Do you want to build SUPER habits & eliminate DESTRUCTIVE habits?

In this podcast, Dr Jon Finn discusses Chapter 8 of The Habit Mechanic.

He explains how we can identify and build our SUPER habits and also eliminate our DESTRUCTIVE habits – so we feel better and perform better everyday.

He also shares many fascinating stories about his experiences and the journey he went on, prior to writing his best-selling book.

Dr Jon also gives an update about his new ‘Habit Mechanic’ keynote for any organisations looking for a corporate speaker.

Podcast Transcript

Hello Habit Mechanics, I hope you’ve had a fantastic week so far. My name is Dr Jon Finn. I’m again joined by my friend and colleague Andrew Whitelam and we’re going to dive into another chapter of the Habit mechanic book. Andrew, how are you doing?

Hi Jon really well thank you. I hope you’re doing good too and yes this podcast we’re looking at chapter eight which um is a really seminal part of the book for me it talks about your journey to where you are now in great depth and it’s fascinating um you title it my light bulb moment why I made it my mission to help others become Habit Mechanics and there’s so much fascinating detail and so many fascinating stories and anecdotes in there um that I think people really will want to listen to this one uh we’ll get into that in a moment but but what have you been up to uh in recent days Jon do let me know.

Yeah so really busy at the moment in fact most of the spending most of my time training people up to become certified public mechanic coaches um which is really exciting and interesting we’ve got to diverse range of people who were training up um where we work one-to-one together over about six months we do six 90-minute sessions where I train people how to use The Habit Mechanic Habit metric tools and the Habit Mechanic toolkit so that they can use them for themselves but also for their clients um or to start creating packages that they’re going to use for the inside their business or inside the new business that they’re creating we’ve got people who are working in big businesses within sport within the military and within education but also people have got their own private coaching businesses.

But also people that want to start a coaching business and then yeah I’m just I’m just excited that we’re getting such a a great group of people um it will be they’ll go on our website as certified coaches um and just makes it easier for us to help as many people as possible to to use these pride and tested tools to make life easier because we know how difficult it is so that’s why I’m spending most of my time doing this week and um it is really rewarding work so that’s good yeah and it really does connect with something we’re going to discuss later in the podcast um we’re returning to the topic of artificial intelligence again and it’s implications for our modern world and our society and our our world of work and and the fact that you’re helping to create more people who can add value to other people’s lives and support them um in ways that shall we say machines can’t that’s perhaps a hint of what we’re going to talk about I think that’s so important and so fascinating so we’ll talk about that later in the podcast we’ll also be taking a question um so please I do listen out for that but let’s now dive deep into chapter eight as we said we would Jonum your light bulb moment as you turn it it’s a fascinating sequence we’ve talked before about your failure in inverted commas on the Rugby field which which kick-started a journey for you um and that was the start that’s the start point of this chapter um from from there into other sporting Endeavors and and developing on from that to where we are now so please do start the story for us if you would yeah thanks for reminding me about that Andrew

Yeah this is a real real event that happened in my life I was always very good at sport surprisingly surprise surprise because that’s pretty much all I did as a kid I just played sport um so I was good at catching throwing um running quite quickly yeah and I’m at University I I got selected for the international student team the training Squad um when we were having a warm-up game before we were going to play Australia and I basically blew my chance by what we might call in sport psychology choking under pressure so it was a cold wet windy day in the north of England and we were playing the men’s professional team I think I was 19 at the time and um all I had to do was catch a high ball that well I was pretty much stood underneath the goal posts on our own girl line and the ball was swirling around up in the air coming down and coming down faster and faster towards me but all I could say to myself was don’t drop it don’t drop it don’t drop it and it’s like saying don’t think of a white elephant you know I didn’t even drop the ball I just completely missed it the opposition’s got a try I got substituted pretty much soon afterwards and then I didn’t get selected for the game but I’d also ruptured a quad in that sort of probably 18 month period so it was a real struggle for me to keep physically fit enough to um get to the physical conditioning levels and you need to be able to to compete at that level so I knew that my Rugby career was pretty much over anyways I was physically and a broken so I decided that if I couldn’t compete on the field the next best option was to help others to do it better and I you know part of the reason I was kicking myself about the particular choking episode was because I was studying sports psychology and I was finding it particularly interesting so I knew that I shouldn’t be saying that to myself but we know there’s a big difference between knowing.

And doing and that that really I suppose accelerated my focus in my academic studies knowing that if I wanted to make a career of this I needed to get a good undergraduate degree classification so that I could go to study a good master’s program and you did that JonHowell exclusively reveal for everybody listening or people who haven’t read the book and um your interest in sports psychology and the mental processes within sport prompted you to study a masters then and and because of your performance as an undergraduate you were able to um and during that time you had some contact with some very Progressive thinkers some people working on The Cutting Edge of the discipline and also um around a period term the decade of the brain where new new science specifically functional MRI technology enabled us to learn more about how our brain works yeah so where I studied my masters it was a five-star Research Institute this is the elite level of of research programs that’s judged by the government and we had a such a fantastic range of academics um carrying out Cutting Edge performance orientated research we had some very high profile um physiologists doing NASA research they were looking at muscle atrophy and the the impact astronauts going into space had on their muscles that was fascinating and then we had a group of sports scientists that were trying to use the latest measurement tools to really understand physical and mental performance sir we had the physiologists working with Olympic world champion athletes the biomechanic biomechanist doing the same really big and deep in terms of what was going on inside the body physically but we also had this psychology group um you know working in cahoots with those guys but the Sykes were not only looking at the physical impact of performance pressure all this stuff had on the body and the Brain but they were also starting to use those new sets of data that were emerging out of the decade of the brain where we were able for the first time to look inside the human brain in real time using Technologies like functional well primarily functional MRI scanners um yeah and I remember at the time a lot a lot of the for some reason the the French government had invested a lot into functional Mrs and I saw a lot of the papers we were reading were thankfully they weren’t raining French but I remember French academics because I can’t read French but they’re written by French academics so we were we were sort of on the first web of seeing this data and trying to make sense of it as to what did it mean for physical performance you know I’m one of the seismic things that was coming out of that data which might feel really obvious now is the is the concept of neuroplasticity that brains are changing all the time we did not used to understand that um and it was you know back then it was almost like we think we our brains are like plasticine but you know now we’re very compelled by that so yeah that was a fascinating time and again because I decided that I wanted to make a living out of this I just kind of threw myself into it and think off the back of that work that that year I had I think I generated um two or three peer-reviewed Publications um so I was just Keen to to Really throw myself into it and also because it was an Elite Sporting um university and it was lots of opportunity to practice applied sport psychology skills as we would call them there so normally getting the research but also able to apply that research

yeah thanks Jonthe Crux of it then really I suppose for people to to take away is that you as practitioners were able to see what you’ve said it in plain English but you just you think it’s worth re-emphasizing you’re able to see what is happening when people have a thought when people try to carry out a physical action you’re able to see what’s happening in the brain and and see patterns and establish the exact process when these things take place yes and your brains are very very complex organisms well I mean that’s an understatement when other brain is the most complex organism in the non-universe and we were certainly able to see those things far more

um precisely than anyone had been able to see them before so we were trying to make sentence of of some of those things we were seeing when you got activity you know in the front part of the brain what did that mean what did it mean when it was in this this love what it mean was in that lab so yeah trying to get a just sense of the big focus of my interest was in it it was an imagery and what we would call functional equivalence uh in in the book I talk about this in um chapter 24 forming under pressure where I talk about the um King George the The King’s Speech film it’s the King speech film isn’t it people recognize that yeah I use that I use that example and I introduced something called the t-tap model which is a functional equivalent practice model so the idea is that when you practice for a real performance you’ve got to be activating as many neurons as possible that you’re going to need to fire in that physical performance um so yeah we were using yeah we you know I I didn’t I didn’t see any of that stuff in my undergraduate and my suspicion would be nice I went back to the Amanda graduate again I’m not sure I would see any of it or you know maybe much of it I think my understanding speaking to peers and colleagues is that they were not exposed to this stuff and many of them still are not so even though that’s you know 20 years old now are these experiences that we’re sharing they’re still not widely accessed you think you think if someone’s done a degree in Psychology they must know everything about why people think and what they’re doing how to change their behavior well that’s a nonsense psychology is the most it’s so complex you think if you’re going to be a medical doctor you um you’re trained I think for seven years is a minimal then you specialize in something and you know medical DOT even your GP doesn’t know everything about everything they’ve got a general gist of things and will be seen in in their office with them sometimes and we’re going to have to go Google or look in their database to check something out so if you get a degree in Psychology you spend three years looking at something psychology has. I think it’s got seven core disciplines you’re going to maybe learn a little bit about one of those disciplines.

Whereas what really started to resonate with me in this when I started to get exposed to the brain in the master’s program where the brain is at the middle of all this the brains at the heart of this stuff and no one’s ever mentioned it to me before and when I’m reading all these other psychology texts but no one’s talking about the brain yet that’s the the heart of all of these processes and now we can look inside it we don’t have to rely on these black box outdated thinking um theories anymore we can move Beyond this and that was the start of the journey not just for me it was the first time we could actually see inside the brand so so yeah yeah and I think people might be worried that the podcast turning into uh University challenge or some sort of academic Forum but I think it’s so important just to flag that and emphasize that for people that this understanding now when you when you realize the understanding you had and the insights you gained you can see why it’s the foundation as you say for the Habit mechanic approach the book Habit mechanic University app and and changing behavior and understanding how people think so I think it’s really worthwhile just dwelling on that for a moment so back to you then Jonum after this period the successful period uh of study um you started to then move into the world of work where these these skills and insights are required the sports industry uh and you worked in a sports analytics company and in those disciplines and that that brought you to a lower league football club where some of this stuff really happened for real and and you were able to observe and influence some some really fascinating moments tell us more about that please yeah so I got the first job after my masters with a company called prozone that doesn’t exist anymore it’s now called stats there with one of the pioneering companies that were measuring in real time what professional athletes in particular footballers were doing on the field how far they were running how many tackles they were making how many passes they were making etc etc so they were creating this suppose statistical software package after every game the coaching staff of the teams that were our clients and as part of my training I got posted with a small team called Scunthorpe United who were at that time in League one which is third tier of the English professional football leagues and yeah I work with them for three so I ended up going to work with them um being employed by them not by I moved away from Frozen I actually just went to work at scunthorpe so I was using my ability to use the software but also my my psychology skills as well so I was the psych the psych analyst and in my second season we we won the league against the odds but we were more favorites to be relegated and get promoted and we ended up winning the league by by spending 50 Less on player wages than our direct competitors essentially the teams that came second and third in the league they spent about 50 more than his own player wages yet we accumulated more League points than they did and at the time it was a UK record in professional football for the least amount of money spent for the mostly points gained it was a seismic achievement and part of how we were able to achieve that there’s a real Moneyball story was that we were very good at recruiting young players from Premier League teams um from much bigger teams than us that that were very good doing players were very good but they weren’t better than David Beckham or Wayne Rooney or Stephen Gerrard so it was hard for them to get first team football on a regular basis at the Pinnacle of the English football pyramid so we typically take these guys on loan the young guys would see if we like them if we like them we typically pay in the region of about a hundred thousand pounds for them yeah some of the players that we we pay under a thousand pounds for a few years later I think we saw one guy on for a 95 profit and with the club that bought him was the clip the same club we bought him from so he was their products potentially but there were other young men I’d say not so much our club but um that you know you would see that that I would know because that was sort of my I hung around with quite a lot of high performing athletes um I knew from my own stories from the from the the things I was seeing in the league in the professional football rugby Cricket also from the literature just because you were one of the best when you were 18 it was not guarantee that anyone would even be paying you a profession a full-time wage to play full-time football for example when you were 21 22. so the what you would call The Academy to First Team transition became really interesting for me and then also when we got promoted to we got promoted out of League one into the championship which I’d argue is the most competitive league in the world which is the second tier of um English football so everyone fighting to get into the Premier League which is when I was the most lucrative soccer league in the world

I just saw a lot of really interesting transitions on my entire league what I’d call Performance transitions, leadership transitions so my interest in the Junior to senior slash Academy to First Team transition and the leadership performance transitions I was seeing during that promotion periods inspired me to do a PhD to learn more about the things I was seeing and at the heart of that PhD was a promotional regulation which I felt was the key to being healthy happy and at your best and if you could learn how to get good at it and Habit ualize it which I talk about I think it’s chapter 14 of the book implicit emotional regulation if you can do that then that is literally the yeah it’s the key to being healthy happy and at your best yeah so I think now people can see that when they’re following your story uh there’s this combination of real world practical experience and and seeing things happen for real and having access to these Cutting Edge and scientific insights about how the brain works and how Habits run us, it’s clear to see that that you’re starting now to approach uh where you are now today with a Habit mechanic although still still some way to go and another step on the journey um was was in another sporting discipline specifically professional golf you work for the professional golfers association and supported them um in an area that I suppose anyone who plays golf will recognize performing under pressure yeah so without going into too much detail the professional golfers association which is the preeminent training Organisation for golf coaches in the world the UK version is the preeminent one they’re wanted to introduce Sports Science into their training program and part of that was sport psychology golf psychology so they they asked me could I help to create that program and

you know people who’ve done sports psychology read about sports psychology will be familiar with ideas like imagery and self-talk and triggers Etc but I thought that we that’s going to be too intangible for the coaches to be able to really use when they’re giving a golf lesson so I thought how can we make this even easier for them so I created this thing called the pre-shot training program which was essentially taking what I understood about how we learn from what I’ve learned about how Brands work

taking wide learned about how we can activate the same neurons in the brain during practice that are going to be activated under pressure I created this physical toolkit coaches could use and golfers could use to help them to prepare or to practice to have to practice thinking the same thoughts that they were going to be thinking when the pressure came on so essentially the pre-shot case and I wrote a few books about this that you can get on things are available on Amazon um you can you can put the it’s a pack with big squares that you map out on the floor and you plan out your thoughts you plan out what you’re going to be saying to yourself that we now call Focus words and what you’re going to be imagining that we now call Focus pictures so he created made it really easy for golfers golf coaches to teach their golfers how to create really psychologically robust free free shot routines but also per shot routines and then actually we were able to use that same kit in different sports in different contexts because it made something that’s very intangible thinking into something that was really tangible something real real making it really easy to actually plan and to practice yeah and um a clue for people that that making the intangible tangible is something we’ll come on to later in John’s story and and as he and he says it relates to how how we all think and and this is now really uh I’m sure people will start to recognize that approach when they read The Habit mechanic book use the Habit mechanic University app or perhaps work with you on your certified Habit mechanic coach program Jonand just one thing very briefly on the golf I remember once uh working with you we were on a golf range with a golf journalist and um you took them through the pre-shot routine using the Practical kit talking about teaching them how to think more helpfully when playing golf and and I think we saw a pretty miraculous almost instant Improvement and it just struck me that of course in the certified hammock mechanic coaching programs you you show people how they can improve happiness and and performance by 25 over a 90-day period in other words a quick a quick effect a quick benefit and that happened in the in the realm of golf that is so you would you would emphasize this quick Improvement can take place when you focus on the right thing yeah you can get really quick wins and then the beauty of our approach is we show you how to Habit ualize that as well so yeah you know many people you will rock this this this podcast is obviously about that mechanic but we’re working to chat through chapter by chapter books uh are in the market that also have the word Habit in the title are often written by journalists and the backbone of my experience I’m explaining here I don’t mean to sound blossful or anything but just this is this is why this approach is different because I’m not a journalist like this is all I’ve done in my life since I’ve been um well a teenager I’ve been working on this putting it together piece by piece layer by layer testing and trying as we go along so I have a mechanic approach didn’t just magically appear it literally is it’s 20 plus years of work to get it to where it is now and all these um pieces of the puzzle that we’re talking through in this episode of have been absolutely key and the pre-shot was a real the pre-shot kit was a really important um foundational Stern in this program and it and we got told multiple times this is the best thing I’ve ever seen by world-renowned coaches you know people who coached world champion athletes this is the best thing I’ve ever seen um and without pre-shot we definitely wouldn’t have to have a mechanic and that leads on very nicely to to the next phase of this story that we’re telling uh this this story about your development and the development of the Habit mechanic approach um from from Elite Sport you then moved into education but that was because somebody recognized the benefits of of these approaches that were being favoured in Elite Sport um specifically you work for um a private school developing a very special specific program yes I work for the haberdasher’s Livery company with their Monmouth schools and yeah the the timing of my PhD finishing coincided with the build up to the London 2012 Olympic Games so that was a I suppose a natural focus on Sport and Elite Sport and the benefits that that brings and there was

a person called Sir Colin Moynihan who’s associated with the the haberdashers and the former people of them of them on the schools also a former well of Olympic Olympic medalist former Sports minister in the UK government and at the time he was the chairman of the or maybe there was the he was one of the senior leaders of the Olympic UK Olympic Association service Island involved in the London Olympics and it’s my understanding that he said in short I’ve always benefited from insights from sports psychology across everything I’ve done in my life so why wouldn’t you teach these skills to young people and the harbor Dash’s periodically put up money to bring in what they call teaching fellows experts into their schools to I suppose bring a competitive advantage to the young people there were developing and they’re really liked my PhD work but also the fact that I had things like the pre-shot care and I can make this stuff really practical so they said will you come and work in our schools for a few years you’ve got a blank piece of paper and you help us to integrate performance psychology into the day-to-day lives of our young people so that’s how that started and that was a really important chapter in the yeah in my journey to creating the Habit mechanic approach as well yeah and I suppose then that is uh the first time some well young people children which I think is very significant were exposed to this approach and they weren’t of course like professional athletes who For Better or Worse might have had a reason to be interested in improving their mental approach to what they did young children I’m sure um just go with the flow to it to a certain extent in their education so you were able to influence them very positively um and just digressing briefly that it’s worth pointing out I think that in education this approach really found its fate that the approach you now have and use in the Habit mechanic book and you see academic benefits as well academic benefits were seen and continue to be seen by young people who apply these approaches yeah absolutely so we’ve got really um

well refined and tried and tested but we have an entire curriculum um we call it the me power Academy school Success program and in fact yesterday I actually sent out um I made some of those resources from that curriculum freely available on our website because I know revisions a Hot Topic at the minute as exams rapidly approaching probably the first set of real exam since um the lockdown you know where there’s I suppose no no leeway being given to the young people taking them so the pressures on say I made some of those resources available yesterday for my curriculum but yeah we see um we’ve seen time and time again and these are not just examination Performance Tools these are two this the curriculum is for developing you know it’s like if you’ve read The Habit mechanic it’s the kids version of that um but the people always ask about impact and an obvious way to measure impact in education is exam performance so we’ve seen time and time again that if you take for example GCSE students just after that you mock exams mock GCSE exams which kids typically do before or after Christmas they give a um a baseline measurement for where everyone’s at and what we see then if we can if we take some young people after that after their mock exam so you’ve got a baseline measurement we give them say 12 weeks training program you know we don’t spend 12 full weeks with them but we teach them how to use our planner for example we give them an hour a week just upskilling them on different things we see that those children that we train to become Habit Mechanics they get an extra half a grade Improvement per subject compared to the pupils of don’t do it that’s an average some pupils jump on multiple grades so the everyone improves between their mock exams on average and their real GCSE results are the people that we work with improved by an extra half grade across every subject we don’t teach them anything about their subjects we teach them how to focus and learn and build better revision and exam performance Habit s and we teach them that stuff in a way that they can transfer those learnings out into every domain of their life so we hear the word transferable skills quite a lot this is the these are the real transferable skills I would say learning how to analyze your Habit s learning how to build better Habit s are the most important transferable skills that anyone can teach us and that’s what we teach young people yeah and it’s hugely impactful yeah and uh it links Us in very nicely to something else we’re going to talk about in the final half of the podcast and our discussion about the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the concerns and issues and debates around that stay stay with us for that it’s going to be fascinating um so back to your story then Jonwe can see now approaching full speed metaphorically then on your journey um and through this experience in Elite Sport in education developing your approach with with the insights you had at your fingertips you arrived at something which I don’t think you coined it at the time but later in the process of putting the Habit mechanic book together you call it the Habit mechanic Manifesto you you arrived at this this this insight about the pivotal nature of our brains and the pivotal nature of Habit s

yeah so the the public mechanic manifest if you go into the app which is free to download

um free to use this is labeled as our mission in there so yeah pulling it all together having mechanic money faster I am a Habit mechanic I don’t use outdated self-help and coaching methods that are becoming less and less effective in the challenging modern world I use proven insights from Putting Edge Neuroscience Behavioral Science and psychology to develop my own resilience and performance Habit s and I use the same techniques to help those around me Thrive and succeed I change people’s lives by empowering them to be their best my fellow Habit Mechanics helped me to be my best I’m only one Habit away so yeah in a nutshell that’s what I think the Habit mechanic approach is about um it’s a force for God it’s about helping people to actually do better and learn to do that in a way that they can also help others to do better um you can do that for only by learning to become a certified mechanic coach but equally um you know any tool that you’re currently using from the book it’s designed in a way that it’s easy to show someone else how to get the benefits yeah and in the book um you set out that Habit mechanic Manifesto for people to see and as you say it’s in the Habit mechanic University app too um you then go on to talk about an important concept I think um you use the phrase only one Habit away to I think show people how they can begin a journey to feeling better and doing better performing better um you talk about the idea of super Habit s and destructive Habit s and identifying those and the importance of that um please tell us more about that because I think it’s something that people really really does get their attention yeah so in short I’ve learned some Habit s a more impactful than others both positively and negatively the ones that are more positively impactful I call Super Habit s the ones that are more negatively impactful I call destructive Habit s the destructive Habit is something that you do one Habit that has a negative knock-on effect and activates lots of them lots of other unhelpful Habits so for example a restrictive Habit might be I finish work too late it’s uh I’m really hungry so I eat too much

um then I can’t sleep very well and then the next day I don’t feel very good so I’m not very productive you’re not very focused so I end up finishing work late again and I eat too much again and then I start to gain weight and it goes on like that it’ll be I I finished work too late and I’m stressed I have a glass of wine but then I have another glass and another glass and although I might fall asleep quickly the quality of my sleep is poor then the next day I’m not focused um I’m not productive because my brain’s not had the chance to clear out all the unhelpful things that have built up in it during the stress responses and therefore at the end of the day I’m stressed again and I have another glass of wine and it goes on like that so that’s an example of destructive or some destructive Habit s super Habit s are one thing one Habit you’ve got that activates lots of other helpful Habit s so for example on work days the first thing I do is I go for a run that’s a super Habit because by going for a run it means that well I get my account I I start my calorie count for the day I try to do about um 10 miles of work days walking and running I um get my brain working well get the right neurotransmitters into my brain so I can get my sit at my desk and be focused clever productive do the kind of work that makes me feel good about myself do the kind of work that helps me to achieve my goals I know that I’m going to eat more healthily if I’ve done that exercise I’ll be able to finish work on time and so on and so forth just by doing excuse me one of the one Habit going for the run and I have a multi I have lots of different you know creating a teapot is another Super Habit that I’ve got you see people doing that in the app every single day so yeah that’s a super Habit s and destructive Habit s and essentially that’s what the Habit mechanic approach is all about it’s a program to help you to find your destructive Habit s and Destroy them and also on cover your super Habit s consolidate the ones that you’ve got and build more and people might think wow the way you’ve explained it I can see how Habit ual innocuous behavior that might not even be noticed can have such a profound negative or positive effect on our lives and our well-being I think that’s a sobering sobering insight for people but I also think it’s worth stressing that in your approach you’re making it simple and practical for people to start the Journey of identifying these things and changing them if they want to yeah so it’s not good just knowing about supervisors and destructive Habit s you need the tools to help you to uncover yours and then build new Habit s and that’s what they have mechanic program which is in the book is all about so we start with the Habit metric tools to allow us to analyze our Habit s and then we use the Habit mechanic toolkit to allow us to build better Habit s always using a Habit building plan to allow us to activate the management factors to give us the best chance of actually getting rid of the neurons that are not helping us to be at our best and replacing them with neurons that will help us to fit our best yeah and normally on this podcast Jonwe save the questions to them but I think what we’re talking about is a great time to bring um the question um we’ve had in um and this question comes from David what is your second name David but thanks thanks a contribution and just a reminder please do keep your questions coming in we’ll Endeavor to answer them on the podcast uh submit your questions via the website tougherminds.co.uk or on social media if you want and and David asks actually he has read The Habit mechanic book um to some extent always is certainly come into contact with the ideas by the sound of it um he he asks talking about super Habit s and destructive Habit s will I will I discover more Super Habit s and destructive Habit s David asks as I continue using the Habit mechanic approach and continue on my journey with tougher Minds um or or will I just identify someone and then no more is it is it a fixed process or might I uncover more of these super Habit s and destructive Habit s as I go on yeah you will um because your life is changing and the rules are changing all the time you know so the injection of this human-like artificial intelligence will mean that some of the things that are currently helpful for us to do we won’t need to do those things anymore we can use that time to do something else but yeah absolutely and also you know you might create some good Habit s but then go on holiday something happens in your life and those Habit s they disappear so then you need to re-establish them one of the things for example I’ve just been aware for a week and I I’m one of one of the things I reflected on was so I I built previously a really good Habit of not checking the news in the week which some people think is that’s really extreme but I just found that that’s not helpful for me to keep checking the news when often there’s nothing that I’m missing out on you know if I just check the news at the weekend it’s actually quite rewarding to see all the interesting stories and how they’ve developed um but also I’m not constantly interrupting my attention by looking and seeing what’s on the news I’ve noticed that that Habit had really slipped um during the last period of time so I want to re-establish that now so I haven’t actually checked the news um yeah this week so far I’ve listened to the certain podcasts I listen to news podcasts and things that give me business news or whatever but you know I mean I’m going and actively looking at newspapers or on these websites but you can feel I can feel it would be easier for me just to open up the BBC website you know you can feel your you can feel that the urge to do that um so it’s just an example of me

re-establishing or destroying a destructive Habit that I’ve been on top of before but it slips so now I need to work on it again so our life is always dynamic things are changing the rules are changing and whenever you’re just going to find a set list of super and destructive Habit s there will be there’s always going to be a backbone of my super Habits it’s going to be pretty stable but there’s there will always be new little things that I’ll be adding into it tweaking and refining and the same for destructive Habits there’s a good chance that a new destructive Habit is going to creep into my life in the next next six months um it’s going to be really unhelpful for me but if I keep engaging in regular self-watching daily weekly monthly I’m going to be aware of that faster and therefore I’ll be able to destroy it faster so I hope that answers the question for David yeah I think it does Jonand David many thanks for for send any question in as I say please do keep them coming in by the website tougherminds.co.uk well um in the final bit of the podcast Jonum you’ve touched on it already we’re going to talk about a new story here relating to artificial intelligence so something you mentioned just in your answer then and um we’re prompted to do this again by um a podcast called the real story which is available on BBC sounds um and it asks the question can we control artificial intelligence because um a number of figures in the tech world have expressed major reservations about the rapid development of AI Elon Musk is among them I think in the in the podcast he says it’s it’s he’s reported as wanting to have a pause on the whole development of AI around the world apparently the European Union is developing regulations uh a regulative framework to govern AI China is trying to develop a law to regulate the development of AI and hundreds of senior figures in the technology sector have signed a letter asking for this pause to happen so real genuine concerns almost um sounds like um some sort of international diplomatic crisis the way they’re putting it and that’s the background that people are saying that AI can be terribly damaging in terms of things like human rights disinformation uh fake news Etc um but the podcast also interestingly asked for an expert panel to consider the risks and rewards of it more broadly um and one of the questions that they raised was should we automate all jobs uh and this feeds into the report by Investment Bank Goldman Sachs which said AI could replace 300 million full-time jobs in due course which we’ve talked about in previous podcasts in Europe only wow I missed that JonI missed that fact okay so that gives you a even bigger sense of the scale um and then um the final element which is just important as we just set this context a professor of computer science at the University of California Barclay um Stuart Russell and I’m paraphrasing him here he says in this new age of AI um people people an important distinction to draw will be involved in interpersonal jobs uh machines will do the routine tasks um and and he says um and I think this is so timely given it comes a few months after the publishing publication of the Habit mechanic that that the the the the job of helping people to be healthier happier and perform better um adding value to people’s lives won’t be regarded as I think he uses an American word woo-woo I slightly Airy fairy as we might say in the UK they will be regarded as essential to everyday life and I know that’s an approach that’s an analysis you have a a lot of time for yeah and I think that so we’re going to need more certified public mechanic coaches absolutely this is the thing and the challenge that Stuart Russell was still wrestled in an entire lecture series for this on the BBC I think Christmas of 2021 in the is it the wreath or the rift lecture series um yeah he points out that human we’re going to need humans to look after each other essentially because AI is a is millions of miles away currently from being able to do that and being able to read humans emotions Etc but the challenge that we face is and he points this out the main stream approaches to doing it and not very effective and the woo-woo is is an American terminal for what we call in the UK a little bit fluffy it’s not very robust and the way I think about it so if you’ve got and it’s interesting actually we can contextualize this because there was some data that came out yesterday

um from the New York University’s Brookings Institute a very well regarded Research Institute and and their data showed that 23 of the U.S adult population has mental health challenges that’s about 58 million adults in the us alone an interestingly what they find is is that if you’ve got these mental health challenges when you’re between 27 to 35 years of age so if you know if you’re now between the age of 27 to 35 you’ve got mental health challenges that by the time you get to 50 your earnings will be 24 lower than those peers that don’t have mental health challenges right in the same age period you know so they’re starting to tie us not our brain’s not working well or has not been able to get our brains working well not being able to build and sustain helpful Habit s with things like loss of earnings substantial loss of earnings and I think that’s really interesting and when I look at what are the what are the if I’m 27 if I’m 35 in fact if I’m any age what are the solutions available that can actually help me to do better well one is we have medicine and if we look at the nine action factors which is in chapter 18 of the book I’m not going to go into all of it now but we look at the animation factors medicine really deals with just one of those factors which is brain optimization which is great it’s a great starting point but it doesn’t deal with the other eight factors you need to activate to help you to build and sustain more helpful Habit s which is what mental health management is about which is what also what high performance is about so that’s one mainstream approach we use the other mainstream approach we use is therapy or coaching traditional coaching and I’d say if you plug medicine and traditional coaching together that probably represents 99.9.9.9 of the ways that people use tell them to do better but therapy and traditional therapy and coaching also are not all that effective because the only active are I think three of the nine action factors they’ll help you to get your brain working better they’ll help with some process of stress they’ll help with your mindset which is another one of the Natural Factors and they’ll also help with some more knowledge and some more skills which is another one of the island management factors but it’s they’re still don’t directly deal with the other six plan action factors so we need to get better at helping at learning how to help ourselves and others to do better in a sustainable way one because the AI ain’t gonna be able to do that anytime soon so that’s where our jobs are going to be but two because the current approaches are not very effective they’re a great starting point that they’ve done they’re not designed to actually help people to change and build new lasting helpful Habit s because they don’t activate all of the management factors the only approach that I know that does that it is the private mechanic approach and that’s what people that are training to become certified having mechanic coaches are learning how to do behavior is like a game because there is this established set of rules that we Now understand that drive what we do so when you’re trying to become a certified have a mechanic coach you’ll learn how to play the game in your own life but you also learn how to help others to play the game so they’ve got a better chance of winning uh so that they’re healthier happier and at their best more often so yeah I think it’s a fascinating area and as you’re saying it just makes the mechanic approach more important because we can use AI to do lots of we’re going to be able to use AI human like to do lots of things but it ain’t going to help us to

um do the very clever human what we might call you know approaching processes um because you know the text just nowhere near being able to do those generalizable things yet yeah and I think another another facet of this which feeds into the Habit mechanic approach Jonum obviously you’ve told us everything we need to know really then about that about that idea of working towards getting people to help each other more in the way that they need to be helped in this in this new world A Brave New World to quote uh Aldous Huxley but also this is a massive period of change and flux in in business and industry and in society and the Habit mechanic approach can can help us be resilient and and manage the change successfully

yeah so the heart of changes Habit s ultimately your organization is built on Habit s you know just taking this a step back from that as well you know if we just think about education we don’t need teachers to dispense the knowledge anymore it’s available on Google is available in you’re going to be able to get a an artificial intelligent chat bot to teach you anything that you want to learn we already see that in the language apps you know language learning apps much more effectively 24 7. than um a human a human being come by themselves so we’re gonna need what we’re going to need from from Educators is that they are actually better at their job is to nurture and Coach the young people so you don’t for example get the first learning of Shakespeare in the class you do that outside of the classroom and then what you do in the classes you know it’s more discursive it’s more about coaching and tweaking and refining yeah so coaching is key but yeah the the change management is harder than ever to do I’m hearing and it’s more relevant than ever because when we’ve now got probably millions of people right now as we as we speak looking into how do we embed this new human-like AI into our businesses how do we use it to help our businesses be more competitive and be our competitors um but in order to do that we’re going to have to help people to develop new Habit s and not just Habit s to use a new tech but actually a Habit s so that it can do more focused clever high impact work that the artificial intelligence can’t do when we talked about that I think in the last episode of the podcast so yeah

having some more important than ever before because we have to get better at understanding the positives and negatives are on Habit s bring to our own lives to positives and negatives our people’s Habit s bring to the culture of our organisations and then we have to help people to actually build new sustainable long-lasting Habit s and again The Habit mechanic is the only approach I I know that does that

yeah well certainly um as you say we’ve discussed it before and I’m sure we’ll be discussing it again because uh the development of artificial intelligence will no doubt be in the headlines and affecting our lives and our work um well in many different ways so many many years to come um you talked about working with businesses there and and as we come to the end of the podcast JonI just wanted to um ask you a little bit actually about the Keynotes you’ve been doing I know you’ve been out and about um working with a new agency um uh to to promote your keynote Services as well we were talking in previous podcasts about some of the uh others others you’ve been uh reaching agreement with to work with and help people access your Keynotes in the world of business and Sport and education um and and great news the vbq agency I think is is the the latest one um your keynote obviously something that you’ve developed this year the Habit mechanic keynote um again we’ve talked about a quick win and in that you’re saying that that you can help people to develop the happiness and performance by at least 16 in in 90 minutes what what can people expect from a Habit mechanic keynote if they if they have the uh the fortune to experience one yeah well very quickly you’re gonna be able to analyze your own how we’ll learn how your brain works analyze your own Habit s there and then and then be equipped with the tools that will allow you to build by the Habit s in which area whichever area you want sir you know many Keynotes are just someone telling a story something that’s that’s interesting that might hopefully be inspirational this goes beyond that you will be inspired I think by your own abilities that are locked away inside you and the fact that you can learn to unlock them but actually will help you to analyze yourself start to build even the toolkit to start building better Habit s so we know people are time poor um that’s why we designed very deliberately have a mechanic key not to be so to have such high impact in such a short space of time um you can check out details on our website um and you know if people are interested in booking a keynote for their their team for their organization and just get in touch and we can have a conversation yeah and I think um and something else just worth just worth mentioning anyone who who does just speak to you about a keynote that they also can discuss the opportunity to get signed copy of the Habit mechanic book and free access to the Habit mechanic University app too so something to take away with you from from that experience yeah so you get the toolkit you don’t just you know the main thing I hear about people’s experiences of keynot says well that was really interesting but you know I put the notes in a draw and I never use them again we need to move beyond that now because people need help to do better and what that means is they need help to build to understand their own Habit s and build new Habit s so we give you the tool the toolkit to be able to do that which when you plug the app and the book together it’s a very very powerful toolkit well thanks for that Jonand yeah you can find out more on the top of Minds website tougherminds.co.uk and you’ll see keynote in the top menu there well Jonthanks so much for your time again um absolutely fascinating to hear your story of how you started and how you arrived at where we are today with a Habit mechanic book an Amazon bestseller and the Habit mechanic University app and your certification programs so people can become Habit mechanic coaches and your Keynotes and services and also what’s offered to education as well so um it’s been it’s been fascinating to talk and dive deep into chapter eight of the book uh thanks for your time um we’ll be back with another podcast soon so please do like like us on the platform you get your podcast from leave a review if you can five star one would be great and subscribe as well so you don’t miss out when we release a new episode of this Habit mechanic podcast um yeah thanks again Jonum anything you’d like to say in closing just thank you to you Andrew thank you to everyone for listening and remember you’re only ever one Habit away.