>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm here to welcome
Caroline Arnold to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Caroline is here to discuss
her book Small Move, Big Change; Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently.
She has designed a system involving small pivotal behavioral changes that will lead to true
personal transformation. She has been a technology leader on Wall Street for more than a
decade and is a managing director of a leading investment banking firm. She led the team at
Morgan Stanley that was awarded the Wall Street and Technology Award for creating the
Google IPO auction platform. Please join me in giving her a very warm welcome. [applause]
>> Caroline Arnold: Thank you, really. Thank you all for coming. It's great to be here. It's a
special pleasure for me to be at Microsoft because I am a tech person and I grew up
programming on Visual Basic, Visual C++, . Net, still important technology to me today. In
addition to programming languages, the Office Suite is still, figures largely in a lot of the
innovative things that we do. As Amy mentioned, my team built the auction platform for the
Google IPO, which was a very unusual transaction. I don't know how many people remember,
but anyone in the United States was allowed to sort of bid on Google stock and we only had six
weeks to build a system that would gather all of these bids across Wall Street and process
them, and so almost immediately we hit on the idea that we would be passing Excel files back
and forth between these brokerage firms and ourselves. This is my first book and it's my first
book tour. It's my first time in Seattle. It's not my first time on a Microsoft stage because in
2003 I was invited for the 2003 launch of Office to appear with Steve Ballmer in Orlando. My
handlers who got me ready and told me what to expect, said when you go out there Steve will
ask you some questions. If he doesn't like you, like if you are bombing, he will just thank you
for coming. [laughter]. And even if you haven't finished that's your cue to leave [laughter] so
just go and, you know, sort of like the Ballmer hook. And I went out there and it was sort of like
being shot from a cannon. There were all these blaring lights and everything and I thought we
were talking a lot, but it seemed to go by for me like in a second. When I exited I thought, you
know, well, how did it go? And they said oh my God, that was like a home run. He kept you
two minutes over and like that two minutes was considered, you know, Steve's time being as
critical as it is, was considered a sign of success. I have a little bit longer today and I just, you
know, if I'm looking, wondering is he going to appear and thank me for coming [laughter]
halfway through the thing here that would be bad. It is the new year and this book is about
change. It's a time of change. Can I just ask for a show of hands for how many people have
made a New Year's resolution? Okay. How many people have kept their New Year's resolution
so far? Okay. A little fewer. How many people can remember their New Year's resolution from
last year? How many people succeeded at their New Year's resolution last year? Okay. Ninety
percent of people fail at their New Year's resolutions whether you are a high achiever or not.
It's the punchline this time of year on late-night talk shows and stuff. It's such a common thing
to fail at your New Year's resolution. Organizer shops and fitness programs and diets and even
books like mine do their best business during January because that's the time when we kind of
shake ourselves out of the holiday doldrums and do something, but very few of us succeed. It's
a rare event to succeed at a New Year's resolution and I think a very common thing when you
fail at your New Year's resolution is to blame yourself. I think it's kind of a common thing to say
I just wasn't strong enough. Why am I so weak? Why can't I succeed at this? I succeed at other
things. But in fact it isn't weakness. It's not a character flaw. It's neurological. Willpower is a
neurological resource and it actually shares a pool; it's part of a pool of neurological resources.
Mental energy activities, one is willpower. One is active initiative, you know, taking charge of
things. One is decision-making and problem-solving. They all share sort of the same pool.
Willpower is depleted over time and if you stress your willpower too much it just runs out. But
because it also shares this same mental spaces with these other really important brain
activities, other things can deplete your willpower. If you have to make a lot of decisions during
the day at your job, it's taking away from that willpower space. Anytime you have to kind of
negotiate yourself or get yourself up for, using the same mental energy as that willpower space.
That's a lot of why people fail and there is a way to sort of rethink these resolutions so that you
can be more successful. So coming back, fundamentally, coming back to the resolutions that
we make, I'm going to read some resolutions and you tell me, raise your hand if you've ever
made any one like this before. Anyone ever made the one to be fit, you know, go to the gym?
Go running. Okay. A lot of people. How about to be slim by summer? That one. Okay. Be
organized? Be on time? Get more sleep? Okay, good, because sleep is important. We'll talk
about that more. How about to be more assertive? To be less defensive? Improve a
relationship, okay. If you listen to the language like on being neat, if you listen to the language
of those resolutions, they are a lot about being, to be something different. Really, they're
closer to wishes than they are to resolutions for action. When you're a slob and you resolve to
be neat, you're just wishing to be a different person, to like drop all the habits and the
behaviors. If you make a resolution to be organized, you're pretty much going to, every time
you touch a piece of paper all day, be organized. Be organized. Open a kitchen drawer, be
organized. Be organized, be organized be organized. And pretty soon you've exhausted your
will to change. I mean, you're really putting yourself in a space where your number one activity
is telling yourself to be different in another way. That is a large part of why it is stressful to
make a New Year's resolution. The way that we actually are able to preserve this mental
energy we have is that mostly you are running on a kind of personal autopilot all day long. It's
the massive behaviors and attitudes and preferences and habits that you learn through your
whole life. It's mindless and its efficient autopilot. It doesn't cost you any willpower or real
mental activity. You don't have to concentrate to tie your shoes, right? Autopilot ties your
shoes. Autopilot locks the door. If you grew up making your bed, autopilot makes your bed for
you. You turn around to make your bed and go my God. My bed is made. The stealthy hand of
autopilot did it for you. You didn't even realize it. It's so mindless for you. But if you didn't
grow up making your bed and you decide you are going to make your bed, it will cost you. It
will cost you because it's not part of autopilot. Autopilot does a lot of good things for us
because it allows us to kind of, has a low efficient hum of running your day. But autopilot is
also the thing that snags the last donut by the coffee machine. You know, it's the thing that
snaps at your partner when there's a certain kind of dynamic. It's the thing that causes you to
skip the gym. If you don't usually go, and you make a resolution to go to the gym, if it hasn't
been part of your autopilot, you'll feel tremendous resistance. Autopilot is about resisting
change because that's what makes it efficient. It pushes back on change because routine is its
thing. So when you make a resolution to be organized, you are really declaring war on
autopilot, because you're going to have to be conscious about every single thing you do all day
to be organized. And that's what depletes your willpower so quickly. Between autopilot and
that mass of sort of ingrained behaviors and attitudes and stuff, willpower is the loser.
Autopilot is the winner, generally. Now some people will say oh. I've known people who have
had these, they transform themselves overnight and that can happen. It's just a very rare event
and often it's attached to something negative. If you get a bad health report or you get a bad
review on the job that says you are disorganized, you might clean up your desk overnight and
be really on to that and it's going to dominate your life. Or if you fall out of a relationship, I've
seen people fall out of a relationship and all of a sudden they are at the gym and they are
eating less and things like that. But mostly, you don't want to be driven by -- like Alec Baldwin
who was very thin in his 20s and then he gained a lot of weight and, you know, sort of ended up
being the heavy in films, got a, just past year was told he was becoming diabetic and in three
months he gave up sugar and lost 40 pounds. And he could've lost that 40 pounds anytime. It
would have probably been healthy for his career, but he didn't because it kind of got tied to
something dire. You don't want to only change or be able to change when you get that kind of,
be put in that kind of situation. You want to really be able to change all the time. The thing
about New Year's resolutions and the failure thing we get into, make a big push and then we
make some progress. You lose some pounds or something and then it sort of withers, right,
and it goes. And you think gosh, if you don't think that you're weak. You think that it's because
it was the wrong time. It's such a stressful time. In three months I'll be able to do it and you
get into this kind of stopping and starting and stopping and starting without making any
progress and the book that I'm here to talk about today, Small Move, Big Change is about
continuous self-improvement. You are just redesigning your behaviors one at a time. It's about
the transforming power of the marginal behavioral change. The marginal behavioral changes
that you can sustain forever can transform you, your personal life and your professional life.
Okay. How did I get into this? I mean, how did I come to be here talking about this book? I
came because I myself was a resolution breaker, so several years ago I had broken my
resolution four years in a row. My resolution was to lose weight and exercise more. Lose
weight and exercise more. And I had broken it every year and I couldn't understand that. I
mean the failures were a mystery to me. And how was it possible that I could move a mountain
at work and do pretty well for my family, but the one thing that I wanted to do to change
myself I was a bust at every year? And I thought it must be that I am picking the wrong
resolutions. It's just so hard to eat less and exercise more. I'm going to pick something easy
because this year I'm going to succeed. So the easy resolution that I picked for myself that year
was to be organized. It's the one we were talking about before, and I went out and I got all the
desk organizers, the cubbyholes and the slots. I color-coded all my files. I put everything away
and when I stood back and surveyed my desk I congratulated myself on having succeeded at my
New Year's resolution and three months later my desk looked as crappy as it had before I
bought all the organizers. Because I really, I had a burst of organizational zeal to get over this
hump, but I didn't really have any behaviors to sustain it. But on this year, because I thought
that was going to be my easy resolution, I was so mortified to have failed at what I thought was
going to be my easy resolution that I just wouldn't concede defeat and I thought okay. If I can't
be organized, what is one thing I can do that would be, make me more organized? And I looked
through all the ways in which I was disorganized. I sort of reverse engineered my behavior, for
those of you who are programmers, and I had many options to choose from at being
disorganized. But I just picked one and the one I picked was to put all my notes in one
notebook. I had a habit of taking notes on whatever was handy and in front of me, so if I was in
a meeting and there was an agenda, I would take my notes there. By the phone, if there was
like a loose pad, I take my notes there. At home I might write something on the back of an
envelope. And then if I wanted to find something I'd have pieces of paper on my desk at home,
pieces of paper on my desk at work, pieces of paper in my handbag and I finally put all of my
notes in one place and I went out and got like a little shiny red notebook. I still have it with me
and I thought, this is going to be a breeze. The revelation was is it was really hard just to do
that one thing. I hated doing it. I hated taking notes in the book. It felt awkward. It felt weird.
If I was sitting in a meeting and I was talking to you and we're doing something and I want to
take a note, I thought oh, I have to fish into my handbag and find this notebook, find a page and
do it. If I was on the phone and I just wanted to jot down a confirmation number or something
and I'd see my book over there, I had to go get my book and do it. If somebody stopped me in
the halls at work and told me something I needed to know, I thought well won't I just
remember it. I had to do it. Because it was such a reasonable resolution I just felt I had to do it,
because if I didn't do it I would have to sort of face that I was never going to improve at
anything. It was so obvious that I could do it that it was feasible and limited, so I stuck with it.
And I'm only going to read one thing today, but I will just read this one section about this short,
okay. I stuck with it. I forced myself to put all my notes in my little red book. If I had an idea
for a client, I wrote it in the book. Confirmation numbers, in the book, recommended articles,
website events in the book. Random contacts I might never need again in the book, packing
lists in the book, priorities and to do lists in the book, bullet points for my next presentation, in
the book. Recipe from a friend, in the book. After weeks of reminding myself to use the
notebook, I noticed my feelings of resistance and awkwardness fading as the notebook became
second nature. I just did it without thinking, like brushing my teeth. As soon as I sat down in a
meeting or at my desk, I reached for the notebook. Now I could locate what I needed almost
immediately without stress or drama. Notes I would've once deemed throwaways proved
significant weeks on. The notebook rule that I had first found intrusive and constraining I now
experienced as empowering and liberating. My stress level declined. I had become more
organized. And that was sort of my first sort of epiphany, if you will, about how change
happens, that it's something very targeted, that it fills a specific need, that it gives you a
benefit, that it's something you can sustain and I decided to try diet. I thought, okay. I did the
notebook. Can I apply the same rule to eating? And I looked through all the things that I did
with respect to my eating habits and I picked one thing. I decided never to eat a conference
room cookie again [laughter]. I worked in a firm where they were really rich cookies and
afternoon meetings sometimes I would eat one; sometimes I would eat two. They probably
had 400 calories each. Sometimes I would eat three and I would leave these meetings kind of
sick and in the food coma space and then I would crash like an hour later and I just thought, I'm
never going to eat one of these again. I'll bring my own cookie. I didn't say I would never eat a
cookie again because right, that's in the failure space. I didn't say I would never eat in a
conference room again. That wouldn't have worked either. I just said I'm never going to eat
one of those cookies again. And I didn't. I sort of arrested the long-term upward climb of my
weight. What I ended up doing was spending time on this stuff and really practicing this. This
was my year of behaving differently where I actually behaved differently and I did a couple of
these things the whole year, throughout the year and then friends of mine began doing it and
colleagues began doing it and they sort of began giving me their stories and that became the
basis for this book and the set of rules that sort of developed around this. But the major thing
that I discovered during this year was real change happens at the margin. It happens at the
margin of behavior, what you might almost call the vile margin. People don't wake up 15
pounds overweight or many thousands of dollars in debt. It is something that happens at the
margin and a change in eating habits can have one eating habit, can have a big effect. A change
in spending pattern can cause you to save more money. These are all positive things. A subtle
change in communication can help you in a relationship. A slight change in attitude can help
you advance on the job. To prove this to yourself you only need to see the reverse of that is
true, that relationships get sour on the corners and on the edges. It isn't an overnight thing
that people end up going into debt over time by small, small behaviors. And when I realized
that and realized the linchpin of that was to work the margin, I started to make a lot of progress
and that each one of these microresolutions sort of advanced the ball and I began to develop
differently. I think one way to think about this as technologies that might be useful especially
at Microsoft is, you know, we live in the age of the small and the powerful, microcomputer
chips, iPods, iPads. Nano technology is revolutionizing medicine. You know, micro-financing is
eliminating poverty. Critical communications come in 140 character tweets. You know, each
one of these tools is a very set of precised dart aimed at a precise target filling a certain need in
delivering a benefit immediately and that's kind of the idea behind the microresolution. Like
how to start, we can try some today and I'll sort of go through some of the principles and the
way the book works is the first part of it is sort of the seven rules for making microresolutions
and the second half is broken up into the most popular areas of kind of self-improvement with
a lot of stories and models. There's a lot of science in the book if you're interested in that,
willpower science, et cetera. But the first rule of making a microresolution is a microresolution
is easy. Everybody has to like that. Don't make resolutions you can't keep. Make a resolution
you are absolutely sure you can succeed at and don't tell yourself it's too small to be significant.
Say what is it that I can do that I can succeed. To be sure that you can succeed a no excuses
resolution, it's got to be limited. You know to say I'm going to walk everywhere all the time or
I'm going to give up sweets or I'm not going to online shop, that's not limited. Limited.
Something absolutely targeted. It's got to be reasonable. Something that you think that you
can absolutely follow through with. Okay? It's not relative, you know, to snack more or to
snack less or to exercise more. It's got to be in sort of the absolute space. When you are going
to start, start in an area like let's say it's neatness, and reverse engineer your behavior. Look at
all the things that you say if you want to be neat, forget about being neat, what are you going
to do differently today that makes you neater. It could be a simple, if you are a total slob as just
closing all the drawers after you've opened them or closing the closet doors. It could be
segregating surfaces so that, you know, you don't end up with your hairbrush on your desk and
coins and keys in your bathroom. It could be as simple as that. Or it could be more ambitious
to do your dishes immediately after dinner, whatever it is, but it's going to be based on you and
your behavior. If we take to be fit, a lot of people say okay. I'm going to go to the gym three
times a week, also very vague. What are those three days? Okay? You don't know. First of all,
it's probably too much. If you don't go to the gym today and you don't have the habit, your
autopilot is going to find a reason for you not to go a couple of those days. But this gets to a
very important principle. If you overreach, all you do all week is bargain with yourself. You say,
I didn't go today, but I'll go tomorrow. Oh I didn't go Wednesday, but I'll make it up on
Saturday or Sunday. And that kind of bargaining is decision-making; decision making depletes
willpower. The more you have to think about it, the more you have to discuss it with yourself,
the less likely you're going to succeed at it, so you want to be absolutely explicit. If you say, it
could be I'm going to walk to work or one day a week. I don't do it now. I'm going to walk to
work one day a week. If you are in a driving city, it could be I'm going to drive to the furthest
parking lot at Microsoft and I'm going to walk to my building and walk back. Whatever this
thing is that you think you absolutely can do. So much science now is also about, when I
started searching the book, also about what happens at the margin. It turns out in fitness, I
think maybe some of you have read how bad it is to be sedentary, to sit all day. It's kind of like
the new smoking. They say it's better, you get a better health benefit of getting up two times
an hour to walk around for a couple of minutes then you do to go to the gym for an hour after
work. That is a better health boost than the hour after work. There's so many things like that
that boost your health. Since we're talking about fitness, standing if you take a bus or train, you
don't have to stand every day. You're not going to want to stand every day. You want to stand
maybe one way in and after a while you may prefer standing, but whatever you do that's
different I'm going to tell you this, you're not going to like it. It is really disturbing to your
autopilot. It feels weird and awkward and you have to have enough willpower to push past
that time where it just feels icky to the time where it actually supports you and goes into
autopilot and you don't need any willpower to sustain it, which is really the definition of getting
something into willpower. That business of arguing with yourself and deciding, it actually has a
name in science; it's called decision fatigue, decision fatigue. You see that a lot too in people’s
diets where they say okay. I'm going to cut a hundred carries out a day. Okay. If you don't say
what hundred calories you cut, you're going to be counting and adding and figuring it out all
day long. That's decision fatigue. You want to get these things a space where you don't have to
think about them. You want them to be mindless. One thing I found out is there's no such
thing as a small change. They're all significant. The ones I've made, practically and personally
and psychologically, but you get something, something that seems limited has a lot of benefits.
If you walk to work one day a week, which is where I started and now I walk to work five days a
week and do Pilates three times a week, but I started walking once a week. You're going to be
fitter. You're going to arrive at work with a clearer head. You're going to see every season of
the year for good or for bad which has a its own effect. You may sleep better. You may think
better at work, all these things from doing one thing differently, one thing differently. Okay. So
that's one kind of microresolution. Another one is, you know, your head is a lot to do with who
you are and how you react to things, your attitudes and your values. You can do something
called a microresolution message which is not a commitment to act or behave in a certain way,
but just to send yourself a message on a cue. So for example, you might send yourself the
message when you come home with your coat if you are working on neat, it's really just as fast
to hang it up before you drop in the chair. Don't commit to hang it up; it's really just as fast to
hang it up. If you are tempted to snack instead of telling yourself no snacking, you could work
on a mindset thing which is just I really enjoy dinner so much more when I'm hungry for it. I
really enjoy dinner more when I'm hungry for it. That was one of mine. So it wasn't that I
didn't snack, but I started shifting to where I snacked to where I'd be hungry for my meal. And
these things work on you and they'll change the way that you behave. If you are tempted to
spend on something and you overspend, when you're looking at something that maybe
shouldn't, really, really can't afford to buy, you can send yourself the message the greatest
luxury is security. The greatest luxury is security. It's personal. All of these are personal. You
have to kind of find the dart that hits your psychological spot and has a difference, but it will
affect your head and it will affect the way you behave and maybe we'll talk about some of the
ones that people have done that have been very good. Freud said thought is father to the
deed, so that's kind of the idea there. Okay. The next rule. So first one is it's easy. The second
thing is it's an action, an explicit and measurable action. As I said, it's absolute not relative. It's
not doing something more or doing something less. It's absolutely specific to that. It's not
something in the aggregate like I will have done this three times a week, or I'm going to do this
five times a month. If you are going to do something once a week, you have a day and a time
that you are going to do it and you only measure yourself on that. So if I say I'm going to walk
to work, I'm going to walk to work on Monday morning. That's it. That's what I'm measuring
myself on. Okay. It could be snowing, so I don't go. It didn't happen that way. But, and I can
walk more if I feel like it, but the only thing I'm going to measure my resolution on is did I walk
on Monday morning. And that relieves all of this kind of negotiating and everything else. And
one of the magic about being so explicit is that you want to manage obstacles out of your way,
because this is your only chance. You're not going to defer it. You're going to say this is it. I'm
going to do my resolution and if I don't do it I can't make it up. So you want to be absolutely
explicit about what you do. I think I brought up the hundred calorie example. That's just a
math problem you have to solve all day, a hundred calories. You won't know until the end of
the day did I save a hundred calories? You don't want to be in that place. If you say you are not
going to eat bread at dinner because that's a hundred calories, and you do that. If you drink
two glasses of wine and you drink a glass and a quarter, that's a hundred calories. If you say I
eat a candy bar at three o'clock everyday or a cookie; I'm going to the half of it, that's a
hundred calories. That's the space you want to be in, mindless. You want to think mindless, so
that it can just slip in and become part of your autopilot. It's personal. I think we spoke about
that. It's a reverse engineering thing. You have to look at your own habits. Something that
makes you late isn't the thing that makes me late. If you drive, being out of gas can make you
late. If you commute with a card, being out of fairs can make you late. I was late in the
morning and I wanted to reverse that. There were a hundred reasons that I was late. I picked
one. The thing that bothered me the most was when it was time to leave, I live in Brooklyn. I
commuted to the city. I take my young daughter to school and then I go on to work, is that
nagging feeling were my keys where they were supposed to be or were they in a coat pocket or
on my bureau? Did I really have enough money left on my metro card to just slide through the
thing or was it going to say insufficient fare as I heard the train come rumbling by. What about
cash, because I need a little bit of cash for a car ride with my daughter? And all morning that
sort of hung over me, that sense of were all those things there, and I finally just got a separate
purse and every Friday night I filled up my Metro card and put it in this purse. I got money on
the way home on Friday night, enough for every car ride. I put it in the purse and I put an extra
key in there, and I did not use that purse for anything else. If I had to commute someplace else
I had a separate card, so there was no way I could lose track of how many fares there were. If I
ran out of money in my regular wallet, I went and got money at the cash machine, but I didn't
deplete that wallet and I haven't been late for that reason since I did it. There are other ways
to be late [laughter] I'm working on those, but I have not been late for that. So you have to sort
of take a look at your own behavior. Eating, so personal. Everybody picks up the same diet. It's
really personal. Some people are snackers. Some people skip breakfast. Some people eat late
into the night. You need to take a look at why you eat and how you eat. I think one reason
though is, you know, those diets that give you the packaged food that come, highly prescriptive,
one reason those are so successful is it's a new kind of autopilot. You know, you don't have to
think; you just rip open the package and eat it. But sooner or later you have to kind of go back
into the real world and back to the cafeteria and you haven't really changed that behavior. So
when you think about it, come up with that personal thing. One of my favorite resolutions that
someone made was just to be something on their plate, just leave something on their plate.
Even if you serve something a little bit more, just leave something on your plate because if you
are used to finishing, which is an autopilot activity, finish all my food, and you train yourself to
see something tasty disappearing with your plate, that will be a game changer. All of those can
be really, really profound changes. So we went through personal, action et cetera. Let's do just
a little bit more. Okay. I guess the only other thing I want to say is you have to be relentless,
single-minded purpose and relentless. You hone in on this narrow behavioral change and you
just hammer it. You hammer it and hammer it until after a while it doesn't feel weird. It might
not feel natural for a few weeks. At about 4 to 6 weeks it won't cost you so much to maintain it
and then you can go on to other microresolutions. Just two at a time, because you can really -you can try to do them all, but you will fail. It's a lot of focus and the thing is you want to
preserve most of your focus for these other things that you're doing that work, so just two at a
time and single-minded purpose. The rest of the book is devoted to sort of different chapters
on, and there are chapters on cuing and how you cue a resolution. There's chapters on how
you frame a resolution so you want to do it. The cue is important. You want to be explicit
about it. We did talk about sort of scheduled cues, like doing things on a day, but if it's a
relationship cue, for example, or something like that, you have to isolate the moment that tells
you, okay. This is my new behavior. If your behavior in a relationship that you are trying to
change is not to say I told you so to your partner, you might not think that's a big change, but I
can guarantee you it will improve your relationship tremendously if you don't say I told you so.
When you feel the impulse to say I told you so, that's the cue to not say I told you so, right?
[laughter]. If you have trouble when you receive feedback at work, what we call feedback used
to be called criticism. Now it's called developmental feedback. When you receive
developmental feedback you could receive it from a colleague or a subordinate or your boss. If
you try to solve for all of those cues you're going to short-circuit, so I would say pick one. If you
have subordinates who want to be able to give you feedback and tell you that you're wrong, I
would say, you know, that's a great thing for a leader to feel okay about being told you are
wrong. You might practice a response. When your response, when you feel yourself wanting
to say, oh the reason I did that or whatever, you might train yourself to say thank you. I really
appreciate your giving me that feedback. You have to say you agree with it. But these kinds of
things disrupt those cues between people. It gives you the chance to respond in a different way
and there are a lot of them in the book. I'll do one more which I think is really significant for the
workplace. There's a story of one person in the book who didn't get promoted because she was
told she was a bit negative and they thought that she would have to develop sort of a more
positive attitude in the work place before she had a leadership position. At first her response
was how unfair it was but she had heard it before and she decided to make a resolution -- this
person was a complainer -- she decided to make a resolution not to be the first to complain in
the workplace, not never to complain, but not to be the first to complain. The very first day of
her resolution something happened in the workplace that she thought was worthy of complaint
and she sort of waited for someone else to take the lead and no one said anything. In that
moment she realized it was her. She really was the person. It seemed like a group thing,
because everybody joined in, but she was really the one that started it. So a lot of subtle things
can make a huge change and that's really partly, really when the book is about. One more thing
and then I'd love to do questions. Sleep is your friend in self-improvement . Sleep restores
your willpower. It restores your self. It rebalances hormones that have to do with appetite and
being satiated to help you if you diet. If you don't get at least six hours those hormones don't
come into balance and you feel hungrier and what you eat satisfies you less. People spend
hundreds of dollars on creams to make them look more youthful. If you get more sleep you'll
look more youthful. All the studies show that, you know, before anything physical, you'll sink
more baskets, you'll get more first serves in, you'll do flip turns in the pool faster if you sleep
more. Sleep load if you have something big to do. It's really hard if you're a programmer, but
there are a lot of things that you can do. If you get on the computer late at night just to check
your e-mail, you are likely going to be on for two hours. That’s something you can do. But
really taking a look at sleep and making sure you get more of it is important. Anyway, that's
sort of the basic outlines of the book and why it works for me. I've lost 22 pounds. I'm the
fittest I've ever been. I'm the most organized and the neatest I've ever been. I've improved the
relationships. I'm not perfect in any of these things. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the endless
work of self-improvement, but doing one thing differently, proving to yourself that you can
learn to do one thing differently really punches your ticket for the voyage of continuous self
improvement. Once you kind of it that hit, hey. I change myself. It's just a question of deciding
where you want to go that day. So that's that. So any questions? Yes?
>>: Do you believe there are aspects of personalities are going to change?
>> Caroline Arnold: Do I believe aspects of personalities don't change. I believe personality
traits are tenacious, but I think things give way to doing differently. Being different is one thing,
but if you learn to behave differently and you can train yourself in that example, not to say I
told you so, you will definitely change your personality. You may feel very liberated not to feel
that you still have to say I told you so.
>>: But in that case you are changing how other people are going to perceive you. You are not,
and it is possible that other people now perceive you differently and they might believe that
you have become a better person but you may still not be in agreement with yourself which
could be a cause of…
>> Caroline Arnold: That's a great point. Let me make two points about that. One of these I
did for myself was I would come home. I had worked all day. I made dinner for my family and
then my husband would say something like. Hey, you know you left the light on in the
basement. [laughter]. And I would feel this surge of resentment but I would say oh, I'm sorry
and then I would explain why it was, which was really my long litany of everything I had done all
day that he should have appreciated, right? And there would be such a sour feeling in the air
after that. And one day I decided what would happen if I just didn't apologize, if I just said oh.
Got it, you know? [laughter]. And I started doing that and I felt so much better. I didn't feel
like I had to base myself by apologizing when I didn't mean it. It became like a microresolution
not to apologize when I didn't really mean it. You know, as a gotcha, I treated everything he
said as if it were a gotcha. If a gotcha doesn't get you, is it still a gotcha? I don't know. It's just
information. And I felt lighter. I feel better. I enjoyed life more. You change by doing things
differently, not just by telling yourself that you must change, and it's really profound to do that.
And, you know, I have a lot of these things with my child in elsewhere. One thing I didn't
mention that was important is a microresolution has intrinsic value. It's not a someday thing.
That's one of the things that is a problem with New Year's resolutions. It's not like if I do all
these things, someday I'll be neat. If I do all these things, someday I'll be organized. I don't
even think of these things as steps. A step implies the reward is in the future. It is what it is. If
you teach yourself to make your bed, that's what you get. You get a made bed. If you teach
yourself not to eat half a candy bar in the afternoon, that's what you're going to get. You don't
eat half a candy bar in the afternoon. You make your bed, whatever it is. It's like an intrinsic
value and there's no such thing as a small change. All of them carry benefits. Change is good
somebody said and it is. Any other questions? Yes?
>>: How do you recommend getting past like catastrophic failures in your plan? Like what if
you lost your red notebook on an airplane and you never found it again and all of a sudden all
of your notes are gone?
>> Caroline Arnold: If something like that happened I would go get another notebook and just
chalk it up to experience. But you do raise a good point. Sometimes they don't work. So one
of the tenants of the book is hey, they should always succeed. If it's reasonable and limited and
in your power to do, you should be able to succeed. But the book does talk about test driving
your resolution because it does take a couple of weeks to sort of feel do you have it right? If
you said to yourself, I'm going to walk twice a week and it turns out to be too hard, scale it back
to what you can do. If you say you're going to walk a mile and it turns out to take too long,
walk half a mile. And if it seems like a copout, it isn't, because what you're looking for is a
behavior that's repeatable forever. It's a forever thing. So if it takes, I mean I'm not saying that
sometime in your life you might decide you're going to stop walking to work. Of course. But
you're trying to do something and routinize so that you can do it forever. So getting it right and
getting it to fit is important, so don't be afraid to make adjustments during the first couple of
weeks. Yes?
>>: One of the changes you talked about was sleep and New Year's resolutions and you also
brought up framing and we can train things differently. I would really like to hear your
thoughts on okay. So I know that I definitely need to get more sleep and every day it's like I say
I'm going to get home by nine so I can be in bed by 9:30 so I can sleep more, so in terms of
framing what would you suggest?
>> Caroline Arnold: The first thing I think is to find out why it is you stay up late and what keeps
you up, and then I'll talk a little bit about framing. If you find yourself eating late at night, but
you're not really hungry, you're trying to stay awake. Sugar is, or something sweet, when
people say they have the munchies and they ate dinner two hours ago, they're really trying to
stay up. One resolution might be, and it's in the book somebody made, not to eat to stay
awake, let's say. Another thing is, you know, I ended up getting about seven hours more sleep
per week by breaking up this habit. I would put my kid to sleep and then I would rush
downstairs to kind of hang out with my husband which usually meant watching TV and then I
would fall asleep on the couch for a couple of hours and I was too tired to get up and get ready
for bed. I just could not face like contacts, flossing, phone charging, pajamas, so I just kept
sleeping. And then finally I'd get myself up and I'd do all those things and then I'd be wide
awake and couldn't sleep because I had had my nap. So one simple thing I did was I just got
ready for bed before I ever went downstairs and as soon as I felt dozy, I got up and just slipped
between the sheets. There was nothing left to do. To your point about framing, to these
changes that I made, I also sent myself the message, I'm just, when I'm tempted to stay up, I'm
more successful when I get more sleep. I'm more successful when I get more sleep, like a
mantra. Framing is a great topic. I once made the microresolution, one of the most important
ones I ever made was to eat more slowly. I ate really fast. I was the first done and then I would
eat bread out of the basket or go get other food because everybody else was still eating
[laughter]. And I told myself to chew my food slowly. Yuck. What a horrible resolution, to
chew your food slowly. So I reframed that to dine leisurely and savor my food and drink. Who
wouldn't want to do that? Dine leisurely. [laughter]. Savor my food and drink. And while I was
dining leisurely and savoring my food and drink this little voice would say to me if you don't
speed up you'll never finish all this food. It came to me again and again. It was not an accident.
I never knew until I sort of isolated the channel that I had in my head the notion that I had to
hurry up and finish and get done. It's yet another accomplishment in my day to finish all my
food, and I realized kind of in that moment I rushed in everything I do. I rushed whether it was
the weekend, if somebody is walking slowly in front of me and I really don't have any place to
go, I resent that person. And that was kind of a revelation. One thing when you really isolate
and get down to these precise targets, you are listening on a channel that is so clear you can
really hear what it is psychologically to the point this gentleman made, that's in your way. I
don't know if I answered your question entirely about framing and sleep.
>>: Yeah, I think that was good mantra.
>> Caroline Arnold: Okay. But yours will be personal. Yes, Amy?
>> Amy Draves: We have an online question.
>> Caroline Arnold: Okay.
>> Amy Draves: I have a two-year-old that sleeps with my wife and I. We would like to get our
daughter to sleep in her own bed. What would be a microresolution to work on that?
>> Caroline Arnold: That's a good one. I don't know a lot about what the bedtime routine is
like. It could be that if now you just put the child in bed with you and that's the routine, you
could maybe have the bed and go spend a certain amount of time with your child. You could
say that you are going to move your child after a certain amount of time, pick them up when
they are asleep and tell them how much better that's going to be. You know, training a child
and making a shift like that is a little different from changing your own behavior, but trying to
understand what your child gets out of that arrangement might help you come up with
something there. Something with my child, for example, a little different again, my own
behavior, not my child's behavior is once she became a teenager we started to have kind of a
lot of yelling and standoff. One day I just made a resolution not to try to top her with my voice,
but to lower my voice. And every time she raised her voice, I lowered my voice and then she
would perk up her ears, you know, she had to lean in to kind of listen and it didn't always carry
the day. I can't say that I've never blown it, but mostly it helped a lot. So kind of understanding
her psychology a little bit, her desire to fight, same thing with the child who wants to sleep. Of
course, it's about security, so what are different sort of security substitutions you can make bit
by bit that ultimately make your child, you know, confident enough to sleep on their own. Yes?
>>: You mention it takes about 4 to 6 weeks to take that microresolution into autopilot, and
did you also say you would never get more than two that any one time.
>> Caroline Arnold: Two at a time. I want to be clear. It won't be completely autopilot after 4
to 6 weeks, but it won't bug you so much. It will be more natural. It will be kind of it doesn't
take a lot of willpower at that point. Over a period of weeks, it moves itself into autopilot. Two
at a time is plenty. If they average five a week, that's 20 changes to your behavior you can
make this year. That's profound. You know what the tenant of behavioral science is by Towns
and Beaver [phonetic] two behavioral scientists? This is the tenant. Most of the time what we
do is what we do most of the time. Every once in a while we do something new, every once in a
while. Doing something new is a big deal, so if you do 20 things new this year, it'll be
immensely empowering. Actually changing your behavior and seeing it go in the place where
you never want it to change back again, is empowering. It's also identity changing because all
the preferences that you have and attitudes and the values line up with the way that you
behave. When you shift your behavior some of those preferences hang around for a while but
sooner or later they realign to your new behavior and you feel like a different person. You have
a new identity. If you describe yourself, I am such a hopeless slob. At a certain point you don't
feel like a hopeless slob anymore, because you've done these things. You haven't become, and
your preferences start to be for order, you know, because you've trained yourself to appreciate
order in one area and it starts to spread. It's like a cornerstone. But two at a time, beyond that
you are just going to short-circuit yourself. Don't be impatient. That's my New Year's
resolution, patience. Yes?
>>: You have a microresolution. You achieve it. You move on to some other microresolution
and year first resolution has now gone bad. What do you do?
>> Caroline Arnold: It now goes bad?
>>: Yes. It can happen.
>> Caroline Arnold: It shouldn't happen. If it does happen then you have to go back, you know,
and keep going. You shouldn't ever move on to a new one. Four weeks is kind of the standard,
but if it feels really wobbly and like it needs a lot of support, don't move on to anything else
until it's ingrained. Yes?
>>: I guess my main question is about planning. This is something when I tell myself I'm going
to do things once a week or something and then everyone, everyone heard it over and over
again, scheduling an exact time and a place that you are going to go, but then with schedules
that change, travel and all that, how would you suggest? Because, you know, I said I would do
this Mondays but this Monday and the next three Mondays I am out of town and then it
disappears.
>> Caroline Arnold: Uh-huh. Okay. I think that's a very common thing. Schedules can change.
You're looking for the best time that you are most likely to be able to do this thing, so if you
think about travel, three-day weekends, or personal things that you might end up doing on a
Monday, you are going to skip. If you have something that is scheduled, there are going to be
times that you skip it. But if you do it most of the time, you know, it will succeed. And, I
wouldn't say, if you missed a Monday, I wouldn't say don't go Tuesday. You probably will want
to go Tuesday. I only say only measure yourself on Monday, because you want to get the day
that is best to maintain. If you say, okay, Tuesday’s as good as Monday. Wednesday is as good
as Monday. Tomorrow is as good as today, if any day is as good as today you will get to the
weekend and you won't even know what happened. Why did I not go? Because no day is
good. No day is good for change in behavior. What's good is to do everything the same way all
the time. So yeah. I mean, look. I had a thing of paying bills on Monday nights because my
husband had a class and he came home and so the thing was I would just go through all of my
paperwork and do it. And then he gave up that class and the thing went away and for months I
had like, I couldn't get on top of it. I had to come up with another time that was good, so things
do shift around. And so you have to kind of be flexible in that way, but if you are completely
flexible and there is always a good reason for not doing it, you want to get it to the habit space,
right. One thing about going to the gym, I think like a lot of us want to go to the gym. We want
to be fitter, but we don't really imagine all that business of you are tired after you go to work,
you get out onto the floor, you exercise and then you have to get back into your tired work
clothes again and go home. The whole thing, it, it's a lot of pieces that are uncomfortable. In
the book one person goes to the gym for 15 minutes, 15 minutes to row, that's it. But what is
canny about that resolution is it's going to the gym and doing all those steps and leaving that
gets you the habit. It's not whether or not you spend 15 minutes or an hour; it's like figuring
out what is the gym near you? What is the right time to go? And if you say I'm just going to go
for 15 minutes, it's like well that's not going to do anything. Yeah, it will do something. It will
neurologically embed that feeling of going to the gym and doing all of those steps. Somebody
else, yes?
>>: So writing a book is a pretty big project, but it's also not necessarily [indiscernible]. Did you
form microresolution is to get yourself to write regularly?
>> Caroline Arnold: Yes. I actually did. I have to be honest and say once I had a contract, I did
take some time off work, but I did go back to work and I had to keep writing and I had to get up
an hour earlier to write on weekdays. I sort of adjusted my sleep so that I could get up. It's my
best hour for writing and at first it wasn't an hour. At first it was really just 20 minutes, just to
get 20 minutes in and I sort of successfully moved that back for me. But I love getting up early
and writing now and I always have been kind of a late morning person, so it just goes to show
you. Yes?
>>: One more, so obviously some microresolutions are harder than others. I personally have
one that is flossing every night and that's great, but it's pretty easy. Another one I would have
is like listen well and which has a lot behind it, as far as not thinking of other things when
people are talking at you, important people in your life. How do you break those things down
to make that like a microresolution?
>> Caroline Arnold: Okay. That's a great question. What is listening well to you? Give me a
characteristic of it. Is it…
>>: Well it's giving. It's sympathetic. It's…
>> Caroline Arnold: Maybe, not interrupting?
>>: More for me it's about not, I'm already thinking about other things and I'm not listening to
what you are saying.
>> Caroline Arnold: Okay. This is what I would say [laughter]. You're not going to listen well all
the time. If your head is in that space, so pick a time where it's really important to listen well.
It could be when your kid comes home from school and your first interaction with them, you
tell yourself I'm going to give my kid my attention. I'm not going to go to the phone. I'm not
going to do anything, and you practice it in a limited space. It could be, you know, when my
partner tells me about this special project that they're doing that bores the tears out of me
[laughter]. I'm going to pay special attention and I'm going to ask a question. It can be as
simple as that. I'm going to pay attention when I hear about this project. I'm going to ask a
question. There's a story about somebody in the book who had a regular job and the husband
had a creative job, and his creative job allowed him to stay up late and work in front of the TV
and stuff, and always wanted to tell her about the movie he had seen the night before and she
hated it. It was like oh my God, and it was a movie she had seen and she felt some resentment
that should she had to, you know, get up at six and he stayed up till three and one day she just,
she kept signaling him that she didn't like it. She said that she was so antsy that she couldn't
even sit still. She never looked at him. All of these kind of things [laughter] and then one day
she just finally decided okay. I'm going to give him my entire attention when he tells me about
the movie. And she never really got interested in the movies, but she did give, and she asked
questions and she said the goodwill that was created between the two of them was enormous.
She couldn't believe it. When she stopped just fighting him, oh my God. [laughter]. Here it
comes. He's going to tell me about Nashville, you know! She just listened to it. So I think if you
pick a specific instance where it really counts and practice there, it will bleed into other areas.
It's a skill to listen well. Yes?
>>: Is there any sign behind the frequency of the habits you are trying to establish? I seem to
have this obsession with daily things. I'd say weekly, or [indiscernible] every two weeks? There
further apart they are, it's harder to relate.
>> Caroline Arnold: Yes. There's a lot in the science of cuing. In a certain way and to the point
that this young woman right over here, what about Monday or whatever. The things that I had
that were once a month things, I have to cue myself. So if it's I'm going to review, I review bills.
Not to see if they are accurate, but to see if there is any way to save money. You know, I
actually have something in my calendar that tells me the day is coming up a couple of times to
remember, so that I do it. It is easier to do it daily. I think catching cues is a very, you know, for
things, scheduling can be difficult if it's only once a month or whatever, but on the other hand
it's very concrete. These kinds of cues between people, you know, where you want not to be
offensive or not to complaint or you want to remember to do something differently, that
requires kind of isolating something in the environment to cue you. And you are responding to
cues all of the time. If somebody brings donuts, that's a cue. If they bring pizza, that's a cue.
You go to the store and they put out samples, the environment is serving up cues all the time,
so if you say well, I'm just never going to eat any food I didn't plan to eat, that's not going to
work. But if you say okay. I'm not doing donuts. So it's trying to find that one cue can be really
critical. Piggybacking on things, because like with my notebook habit I kept forgetting to take it
out at the beginning of the meeting and one reason that it irritated me is because I would have
to stop and find it. So I started saying as soon as I slip off my bag, I take out my book. I slip off
my bag; they take out my book. And I never thought of slipping off my handbag as a habit or a
behavior, but it is. It's something that I do all the time. I sit down. I slip off my handbag. I take
out the book. And so in that way I was able to get a better flow with it. I hope if you get the
book, there are some other things in there that might be helpful. Anybody else?
>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much.
>> Caroline Arnold: Oh thanks. You guys were great. Really appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
[applause].
>> Caroline Arnold: Good luck. It's fun. Change is fun.