James Clear’s writing career all started with a blog post that he committed to writing twice a week, which lead to over 400,000 subscribers, which then lead in 2018 to the publication of an International best-selling book, Atomic Habits. That’s quite the story, and it’s a great example of the power of showing up in action.
In this episode of the Stand Out Life podcast, Ali Hill interviews James Clear. And as you’ll soon find out, there’s a strong connection between habits and identity, as well as a few helpful laws on how to make or break habits.
Give the episode a listen or read the transcript below.
James Clear Interview | Stand Out Life Podcast
Ali Hill:
Welcome to Stand Out Live, a podcast dedicated to living boldly amongst the busyness.
Ali Hill:
My name’s Ali Hill and as a psychologist I love asking people questions and I thought what better way on do this than to get the people I admire into a studio to share their stories.
Ali Hill:
This podcast is our corner of the world where all of us can dive deep into what it takes to live a standout life.
Ali Hill:
It started with a blog post that he committed to writing twice a week, which led to over 400,000 subscribers and in 2018 James Clear published his international best selling book, Atomic Habits.
Ali Hill:
James unpacks why the tiny changes can create remarkable results. His articles reach 10,000,000 hits every single year on his website and his work frequently appears in publications including the New York Times, Forbes and Business Insider.
Ali Hill:
With the start of 2020 coming at us, this is a timely conversation to consider what do you want to become this year? In this conversation we dive into the connection between habits and identity, the questions that will pull us back to what really matters and the four laws on how to make or break the habits that you want to change in your life.
Ali Hill:
James shares his insights into the hacks that will change how you see habits, including the two minute rule and the power of showing up.
Ali Hill:
Take the time to absorb James’ work and this year could be the true start to a life that you never thought possible, especially if you commit to it. Map out what’s possible, step into new habits with these insights from James Clear.
Ali Hill:
James, welcome to the studio.
James Clear:
Hi. Good to talk to you. Thanks for having me.
Ali Hill:
Look, it’s great to have you here.
Ali Hill:
Atomic Habits is your book. We’re going to talk a fair bit about that today. It came out last year. It’s an international best seller. We were just talking, 1.2 million copies sold around the world?
James Clear:
Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s been a very busy year. I’m very happy with how it’s gone so far.
Ali Hill:
That’s a huge amount of books that have sold.
Ali Hill:
Often when we talk about books we talk about the writing that needs to happen, the marketing, the launch. I’m interested in the last year. What’s that year been like and is there anything that has surprised you about that experience?
James Clear:
Yeah. Depending on how you slice it up, it took somewhere between three and five years to write the book and probably nine to twelve months to plan the marketing. There was a lot of building of potential energy that was eventually released when the book came out and this last year has just been kind of a whirlwind because of that. Some of it was expected or at least hoped for. I hoped the book would do well, I hoped that I get to book signings or interviews or things like that.
James Clear:
Then there were quite a few things that were unexpected and most of those were just very random opportunities, whether it was coming to new countries. I think the first six months of the year I was in 13 countries all for the book in some way or shape or form, which for me was a lot of travel, probably more even than I would like, but very exciting. Then also just the range of places that I’ve talked about the book.
James Clear:
I was mentioning earlier, telling my publicist that within the span of one week, I did an interview on CBS this morning, which is a popular morning show in the US, and was in shirt and tie and a very proper and focused interview, and then that same week did a podcast interview with a health and fitness podcaster who I met at a dinner the night before and he was like, “Oh, do you want to come on my podcast?” I was like, “Okay, sure. It sounds good.” I come over the next morning and I went over there and he had in infrared sauna and he was like, “Hey, we should get in this and try it before we do the interview,” and so I stripped down to my underwear, did that for 20 minutes and then did the interview.
James Clear:
Yeah, that range of experiences is very broad, but it’s all talking about the same book and so that is one surprising and magical thing about putting ideas out into the world, is that a book can carry you to many interesting places that maybe you weren’t expecting.
Ali Hill:
I wonder if the topic of the book as well, being habits, is something that’s so transferable in different areas and different environments as well.
James Clear:
Yeah, I think that does help. Yeah, you’ve got writing habits, study habits, health and fitness habits, meditation habits, study habits, reading habits. There’s so many different types that it gives you a lot of different entry points to both have conversations, but also meet entirely different groups of people.
James Clear:
I’ve given speeches to organisations of dentists, a group of doctors, corporate America, high school students. It’s a very broad range and I think that’s one thing I really like about the topic and one reason why I felt it was worth five years of my time to spend writing a book and researching that, is that habits are so universal and so widely applicable. It’s something that we all need and for most books if you ask who’s the audience and you said everybody, that would be a terrible answer, but I think habits …
Ali Hill:
Yeah, marketing would look at you and go, “Hang on. No.”
James Clear:
Right. Yes.
Ali Hill:
We need to niche this.
James Clear:
Who is your target customer? For habits I think that actually there is an element to truth to that, that not everybody in the world will read Atomic Habits, but I think pretty much anyone can look at the cover and be like, yeah, I get why that would be useful for me, I get why building good habits and breaking bad ones, why that’s important and helpful.
Ali Hill:
In the five years of research was there any point where you might have gone, hey this book is about something else or there’s a branch off of this or was it always coming back to habits? Was that always, I guess, front and centre?
James Clear:
There are two answers to this. The first answer is that it should have always been about habits and there was a phase maybe a year in where my perfectionism kind of spiralled out of control and I just kept collecting books and insights on human nature and habits and human behaviour and it grew from a book about habits to a book about human nature, to a book about all human behaviours, and nobody can write a book on that topic, it’s too big.
Ali Hill:
What brought you back then, because I could imagine once you start to dive into the research you go down a rabbit warren, you go down maybe the book’s about this or maybe people are interested in that? What brought you back to habits?
James Clear:
I sort of felt like, well if I really want to do a comprehensive job on this, which I still feel this way now, my hope is that Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive book that’s been written on the subject. If you want to understand what habits are, how they work and, most importantly, how to change them, then I want this to be the one book that you should read.
James Clear:
Who knows if I’ve hit that mark or not. If I do an expanded and updated edition in say 10 years, that’s the same thing I’ll be shooting for, but you can see how that starts to spiral out pretty broadly, you start to feel like you need to cover everything.
James Clear:
This is the second part of the answer, which is that there was one question that kept bringing me back to centre that kind of saved me from myself which was, what is the object of the reader’s desire? Whenever I didn’t know what to write, whenever I wasn’t sure if this should be included or not, I could just ask myself, what is the object of the reader’s desire? Well, in this case what they are desiring is to either build a good habit or break a bad one, so if what I’m writing right now is not about that, it shouldn’t be included. If what this chapter is covering is not about that, it needs to be cut.
Ali Hill:
Did you come to that question through the writing process?
James Clear:
I came across it from another writer, but it wasn’t about writing books. If I’m remembering correctly and I don’t remember the person that it came from, but I was about writing sales pages or advertisements, because the only way that ads work is if they deliver on what you’re desiring and I felt like the book needed to do that as well. That kind of helped me stay focused.
James Clear:
The first draught of the book was 720 pages and the finished version of Atomic Habits is about 250, so I compressed and cut a lot and that question did a lot of the heavy lifting for that, but I sort of thought, well, if one out of every three pages I write isn’t any good then I got a real problem. If we’ve cut it down by that much and there’s not something useful to say here then we’re really struggling.
James Clear:
I think that’s kind of how I write in general though, is I cover a lot of ground and then I compress and try to retain the potency of the idea while saying it in fewer words or in a more effective way.
Ali Hill:
For mine that’s where you’re describing that’s the niche, so when you talk about it’s only interest two people because it’s so niche.
Ali Hill:
Why habits?
James Clear:
There are big picture answers and more detailed answers. The big picture answer is that pretty much every area of your life is at least to some degree a lagging measure of your habits, like your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your eating and training habits, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits, your clutter in your bedroom or on your desk at work is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.
James Clear:
There certainly is an element of luck, randomness, uncertainty. All those things impact your outcomes in life, but by definition luck is not under your control, but your habits are and so on I think the only rational approach is to focus on what you can control and because they exert such a strong influence on your results and because they’re under your control, I think it makes them a very important thing to focus on.
James Clear:
I do think it’s worth noting, habits are not the only thing that matters. I think they’re one of the two big pillars for results in life. The first are your habits and the second are your choices, the strategy that you follow.
James Clear:
You can imagine if you have two entrepreneurs, one of them starts a software company and one of them starts a pizza shop. Most people would say the software company probably has the greater potential energy, the higher trajectory, the more promising future, and so that’s strategy, that’s the choice, which one do you choose to start. You can imagine many entrepreneurs who might have great habits and they start a pizza shop, versus someone who has a good software idea but has terrible habits and doesn’t execute, the one with the better habits may end up capturing more of that potential energy and actually getting better results.
James Clear:
Now ultimately but what we want is to have both great strategy and great habits, but I think those two work together and so it’s not only about habits, but man they play a really crucial role and they kind of determine whatever opportunities that come to you in life, whether they’re big or small, your habits determine whether you capitalise on that, whether you gain some of the benefit that is available to you.
Ali Hill:
I think it’s really powerful to have that discernment to go, well what is my choice and actually consider the strategy, and therefore what are the behaviours or the habits that we might kick into around that.
Ali Hill:
With the book being so successful and certainly you’ve described travelling internationally and having conversations around habits, I’m wondering in some ways whether you’ve become like the high priest of confessionals when it comes to habits. People sharing with you their deepest, darkest habits or things that they want to shift and change. Is there any that have come to mind that have come up in conversations that you have had while you’ve travelled around the world?
James Clear:
Yeah, it is interesting to see. I tend to get more of those confessionals via email than face to face, so my email newsletter is fairly sizable as well and when I send out messages, like I sent out one today, usually go out to 500,000 people or so and there will be a lot of replies from people who either feel guilt or shame about their habits or they just feel kind of frustrated or like they’re giving up hope, they feel like they change them.
James Clear:
A lot of the big categories are what you would expect. Health and fitness is a really big one, so whether it’s doing pushup each day or not just physical health but also mental health, meditation or reading, things like that, stress reduction. That’s a very common category.
James Clear:
Productivity and time management is probably another very common one, but the category that I wasn’t expecting that I’ve heard a lot about are, I guess for lack of a better word, ones that impact your social relationships. Sometimes that’s marriage habits or things like that or habits of affection, but sometimes it also friend groups and how those impact your habits. A lot of young people, particularly in the United Sates, if you live in a big city you feel like you have to go out to happy hour or restaurants or go out to the bars with your friends because otherwise you get ostracised from the friend group, but it ends up causing a lot of financial stress because they feel like they don’t have money to go out every week, but that’s what everybody’s doing so they feel a social pressure to do so. That’s really interesting and I think I’ve heard a lot more about that than I expected to and it also has raised some questions for me about the influence that the social environment has on our habits and behaviours, because I think it’s a very significant pull. Peer pressure can be positive or negative and I’ve heard a lot about that on both sides.
Ali Hill:
Yeah. I was thinking about that in terms of even preparation for our catch up today. The influence of our habits are the people around us and sometimes, and when you talk about choices and strategy, sometimes those choices are not ours, they’re our family, they’re our friends, they’re people saying this is what you should do and so therefor we’re trying to fit a mould as it comes into play and I really do wonder if that social impact has a big impact on the clash around some of those habits.
James Clear:
There are a lot of strategies you can use to get a habit to start, but if you want a habit to stick, the social environment is maybe the most important factor. If you just think about some of the normal habits that we perform, things that we almost don’t even consider on most days, like you move into a new neighbourhood and you walk outside on Tuesday night and you see that your neighbour is mowing their lawn or something. Well, why do we mow our lawns and trim our hedges? Partially it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you don’t want to be judged by the rest of your neighbours.
Ali Hill:
Keep up with Jones’s.
James Clear:
It’s really that social expectation that gets you to perform that habit for the next 25 years or however long you live there, and we wish we could be that reliable with a lot of our other habits, right, we wish we could do something every week for 20 years. I think that’s an important question to ask yourself which is, where is there a group, where is there a tribe where my desired behaviour is the normal behaviour, because if it’s normal in that group then performing the habit will be very attractive to you because it will help you belong.
James Clear:
Most people, if they have choose between I get to have the habits that I want but I’m ostracised from the group or I don’t fit in that much, I’m cast out, or I have habits that I don’t really love but I get to fit in and be with people, most people would rather be wrong with the crowd than right and by themselves. The desire to belong often overpowers the desire to improve. Particularly in the long run. You might be able to run against the grain of the group for a week or a month, but man, at some point that just starts to wear on you and you’d rather just not have the social friction.
James Clear:
I think this is why you often see when people really build habits that stick, they often join new groups where that’s normal. They pick up a reading habit because they’re part of a book club or they change their fitness because they joined a running group or a cycling club or something like that. They need sort of a, it doesn’t have to be their whole life, it doesn’t have to be 24 hours a day, but they at least need some sacred space where they can go where that behaviour is normal and it’s uplifted and reinforced by the people around them. That’s one of the strongest ways to get a habit to last I think.
Ali Hill:
Do you have any insights or strategies from those conversations, because I 100% agree? I think it is those people around you and those environments and as you say, it’s not that you have to live in that, it can just be where can you go in and out. Sometimes those new environments or new social connections can come with judgement from your previous or your current connections as well, like who are you hanging out with and why are you going to the gym, and there can be judgements around that. Do you have any strategies on how to address that or deal with that in order to keep connected to the behaviours you want to be engaging in?
James Clear:
Right. Yeah, that’s a good questions. There are multiple elements to this. On the one side, even going to the new environment where the habit is praised, you can often feel like an imposter or feel like you don’t belong at first. A lot of people, they go the gym for the first time, they’re around other people who are working out but they feel like they don’t belong, they feel very uncertain or feel like they are being judged. Am I doing this wrong, do I look stupid, things like that. For that reason I think that there are a couple strategies. One is that you can focus on the areas that you already have overlap with those groups.
James Clear:
One of my favourite examples, my friend Steve Kamb, he runs this company called Nerd Fitness, and it’s all about getting in shape but it’s specifically organised for people who identify as nerds and so the workouts are what Spiderman would do for a workout or what Legos can teach you about pushups or things like that. If you show up there to that community, you’re like well, I don’t know what to do, but I love Star Wars and so does this other person who’s already here and we can connect over our mutual love of Star Wars and then I can soak up the workout habit later.
James Clear:
I guess what I’m advocating for here is looking for mutual areas of interest that may not be the habit that you’re looking to build right away, but it will allow you to form connections and it’s really about connection and belonging, and once you belong with the group then you’ll start to take on some of those other behaviours. You actually, you see this kind of thing all the time in different communities, like a Crossfit gym. People who go to Crossfit, ostensibly they go there to work out at first, but pretty soon they’re signing up for paleo meal plans and buying certain types of knee sleeves and buying certain types of shoes. They’re doing all this stuff that they didn’t even … They’re picking up habits they didn’t even intend to pick up, once they feel like they belong with the crowd.
James Clear:
The second thing you can do, and I think this is … We’ve talked a little bit about how to get a habit to stick with the social environment, this is a great way to get a habit to start, which is, I call the two minute rule, but it basically says take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. Read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. Sometimes people resist that a little bit, right?
Ali Hill:
Yeah, talk to me about this, because…
James Clear:
Well, because they’re like, okay, I know the real goal isn’t just to take my yoga mat out, right?
Ali Hill:
Yeah, and two minutes, what’s it really going to do?
James Clear:
Yeah, what’s that going to do? Exactly.
James Clear:
I had this reader, this guy named Mitch, I mentioned him in the book, and he ended up losing a lot of weight, 100 pounds, 40 or 50 kilos, something like that. For the first six weeks that he went to the gym he had a little rule for himself where he wasn’t allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. He would get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. It sounds silly, it sounds ridiculous, it’s just like what you just said, what’s that going to do, but if you step back what you realise is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes.
James Clear:
I think that that’s a deeper truth about habits that is often overlooked, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved, right, it has to become the standard in your life before you can optimise it or scale it up into anything bigger. For whatever reason with habits, we’re often so focused on optimising, we’re so focused on finding the perfect business plan, the ideal workout programme, the best diet to follow. We’re so focused on finding the perfect thing that we don’t give ourselves permission to show up even if it’s just in a small way. I think the two minute rule helps you get over that, it helps get past that perfectionism.
Ali Hill:
I love it, because it actually requires you right at the very start to almost discern what does success look like, because we set these habits, whether you say I want to go to the yoga four days a week, so then if I only go three I’ve lost, whereas what you’re describing is there’s a different layer of success and a success just to start is about showing up, so it’s kind of liberating.
James Clear:
Yeah, I think you’re making an important point there, which we could phrase it in a different way as well which is, one of the most pervasive … What do I want to say? One of the most lasting forms of motivation for humans is the feeling of progress. If you have signals of progress then you have every reason to feel motivated and continue because you’re making progress, you’re moving toward your ultimate destination. In many ways starting with a really small habit, it facilitates feelings of progress, it facilitates signals of that.
James Clear:
If you set your goal to do 100 pushups a day and on the good days, yeah you can figure out a way to get 100 pushups in, but on days when you’re tired or exhausted or you’re sick or your kids need you for something or you have to help out your parents or work is just crazy, you’re not able to stick with it and then immediately what happens is that, lets say on pretty much any day you could do one push up, right, anybody has enough time. If you make that the goal then you feel like a success, but if you made it 100 and you only did one or five or even ten, you feel like a failure because you didn’t hit that mark and so it’s a weird thing that our expectations play on us in that way.
James Clear:
I think for that reason it’s very helpful, particularly in the beginning, before it’s a habit, to set the bar low, develop a feeling of progress and master the art of showing up.
Ali Hill:
I love it. It feels so counter intuitive, but it’s the regularity, it’s the consistency of it which is what habits are all about.
Ali Hill:
In the book you talk about the slow pace of transformation, which I think ties into this really, really nicely, is yes show up, but what if you don’t see the results? Again motivation is connected to starting to see some change. How do I know that I’m showing up in the right way at the right time or have I got my ladder leaning against a wrong wall and I should be doing something else?
James Clear:
Yeah, this is great question. I think the answer, at least one of the answers is you need some feedback, because if you are performing an action but not getting feedback, you have no way to measure or know whether or not you’re making progress.
James Clear:
There is a certain level of persistence and grit and consistency that I think does need to be brought to the table to start with. I love the, there’s a quote I mention in the book, the San Antonio Spurs, NBA basketball team, they’ve won five championships and they have this quote hanging in their locker room that says, “Whenever I feel like giving up I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock 100 times without it showing a crack and then at the 101 blow it splits in two, and I know that it wasn’t the 101 that did it, but all the 100 that came before.” I think so many of our habits are like that. It’s not the last sentence that writes the novel, it’s all the ones that came before. It’s not the last workout that changes your body, it’s all the ones that came before. You need some willingness to be consistent and persistent in order for those to show up, but along the way it’s important to have a little bit of feedback.
James Clear:
I think the key here, I have a chapter where I talk about measurement and measuring your habits and there’s more nuance to it, but one of the keys is choosing a pace of measurement that matches the pace of the habit that you need to perform. Take my dad for example, he likes to swim. On any given day when he goes and swims, he gets out of the water and his body looks exactly the same, right? There is no visual improvement, no visual feedback of the benefits of that workout, but he has a little pocket calendar and he pulls that out and he puts an X on that day and that little habit tracker, the Xs on the calendar, that is a form of feedback, a form of visual measurement that matches the pace that he needs to maintain of the workout. If it was just about the number on the scale, that might change too slowly. If it’s just about how his body looks in the mirror, that definitely changes too slowly, but if it’s about how many Xs I’m building up in my current streak, that’s fast enough that it matches the pace of the habit and so it’s a form of feedback that is quick enough to help maintain the motivation.
Ali Hill:
It’s particularly that habit streaking, there’s something about you don’t want to be in that day, you don’t, not cross that off.
James Clear:
That’s idea can be powerful. Don’t break the chain. You don’t want it to be a day where you mess up or slip up and miss and then all of a sudden the streak is broken.
James Clear:
I will add something to that though, which I think is powerful. At some point every habit streak breaks, right? You get sick or your kids need something or whatever, and when that happens the mantra I like to keep in mind is, never miss twice. It’s like well, all right I wish I hadn’t missed my swimming workout, but never miss twice so let me make sure next morning I get in. I think we all sort of implicitly know this, which is that it’s never the first mistake that ruins you, it’s the spiral of repeated mistakes. It’s letting missing become a new habit that that’s the real problem.
Ali Hill:
Yeah, that’s a great point. You don’t want to start that streak.
James Clear:
If you can find a way to get back on track. Right. If you can never miss twice then it’s just blip on the radar at the end of the year.
Ali Hill:
Yeah, and in the grand scheme of a lifetime it’s nothing.
Ali Hill:
One of the things, you’re not the first person to talk about habits, there’s been a huge amount of research that’s led up and certainly in the five years that you’ve dived into it, but it’s incredibly accessible this book and there is something about it that is powerful. One of the things that really was an ah-ha for me when I read through it was the connection between habits and identity and I think you’ve brought that together in a way I’ve never seen before. Why is identity important when we talk about habits?
James Clear:
Yeah. I think this is a crucial question. Maybe the most important question about habits.
James Clear:
Often when we talk about habits we talk about them as the avenue for changing our external results. They can help you get six pack abs or lose weight or make more money or reduce stress, and it’s true, habits can help you do all of those things and that’s great, but I think the real reason, the deeper maybe true reason habits matter is that they are a method for changing or shifting your self image, for getting you to believe something new about yourself.
James Clear:
The way that I would describe this is that your habits are kind of how you embody a particular identity. Every morning that you make your bed, you embody the identity of somebody who is clean and organised, or if you study biology every Tuesday night for 20 minutes, you embody the identity of someone who is studious. The first time that you do things you don’t necessarily believe that about yourself. You may not study biology one time and then think, I’m a studious person, but if you keep doing it every week at some point you cross this invisible threshold where you’re like, well I guess I have to admit it to myself that part of my identity is that I am studious.
James Clear:
This I think is perhaps the most powerful thing that habits and even small habits do, which is they cast a vote for the type of person that you wish to become. In that way you can sort of summarise the power that habits have by saying, every action you take is a vote for that type of person and so no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for, I am the type of person who is a writer, and no, doing one push up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for, I am the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
James Clear:
The more that you cast those votes, the more you build up this little body of evidence of, this is the type of person I am, and I think this is more powerful than one of the common things you hear, which is fake it til you make it. Fake it til you make it, I don’t necessarily have anything wrong with it. It’s asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it’s asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it and we have a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence, we call delusion. Right, like at some point your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you’re saying and what you’re doing, and so my argument is, lets let the behaviour lead the way. By doing one pushup you cannot deny that in that moment you were they type of person who didn’t miss workouts. That evidence, that little bit of evidence, even if it’s just for a minute, it is a little bit of proof to root that new identity in.
James Clear:
Ultimately I think that that’s the longterm power habits have, is that they can allow you to shift that identity and it’s why I say, the real goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book, the goal is to become a writer. Not to do a silent meditation retreat, to become a meditator. True behaviour change is really identity change in that sense. Once you’ve become that person or start to identify in that way, you’re not even really trying to convince yourself anymore to do the action, you’re just like, yeah this is just what I do, it’s part of who I am.
Ali Hill:
Because I’m a runner or because … Yeah. Are people ever resistant to that? One of the reasons why I ask that question is, particularly that one about being a runner, it’s something I’ve picked up later in life, I’ve started doing it. It wasn’t until people started to say to me that you’re a runner and I just went, no I’m not, I’m just out going for a run. I think I had run two marathons at that point, but still wasn’t convinced that I was a runner because runners are fast, they’re super fit, they go out every day, they do 10Ks a day. I don’t do that.
Ali Hill:
Is there some resistance in embodying those identities that actually can backfire on us in our own habits?
James Clear:
It’s an interesting thing. It probably wasn’t until about three to six months after Atomic Habits came out that I identified as an author, which isn’t it so strange? It’s like no, its already been written, it’s already here.
Ali Hill:
That’s ironic. Yeah, so was there a moment then or did someone tell you that yore an author now?
James Clear:
Well, there wasn’t a moment, but I think where I currently fall in this is that, so like in your case with running, you’ve got sort of a lifetime of evidence of not being that and it can take a surprisingly long amount of time for the scale to shift, for the amount of evidence on the other side of the scale to outweigh that and for you to feel like, oh okay, this is who I am now.
James Clear:
I think in the long run that’s ultimately what we’re looking for with habits, but in the short run this is why you need a lot of the other strategies that I talk about in the book, whether it’s habit tracking and putting an X on the calendar or using the two minute rule or whatever it is. These other strategies are really useful while you’re bridging that gap and thinking I’m just out for a run, I’m not a runner. All those things can be very helpful for that period as you’re working through it.
James Clear:
I also think about, there’s a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and he talks mostly about writing habits in there and he had a little example that he gave where he talked about, a wolf for example, has a territory and you, as a writer or you could apply it to any other habit, have a territory as well, but the only way that it starts to feel like your territory, like it’s your home, is if you spend a lot of time there. Early on, the first time you go to the gym, you don’t feel like it’s your territory, you feel like this is a foreign place and I don’t fit.
Ali Hill:
I’m an imposter. Yeah.
James Clear:
Right. There’s this period of time with any habit where you’re doing it and from the outside people look at you and they’re like, you just trained for six months and ran a marathon, you’re a runner, and you’re like no, it still doesn’t quite feel like my territory yet.
James Clear:
The threshold of crossing that I think is just an invisible line and we don’t know exactly when it happens and it changes for each habit we’re talking about, but I do think that there is a time that comes, that when you show up enough you feel like, yeah, this is home now, this is where I belong.
Ali Hill:
I think one of the things you do in the book is an invitation to bring that consciousness earlier. It’s almost a permission to go, well at least ask what would that look like or when would I define myself as an author or when would I define myself as a runner, which is a really interesting invitation for people to [inaudible 00:33:37], I think.
Ali Hill:
Is there ever a time where there’s an identity clash in a particular moment? What I mean by that is, I think of myself for example, I’ve got two kids and there are some mornings where I want to embody the person who gets up early and goes for a run and I also wants to embody the parent who’s there for my children, and it feels like in that same hour those two identities can clash. Have you come across that and are there any strategies on how to reconcile that in that moment?
James Clear:
Yeah. This is a big question and we could phrase it in a variety of ways. You could phrase it like identity clashing, you could phrase it as your priorities or your values clashing. For a long time what I thought was, my friend Tim Urban he talks about values or priorities as being a ladder and so well maybe, for example, you’re going for a run is on the third rung, but actually being a parent is on the second rung and so when they compete that’s the one that wins and so you decide I’m going to stay home, I’m not going to do the run, I’ll be with my kids.
James Clear:
You wish you didn’t have to make that trade off, but there’s this ranking of the priorities and I used to think that was a good way to think about it, and it still is to a certain degree, but I think in real life it’s often much more complex than that.
James Clear:
Most people would probably say, oh family is more of a priority for me than work or my health, I know that if I don’t have my health I don’t have anything and so that should be a priority, but actually if you look at how people behave on a daily basis, a lot of people will choose to work late to finish the project rather than to get home by dinner or to spend an extra hour getting into the office and skip the workout or whatever. I think the truth is there is for each value, for each identity that we have there’s a certain level of urgency or priority attached to that on any given day and most of the time, if your health is reasonably good and you don’t have any emergency, that does not occupy the top rung, even if ultimately in the big picture of life we’ll say yes, if you don’t have your health you don’t have anything, most days it’s actually not. There’s much more of a shifting of that on a daily basis.
James Clear:
I haven’t come up with a good way to define that yet, other than to say it’s kind of this collection of moving targets.
James Clear:
The question about what happens when those identities come into conflict, that’s kind of the moment when you actually find out what your identity really is, if it’s not in conflict then you never have to make a trade off, right, and so you don’t actually know what the true priority is. I don’t have … Obviously this is going to differ for each person what the identities are or whatever.
Ali Hill:
I think sometimes it even differs each week.
James Clear:
Right.
Ali Hill:
Because if I haven’t seen the kids for a week then that becomes a priority, but if I’ve seen them and I’m done with them, I’m happy to have an hour out.
James Clear:
Right.
Ali Hill:
Sometimes that can be what else is happening, is my perspective on it as well.
James Clear:
I’ve actually heard this for a lot of habits. People say, it’s very easy for me to skip my run, for example, if I’ve had four days in a row where I’ve run, because I’m like oh no, things are going well, I’m okay, but if I’ve missed for four days in a row then I’m like, I got to get out there, I have to make this a priority.
James Clear:
It’s very similar to what you just mentioned there with kids or something else. It’s like when your capacity in a given area is high it’s easy to rationalise letting it slip once or twice. I don’t quite know where I fall on that, because on the one hand I feel like maybe that’s the time when it’s most important to get in, because if it’s easy for you to rationalise and let it slip, then it’s easy for it to become something that, oh shoot, two weeks pass and I haven’t done this now.
James Clear:
I think the question that you’re asking is a very important one. I don’t know that I have a good answer to it, but we all have these trade offs that we have to make.
James Clear:
I do have one other thing that I think is worth adding which is, I think any ambitious person, they don’t like the fact that they have to make trade offs because there’s a lot of things that you’d like be able to achieve. You would like to be able run a faster marathon time and be a great parent and do high quality work and so on. The question that I keep coming back to is, what season am I in right now, and so I like this idea that life has different phases of seasons, and you can define that however you’d like. Maybe it’s a big picture one like what is that season of this decade or maybe it’s a much smaller thing, what season am I in this month or this week.
James Clear:
If I ask myself what season am I in, for me currently, I don’t have kids yet so I’m in a pretty career heavy season and personal health focused and if you imagine burners on a stove, the family burner is probably turned down pretty low and maybe the friends burner too even, but at some point I will have kids and that will signal a shift in seasons and now the family burner needs to get cranked up and maybe something else has to get put on low. I don’t like that I have to make that trade off, but I do think it’s important to ask what season am I in and are my habits matching the season that I’m in right now, because habits don’t have to be permanent in your life, they may just be permanent for a season, but that line of questioning can help you figure out.
James Clear:
Another way to say this is like, what am I optimising for? Right now you may be optimising for money or for time or for family or whatever it is for you, but what you optimise for may shift over the decades or even over the weeks and months.
Ali Hill:
In your book you talk about these four laws and you talk about both, not making new habits but also breaking other habits, and I think it’s the second part of that that we often don’t refer to. We go, well I need to make new habits but we have to have the time for that, right, and sometimes none of us are sitting around going, geez I’ve got a day I wish I knew what to do with it. All our days are full so something has to give. What are the four laws that you unpack in your book? If you could dive into those for us.
James Clear:
Roughly speaking, if you want a habit to form you need about four things to happen. You don’t need all four to happen at the same time, but the more of these that you have going for you the better position you’ll be in.
James Clear:
The first thing is that you want your good habits to be obvious. You want the queues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier they are to see, the easier it is that they’ll catch your attention.
James Clear:
The second thing that you want is you want your habits to be attractive. The more attractive or appealing a habit is, the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it.
James Clear:
The third thing, the third law of behaviour change is you want to make it easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionless, simple your habits are, the more likely they are to be performed.
James Clear:
The fourth and final thing is you want to make it satisfying. You want your habits to be rewarding and pleasurable and you need some kind of … Not every experience in life is rewarding. Sometimes there’s a consequence, sometimes it’s just neutral, but if a habit is not rewarding or if a behaviour is not rewarding, it’s unlikely to become a habit.
James Clear:
Those four, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. That gives you a high level picture for how to build a good habit and then if we want to talk about what you just mentioned, if we want to break a bad habit, then you just invert each of those four. Rather than making the queues of your good habits obvious, you want to make the queues of your bad habits invisible. If you’re trying to stick to a diet, don’t follow food bloggers on Instagram. If you want to spend less money late night shopping, unsubscribe from emails from the latest fashion brands or stores. If you feel like you’re spending too much money on electronics, don’t read the latest tech review blogs. That exposure, make it invisible.
James Clear:
Second, make it unattractive instead of making it attractive. Third, make it difficult instead of easy, so increase friction, add steps. Then fourth, make it unsatisfying instead of making it satisfying. Add a cost, add some kind of consequence to the behaviour.
James Clear:
Those four steps sort of give you the big picture view of how to shape a habit. They give you four different places to intervene if you want to build a good habit or break a bad one.
Ali Hill:
I can see why. I mean one of my questions was, what about those habits or those things that we do that we know that we don’t want to do anymore but we almost can’t, we feel like we just can’t stop ourselves from doing it, why is that? As you were talking I’m almost going, well it might be because it’s right there in front of you, it’s too easy to do. It’s all the things that you say. You want to create a new habit is actually those things that you’re stopping, so reversing that.
James Clear:
It can partially be because of those reasons that you just mentioned. It’s too obvious, it’s too convenient. Smart phones are like this a lot, the action is so frictionless. Our phones are literally often a millimetre from our skin, they’re right there in your pocket at all times. It’s so frictionless, so easy that we find ourselves sliding into it even if we don’t really want to do it or don’t want …
James Clear:
A good habit that I’ve built recently, over the last year or two, is I’ll leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. I have a home office so if I have my phone on me, if I take it in there, I don’t do it all the time but I probably do it 90% of days, but if I bring my phone in and I’m like everybody else, I’ll check it every three minutes, but if I leave it in another room it’s only 30 seconds away but I never go get, which is always interesting to me. I’m like, well did I want it or not? In the one sense I wanted it bad enough to check it every three minutes when it’s next to me, but in the other sense I never wanted it bad enough to work 30 seconds to go get it.
James Clear:
I think a lot of our technology habits are like that. They’re so convenient, so frictionless that at the slightest whim of desire we act on them. Convenience is a big part there.
Ali Hill:
What prompted you to change that?
James Clear:
I realised that when I had my phone on me I was spending more time responding to everybody else’s agenda than working on my own and whether that was reading things on social media, replying to comments, checking email and then getting sucked in to whatever thing was there.
James Clear:
Somebody asked me a couple weeks ago, actually it was a reader, it was on Twitter and he said, “What is one thing everybody in the world can get better at?” It took me a while to come up with something I felt was a decent answer, but what I ended up saying was allocating your attention. It’s almost guaranteed that nobody in the world is always focused on the highest and best use of their time and in that sense phones, despite their power and they do have a lot of power and productivity and wonderful things they provide, they also are distraction machines for your attention and it’s very unlikely that the best thing for you to be working on is whatever happens to pop up in your inbox or on social media or the notification on your phone or whatever.
James Clear:
I figured I wanted to be a little more intentional about that and leave it in another room. I got plenty of time in the afternoon and evening where I can check it all, right, but I just want a block of three or four hours where I can work focused without that.
Ali Hill:
What have you found with your productivity? That’s a great question to ask on Twitter and I was wondering around that, whether you have any tips and hints on performance, particularly in workplaces. How do we get more done with less time and less to do? What have you found in terms of your own productivity with having that phone 30 seconds away as opposed to right next to you?
James Clear:
That helped me stay focused on whatever task I was working on, but I like rather than giving advice, although we’ve talked about a lot of ideas here that are in Atomic Habits, I’m starting to find more usefulness in questions.
James Clear:
Advice is very context dependent in the sense that it only applies in that situation, but questions are much more useful in a very broad range of context. To link this back to something we’ve talked about earlier with identity, one of the questions that came across from a reader as I was working on the book, is she lost a bunch of weight and the question she kept asking herself each day was what would a healthy person do, and that’s actually much more useful than a piece of advice that says, follow this diet or do this workout, because she can carry that question around with her to every context in life and just keep asking, what would a healthy person do here, and then follow that.
James Clear:
In the case of productivity, I think a really good question to ask is, what is the work that keeps working for me after it’s done, because there are a lot of things that we do that they are just a task to be finished and then as soon as they are finished they no longer work for you.
James Clear:
As an example, we’re sitting here recording a podcast. I strongly prefer to do podcast interviews over radio, because let’s say we sit down for 30 minutes in either case, when the radio interview is done, that work no longer works for me because it was aired and then boom, you’re off the air and it’s over. With a podcast it’s recorded and even right now as we’re sitting here in this conversation, there are other podcasts that I’ve recorded that somebody somewhere is listening to right now, and so it’s still working for me even though the work is done.
James Clear:
I think that question allows you to identify high leverage places to work and ultimately if you start making decisions like that each day, man, that really compounds over a long time if you keep doing work.
James Clear:
Writing Atomic Habits, another example. Took me three to five years, but that work now that it’s done, it’s still working for me right now, there are people reading it somewhere and so that ends up showcasing, I think, to you the highest leverage places to allocate your attention and effort and that really lets you compound yourself over the long run.
Ali Hill:
I love that. What can I do now that will have a latency further down the track.
James Clear:
It’s more like, what are the most durable tasks. What are the task that continue to deliver again and again even though that hour has already been spent?
Ali Hill:
Yeah. I loved sitting in that question. It’s certainly something I’ve been playing with around the power of questions and the right question at the right time, but also as human beings we have a resistance to … We want to get the answer and I think just sitting in a question is something really, really powerful.
Ali Hill:
We were talking off mic before around, we we’re talking about this year and what it’s meant for you and what it’s been like and you said one of the surprises has been that the very thing that you did to get here, which was writing, you haven’t had the time for because you’ve had to say yes to a whole bunch of other things. We started talking about the power of saying yes and saying no. What are the things that you say yes to and what are the things do you say no to at the moment?
James Clear:
Yeah, that’s a good question. As I mentioned to you earlier, when you say no to something, you’re only saying no to that one thing and you can still say yes to anything else, but when you say yes to something, it’s like you’re saying no to every other option. In that sense, yes is a responsibility, it’s a commitment, an obligation, and no is an opportunity still and we don’t usually think about it that way.
James Clear:
Another way I like to phrase this is, yes is like a time debt, when you say yes to something it’s a debt you have to pay back again in the future. If you say yes to a meeting you have this debt of one hour for that meeting that you have to pay back later, but no is like a time credit. It retains the option to use that hour for whatever you’d like.
James Clear:
Although I can say that, it’s been much harder for me to practise it.
Ali Hill:
I was about to say, that sounds so appealing, but no is hard.
James Clear:
I think one thing that’s helped a lot is, at first when the book came out I would get emails about, hey, do you want to come here to speak, or do you want to come be part of this event or we have this really interesting idea for a podcast, do you want to partner on that, or whatever it is. There were a bunch of cool crazy things that came in the inbox and if they came in one by one and I made a decision right then, I would only be thinking about what that opportunity was and I was very likely to say yes or more likely to say yes, but if we collected all of the opportunities and then put them in a list and then we revisited them at the end of the week, then I was looking at opportunities relative to other ones and relative to everything else we had at our list to do, and so it was much more likely that I would feel the trade off that that would force me to experience, so I wasn’t only thinking about that one opportunity, I was also thinking about how it would impact everything else we were focused on.
James Clear:
I guess what I’m advocating for here is a little bit of distance between the opportunity and the decision. The more that you can create space, the less likely you are to be sucked into whatever sounds cool in the moment.
James Clear:
There was another strategy that I thought was a pretty good one. Brian Cox is a physicist, we did a radio show together last week, and he said he’s been struggling with this and one of the things that helped him was that whenever someone asked him to do something the question he tries to turn around in his head is, would I do this tomorrow and if I wouldn’t do it tomorrow, if I wouldn’t drop everything I’m doing to fit it in, then I should probably not do it.
James Clear:
If something is a year from now or six months from now we’re like, yeah sure, I have time, my calendar is free, but then the time comes you’re like, I kind of wish I wasn’t committed to this thing. The compression of time, the making it more immediate, what that cost is, it clarifies whether you should do it or not. This actually ties back to Atomic Habits, this is one of the concepts I call the cardinal rule of behaviour change, which is behaviours that are immediately rewarded get repeated, behaviours that are immediately punished get avoided and if you can feel the immediate cost of that time commitment then you’re much more likely to avoid it or at least to be clear about, yeah, this is actually something I really want to do.
Ali Hill:
Bringing it forward, because at some point it’s going to be tomorrow.
James Clear:
I think bringing it into the present moment or as close to the present as you can, is a much more powerful way to determine, is this actually a priority I should be focused on.
Ali Hill:
I love that because it actually at some point it’s going to be tomorrow, whether it’s in a years time or whether it is tomorrow.
James Clear:
Right. Yes. Exactly, at some point it is the present.
Ali Hill:
Yeah. Yeah, so how do you bring that forward and how does that then sit with me, so I love that discernment. In a really practical level, how do you say no? Even if you’ve made the decision. but you know you’re going to let someone down or it potentially might be a great opportunity, because it might be that you’re saying yes to one but both are really good? How do you say no?
James Clear:
Yeah. Well actually, so two things there. The first, what you just mentioned, they both might be good. This I think is the real challenge as you become more successful or throughout your career you gain more opportunities or whatever. The hard part, most people know they shouldn’t say yes to time wasting things. Whatever, we all do it occasionally, but most people are like, yeah okay, I know I shouldn’t be watching videos on YouTube or watching Netflix or something, and that’s actually not that hard to avoid. It’s much harder to avoid say items three through six on your priority list, the good uses of time but they’re not great uses of time, because you can always rationalise it. You can be like, oh I’m working on item number four, that’s fairly important to me, but actually it’s a distraction.
James Clear:
The most dangerous items on your to do lists are ones that look like opportunities but are actually distractions, because they prevent you from doing the great work and you can rationalise it because it’s good.
Ali Hill:
That’s integral. That’s high performance, is that ability to decide between …
James Clear:
That discernment between what is great and what is good.
Ali Hill:
Yeah.
James Clear:
It’s very hard, and not only the discernment of it, which is a crucial element, but the practise of it, yeah, the courage to say no to good uses of time, that’s something that I think is … I’m still trying to build it myself. It’s hard to do.
James Clear:
The other part of your questions was, okay, practically how do you say no? This is something I could probably get a lot better at. I think there’s a book called The Power of the Positive No, and essentially, the rough version of it from what I understand, I haven’t read it fully but I had a friend who told me a lot about it, the rough version is that when you say no, also offer an alternative. For example, no, thank you so much for thinking of me for this keynote event, I’m sorry I won’t be able to speak, I already have a conflict, but here are two other great speakers that you might consider, or thank you so much for offering to partner on building a podcast together, unfortunately I’m focused on core business concerns right now and working on a second book so I definitely can’t focus on that, but here are a couple of ideas that I think would be interesting for a podcast like that or themes that I would love to see a podcast explore.
James Clear:
What ends up happening is that you’re saying no but people often thank you for it. They’re like, oh thank you so much for these ideas or thank you for the additional recommendations for speakers or whatever, and so I do like that. I like being direct but also offering alternatives.
Ali Hill:
Yeah. I was just about to say, I mean the other thing they’re thanking you for is not the vagueness. Oh maybe or call me in a month, where you’re actually quite clear in that is important.
James Clear:
Yeah. That’s actually brutal and you see that not just with business, but my wife and I, when we sent out wedding invitations we had a few different friends who just put off and put off and put off telling us whether they could come or not. When I think back on it now, I think it was mostly they kind of knew they probably wouldn’t be able to come but they just didn’t want to share bad news, and it would have been way better for everybody if they just had said from the start, no, I’m sorry, we can’t come, and it actually made it worse for them by putting off the conversation they didn’t want to have.
James Clear:
Being more direct I think is helpful. Brene Brown I think has a phrase where she says like, “Clear is kind,” basically.
Ali Hill:
Yes.
James Clear:
The more clear you are, that actually is the kind response even if it’s not the response they were hoping for.
Ali Hill:
Yeah. It might feel impolite, but what’s impolite is making it wait longer and down the track.
Ali Hill:
Here we are, obviously we’re having this conversation in Australia, but we are coming into 2020, so a new year. We talked a little bit about habits and identity. Who are you going to become in 2020?
James Clear:
That’s an interesting question. I like the track that I’m on right now, so a lot of it I think will be reinforcing current habits that I have, particularly the writing part. I mentioned earlier that it took me a long time to step into the idea of I’m a writer. I held on to my book … Atomic Habit’s only been out for a year, but my business I’ve been writing for eight years, so I identified as an entrepreneur for much longer than I did as an author, but I like the author part now and so I think stepping into that maybe a little bit more. Maybe that means a second book, I’m not sure, but toying with concepts around that.
James Clear:
Then the other one, the one that I feel like is … I just sent this question out in my newsletter today, which is what is the most neglected important area of your life, and if I think about myself for that, an area that I’m just kind of treading water on right now is training in the gym. I haven’t gotten unhealthy this year but I also haven’t made progress and I think a lot of that has been because I’ve been travelling so much for the book and that’s an identity I would like to reinforce and kickstart and motivate more in the new year.
James Clear:
I know I can do it because I’ve been there before, so it’s more about returning to a past self than it is becoming something totally new or unknown, but that’s an element I’d like to be a bigger part of my life.
Ali Hill:
Is there potentially an evolution in that in terms of how you maintain that on the road, so when you travel, because sometimes it’s that routine of I know how to do it when I’m at home, but this life now is going to be on the road a little bit?
James Clear:
Daria Rose, she’s a nutrition blogger and she has a good concept I like, which is home court habits and away court habits.
Ali Hill:
That’s great.
James Clear:
Yeah. When you’re in your home court, when you’re at your office or at your house, that’s probably the first place to focus on getting your habits dialled in because you spend most of your time there, but occasionally, depending on your job or depending on the phase that you’re in in your career or whatever, you may be in the away court a lot. You may be on the road a lot and if that’s the case then it makes sense to try to figure out, what can I do to get habits to stick? I do think the strategies are a little bit different, because when you’re at your home court habits are … The way habits usually work is they’re tied to a particular context, so you always journal in your living room or you always do your workouts in the basement or whatever it is, you have some context where the habit typically occurs. You always listen to podcasts while you’re cooking dinner or in the kitchen or whatever. When you’re at an away court, the context is always changing. You’re always checking into a new hotel or in a different city and so it’s really hard for a lot of people who travel a lot to build habits because of that context switching.
James Clear:
I think one strategy that can be useful is rather than building the habit around the context, build it around a part of the sequence that always shows up. For example, after I check in at the hotel I will say one thing I’m grateful for or after I put my luggage on the bed I will do 10 burpees. You don’t know what bed it will be or what hotel you’ll be in or what city you’ll be at, but you know that part of the process will always happen.
Ali Hill:
You hope there’s a bed.
James Clear:
Yes.
Ali Hill:
You got to have that.
James Clear:
True. Depends on where you’re travelling.
Ali Hill:
[crosstalk 00:58:39] connecting the two.
James Clear:
Focusing on those repeated actions rather than repeated context, that gives you maybe a different entry point for the habit to live or to kickstart.
Ali Hill:
There’s so many angles I could have gone down and this book is great. It’s incredibly accessible for people to tap into and maybe next time you’re out in Australia we’ll dive into a few other areas, but I’d love to wrap up this conversation by asking a question that I ask every guest that comes on.
Ali Hill:
The podcast is called Stand Out Life. When you hear that term, what does that mean to you to live a stand out life?
James Clear:
Probably to live an authentic life or a genuine life to you. Humans are imitation machines and we kind of need to be to survive. When you’re a kid you imitate how your parents talk or the habits that they do and then you go off to university, you imitate how your roommate talks and what they do, and then you get into the workforce and you imitate the habits of your supervisor or your boss because that’s how you thrive in that particular workplace. We do that all the time, but I think the downside of that is that we often imitate the goals and objectives of society at large.
James Clear:
A lot of people are living lives that are focused on borrowed goals, the goals that they borrow from the people around them, from their neighbours, from their peers, from what the news says or what they see on social media. If you can step outside of that … It doesn’t mean you should never do those things, but it does mean that you should question whether that’s what you want to optimise for, what is authentic to you. If it is, great, but if it’s not then you need to shift something.
James Clear:
If once you figure out what you’re optimising for, I like the question, can my current habits carry me to my desired future, and if they can’t something needs to change. I think living a stand out life generally means you’re current habits are carrying you toward your desired future, they are carrying you toward that authentic or genuine or unique personal outcome that is right for you, rather than just borrowed from the people around you.
Ali Hill:
Love it. Thank you so much for your time, James.
James Clear:
Thank you.
Ali Hill:
If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, then there’s every chance that you might also enjoy reading a copy of my book called Stand Out: A Real World Guide to Get Clear, Find Purpose and Become the Boss of Busy. You can grab a copy by heading to my website www.allisonhill.com.au.
Ali Hill:
Thank you for tuning into this episode. I wonder if there’s someone in your world, someone who comes to mind that you know who would also love to hear this podcast? Someone who might soak up the insights that you’ve just heard from this episode. If there is someone that comes to mind, I’m wondering if I can ask a favour. The next time that you see that person or the next time that you spend time with family and friends, why don’t you ask to borrow their phone just for a moment, search Stand Out Life on their podcast platform and subscribe them to this podcast. I reckon they’ll enjoy it and it’ll mean that we can keep having these conversations with even more amazing people.
