STOP celebrating your goals if you want to achieve them.

Your biggest goals might be losing because your rewards arrive too late.

If you have ever crushed a plan for a week, then slid back into old patterns, the issue is not that you are “lazy” or “not disciplined enough.” We are wired to repeat what feels good right now, and that wiring runs the show when you are trying to build consistent habits for long-term goals.

I am Angela Shurina, and I break down a research-backed habit formation principle drawn from behavioral psychology and neuroscience: immediate rewards create lasting behavior. We talk about why celebrating big milestones does not build the habits that lead to those milestones, why fantasizing about goals can fall flat without the right practice, and how Pavlov’s conditioning research points to a surprisingly tight timing window. When the good feeling comes within seconds of the behavior, your brain connects the dots. When it comes weeks later, it does not.

You will leave with practical ways to celebrate micro wins so your workouts, nutrition choices, bedtime routines, learning sessions, or even uncomfortable tasks like sales calls start to feel easier and more satisfying.

If this helps, subscribe, share it with someone who keeps yo-yoing, and leave a review so we can reach more people who want lasting change.

What habit are you going to reward within 2 seconds today?

Transcript

Welcome And The Habit Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, transformation, in bettering ourselves, learning about discovering more and unlocking and using more of our human potential in this world so together we could live the most extraordinary lives and create the most extraordinary world all around us. Today, guys, we are talking about one of my favorite topics building habits to create and sustain long-term goals and achievement. And today you're gonna learn like why so many people, how so many people get it backwards. And that's why so many people struggle with wiring the consistent behavior, the habits that you need to create in order to achieve and maintain results that you want in your life, whether it is to be in the best shape of your life till the rest of your life, or creating the business that will fuel your life, your impact in this world, and fund all of your dreams, whether that's creating a relationship of a lifetime with someone special in your world, or maybe with yourself, you know, the most important relationship in the world. All of these goals that we care about in life that make our life worth living and meaningful and so much joy and fun, all of these goals are on the other side of habitual behaviors that we need to do. It's kind of like shower or brushing your teeth. If you want to have a clean, bright smile for the rest of your life, or I don't know, you want to be clean every day, you gotta take it daily, right? You gotta do daily. And most people get the uh the wiring of the behaviors, so you get to do it every single day wrong. And because of it, people struggle with so many habits that can be sticking much easier, you know, changing days, not in years. That's the tagline of this podcast. And today you're gonna be learning one of those concepts, which is research

Why Celebrating Big Milestones Does Not Help

SPEAKER_00 2:30

backed, backed by almost like a hundred years of research on the mammalian brain that we share with other animals, that uh tells us that hey, this is how you wire habits and consistent behaviors if you want it to stick, not for a season, for a month, for a week, but for life. And this is how you don't do that. And the most important takeaway from this podcast, yeah, that you want to remember and sort of tattoo in your brain, is that celebrating your wins, your big achievements and milestones and goals, it is important, but not for the reason you think it is. Uh, celebrating your big goals will not help you to build habits to get to those goals. Like again, whether you want to build much better health and fitness, whether you want to build much better relationships with yourself and other people, whether you want to build a career business and you need to work on certain learning habits or a certain self-improvement habits, a certain work habits, whatever that behavior is, which is hard, which is challenging, and you need to be repeating it to get where you want to be and uh stay there. Uh celebrating big moments isn't the way to get there. And fantasizing about those big goals, big accomplishments, uh, big achievements, also, what research and science uh tells us isn't that effective or helpful at all at all. I'm finishing a book that's uh that's called Rethinking Positive Thinking, and it's all about a about the science of fantasizing or dreaming or envisioning our goals and achievements and our dreams, and how it is actually not that helpful unless it is sustained and supported by other practices, one of the core practices you're gonna learn about today. But how did this podcast episode come to be in the first place? Yesterday I tried something new. There is this amazing app, probably the best in the world, uh, that helps a lot of people to build long-term habits for health, well-being, Doom, and OOM. And they have a new addition to their main app, which is called Noom Vibe, which is more of a community place where people do live streams, audio live streams where people share their achievements, like step counts where people connect with each other, support each other, listen to audio streams, to have conversations with each other. If you um tried Clubhouse at any point, then that's kind of very similar experience, but also with this like background of health, well-being, and fitness, and building habits to take care of yourself and build that health, fitness, and well-being for life. But anyhow, so I was trying this live stream as I was invited by one of the main hosts on the platform. And one of the guests asked me this question As a coach, how do you celebrate wins and how do you help your clients and others

The Noom Vibe Question On Wins

SPEAKER_00 5:55

celebrate theirs? It's super important to celebrate your wins to keep yourself going. And to each other, it replied, Yes and no. Yes, acknowledging your journey matters and celebrating your achievements and progress, uh, tracking your progress to build confidence and self-esteem, self-afficacy, or this belief in yourself that you can do hard things and achieve hard things. These are the mental foundations of a good life, personal and professional growth, uh, feeling good about yourself on your journey. But for any goal worth more than a week of effort, like again, building that business, building that health, building that relationship, which is basically again everything you really care about in life, celebrating milestones isn't particularly effective, if not harmful. Celebrating the behaviors that you need to get there, that is what's super effective, and what science and research in human behavior including tells us. Celebrating the habits, the behaviors, the micro steps. We humans, guys, we are more like Pavlov's dogs. I don't know if you know about this experiment. You can look it up Pavlov's experiments with dogs on conditioning. How, for example, he Pavlov, uh, he was a scientist, he taught the dogs to salivate and release digestive juices in the absence of food. And what he did was he would ring a bell, give the dog a treat, and he would do that many times, and then after

Pavlov And The 2 Second Rule

SPEAKER_00 7:45

a while, he would ring a bell and give nothing to a dog, and the dog would still salivate and release gastric juices, anticipating the thing. So, what created this sort of like response, this positive response in a dog was the ringing of the bell because it is was uh it is uh it was connected to the actual reward and feeling good and obviously getting some nourishment. And the the main feature of that experiment, one of the main features, which then was researched further in other experiments, was that the reward to create this conditioning, this response of physiology to the ringing of the bell, the reward had to come really, really fast after the after the signal. So I'm reading you a quote from Science Direct and one of the research papers there. If you delay a treat, and that's talking about docs training by more than, and pay attention here, guys, 1.3 to 2 seconds, not minutes, seconds. If you delay the treat more than 1.3 to 2 seconds, the training quickly loses its effectiveness. Research shows the dogs fail to connect the reward to the command when delay exceeds this window. Instead of rewarding the desired action, you risk act, you risk accidentally reinforcing a completely different unrelated behavior your dog just happened to do. The thing is, we still share our mammalian brain with dogs. And even though maybe the window is not two seconds, although later on BJ Fogg, one of the top researchers of habit formation uh in the world, he did his experiments as well and confirmed that when the reward is not immediate, the habit formation happens a lot longer and is a lot less effective. In fact, things like drugs are so effective at forming your habits because you get such a positive emotion or response of your physiology in such a fast manner, manner that the brain wires that habit, this addiction, almost instantaneously. And the faster that reward or the dopamine hit hits your system, the more addictive the drug or any experience is. So speed does matter for your brain as well. That's what you want to understand. Speed of the reward that follows the behavior that you wanna repeat. That's what you want to really, really understand. With dogs, you know, ring a bell, do the right thing, get a reward. That's how you train your dog effectively. That's how you also in humans build consistent action, consistent habits. And consistent action is what actually gets you the goal. The goal won't build itself without a consistent action. So do the behavior, immediate reward, newer wiring off of the habit, like a drug does, but you know, you're probably never gonna have a habit that's like a drug, but you want to understand the principle, speed matters. And then you have desire to repeat. And the more you repeat the action, uh if it's you know the action

Willpower Is Scarce, The Right Rewards Work Better

SPEAKER_00 11:20

that you want to repeat that leads you towards your goal, the more you repeat the action, the faster you're gonna get to the goal. Right. In my younger years, before my 18 years in coaching, before all my certifications, before I understood how the brain actually works for wiring habits and consistent behaviors, I thought, set a big inspiring goal, remind yourself of it often. The rest is discipline and willpower. And I was so wrong, guys. And I really reached my long-term ambition, I really cared about, whether that's personal life, fitness, or my business ambitions. This false belief stole my life for a good decade from the progress that I really desired. Willpower, guys, is scarce. Motivation is unreliable, discipline is a subject to your mood and energy levels. The brain doesn't care about your milestone. Not really, six months or leave alone a year, a decade from now. What your brain cares about is the cookie, quote unquote, the reward, the treat right now. And the question is: are you giving that reward to your brain every time you do the right behavior? Or, like most people do, hating your way through the whole process, hoping that once you hit the goal, you somehow will love the process that also is needed to maintain that goal. Right, so when I stopped fighting my brain and started working with it, everything changed. Right. And now, based on nearly 100 years of behavioral research, I make myself feel good every time I do the right behavior, and not when I achieve my goals. And to be honest, once you learn how to love the behavior that leads towards the goals that you want, celebrating your milestones and your goals is actually quite useless. You'll achieve your goals even without celebrating them. Although, again, it is very helpful to learn from that, to acknowledge, build its self-efficacy, self-confidence feeling. But to achieve those goals, all you need is start feeling good, really good, about the behavior you need to get there. Again, back to dog training. Do the trick, get the treat immediately, in one no more than 1.32 seconds, repeat, and then you get the skill. Human goal achieving works the same way. Again, we share our mammalian brain. Do the workout, eat the right meal, go to bed in time, then as soon as possible, make yourself feel genuinely good about it under two seconds. Notice the change, notice the feeling after, give yourself acknowledgement, give yourself high five, and maybe five minutes of your favorite show, or a little bit of dark chocolate if that's your thing, and then repeat. And your brain starts making you do more of what you need, just like a dog, wiring the habit without all the willpower you think you need. I give myself again high fives in the mirror, or just like internal, like yes, right? That like feeling I did it. I'm like, I'm so cool. After every uh cold sales call, full like Mel Robin style, you know, high five yourself and five, four, three, two, one, do the thing, and then high five yourself. Sales calls are something I'm actively working on, and I'm at the point where I almost love them, and I start recommending

Make Micro Rewards Effective

SPEAKER_00 14:55

into people, like, yeah, I love doing that. It's like, you know, making friends, talking to people around the world. Like, I genuinely start enjoying this process. And with my clients, I help them find their power move, their high five, the internal dialogue that makes them proud. Maybe a small treat, five minutes of Star Trek or friends, or their favorite song, or a small square of dark chocolate, right? And within days, again, change in days, not in years, not months, something changes. The workout you used to dread, you start looking forward to it. And that's when we start talking. The biggest mistake, guys, again, people make trying to chase a goal, especially a long-term goal, goal that requires anything more than a day or a week. The biggest mistake is treating the required behavior like necessary evil instead of deliberate joy, instead of focusing on learning how to love what you need to do consistently for quite some time, probably till the rest of your life. You hate the habit, the habit doesn't stick, and nothing unpleasant does, and then there are no milestones to celebrate, and you keep going yo-yoing between up and down, up and down, up and down, because what you hate just doesn't stick with your brain. And the win doesn't last, even if you happen to achieve it. And you keep again yo-yoing between your new habits and your old self. So the moral of this story and the message of today's podcast, guys, is look at your big goals you're working toward right now, your milestones, achievement. And if you wanna, especially if you want to speed it up and bring it forward faster, what you actually need to focus on is not focusing obsessively on the milestone or the goal, but start learning how to love what you gotta do to get there. The more you love it, the more you'll do it, the more you'll do it, the faster you'll achieve your goal. So, are you celebrating the right things at the right time? Remember Pavlov's dogs, remember dogs training. 1.3 to 2 seconds is all you got. Actually, BJ Falk says that is the ideal time frame for the human as well. So, are you rewarding the right behavior that you need to do on the right time frame versus a week, a month from now? Like, I am 100% sure no brain does this connection that you do a thing, and in a month or a year you reward yourself. Like, I don't know what kind of brain you think you have, but definitely not the one that makes such a long-term connection. That's why people find it so hard to do the right thing for long periods of time, because they don't celebrate anything for like a year, and then the whole thing feels like an uphill battle all the way the battle that you don't necessarily enjoy and find pleasurable. Okay, so are you celebrating the right things at the right time? Or are you still betting on willpower and a big celebration at the finish line? So, willpower, discipline are a scam. Guys, that is not, and celebrating your big wins, your big milestones is useful for

Share The Show And Do Homework

SPEAKER_00 18:20

a complete other reason than building the actual behaviors that you need to do consistently and very often till the rest of your life to get the goal and keep it. So, besides sharing this podcast with another person who keeps yo-yoing and going back and forth and not being able to do the right behavior consistently, like share this podcast with that person, share it with your team, share it with your loved one or a friend, anyone who you think it might be useful to do the right thing, enjoy the journey and get the result and achieve all of their long-term goals and keep them. Like whoever that person is, share this podcast with them. And also reach with you so we reach more ears around the world who are eager to achieve their big milestone and goals. Let's do it together. Without your help, I can't do it effectively. Besides that, that guys, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. And your homework for today is this. Look at all of your long-term goals that you're currently working on. And list all the behaviors that you need to consistently do in order to get there and stay there. And then ask yourself, how can I celebrate this behavior every time I do it immediately? And that's what's gonna help you to wire those habits in days, not in years, and achieve your goals a lot faster. Because again, at the end of the day, what builds your goal isn't your celebration, but the actions you take every day. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for tuning in today. Until next time, keep growing and keep celebrating the right things at the right time.