TJ Walker (The Habit Influencer) argues that to change behavior we should study what actually influences people — including the vast advertising industry — not only traditional personal-development methods. He cites industry spending (self-help books, broader personal-development, mental health, and advertising) to show advertising is a dominant, intentional influence strategy. Walker proposes using simple audio recordings (a "Selfie Speak" program) as a personal form of advertising to influence your own habits.
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Influence. Would you like to have more influence in your life? Of course you would. We all want to influence clients, customers, friends, family members to do what we want, right? But what is it that influences ourself? That's what I want to spend a little time on. Hi, I'm T.J. walker. And in today's video and today's show, I want to dive a little deeper into the forces that influence us. Things we spend money on, things we try around the globe and give you a slightly different perspective. Now, you've heard of self help books, personal development books, 7 Habits of Highly effective people, Stephen Covey, Things like that. Clearly a lot of people love books. I love to read books. Books can be an important way of learning, educating yourself and really creating change. And people do spend money on it. I want to share with you some statistics I have on this. This is from, from one reference cited, brandmaids. Americans spent 1.24 billion with a B billion dollars on self improvement books and audiobooks in 2014. So this is a huge, huge industry. Obviously some people consider it quite effective. People spend money on it. There's investment, there's entire publishing houses devoted to personal development to help individuals like you, like me, influence ourselves to create positive habits in our life. So that is one source books. Now, Brandmates also says that if you look at all money spent on self development, this is as recent as 2016, $9.6 billion was spent on personal development. This includes every kind of seminar workshop around the globe. So this is a huge, huge industry, personal development, most of it at some level geared towards helping you and me influence ourselves. When we change our own behavior, our own daily habits, our work habits, our study habits, our sleep habits, everything else in life tends to get better. So clearly if you want change, you want to influence yourself. The personal development industry is a big established industry. People do spend money on there. Now where else do people spend money trying to influence their feelings, their happiness level? Look at the mental health industry. Now this would include this. According to the Huffington Post, in the year 2013, more than $2002-010000-00000 was spent on mental health. Now this can include things like psychiatry, psychology, therapy, therapist. I don't know if this includes things like acupuncture and yoga, but clearly there's a tremendous amount of money. I mean $1.24 billion on books, $201 billion spent on things like drugs. I'm not making any decisions or casting any judgments on what is better. But, but I want us to see the trend line of where People actually spend their money doesn't mean where people spend their money is a sign of what is truly effective. But I do think it's interesting to see where we collectively as human beings are spending our money when it comes to attempts to influence our own behavior. Now, in most people in the personal development field, when they're discussing things, they typically end the conversation right here. You got self help books, maybe things like nlp, hypnosis, traditional therapy, psychiatric drugs. There's this, this hierarchy. There's categories of where people spend money, time and energy. But I asked myself, what is it that really, truly influences behavior? What makes you want to make that purchase for the 50% discount on Groupon? What makes you want to buy this movie on Amazon similar to the one you bought last week? Well, typically it's some form of advertising. Now I realize most people in the self help movement, the personal development fields, don't really talk about advertising. That seems like something so completely different. But hear me out. What is it an advertiser is trying to do? Ultimately, they're trying to influence you, me and everyone else to take a particular action. If it's Kentucky Fried Chicken, kfc, it's to influence, to buy chicken. If it's Coca Cola, whether it's a billboard ad, whether it's a TV ad, it's to influence us, to cool, crave some of that Coca Cola. Especially when we're at the movies eating popcorn. You see the movies, the ads at the movies. So advertising clearly is about influencing human behavior. So do people spend less money on advertising than books or even on drugs? Well, according to a website statistica, $563 billion was spent on advertising or will be spent in advertising by the time 2019 is over. That's more than half a trillion dollars per year spent on advertising versus 1.24 billion spent on personal development books. So that's right. It's 500 times a greater investment on advertising than books. To me, that says people who really are trying to influence behavior put a lot more stock in advertising than they do books. If books really influence people's behavior, then McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca Cola would be mailing you and me books every single day. So I want you to really think about that. I know it sounds trite, almost like I'm stating something obvious, who cares? But if you really follow this to its logical conclusions, it means we need to change our behavior when we want to influence ourselves. You may be thinking, okay, tj, fine. Fancy super bowl ads, fancy ads during the World Cup Yeah, they spend millions of dollars on them. Of course they're effective. What good does that do me? If it's a giant full page ad in a newspaper or a fancy billboard ad with flashy models and expensive photography, what good does that do me? Think about this. There's lots of different types of advertising. There's TV ads, there are digital ads, there's newspaper ads, billboards, image ads, photographic ads, but there's also radio ads. And you can spend a lot of money on radio production, but you could also use a single human voice. To me, that's what's so exciting is because you have a voice, I have a voice. All of us have voices. And in fact these days, all of us have our own digital radio recording studio. And that's why to me, if everything I've studied on over the last 30 plus years and developed in personal development, to me the most profound, profound insight is this idea that we can create our own advertising to influence ourselves just using our phone. That's what I call the selfie Speak program, SSP for short. And it is as simple as you go to your phone, you go to the audio, record the memo, the voice memos, and, and you hit the little red button and you hit record and you just create an ad for yourself to change yourself in some behavior. Now I don't mean you have to talk at a deep voice and get a jingle maker and have music. It can just be the human voice and you can tell yourself to do whatever you want. Believe me, at some point in the next 24 hours, Coca Cola is going to grab some of your mind space and tell you drink Coke. Drink Coke.
