Month: October 2020

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117. BJ Fogg – Tiny Habits: Small Changes Change Everything

BJ Fogg is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. BJ is the Founder & Director of the Stanford University Behavior Design Lab and has dedicated his life to teaching and sharing his insights about behavior change. Using his Fogg Behavior Model and methods in behavior design, BJ trains Fortune 500 companies and guides industry innovators in creating products that help people become healthier and happier.

BJ joins me today to share his insights on behavior design and habit formation. He emphasizes the role of emotions in creating habits and explains the power of simplicity in cultivating behaviors. He reveals some of the biggest myths about habit formation and describes some factors that make it difficult for people to change their behavior. He also shares the Fogg Behavioral Model and discusses how self-confidence can help individuals form new habits.

” Emotions create habits, not repetition. Design for positive emotions: you change best when you’re feeling good.” – BJ Fogg

This week on The School for Good Living Podcast:

  • A life of helping and serving other people
  • Designing habits through positive emotions
  • Leveraging operant conditioning to change behavior
  • The power of taking small steps in habit formation
  • Teaching the Tiny Habits method and how a dream compelled BJ to write his book
  • BJ’s tips and hacks on writing a book
  • What is a habit and how it differs from ‘general guidelines’
  • Faulty ways to change and why it’s so difficult to change behavior
  • The biggest myths about habit creation
  • How culture and environment influence the creation of habits
  • What ‘golden behaviors’ are and the importance of picking a habit that you want instead of habits that you should have
  • Distinguishing ‘outcomes’ from ‘aspirations’ and why you need to focus on specific, concrete behaviors
  • The Fogg Behavior Model and the impact of teaching it to others
  • Designing effective prompts in the creation of habits
  • How belief and self-confidence can help you change your behaviors easier
  • Using the Fogg Behavioral Model in leadership and management

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Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the School for Good Living Podcast, with your host, Brilliant Miller. If you enjoyed this episode, please head over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe and leave us a rating and review.

Don’t forget to visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And be sure to share your favorite episodes with your friends and colleagues on social media to inspire others to improve their lives and reach their full potential.

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116. Martha Alderson – Boundless Creativity: Unveiling the Universal Story

Martha Alderson is the best-selling author of Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-Doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks and Writing Blockbuster Plots: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Plot, Structure, and Scene. She is a plot and transformational consultant whose clients include best-selling authors, editors, and Hollywood movie directors. Martha, widely known as the “Plot Whisperer,” has written several books, led workshops, and created an award-winning blog to help creatives express themselves and tell their stories.

Martha joins me today to explore the creative process and define what the universal story is. She discusses the ubiquity of opposition in all artistic pursuits and outlines how creatives can overcome them. She reveals the three major emotions with which all creatives face and explains how we are all in the world to heal. She also emphasizes the importance of forgiveness, its relationship with creative endeavor, and how we can give it to ourselves and extend it to others.

” Creativity is fraught with obstacles – that’s what the universal story is all about. Writing a story will change you.” – Martha Alderson

This week on The School for Good Living Podcast:

  • How taking risks helps you stretch, grow, and expand who you are
  • Why Martha wrote Boundless Creativity and how brilliant writers get tangled in fear and insecurity
  • The reason Martha dedicated her life to helping others express themselves
  • Our tendencies to re-traumatize ourselves
  • The universal story and its similarities and differences with the Hero’s Journey
  • The elements that create a compelling narrative
  • The stages of the universal story and how to travel it well
  • Unveiling the universal stories in our lives
  • Strategies in overcoming the Dark Night of the Soul
  • The three major emotions that stop creatives from moving forward
  • The importance of meaning and purpose in life and how we can find it
  • The Wounded Healer archetype and why forgiveness is key to the creative process
  • Why writers should start with the end of their stories
  • The power of plot and structure in developing a story

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Resources Mentioned:

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Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the School for Good Living Podcast, with your host, Brilliant Miller. If you enjoyed this episode, please head over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe and leave us a rating and review.

Don’t forget to visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And be sure to share your favorite episodes with your friends and colleagues on social media to inspire others to improve their lives and reach their full potential.

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115. Annie Duke – How to Decide: Better Choices, Better Life

Annie Duke is the author of How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices and Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. As a decision strategist and consultant, Annie coaches on the behavior of decision making, decision fitness, and emotional control. She is also Co-Founder and Board Member of the Alliance for Decision Education, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization dedicated to empowering students with essential decision-making skills. Before her work as an author and consultant, Annie was a professional poker player who won more than $4 million in tournament poker before retiring in 2012.

Annie joins me today to explain why making a pros and cons list is an ineffective method to make decisions and outlines her six-step process for powerful decision-making. She discusses why people get stuck in analysis paralysis, describes how we can move past it, and defines the “resulting phenomenon.” She also emphasizes using happiness as a tool to measure the value of the choices we’re weighing and illustrates how the quality of our decisions impact the quality of our lives.

“There are two things that determine the quality of life: luck and decisions. Focus on the quality of your decisions; they’re the only ones you have control over.” – Annie Duke

This week on The School for Good Living Podcast:

  • How setting and following finite goals lead to existential disappointment
  • Why most people are bad at making decisions
  • How biases play into the decision-making process
  • The reason social media is a fertile breeding ground for misinformation and fake news
  • How long the average person decides what to eat, watch, and wear
  • The relationship between our quality of life and the decisions we make
  • Increasing the frequency of luck through decision-making
  • The resulting phenomenon and the importance of being aware of it
  • What the “resulting phenomenon” means
  • Annie’s six-step process for making better decisions
  • The two dimensions a pros and cons list lack that make it an ineffective decision-making tool
  • What motivated reasoning is and its relationship with assessing a decision
  • Using the happiness test to weigh decisions
  • The importance of teaching decision skills in schools
  • Annie’s weakness as a writer, how she overcomes them, and her writing process
  • Her advice for people who want to write

Resources Mentioned:

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Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the School for Good Living Podcast, with your host, Brilliant Miller. If you enjoyed this episode, please head over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe and leave us a rating and review.

Don’t forget to visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And be sure to share your favorite episodes with your friends and colleagues on social media to inspire others to improve their lives and reach their full potential.

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114. Tyson Yunkaporta – Sand Talk: Changing the World Through Indigenous Knowledge

Tyson Yunkaporta is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. He is an academic, art critic, poet, and researcher who belongs to the Apalech clan in Queensland, Australia. A senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University, Tyson looks at global systems through an Indigenous lens. Much of society’s problems stem from our worldview, from how we think and relate to how we behave. Through Sand Talk, Tyson offers a template for living and perspectives on how we can make better sense of the world.

Tyson joins me today to discuss how Indigenous knowledge and ideas can help change the world for the better and describes what makes a person or knowledge Indigenous. He explains why we need to have an agency in violence and describes how western civilization has subjugated women and femininity. He also highlights the importance of cultivating a connection with the land, defines Indigenous concepts – such as the Dreaming, totemic relationships, and songlines – and discusses how books should increase what can be known.

“Receive those signals from the land and let them shape you. Let them move you forward. When you accept those messages, they start to change you.” – Tyson Yunkaporta

This week on The School for Good Living Podcast:

  • The network of reality
  • Forming a group mind and what it means to yarn
  • Tyson’s definition of an Indigenous person and Indigenous knowledge
  • Why books should increase what can be known
  • How the language of separation informs our worldview
  • The role of the land in spiritual seeking
  • Receiving signals and messages from the land around us
  • The defining feature of a civilization and how western culture has subjugated femininity
  • What it means to distribute violence throughout the society
  • Intergenerational equity and reidentification within four generations
  • What the Dreaming and songline mean
  • The importance of acknowledging the First Peoples of the land
  • Why we’re all from a common origin and ancestry
  • How creativity is part of being human

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Tyson Yunkaporta:

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Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the School for Good Living Podcast, with your host, Brilliant Miller. If you enjoyed this episode, please head over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe and leave us a rating and review.

Don’t forget to visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And be sure to share your favorite episodes with your friends and colleagues on social media to inspire others to improve their lives and reach their full potential.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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