The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

Why Leaders Fail to Change—And How AI Helps You Get Your Brain in Gear

• Dr. Jon Finn

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Episode Description

Most leaders want to change. Few do.

In this short walking episode, Dr. Jon Finn reveals why lasting change requires more than motivation — it demands the right Brain State.

You’ll learn:

  • Why “behavior” isn’t just what you do — but what you think
  • Why up to 100% of your actions are automatic (and how that traps you)
  • How to break the willpower cycle and access your high-charge brain state
  • And how AI tools can help you reduce cognitive overload and focus your energy where it matters most

🎧 Listen now and start thinking better, leading smarter — and finally making change stick.

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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.