Day 4 – Automate Super Habits: How to Coach Yourself and Thrive in the AI Era

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In Day 4 – Automate | Build Super Habits: How to Coach Yourself and Thrive in the AI Era, we move from knowing what to do to making it automatic — using the Nine Action Factors and a simple habit-building plan anchored by a daily Willpower Story.

You’ll learn how to coach yourself, use AI to cut busywork, and design smart routines that target Recharge, Medium-Charge, and High-Charge Brain States for sustained performance.

You’ll explore:
• How routines work as linked chains of Super Habits
• Why knowledge fails without automation
• Using the Willpower Story at a set time and place
• The Nine Action Factors and ten practical prompts
• Mapping habits to Recharge, Medium-Charge, and High-Charge tasks
• The personal research loop — observe, adjust, repeat
• Coaching yourself with lessons from elite sport analysis
• Using AI to reduce Medium-Charge work and enhance deep focus
• The path to certification and structured three-month training

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If you’re not seeing our messages about this, just reach out — we’ll confirm if any grants remain and whether it’s a good fit for you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Day Four Kicks Off
• 3:25 Why Knowing Isn’t Doing
• 7:16 Routine Engineering Explained
• 11:36 Inside The Nine Action Factors
• 19:20 From Theory To Habit Plans
• 24:44 Coaching Yourself Like An Athlete

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

Hello, Habit Mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. I hope you are well and having a great week so far, especially if you've been working through the four-day challenge with me. And today we're on day four and we're going to get into the fourth step. I do apologize again that we are having building works not inside the Habermechanic office, but just or the tough minds office rather, but around. So if any of that noise comes through, that's what it is. I don't think it will. Also shows you it's not an AI generated podcast. We are doing this real. You don't tend to get those uh those uh noise effects in uh AI generated podcasts, which in my experience you you do actually sometimes get in professional recording studios. Um you'll get a noise coming from somewhere where you have to having paid all that money to go into the professional studio in the first place. Yeah, in my experience, you do sometimes have to stop because there's noise seeping into the very expensive soundproofed room. Um but at least in those uh situations you have an editor with you to uh tell you. But anyway, I think we've I think we've gone beyond having uh having uh massively funded broadcast broadcast quality content. Um I think COVID kind of killed that and uh for the better, I think, because it just means creating insights for people is just easier and you can do it faster and therefore do more of it, and um that's why I I like it, but anyway, it's not an AI, this is me, Dr. John Finn. Um, okay, so we have gone through the first four steps of the AI edge success cycle, and hopefully, there has not only been some light bulb moments going off in your brain, but you're starting to see some progress just in the last three days, even if you're getting getting a little bit more recharge, or you've been doing a bit more high charge or a bit less medium charge or a higher quality medium charge, or just you're just understanding those brain states more, that's a really good result. And what we want to do today, and reminder this is a YouTube video as well, has been a podcast. So I'm going to share my screen, just bring up that four step AIH success cycle. Um, so where we're moving today is automation. So we know that we don't we don't do what we always know we should necessarily do, and that classic example is more people than ever before agree it's a good idea to walk 10,000 steps a day, but they don't. More people than ever agree it's a good idea to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables, but they don't. And we can see that in big sets of compelling data. The most compelling being that the National Health Service, the essentially the biggest company in Europe, spends most of its budget every year treating diseases that emerge because people don't walk 10,000 steps a day and they don't eat five portions of fruit and vegetables. They don't do those basic things that most people agree is a good idea. So if we're going to help ourselves to build what I would call complex new behaviors, uh complex new habits, we need to recognize that knowing isn't enough, and we need to give ourselves the best chance of actually habitualizing, in this case, doing something like the willpower story every day, so doing that very deliberate, intelligent, self-watching and intelligent planning exercise. And that's why we've created the nine action factor framework. So this is the uh uh willpowers. So yesterday I did a bit of a recap on the lighthouse brain, and again, if you have if you're just dropping into this on day four and thinking, wait a minute, where's where's the other episodes here? Just go backwards in the feed and you'll see the last uh three days. If you haven't gone through it um systematically, starting at day one, to day two, to day three, to day four, go back to day one. Maybe even thinking, oh, I forgot what he's talking about here. Um, so go back to day one and do it again. That's why we've created it like we have done, so you can just go back and keep cycling through this process. So the lighthouse brain that I introduced uh or recapped on yesterday, I talked about willpower's assistants. So you've already met the task director and the day designer, and today we're working with the routine engineer. So, what's the difference between a routine and a habit? It's really that routines are strings, sort of interconnected, uh like a linked chain, if you like, of habits. That's a good that's a good way of putting it. I've never said that out loud before. That's good. I like that. So it's like a a routine is like a linked chain, a chain of habits, uh where you're plugging you know lots of um helpful habits together or what we call super habits. You also have linked chains of uh destructive habits, so they're destructive routines. But essentially the routine engineer is gonna help us to think about and plan ahead to get the behavioural science, the the factors that actually drive what we think and do every day on our side. And so if you've got your copy of Train Your Brain for the Higher Revolution with you, and we go to um, we're gonna go down to step four. So this is in step four, but actually, before we go there, we're gonna take a little kind of detour because the visual I want to share on the screen is a nine action factor model, and that actually is a bit further up. Um so we when we've looked over the years at behavioral science in terms of what's coming out of academia, um, and I say looked at, I mean I I was I've taught this stuff for over 25 years now, you know, and you literally find yourself often and less so recently, but more at the beginning of my career, when you're kind of starting out, you'll often deliver the same session again and again and again. So there were periods where I was delivering the same session, I think it was so the same sort of one-hour session, something like 14 or 15 times in a two-day window, doing that consistently. That's when you really get to know your stuff, but it's also where you get critical about the accepted way of thinking and the accepted way of doing things. I remember that very clearly, just for example, with teaching smart or smarter goal setting, um, and thinking there must be a better way to do this, surely. Come on. So when you look at the behavioral science literature, essentially it's dominated by quite a small group of acad of academics. Nothing against academics, by the way, that is my background. I still think of myself partially as an academic, but it the the science is kind of dominated by a small group of academics throughout the world, some groups in the US, some groups in the UK, some groups in in other parts of the world, and often you have one group that really champions just one element actually of the things that drive our behaviour, and they'd be very anti acknowledging that anything else is important in behavior change, or they'll be very reluctant to you know give credit to other theoretical models because that's kind of how academia works, it can be very tribal, people can be very defensive. So when I started my career, there wasn't a playbook like the Nine Action Factor model, didn't exist. And just to give you some examples of what I'm talking about, so if you look at uh one of the founding fathers of behavioral science, um B.F. Skinner, he would be seen probably as one of the most prominent behavioral scientists um with his kind of pigeon research way back in probably the 50s, if not before that, um where he showed the importance of reward and penalty systems, and in particular the importance of variable reward systems in driving behaviour. But that isn't the only thing that drives behaviour, it's an important driver, but it's not the only thing. If you look at uh Carol Dweck's work on what is now called mindset, didn't used to be called mindset. Dweck's been working on that since the 60s, and it's a very important insight that you need to believe that you can change, because actually you can, as Carol Dweck rightly talked about, way before we could actually see inside human brains that brains actually do change and they're like plastocene, they're not fixed. So Dweck's kind of popularized framework is you know the fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Well, that's important, it's important to believe you can build a new habit. Um, but again, it doesn't explain everything about behavior change, and we've got the nudge guys who I forget the name, they're associated to Chicago Booth University. There's a there's a group of them. Um, I know that because I've done a talk at City of London, Chicago Booth University campus, and their uh books are plastered all over the place. But nudge theory is great. This idea that we need to be reminded and triggered, but it doesn't explain everything about how we get good at doing new things, practicing new things, so we can automate them. And this is why we created the non-action factor model because we wanted to give people, well, first of all, we wanted to give ourselves a systematic understanding of what actually drives behavior. How can we create a belt and braces approach to make sure we have the very best chance of helping people to actually get better at the things that they want to get better at, like being more focused, being less stressed, sleeping better, being a better leader, being a better team member, being a better parent, eating more healthily, being more confident, all that great stuff, performing under pressure. So we researched and we tried and we tested and we researched and we tried and we tested, and that's what that's how the nine action factor model emerged. The nine action factor model actually used to be um it was a seven-factor model, probably about 10 years ago now. Again, we refined, refined, refined, and what actually sits behind the national factor model is about 250 different tactics that you can use that we use in our consultancy work. But the simplest application of this when we're coaching people, we're working with them one-to-one, is we use the habit building plan. So by answering the questions in the habit building plan, and if you've got the book in front of you there, this is in step four, and it's in um so yeah, so step four has three chapters: chapter 23, chapter 24, chapter 25, and the habit building plan is um we I I unpack the nine factors in chapter 23. Um I do another assessment in chapter 24, the how you hinders change, and then we create the habit building plan in chapter 25. So in chapter 25, so that you don't have to know all of the nine factors inside out, we have the habit building plan where we ask you there are ten reflective statements, and across those statements, um where um implicitly getting you to kind of tackle each of the nine factors, and the nine factors are all interconnected, so there's lots of crossover. But if you go through these 10 questions, it's a real belt and braces approach to giving yourself the best chance of getting those factors working for you instead of against you because those factors are always on if you're really good at being stressed, and I know Justine is saying that sounds odd. What really good? Because we think about good things as being positive, right? Or being helpful, but we can be good at really unhelpful things, right? So getting stressed, we can be really good at being a poor sleeper, we can be really good, can be excellent at being uh, we can be an excellent procrastinator, right? That means that well, it means you've got a load of a ton of neurons in your brain for those behaviors, and um, I'll do one more. You can be a you can be a world champion whole leader or a world champion, um not very good leader, but which means you've got a ton of neurons in your brain for bad leadership behaviors or unhelpful leadership behaviors. So um, in order to get good at those things, the nine factors were on your side, and they're still on your side now. So, what you have to do is we have to target the new thing we want to get good at, and in this case, we're going to target creating a willpower story. And my example in the question one of the habit building plan is create my willpower story in my workbook at 8:30 a.m. at my desk in my 10-minute planning meeting with myself. Um, and then the next thing we do is we say, right, what's the competing behavior? But I'll come on to that in a second. So you've got to pick that new thing that you want to build. And by practicing, creating my willpower story in my workbook at 8:30 a.m. at my desk in my 10-minute planning meeting with myself. Just by practicing that, I'm starting to build neural networks for it. And you know, the way our brain works is just like, because it's all interconnected, it's just like how physical skills work. Psychological skills work in the same way as physical skills. Even if you just think of writing with your left hand, if you're not left-handed, you won't be very good at it because you've never practiced it, or you've very rarely practiced it. If you add up the amount of time you've practiced writing with your right hand, if you're right-handed, it will be tens of thousands of hours. And that's why it's so fluid, because there's so many neurons in your brain for it. Then we talk about muscle memory, which doesn't really doesn't actually exist if you look at dynamic systems theory, and a theory about learning that was driven by a group of scientists that I was like I actually studied under, um, very fortunately, back then at Manchester Met, um, and those guys went around the world and spread that theory. We're not going to get into that, it's quite complex, but it basically shows muscle memory doesn't exist. But it's a nice, it's a nice term, and we kind of get what it means. But whatever we're good at, we have a load, we have a lot of neurobiological connections for that thing in our brain. Whatever we're not good at, we don't have a lot of neurobiological connections for. So we need to build up new ones. Um, and the questions in the habit building plan help you to do that. I'm not going to go through them all right now. You can do that yourself. But essentially, what we have to do is we have to get the nine factors working for us. Um, and what we're starting to get into now as we close the loop, as we go from step one, measuring brain states, to step two of essentially creating our fam story, our future ambitious, meaningful story, which is a long-term strategic plan for ourselves, but that starts to starts today, it starts in that next 30-day period. Then the willpower story, which is a daily strategic plan, and then um the habit building plan, which is the practical way of getting the nine action factors working for you. What we're starting to do is get in a cycle of personal research. You are doing this research project on yourself to work out where are my brain status right now? What do I need to do to help me to improve my brain status? And this is what we mean by coaching yourself. You are working on yourself. Um, I cut my teeth in professional sport, that's my you know, background, and the technology company I work for, called Prozone, which now doesn't exist, it's owned by a much uh bigger company. I'm not sure who owns it anymore, actually. It's owned by a massive US hedge fund. But anyway, they were pioneers in making it easier for soccer coaches, or as we say in the UK, football coaches, and um rugby coaches as well, and some other sports. They're pioneers in helping the coaches analyse, and the players analyse what was going on in the field. So, how far did players run? So, you know, before we had GPS, we were using trigonometry to work out how far players had run, how many passes did a player make, how many long passes, how many short passes, how many headers, how many tackles, how many of those things were successful? And they were making it easier for the coaches to take what they were seeing, because that's data, um, and to amplify that and to see you know, are there any patterns emerging? It's much harder to do that for our own behaviors for the things that we think and do every day. But what we're trying to do fundamentally with this process is we're trying to get above ourselves and we're trying to look at ourselves in a much more um constructive and detailed way, so that we can see what am I doing every day, and how does that um fit in with the kind of stuff that I want to be achieving this month or in the next 12 months or in the next uh year or the next 10 years. And by connecting those two things together using the AI edge success cycle, we can one small super habit at a time, we can start improving the way that we think and what we do, so it's more helpful in helping us do the things in our lives that we want to do, achieve the things in our lives that we want to achieve. So that's what we're doing, and that same methodology, same simple four-step process that you've gone through. If you're listening to what I'm saying right now, so you've worked through the four days, probably you've done this in under an hour, maybe slightly longer. That's the same process that you use to coach others. And when we talk about becoming a certified habit mechanic coach, we're not talking about necessarily setting up your own coaching business, or you can absolutely do that, and people are are doing that and having greater success. But fundamentally, we're talking about learning how to coach yourself, and it's simple, but also it's complex, and that's why we have this structured three-month uh training program that we've created um that's got in it everything that I've learned about coaching myself and others um over the last you know 25 years now, so that people can access that same learning as well. And excitingly, they can also understand how to deploy that those skills to optimize and capitalise these new neural network AI technologies that are emerging that can help us to essentially improve our brain state scores. That's what they fundamentally can do because they can help us to do less medium charge, do less busy work, help us to do more high impact, high charge work, do it faster, but also get more recharge done. That's why we're so excited about the uh AI. That's why I wrote Train Your Brain for the AI revolution. Um, so that's what you're doing. So this cycle isn't just designed to be gone around once, the AI edge success cycle, it's designed as a foundational framework. And we have other we have a leadership model that we also use that builds on this, and we have a team model, but that's not for today. Um, this is the foundation. So that's all I want to say. I hope that's got you thinking. I hope that's been really helpful. I'd encourage you to revisit this. We are periodically at the moment uh giving 75% funded training grants to people that want to become certified coaches. So if that's of interest to you, you'll probably see some messages about it. If you're not seeing the messages, just reach out and ask us and we'll let you know if there's any less available and see if it's a good fit for you. I think that brain state intelligence and especially those who can help others to do it is going to become one of the most sought after skills on the planet, and currently there's only a handful of people who know how to do it. So this just learning how to manage your own brain states and helping others to do that is a massive opportunity. So if you like this, you think it's interesting, the next step is to put it into practice for yourself. And then I just really encourage you to do the formal training so that you actually understand how to go beyond just knowing this four-step cycle and just kind of doing the the free level as I'd call it, and um, you know, really get into the in-depth expert level so you can see all of the all of the playbooks we've created, all of the hacks. Um I don't like that word particular, but what I mean is there are there are shortcuts to doing very robust behaviour change, if you know how. And I I share all of that with you in the in the certified mechanic coach training program. So thank you for listening. Thanks for taking the time. What should starting to be connecting now actually also is that although it's not completely obvious, so I will say it out loud, every habit we build fundamentally should be focused on three core things. One is helping us to get better quality recharge, two is helping us to optimize our medium charge brain states, and three is helping us to optimize our high charge brain states. Um, or I could say that again: one is optimise recharge, two is optimise medium charge, three is optimise high charge. That's you know, everything that you're doing in terms of habit building really is focused on those three areas. So that's why brain states are so powerful, they're so important. And we need to develop a language to help us to understand how to how to optimize how we use them, and people need teachers to help them to do that, so they need people like you to see this system at a high level in what in practice for yourself, and then you know, share it with others. But that's also why I say you only ever one brain state habit away because the brain state habits are just are so they're everything, really, once you understand that it's a breakthrough moment. So thanks for listening. Revisit the four days if that's helpful. Remember, this is an evergreen cycle, and uh remember you're only ever one brain state habit away.