The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

What are the Six Habits of High-Performing AI-Era Professionals?

• Dr. Jon Finn

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In this episode, we practically unpack how Human-AI Performance Psychology™ gives professionals and teams a real competitive edge in the AI era. You’ll learn why mastering your Brain States—not learning more tools—is the true multiplier for performance, creativity, and resilience. We introduce The Six Habits of High-Performing AI-Era Professionals, a practical blueprint for activating your best work, recovering effectively, and extracting real value from generative AI without burning out.

Here’s what we cover:
• Why your brain—not the tool—is the ultimate AI force multiplier
• The Activation Dial and how to engineer optimal Brain States
• The 30-day focus loop for clarity, momentum, and output
• Recharge protocols for sleep, nutrition, movement, and relationships
• Stress recoding to stop energy leaks before they derail performance
• Confidence engineering through fast, constructive feedback
• Preparing to perform under pressure (and why this matters more with AI)
• Building laser-sharp focus for deep, high-value work
• Real-world results, training options, and certification pathways
• How these Six Habits future-proof your role, your value, and your team

Want to go deeper?
• Explore the Six Habits training on the Tougher Minds® website
• Learn about the Certified Habit Mechanic Coach programme
• We can coach you directly or train your entire team — if you can’t find what you need on the site, just let us know here



SPEAKER_00:

Hello, habit mechanics, it's Dr. John Finn here. I hope everyone had a fantastic week so far. So today I wanna go deep into the six habits of high-performing AI era professionals. Now it might be the first term you've first time you've heard me use that very specific phrase, but actually this is what we've been working on for the last 25 years, and it's what we've been teaching over 20,000 people for that period of of time. It's just now emerged to us that actually a really helpful way to think about this are as six distinct habits, and we're really excited about that because we think it just gives people a clearer blueprint, a clearer map of exactly what they need to get good at in order to be healthier, happier, and at their best in the AI era. So in this episode, I want to unpack those six habits. And I want to start by saying that most people are getting AI completely wrong. They're getting the AI era completely wrong. They are focused on the technology, the tools, and sometimes trying to learn every new tool that's available, sometimes buying a technology or a tool or a subscription and never using it, sometimes buying it and using it, but not using it particularly well. Sometimes buying it, using it, and using it great. But what we need to really understand is that without our brain working really well, another maybe working well today is probably not guaranteed to be working really well next week. Without our brains working really well, the AI is useless. So I talk about a concept called activation quite a lot in our programmes, in our coaching and our training. And the activation dial is a way of understanding our brain energy levels. So we talk about brain status, activation levels is what sits behind brain status, it's about the neurotransmitters literally in your brain. And our activation dial runs from zero all the way around to a hundred. If you're at zero, zero on the activation dial, it means that you're dead. Okay, so that's the starting point. If you're at a hundred on the activation dial, it means your heart is beating as quickly as it possibly can, you're breathing as hard as you can, um you're probably cognitively over overactivated. So if you're zero zero on the activation dial, you're not going to be able to use AI, right? If you're a hundred, you're not going to be able to use the AI technology as well as you can. Um if you're maybe a 60 on the activation dial, that might be your optimal activation level for working really well with generative AI in um high-charge brain states. So our brain is the main conduit for getting the most out of AI technologies, and we and if we want to use this powerful, unique tech, and I think um neural network AI is more like a species. And in the last podcast episode, I talked about the two main types of species that are a genetic and the generative, one being like a robot taxi or a self-driving car, the other being a bit more like a snowmobile. If we want to get the most out of it, so we can get the benefits for our health, our happiness, and our performance, and first and foremost, we need to get our brain working really well. And the the habits, the six habits are all about first of all, getting our brain working really well, and then making sure that we can overcome every challenge that we face, but also give ourselves the very best chance of performing to our potential on demand as and when we need to. So it's not just a fluke or a bit of luck. We can we can consistently every day get into those high-charge brain states because we are recharging our brain properly, we're optimising how we do our medium charge thinking and doing, and we can free ourselves up so that we can actually not only understand AI and how it works and learn how to use it really well, but also we can um do the kind of thinking and complete the kind of tasks that AI can't do and will not be able to do, in my opinion, in any time soon. So AI is here, it's not going away. You might hear this sort of narrative around is it a bubble, is it not a bubble? It doesn't matter. Um the technology, it some of it might be overpriced in the stock market, unless you've got loads of money invested in NVIDIA or Microsoft, you don't need to worry about that really. Um, Nvidia has become uh about six months ago, these are the guys that make that some of the hardware, the chips. Um they became the first company ever to be worth over five, sorry, over four trillion about six months ago. In the last few weeks, Nvidia broke five trillion in valuation, not billions, trillion, and um Microsoft became the second company ever to break four trillion. So, you know, even if these companies half in value over the next few years, which I don't think they will, they're still you know worth trillions, they're still valued at trillions, right? So what we need to recognise is is that we are going through a jobless boom where businesses are making more money, that's their food issue responsibility, and they are doing that by employing less people, but they still need people, but they only need people who can nail these six habits. And once you understand what the six habits are, by just doing a few simple things every day, every week, every month, you can get these habits fired up in your own life and get all the benefits. Whether you just want to be healthier, happier, and at your best more often, whether you are a leader or a parent or you're running a team or you just want to be a better team member, these habits are essential. They are essential, they are the backbone and they're tried and tested. And again, it's not really about the AI. As you build these habits, you can learn how to build some AI technologies into your workflow, but actually, it's really about first and foremost you being at your best. So let me talk you through the six habits. I'll give you the overview to start with, and then we'll go in to speak about each one in a bit more detail. And the foundation of all this, by the way, is understanding how your brain works. You need to understand how your brain works, because by understanding how your brain works, you can then make more, much more sense, much more accurate sense of why you feel like you feel, what why you do what you do, you know, what are the if you understand these basic operatings of what brains are designed to do, just makes everything so much easier. So these habits um are designed to be built on the foundation of you, you know, understanding how your brain works. So habit one we call build a 30-day focus loop. So we need to be in the habit of not just having a gist understanding of why I need to get out of bed this morning. We need to have some clear goals that we're working towards, and we've developed tools over the years and systems that make it really easy for you to build the habit of using those tools so that it's very clear to you what you need to achieve today, what you need to achieve this week, what you need to achieve this month, and how that feeds in to your bigger, meaningful goals. So the I haven't met anyone yet that doesn't want to be healthy and happy in the distant future. So if that's the only thing you know about the distant future that you agree that you would like to be doing, then that means that there are some choices that you can make today and tomorrow and this week and this month that are going to give you a better chance of being healthy, happy, and at your best in the distant future. So the first habit is we need to build that 30-day focus loop, and I'll come back and talk more about it later. The second habit is then, so we once we've got the motivation fired up, if you like, but in a very structured, intelligent way, we then habit number two is we've got to recharge our cognitive battery, or you need to recharge your cognitive battery. If your brain is depleted, it has no energy, you're not going to be functioning very well. You're not going to be able to regulate your behaviour very well. So it's pretty logical. We need charge in the battery, and to get charge into the battery, into our brain state battery, we need to recharge it properly. And recharge, high-quality recharge is not just about sleep, it's also about your diet, how you exercise, who you hang out with, and who you spend time with. And by getting those things right, then we've got the foundations of health, happiness, and performance. So, habit one, we create a clear plan of what we want to do, why we want to do it. We have that 30-day focus, and we're in the habit of renewing that 30-day focus. Um, habit number two is recharge your cognitive battery so you actually have some energy to work on these things that are important in your life, working on the things you need to do to be healthy, happy, and at your best. Habit number three then is record your stress response. Because what many people are finding is that even if they are doing some recharge activities well, they're just losing a disproportionate amount of their energy, physical and cognitive, to stress because they're worrying, they're beating themselves up, and then they engage in destructive habits, like they eat the wrong things, they don't do the exercise they need to, if they get to bed on time, and it goes on like that. Um, they don't look after themselves. So we need a way to recode the way that we respect we we respond to stress, and we've got lots of power, powerful science facts tools that we've developed over the years that people use every single day. So we've just got to build a habit of using one or more of those tools so that we don't let stress be something that just happens to us. We're proactive in how we recode it, in how we process it. We can't avoid getting stressed, or certainly some of the stresses we experience we can't avoid because they're kind of outside of our control. But what we absolutely can do is take responsibility for how we process the stress and recode that stress response. So we've got habit one is uh build a 30-day focus loop, habit two is recharge your cognitive battery, habit three is recode your stress response. Habit four is about engineering robust confidence, so we are living in a world which is becoming less and less familiar, where we're encountering new experiences more regularly, we're being asked to do thing new things more regularly, and you know, AI is a huge driver of that. Many of us can remember making quite a slow transition into digital banking. So, you know, instead of going into the high street branch to do all of our banking, we made that slow transition into the banking app. And slowly but surely we learned how to trust it, and now you know most people are just doing all of their banking just on their phone, which is almost unimaginable 10 years ago. What um the speed of AI development is bringing is newness, lots of new things, and what we're currently seeing in the market in the the world of work, whether you work for yourself, whether you work for a business, whether you're thinking of starting a new business, you know, you know, working on whatever, is that the traditional roles that we've seen are starting to change. Some roles are dying out because they're not they're not needing and needed anymore. New roles are emerging, but everyone is having to adapt. And what's really important then is that we might be being asked to do things that we've never done before. I've never worked with uh generative AI to create a client proposal before. I've never had to manage and lead a team of people that are working so um intensely with uh a human intelligent-like uh technology, AI. Um my children, my youngest children, they're they're now at school having to navigate this pathway to did they use AI, don't they use AI, what's the optimal balance here, what they're gonna be doing in the future. But essentially, all these new to to to quickly adapt to these new demands that are being put on us, we need to build confidence. We need to have that belief and the evidence that we can actually do these things and we can do them really well. So, in order to build that confidence quickly, we have to be deliberately engineering it, hence engineer robust confidence that is habit four, so that we spend less time dwelling and beating ourselves up, and you're seeing this sort of crossover here between the habits, and we are proactively collecting the information that reinforces and shows us that we can do these new things, or we're setting our lives up so we we get better at these new things faster. So we've got to engineer robust confidence, not any old type of confidence, robust confidence. Um, and then that brings us into habit five, which is prepare for pressure. Some people are very familiar with pressurised situations, others not so much. Um, but even if you don't feel a lot of pressure in your life right now, pressure is coming because as we move into this new world where more and more things are new, we're gonna be put out of our comfort zone more often, and we're gonna be we're gonna be expected to be able to adapt very quickly and perform under pressure, and that's what preparing, building the habit of preparing profession, uh preparing for pressure gives us is the ability to perform under pressure consistently at our best when that pressure comes on. And even if you're thinking, well, that's not that relevant for me, it's fine. Um I would suggest that you're gonna be experiencing more of these situations soon because everyone's gonna be pushed out of their comfort zone. But that's the beauty of this blue of this blueprint of these six core habits. You might say, well, you know, the the pressure one, it's okay. I don't really need that right now. That's fine. What we've prioritized then is building the the habit that is most relevant for you. That's uh prepare to perform under pressure, and then habit six is build laser sharp focus. Now, many people are building distraction into their lives, they're getting really good at getting distracted, which has all kinds of negative consequences, and they don't realise they're doing that. But how we pay attention is mainly a function of how we practice. If you practice short bouts of attention, um that's what you get good at, and that's what many, many people have got good at, and it's causing them problems because it weak it's essentially weakens sites in our brain like our dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, our orbitofrontal cortex, and they are really important for um being healthy, happy, and at our best for reasons I'm not going to go into right now, but we can we can we can deliberately build laser sharp focus so that when we want to focus and concentrate, we can do it on demand. Whether we're working with AI or not working with AI, whether we're working from home or we're working in a noisy office, whether we are listening to a colleague or listening to a family member, and we really need to show them that we're paying attention, we can build laser sharp focus. And like all of these habits, all the six habits I'm talking through, these are not just abstract ideas. This is literally what we've spent 25 years doing is building the systems and the science that make it easy for anybody not only to understand these habits at a high level but to quickly build them in their life. But now we have this six habit blueprint, which is really exciting. So if you want to be healthy, happy, and at your best in the AI era, we created this six habit, high-performing AI era professional model for you. And by the way, most people have not seriously been using AI technology until the last probably 18 months or so, and possibly even shorter period than that. What we have seen time and time again when people learn how to deploy these habits into their lives is they do significantly better than those that are not. And you'll hear us see, and you you hear us talk about, and you've probably seen that the the either uh testimonial, you know, getting a$70,000 overnight pay rise, um, people getting 40% pay uh promotions, but not just that, finishing work earlier, getting to spend more quality time with your family, getting to spend more time doing what you want to do. Um, this is this this is the promise that better brain state management coupled with even if it's just a light sprinkle of AI tools gives us, but we can only unlock it if we get these six habits really working for us. So, to make it as easy as possible for people to do that, we've created the six habits training, and you can access this directly from the website. So if you go to um Habit Mechanic website, we've created a training program which talks you through, which walks you through step by step, and I'm your guide exactly how to build these six habits into your life, and you also get some certifications when you do this, and I'll you can check those out on the um the website, and we're all also making the six habits approach the centerpiece of what our coaches are able to do. So, when you become a certified habit mechanic coach, the main thrust of what you're able to do is actually teach people these habits and show them how to quickly develop them and build them in their own life. We're also starting to do uh training, life training with teams um on these six habits, and this is also going to become the backbone of obviously how we coach people one-to-one. So you you can't read about this in any of our books. This is the the next step, it's about implementation. If you've read Train Your Brain for the Era of Revolution, the four-step success cycle system is part of that first habit, but it's not everything, it's just part of it. Um, but you'll get a gist sense and of some of these things that we're talking about. If you've read the habit mechanic, there are some of the tools that um you've used that go somewhere to building a couple of these habits, but we've never had this systematic programme before in place. So we've we've we've got the training. If you want to do this, you might still be thinking, nah, AI is not going to have a massive impact on my life, and that's fine. But what I would say is this is not really just about AI, it's more about you and understanding yourself so you can thrive in whatever context is brought um to bear on your life. If you are deep into AI and you're trying to figure out how do I get the most out of this for myself, for my people, for my team, then this is this is really, really important. It's going to be the cornerstone going forwards of businesses get actually getting return on investment from AI technologies. Most businesses now are not from a gentic AI, from sorry, from generative AI, which is where all the the value is. And what we're seeing is if you get this right, you're able to not just duplicate yourself every day in terms of what you can get done. And I'm not talking productivity here, productivity is a cheap thing. I'm talking about high impact thinking, your best type of thinking, where you're absolutely at your best. If you get this, if you get these six habits working for you, you're not only able to do twice as much of the your cleverest work. So you're not only able to double yourself, you're not even only able to triple yourself. But what we're seeing is people are quadrupling themselves, they are 7xing themselves actually when they optimise this. Um, and that this is what honestly what I'm seeing for myself. The the amount of um complex work I'm able to get through now with uh optimised brain states and some very cheap um generative AI, and I say it's cheap because yeah, there is another way to get in this volume of output, it's hiring people or working with expensive consultants. Generative AI means that you don't have to do that, you can just do it yourself and go so much faster, so much more cost-effectively. So, and and you know, also if your kids are if you're thinking, right, what's the future for my children here? I guarantee you the backbone of their success will be these six habits. Um this is my uh deeply connected to my PhD research, which is really about the transition from being a teenager to an adult and why some are successful, why others are not. So, what whatever you're trying to achieve in life, these six habits are for you. And we've got some um next steps after the six habits, which we're gonna reveal in due course, but the foundational thing is to get these six habits firing for you. So I heard that's um scratched the itch of anyone who's thinking, what are these six habits he's talking about? Well, that's what they are. So let me go through them again. We've got habit one is build a 30-day focus loop, habit two is recharge your cognitive battery, habit three is record your stress response, habit four is engineer robust confidence, habit five is prepare for pressure, habit six is build laser sharp focus. And if anyone's thinking about what about resilience? Well, of course, resilience is the outcome of getting all this stuff right. What about adaptability? Well, adaptability is the outcome of getting these things right, that they're not the habits that you build, they're outcomes. Um, so this approach is about getting your brain working really well and building the habits that automate it working really well so that you can be healthy, happy, and at your best consistently. And if you want to sprinkle some AI into that as well, then that's gonna make you go even further, even faster. If you're not even using any AI tools yet, it's not a prerequisite for doing this training and building these habits. It's um, but it but for most people, AI is gonna be transforming their lives in the next well, you know, from 2026 onwards. I think we're really gonna see that the the game being upped with AI because so many businesses are getting so many great results. Um, so more and more people are gonna be expected to use it and lead teams that are using it. So this is gonna lay the great foundations for anyone who thinks they're gonna be in that situation. So that's all I wanted to say. Um, you know, the key here is brain state management, but brain state management by itself, brain state intelligence by itself, I know can feel a bit intangible. This is the practical thing that you need to do, is just focus on these habits. And we've created the training, the support, so you can do that. If you just want to learn it yourself, check out the six habit training on the website. If you want to help others to do it, check out our certified habit mechanic coach training. If you want us to do it with you, we can coach you, we can come and train your team. Um, and we're starting to do some big projects on this now for our corporate clients. So we've got you covered, whatever you want. Um, and if there's something that I haven't mentioned on the list that you're thinking, can you do this? Can you do this for my children? We can uh we can do that as well. But just this is just the centerpiece of of the work that we're doing now, and we're so excited by the results and uh get it getting these powerful tools into people's hands. So if it's of interest and you can't find what you're looking for on the website, just let us know, or you have any further questions, let us know, and you're gonna hear much more about these habits going forwards. Just by getting one of these habits working a little bit better is gonna have a seismic impact on your ability to be healthy, happy, and at your best. So that's why we always say you're only ever one brainstate habit away.