Tiny Habits® for Quiet Leaders
Why do Quiet Leaders need to develop new habits?
If you are of a quieter disposition, it’s likely that there are certain behaviours that don’t come so naturally to you. You may be less likely to initiate that coffee or lunch, make that phone call, speak up at the meeting or attend that event. This is perfectly normal, as human beings tend to default to behaviours that make us feel most comfortable. So we end up putting off things until another day.
However, as Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do”. Therefore, you might find that days become weeks and weeks become months and there is a long list of things you feel you should be doing, but just aren’t making the time to do so. This is a problem that needs addressed, because to succeed as Quiet Leaders it is important to engage and connect with our colleagues. For example, more extroverted direct reports will likely perform better with regular interaction in order to feel connected, safe and engaged. Additionally, better results are often achieved through collaboration and making connections and you need to ensure you don’t end up ‘out of sight, out of mind’ from your peers and bosses. Whilst you probably know all of this, knowledge and information do not always translate into action. What’s essential is to take the right actions, implement the necessary behaviours and make the required changes to stretch, grow and thrive in your career.
The good news is that thanks to Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab, there is a method and model that is research backed, easy to understand and can be implemented immediately in small, experimental steps.
The Tiny Habits® recipe for Quiet Leaders
The Tiny Habits® Method uses a simple format called a “recipe” for designing habits into your life. The recipe needs to contain 3 ingredients, A, B, and C.
A = Anchor (an existing habit that can act as a prompt to do our new habit)
B = Behaviour (the new behaviour that we want to become a habit)
C = Celebration (to wire in the habit, we need to create a feeling of success)
Check out some sample recipes below:
After I brush my teeth (a), I will floss one tooth (b), then I will smile in the mirror (c)
After I feed the dog (a), I will put on my walking shoes (b) and say let’s do this (c)
After I start the kettle (a), I will read one paragraph in a book (b), then say “Nice One” (c)
Here are 3 helpful steps to start crafting your own Tiny Habits for Quiet Leaders:
Step 1 - Identify your Anchors
No behaviour happens without a prompt.
Mentally walk yourself through your day, noting down all the anchors you can think of. At first this can seem a little tricky, you may think that you don't have many, but there are literally thousands of them. You get out of bed and put your feet on the floor, you turn on the shower, you brush your teeth, you open the fridge, you walk upstairs, downstairs, open the car door, close the car door. Get the point?
Write them down as we did in the example recipes above (After I…). There is a good reason for that which is covered in the members areas, but for now just go with it. For Quiet Leaders, your anchors at work are going to be particularly important. A favourite workplace anchor of ours is ‘After I press ctrl, alt, delete to lock my laptop’. Again there are hundreds of examples, we sit down at our desks, stand-up from our desks, start a zoom call, finish a zoom call, press send on an email, etc.
You will be more successful if you make the anchors as specific as possible. For example, instead of ‘After I start work’, choose something like ‘After I open my laptop’.
Step 2 - Design your Behaviours
There is a reason why the method is called Tiny Habits®. The idea is that we need to make the behaviour so small that we should be able to do it on our worst days, not our best ones.
You may want to run a marathon, but designing a habit that involves running for hours a day if you can’t currently make it past the mailbox is unlikely to stick. In this case you may want to choose a behaviour that gets you out the door every day.
A Quiet Leader may want to connect more often with peers, to check-in with direct reports more regularly, to speak up more in meetings, or to be more visible with written content. Write down some tiny behaviours you could do to stretch as a Quiet Leader. For example, you may message one person in your network, or greet one person in the hallway.
The most common pitfall here is making the behaviour too big, or choosing a behaviour that you don't want to do. Success is much more likely if you make the behaviour super small.
Step 3 - Celebrate!
One of Dr. Fogg's maxims is to help people feel successful. Underlying this is the principle that we change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad about ourselves.
This is how we hack our brain chemicals to create successful habits. By celebrating tiny wins along the way, we feel good and if we feel good when we do something, we are much more likely to want to do it again, and again. The aim of habit formation is progress, not perfection.
However, as a Quiet Leader chances are that you may not feel too comfortable with large expressive celebrations, or it may not even be appropriate depending upon where and when you carry out the habit. Sometimes, a thumbs-up or a smile, or even saying something positive to yourself in your head or under your breath is enough. If a larger, more expressive celebration feels good, then go for it - Woohoo!
A quick tip to find a natural celebration: think about what you do when your favourite sports team scores a goal or a point, or how you react when you get a question right on a quiz. Choose a celebration you feel comfortable with, but be sure to do it. It’s a key part of the recipe until the habit is wired in.
Conclusion
To thrive as a Quiet Leader, you need to continuously stretch and challenge yourself in order to grow. Small behaviours, repeated regularly creates momentum and can have life-changing impact. Tiny Habits® is the perfect method to get started quickly, slots directly into your existing routines and is fun and experimental. Making the changes that we want to make in our lives doesn’t need to feel overwhelming, difficult or painful. By consistently stretching yourself just a little bit with well designed habits you can benefit from the compounding magic that can lead to transformative results over time.
For simplicity, in this article we introduced only the core Tiny Habits® Method itself to highlight how it can be specifically applied in the context of Quiet Leadership. If you need a deeper dive, our members-only section contains a custom Quiet Leaders Guide to Designing Habits, details of the underlying behaviour model, worksheets, tips and tools.
We have also collaborated with Dr. BJ Fogg himself to produce a powerful online training course - Tiny Habits for Quiet Leaders. In this truly unique course, you learn how to implement the Tiny Habits® method directly from Dr. BJ Fogg! In addition, you learn from us at Quiet Leaders Academy about the specific habits that are proven to work for Quiet Leaders, like you!
Please leave a comment or drop us a note to let us know how you get on, if you have questions or would like some additional support.
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