What happens when you put pre-teens in a room, offer them $40 for 10 minutes of work, and then provide the opportunity to blow it all on overpriced goodies?
The book giveaway this week is Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success, a collaborative book developed by some of the folks at VitalSmarts, located right here in Utah. The following social experiment tests the authors’ ideas around behavior, specifically six key areas of influence that can either work for you or against you.
While many of us hope that we aren’t as blind as these pre-teens when it comes to achieving our goals, if we honestly evaluate why we struggle with certain bad habits, we may well find that these influences are wreaking havoc on our progress as well when they could be easily transformed into ingredients for success.
Take a minute after you watch the video and identify one bad habit you would like to change. I am using the concepts and the book to test out whether I can boost productivity by waking up earlier each morning, identifying a high impact task the night before, and completing it by 11 AM.
What influences are working against your desire to change:
- Do your family members or friends have the same bad habit?
- Do they engage in the bad habit with you or pressure you to join in?
- Is the temptation sitting openly in your environment at home or at work, constantly triggering the craving?
- Are you lacking the knowledge or skills needed to effectively tackle the habit?
How might you turn one or two of these built-in barriers into your own competitive advantage?