Speaker 1: Hello Habit Mechanics .
It's Dr Jon Finn here I am walking to the office, which is
why I'm already slightly out of breath Just coming to the top of
a big hill.
Hope you're well.
I want to talk about behaviour change and why it's difficult
and why AI can help us to do it more efficiently and more
effectively.
And I want to start by talking about the word behaviour.
What does it mean?
We often associate it with bad behaviour so somebody behaved
badly.
But in psychology, behaviour just means everything that you
think and do.
So whatever you're thinking right now is the behaviour, and
most of our behaviour is automatic or semi-automatic.
So you're able to speak to yourself in I'm assuming english
, automatically, right, using perfect words and maybe less
perfect sentence structures, but meaningful, automatically.
It's on autopilot.
In the same way, when I said, don't think of a white elephant,
it's already in your brain.
You don't have to consciously think about it.
So one of the big misconceptions about the word
behavior is that it's about what people do physically.
It's not.
It's also about how they.
And what we've found really helpful is the best unit to
break behaviours into is habits.
And when I talk about automaticity, most of what we
think and do is automatic.
We're talking between 98% of what you're thinking and doing
at any given time, all the way up to 100%.
Sometimes it's completely automatic.
You're not thinking consciously at all, most obviously when
you're sleeping.
But people say often I wasn't thinking clearly, I was just an
autopilot.
So our automaticity has the level of automaticity that we
have has been surprising to scientists, and this is the work
that people like daniel kahneman thinking fast and slow,
of thinking fast and slow fame has made his career off right.
So looking at what he calls um, he calls heuristics, which is
basically thinking habits.
So that's behavior.
So we're always behaving because we're always thinking
and doing, and the thing that we then need to understand is look
, how do we start?
If I recognise some of the things I'm thinking and doing
are not all that helpful for me, I'm just taking my jacket off
so that it skews the crumple.
So you may have completed, for example, the human AI readiness
assessment in chapter 8 of Train your Brain for the AI
Revolution.
Or you may have just done a daily T-plan.
Today, ranked yourself out of 10, how well did you do your
best to be at your best?
Today, ranked yourself out of 10.
How well did you do your best to be at your best, or you may
have done using another, another um one of our many self
intelligent, self-watching tools .
So you recognize there are some things I'd like to change.
So that's the first step to changing your behavior is
self-awareness is recognizing, and that's quite difficult.
Step to changing your behaviour is self-awareness is
recognising, and that's quite difficult to do because our
brains are so automated.
We're not really designed to think about ourselves in that
way and that's why people are attracted to coaching and
therapy, because it gives them that way to reflect and think
about themselves and think about themselves.
We kind of saw that mindfulness boom maybe 10 plus years ago
now.
Things like apps like headspace and calm and things came out
and they're really about self-awareness, getting you to
think about yourself.
So now that's just the starting point.
Knowing what we'd like to do differently is very different
from doing it.
Behaviour change is difficult and it's difficult because you
need cognitive resources to do it.
In simple language, you need willpower and that means you
need to be in a high charge brain state and that's it.
We're back to it again at which brain states.
You cannot change your behavior , you cannot be at your best
consistently if you do not understand brain states and,
again, no one else is talking about this, and this is why
we're saying that the hybrid mechanic approach, the new human
ai performance psychology coach for training up there.
They are unique in what they understand because if we want to
be at our best, we have to understand our brain states and
if we want to start to change behavior, we've got to get into
the high charge brain state, and that is difficult to do.
So I think we've all experienced reflecting, whether
that's in a training session or a chat, and then deciding yeah,
I do need to do something differently, I'll definitely do
it, but by the time I get to the end of the day I'm so exhausted
that I never do it, and then I don't sleep very well.
So the next day I never do it or I start and then I fail.
It's because you're relying on willpower and willpower is
depleted because your brain state balance is out of whack.
So and people say willpower is overrated willpower is what it
is, it's the conduit to change.
So we need it in the first instance to put the effort in to
make meaningful change to the sort of behaviors that we need
to change to be healthier, happier and our best, like
sleeping better, eating better, exercising more regularly,
managing stress better, be more confident, be more focused
before managing pressure, better behaving in a way that helps us
to be a better team member and a better leader and a better
parent, or whatever it is we want to do.
They all require willpower as the initiator of change.
We can only access our high charge brain states where
willpower lives if we get that right balance of brain states,
the right balance of brain states, the right balance of
recharge, medium charge and high charge.
And this is where AI is so revolutionary, because for the
first time ever, we have technology we can use to
outsource the tasks that we complete every day that only
used to be completable by human brain power.
So we can outsource some of the medium charge work that we do
every day.
We can outsource it to AI.
So just a tiny example instead of having to manually book in
every single call, you use a tool called Calendly which just
does it automatically for you, and these tools are becoming
more and more powerful every single day.
So we've got the automation side of AI we can use to
essentially reduce the amount of busy work that we have to do
and the volume of it and then what we also have and that's
going to make it easier for us to get into high-charge brain
states.
Then what we also have is augmented ai, so or ai that
augments our high-charge thinking.
So it's almost like, if you think of, when you first learn
to ride a bike it's quite effortful because you've got it,
takes an awful lot of concentration and and your
body's not really attuned to the movement, so you put
stabilizers on right.
Um, generative ai is like that.
It's like stabilizers for your high charge thinking, and
generative AI is like that.
It's like stabilizers for your high-charge thinking.
So it means you can actually do high-charge thinking more
easily and therefore you can do more of it.
And we need to get into that high-charge brain state to do
our clever, high-impact work, which makes us feel good about
ourselves.
Sup, you might be thinking where are you going with this, john?
Does AI help me to eat better?
Does it help me to manage my stress better?
Well, it can, directly and indirectly.
Obviously, there are technologies now we can use to
track and monitor these things.
But what it's allowing us to do is get a better balance of
brain states so we can outsource some of our medium-charge work.
We can augment and supercharge some of our high charge thinking
, and that free.
That means it's easier for us to do more high quality recharge
or spend more time in our high quality recharge brain states.
So if you look at the brain state profiles in chapter nine
of train your brain for the air revolution you can get a free
copy off the website then you'll see what I'm talking about.
It gives you a better balance of brain states.
So you may currently be across the bear where you've got very
little capacity to do high charge work, which is where the
the change is initiated.
Where we work on ourselves as well as do clever work at work.
It's the brain state we used to work on ourselves as well.
So to resist that temptation not to eat the food, to get to
bed on time, to resist the temptation to say that thing
that we know is unhelpful, to resist the temptation to
procrastinate, we need our high-charge brain state to help
us to do that.
So by striking a better balance across our brain states, we're
going to free up more of it.
So that's behavior change.
It's why brain states are so central.
Brain state balance, especially being able to consistently
access our high charge brain states and um, it's how ai can
actually help us to strike a better balance, and what I'm
talking about here is human AI performance psychology.
That is a new field of psychology we've created.
We are pioneering this field and we're doing that because we
want to empower people to thrive in what is a complex period of
human history.
But I think there's massive potential to help us to get a
better balance of brain states and when you do that, you get
massive results and I'm seeing that all the time.
There's a very small case today which I can't go into too much
detail in, but I got a lovely text on Sunday from someone who
I just talked this to on the phone on Friday, and they're
basically the thing they were trying to achieve.
They broke the record.
They'd never been able to do that thing before and just by
understanding their brain states and activation levels which is
the thing that sits behind that they just said it completely
changed their ability to essentially perform to their
potential.
So that's just with the knowledge initially, but that
person was very highly motivated and they have a lot of the
other nine action factors going for them.
But anyway, I just wanted to share that on my walk to work,
I'm conscious of not getting run over.
So I'm approaching some busy roads.
So I hope that's got you thinking.
If there's ever any questions, let us know busy roads.
So I hope that's got you thinking.
As ever, any questions, let us know um.
Remember you're only one brain state habit away.