.