How to be a Habit Mechanic and thrive in the post-COVID world with Dr. Jon Finn

Kathi: Hi everyone, this is Kathi, and today I am with Dr. Jon Finn. I'm so excited because we're going to talk a lot about resilience and how to beat that person on your back that's just talking to you about how you can't do it, and how we're going to bounce back. So welcome, Jon, to the show. I'm so happy to have you here.

Jon: Well, delighted to be here, Kathi. Thank you for having me.

Kathi: Absolutely. I know you have a lot of degrees in your background, but talk to me a little bit about the journey on what got you to where you are with behavioral science and resilience.

Jon: Yes. So when I was 18, I went to university to study sport science: physiology, psychology, nutrition, motor control. That's the science of how we learn. And I got really interested in the psychology side of it. I was a very good rugby player and I got selected to play in the international rugby student squad. We were playing in a warm-up game before an Australia test match, and I was the fullback. It was a cold, wet, windy day in the north of England. I was 19. We were playing against the men's professional team, and the ball went high up into the air. I was stood on my goal line. All I had to do was catch the ball, which I'd done thousands of times before, but all I could say to myself was, "Don't drop it. Don't drop it. Don't drop it." And of course, well, I didn't even drop the ball. I just completely missed the ball. They got a try. I got substituted. I didn't get selected for the match. I sustained quite a bad injury around then as well. I ruptured one of my quads. So I wasn't going to be playing high-level rugby anymore.

Jon: So I decided, if I can't play, I want to help people to be at their best. So I made it my goal to become a performance psychologist. I went on to study a master's, eventually a PhD, and just made it my mission to help other people to be at their best. And I was lucky: around the time I was doing my master's, a technology called functional MRI scanners, which was the first tech that allowed us to see inside people's brains in real time, became cheap enough for researchers to buy it and start to use it. And I was studying with a group of scientists that were really interested in the neuroscience of performance psychology. So I was on the cutting edge of that piece of work.

Jon: And what really rung home for me was that all the things that we'd been taught were very much about helping people to know what they should do differently. Very little about how do you actually help people to make sustainable change. And this is still the case. Most of the advice that's out there is based on theories and insights that are not based on how brains actually work. They're based on what we call black box theories. So I made it my mission to actually take insights from cutting-edge neuroscience and behavioral science and make them really simple for people to implement in their lives.

We don't do what we know we should do. We do what we're in the habit of doing.

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Jon: And of course, what all that science shows is that most of what we're doing most of the time is mindless behavior. It's automatic or semi-automatic. In other words, it's a habit. So pop psychology has done a really bad job in educating people about how important habits are, because most of that work is based on black box theories. It's outdated theories that say habits are about 50% of what we do. We think of habits as things that we do. We don't think of a habit as beating yourself up, worrying too much. That's as habitual as anything else. So we have a tiny bit of consciousness. Habits are running at least 90% of what we're doing, and sometimes it's everything. So we are extremely mindless. A good example is most of us understand, and in fact we agree, that it's a good idea to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and to walk 10,000 steps. We don't do what we know we should do. We do what we're in the habit of doing. So the key is to build better habits. And it's not a nice-to-have. It's driving you. It's driving your family. Habits drive your business. And yet we don't think about them, because they're invisible to us.

Kathi: Oh, sorry. I thought you were going to say that we know we're supposed to do the 10,000 steps, we know we're supposed to eat, but we don't know why. And that's probably true, too. It's just one of those things that we're supposed to be doing, but yet we don't do it. I had a quick question during that story when you said, "Don't drop the ball. Don't drop the ball. Don't drop the ball," and then you didn't even catch it. I thought that was interesting, because usually I think, with programming your mind, you would catch it and then drop it, it seems to me. But also, how long did it take you to figure out? Did you know immediately that that's where your disconnect was, or did you have to look back on that game and say, "Oh, okay. That was the deal"?

Jon: Yes. Looking back, that was an important point. But when you're 19, the parts of your brain that allow you to do the very conscious thinking are not properly wired, because for males, those parts of the brain are not properly wired until we're about 25. Females, about a year ahead. So we get written off when we're 16, 17, 18, 19, early 20s, but our brains are not properly wired yet. So in that story, I knew what I should do, but the habits didn't allow me to do that, because the brain's a threat detection machine. So it was about the threat of messing it up, looking bad, et cetera. And that took over, because the threat detection parts of the brain run the brain, ultimately.

Kathi: Yeah, that's quite interesting. So you've helped so many businesses and helped them with resilience. What do you think is the main lesson that you've learned through helping other businesses be resilient? Is there one factor? Do you think it's the beliefs and the habits, or what would you say about that?

Jon: Well, there are nine factors that drive what we do. So it's not just about belief. Belief is maybe one of those factors. The why, we said before, is another. So that's two. There's still seven more. So we've got to understand the behavioral science that drives what we do. We've got to understand what our brains are designed for. We've been around as a species for over 300,000 years, and our world has dramatically changed. Even in the last few years, our world's dramatically changed. So what we're designed to do isn't what we get asked to do every day. We're designed to walk about 12 miles a day, to move around and solve problems.

Kathi: Really?

Jon: That's what we think, anthropologically. And when we move around, it's easier for us to think cleverly, because we get this protein called BDNF released into our brain. So if we want to help people in businesses to be at their best, we first of all have to understand what their brain is designed to do and what are the factors that drive what they do, the behavioral science. And that's why I wrote the book, The Habit Mechanic, to make it really simple for people to understand these things and to help themselves and their people to build better habits.

Jon: So a lot of the work that I do day to day is helping senior leaders in businesses to move away from what we call knowledge-based strategies. So they're strategic plans that map out: this is what we need to do in the business to achieve our goals. And help them to move towards what we call habit-based strategies. That is, what are the habits our people need to develop and adapt and adopt in order to help the business to achieve? I saw an interesting stat recently that said only 9% of businesses, this is in the US, are happy with their performance management systems. Only 9% of businesses think their performance management systems work.

Kathi: Wow, that is amazing.

Jon: If you went to a professional sports team and asked them, "How happy are you with your player fitness and conditioning levels?" I think you'd get over 95% saying, "Yeah, we're really happy," because they use science to inform how they get their players fit.

Kathi: When it comes to performance management, I wonder how many companies really think about that. More and more, I know here in the US, they have a computer that'll beep at the top of the hour saying, okay, get up and move, and small little things like that, but nothing along the lines of what sports leagues do.

Neuroscience and behavioral science are the equivalent for us in our professional and in fact home lives.

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Jon: Well, businesses are investing millions and millions of pounds into this. Most businesses have performance management systems. That's everything from the peer review structure to your annual reviews, and all that stuff is designed to get people doing the right things, and they're all saying it doesn't work. It doesn't work because it's not based on how people actually operate and the science that drives us. So for me, if we look at what sport science has done for professional sport in the last 20 years, where it's looked at what makes people physically fitter, what's the science of human physiology, and started to use that to inform how it helps players to get fitter: neuroscience and behavioral science are the equivalent for us in our professional and in fact home lives. We can use that science, what you might call habit science, to actually make it easier for us to do the kind of things that we'd like to do and know that we should do, to be healthier and happier and at our best more often, individually and collectively. So I think from a business perspective, if you want to help yourself and your people to build better habits, I'd start with The Habit Mechanic, because that's what it's written to do. Over 10,000 people use our approaches, and already people are saying the book has changed their life, and it's starting to change how people do in their businesses as well, in the hybrid workplace.

Kathi: I love it. I love it. And congratulations on your success. Everyone out there listening, this is a bestselling book and you should definitely grab a copy of it, and we'll have a link for you below the podcast here. So throughout your youth and growing up, what's the best piece of advice that you ever learned, maybe from one of your coaches or your parents or relatives? Is there something that sticks in your mind that was a really good takeaway?

Jon: I think one of the best pieces of advice is that you never lose an hour, which means every hour you invest in something you get back one way or another, even if it doesn't pay you back immediately. That was from my father. I worked with my father from maybe being 12, 13 years old, on building sites, et cetera. They would work 12-hour days, 60-hour weeks. Leave home at 4:00 on a Monday morning to travel down to London, get back at 7:00 on a Friday night. So hard work was drilled into me. But that's the thing with being a business owner, isn't it? Someone isn't paying your wage for you. If you're getting paid a wage every week, you're guaranteed a return on the energies you put in. When you're working for yourself, you don't get the same short-term guarantees necessarily. So it's having the confidence that what you invest, you're going to get back eventually. So you don't lose an hour that you invest in yourself.

You don't lose an hour that you invest in yourself.

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Kathi: I love that. That's really, really good advice, and I've never heard it coined that way. So that's a great piece. Go, Dad. So he did construction? He built buildings, or is that what he did? Contractor?

Jon: Yeah. So he builds laboratories, and he has a factory now that makes the furniture for that, and all my siblings work for him.

Kathi: Awesome. And then you broke away and you said…

Jon: Escaped.

Kathi: Yeah. That's fantastic. So do you have a favorite hack that you use to keep yourself organized as you go throughout the work week?

Jon: Yeah. Well, I think the spine of becoming a habit mechanic is to work out what are your destructive habits and what are your super habits. And that's what The Habit Mechanic book is about. It shows you how to work those things out. So as part of my journey to becoming a habit mechanic, and still growing as a habit mechanic as I develop my habit mechanic intelligence and my chief habit mechanic intelligence, there's a backbone of what I call super habits to my day. So super habits have a disproportionate positive impact on my day. Destructive habits have a disproportionately negative impact on my day.

Jon: So the first super habit I do every day is I go for a run. It gets the right chemicals working in my brain so that when I come back from the run, I'm ready to do my work, to do my most challenging jobs of the day. Helps me to regulate what I eat. Helps me to be more productive. Helps me to finish work on time. Helps me to accumulate more exercise so I can sleep better at night. So just doing that one thing has all these other beneficial effects. Another super habit is called the Daily TEA Plan. And if you're interested in the Daily TEA Plan and learning how to do it, it's the first chapter in the book. It's also the core part of what we do in the Habit Mechanic University, which is a free app, which is on Apple and Google Play. So we have a community of habit mechanics. We just launched this, actually, and the core thing we do in the app is we share the Daily TEA Plan. So if you want to learn how to do that, that's in the app.

Kathi: Daily TEA Plan? Okay, that's interesting.

Jon: Daily TEA Plan. Tiny Empowering Action.

Kathi: I love it. What would be an idea of a destructive habit that would just compound your day and give you a bottleneck?

Jon: So one example: if we think of the current working context, hybrid work, people report they're working longer hours. People feel busier than ever. So I work too late. That's the destructive habit. Because I work too late, I eat too late. Because I eat too late, I'm very hungry, so I eat too much. Because I eat too much, I don't sleep very well. Because I don't sleep very well, I feel groggy and unproductive the next day. And now I start to gain weight. And the next day, I finish work even later. And you see how very quickly it spirals.

You see how very quickly it spirals.

Kathi: Yeah, that's interesting. So what are some ideas of ways to jump-start for people who are not runners? What would be other recommendations to start your day with? I love the running idea, but some people just don't run.

Jon: Yeah, just walking, just getting out and moving around, whether it's just for five minutes. So the key is to start with something that's really easy to do. If you don't do any exercise right now, if you don't go out of the house right now before you start work, giving yourself the goal of going for an hour walk isn't going to be that sustainable. Just walk around the block to start with. Just build that habit of getting out the door and moving around. So, I'm just going to go out for a five-minute walk, but do it with a little bit of intensity. You see people walking the dog and just ambling along. When you start to walk a little bit faster, the benefits really go up, and you'll feel better when you come back. I'm also on a workstation treadmill right now, believe it or not. So I'm stood on a treadmill, which you can hear beeping, so I can start to walk now. So you can invest in a workstation treadmill if you're that way inclined, or you can just go walk outside.

Kathi: And I love the walking. My mother always used to say, if you're going to walk, make it count. And she would always walk very fast. She was off like a clip.

Jon: Neurobiologically, we are designed to move around. Walk up to 12 miles a day, and that feels a far-away concept now. If you go back a hundred years in London, for example, people walked about 10 miles a day on average. We've really gone into this sedentary lifestyle, and the pandemic increased that further. So we're not saying you need to walk 12 miles a day. We're just saying, whatever your footsteps are now, how can you improve them a little bit, and a little bit more? We've got the tech now that makes it easy to do that.

Kathi: So if you had to look back in time and tell your 18-year-old self, probably before the incident at 19 happened, what advice would you give your younger self?

Jon: Yeah, I thought about this question, Kathi. I couldn't think of anything, because I wouldn't want to skew the space-time continuum, you know? I wouldn't want to mess anything up, because I'm pretty happy where I am. I think everything that's happened to me has stacked up to where I am right now. So maybe if I'd been given some advice, it might have knocked me off course. So I'm not sure how to answer that question.

Kathi: That's a good answer, actually. And other people have answered similarly. I think we are where we are. We are blessed to be where we are because of all the stuff that we've been through, for sure. So is there anything that I should have asked you that we haven't discussed here? Something that you really want to talk about? Definitely, everybody needs to check out the book, and we'll put the link there. But what have I missed in this conversation?

Jon: I think we could talk for a couple hours. But I think people know what habits are, or we think we know what they are. We just need to reinforce how fundamental they are for everything that we're doing. So your judgment of me at the start of this podcast wasn't formed by logical, conscious thinking. It's formed by habits. You make a judgment of someone within five seconds. You judge their entire life. That's not a conscious, clever idea. It's habits. How I'm breathing right now is habits. How I'm standing and moving my hands and speaking are habits. So habits are driving everything that we do. If you want to be healthier, you want to be happier, you want to give yourself the best chance of being at your best, it's about understanding your habits and getting better at building more helpful ones. And once you do that, you can then start to help other people to do that by becoming a chief habit mechanic.

It's about understanding your habits and getting better at building more helpful ones.

Jon: The key question to ask me, Kathi, was where do you get the book from? Amazon is the best place to get it. It's in all the formats: physical, ebook, audiobook. I narrate the audiobook, which, if you like my voice, that's good news. If you don't, that's bad news. And it's not a book that's got one idea in it repeated 10 times. This is a manual for life. It's a toolkit for success. It's got over 30 habit-building tools. Once you learn how to become a habit mechanic, it shows you how to become a chief habit mechanic, how to create a high-performance culture. I use this book every day, and I wrote it. It took me over 20 years to write. It's a real workbook. It's really well written, so it's simple to understand. It's based on really good science. It's packed full of examples and case studies and stories. So if you want to be healthier, happier and at your best, this is the book for you.

Kathi: Fantastic. Fantastic. Everybody, make sure to download it. Now, do you have a valuable free resource that you'd like to offer the people to get them initiated into it?

Jon: So I would recommend checking out the Habit Mechanic University app, which is absolutely free. You can get going straight away with creating your TEA Plan and learning more about the daily, weekly, monthly habit-building tools that we use. We've got a whole community of people in the app, and then we've got challenges that we're running there, the more sophisticated elements of the app. So go there, check it out, get it on your phone, get it to the front screen on your phone so it's nice and accessible. Just spend two minutes in there, minimum, every day creating your TEA Plan, and it will save you at least one hour every day. So if you want to save at least one hour every day, get the app.

Kathi: Hey, you're talking my language there. Everybody needs means to create more time. So absolutely, download the app. I'm going to do that. That sounds really interesting. And we can access it anytime we want, and we just start on our own?

Jon: Yeah, it's all in there. There are people from all over the world using it, so you'll see someone else in your time zone using it.

Kathi: Oh, perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. It's been a really, really interesting conversation, and I'll sign off unless there's anything else that you would like to add. Everybody, make sure that you check out the book. Buy the book on Amazon. Twenty years' worth of research. I think you're going to learn a few things. Maybe just a little.

Jon: Yes. We'll put a link to The Habit Mechanic.

Kathi: Absolutely. Yep. It'll be right down below. We're going to put a link to the app, and we'll also put a link to the book. And congratulations on making that a bestseller, Jon. I really appreciate and really congratulate you for spending 20 years putting this book together. I know it's going to be super valuable for everybody.

Jon: Thank you, Kathi. Thank you for having me, and thank you to everyone for listening.

Kathi: Absolutely. Take care. We're signing off for now. And everybody, make sure to download that, and make sure to also download a copy of the Six Steps to Organize Your Amazing Life. So download all your freebies, get them while you can. And signing off for now. Thank you, Jon.

Jon: Thank you, Kathi.