Design Your Destiny: Unpacking the Habit Activation Process

Welcome back to the inhabit Podcast Higher Self Habit series, where today’s focus is on Activation—turning plans into action. If you’re new to this series, I highly recommend checking out the first three parts to fully benefit from the transformative insights shared in today’s discussion.

The Essence of Behavior Design
In this deep dive into behavior design, I explore how to structure your daily actions to foster successful habit formation. The core of our discussion revolves around what I term ‘domino habits’—key behaviors that, once adjusted, can set off a cascade of positive changes across various aspects of life.

Real-Life Transformation
A personal testament to the power of domino habits is my journey with quitting alcohol. This change didn’t just affect one area of my life; it brought about a sweeping enhancement of my health, mental clarity, and personal relationships. This example underpins our exploration of adding good habits before removing bad ones, emphasizing the positive ripple effects throughout your daily life.

ACTS: A Framework for Success
To systematize behavior design, I introduce the ACTS framework, which stands for Ambition, Capability, Trigger, and Satisfaction. This acronym serves as a guide to dissecting and understanding the anatomy of habits:

– Ambition: Your desire to adopt a behavior
– Capability: Your ability to execute the behavior
– Trigger: The prompt that initiates the behavior
– Satisfaction: The reward that reinforces the behavior

Overcoming Friction
One of the biggest challenges in habit formation is overcoming friction. I share an anecdote about foam rolling, illustrating how even minor inconveniences can deter us from beneficial practices. By identifying and eliminating these small frictions, you can significantly enhance your capability to maintain new habits.

Implementing the ACTS Framework
Each component of ACTS plays a crucial role, but it’s often about finding the right balance and sequence for your specific needs. For instance, if a desired habit isn’t sticking, look at the triggers—are they effective and consistent? Are the actions themselves too complex or physically demanding? Simplifying the process and ensuring immediate satisfaction can help solidify the habit.

Behavior design isn’t just about making temporary changes; it’s about rewriting your daily routines to better serve your goals and well-being. As you reflect on this discussion, think about the ‘domino habits’ in your life. What small tweak could you make today that might transform your tomorrow?

As we wrap up part four of our series, remember that the journey to self-improvement is ongoing. Next week, we’ll ascend further with “Ascend and Amplify,” the final installment where we reflect on our progress and prepare to reach new heights. Until then, continue to design your behaviors thoughtfully and embrace the small changes—they’re your stepping stones to success.

If this post resonated with you, don’t hesitate to share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Join the conversation below or on social media, and share your experiences with behavior design. How have small changes impacted your life in big ways?

Listen below or on Spotify, Apple, or Amazon Music.

Prefer to read instead of listen? Here’s the transcript.

---

Alessia Citro:
What’s up, friends? Alright. I am back with part 4 of the Higher Self Habit series, all about activation. This episode will give you tangible tips, the know-how, and the strategy on how to design behaviors, what the four components of every single behavior are, and how to make them work for your benefit. This is an episode you will not want to miss. And if you have not already listened to parts 1 through 3, I would encourage you to do that first. I think it will help you get even more out of it. Welcome to In Habit with Alessia Citro, a show dedicated to helping you expand your life and inhabit your dreams. After becoming a corporate dropout and faltering, I realized that the only thing keeping me from my big vision was not taking the small, consistent actions that compound and move the needle.

Together, we’ll uncover and discuss the ways we stay stuck and how you can unlock your potential in 3, 2, 1. Alright, fam. Today, it is part 4 of the Higher Self Habits series. And I have delayed getting this to you for a number of reasons, which I will share in a bonus episode because I want to keep the focus on this. But this is the day where we put everything together. This is where the rubber meets the road, and you put together what you learned in the first three parts of this series. So part 1 was awareness. Part 2 was alignment.

Part 3 was audit. And now part 4, activate, putting it all together. And this is where we actually get into behavior design. So I am actually going to flip through the manuscript as I go through this episode. And I’m also going to do this one a little differently than I usually do. I am not going to edit anything. If I mess up, you’re going to hear it. You’re going to hear the pages ruffling, and we’re just going to roll with that because I am really working to overcome this perfectionist nonsense that I cannot seem to shake.

So I’m going to just go for it imperfectly and use that as evidence that it’s okay and that I won’t die. Okay. So with that, here we go. Alright. So the first thing I talk about in part 4 of the book, which mirrors this, part 4 of the book is activate. The first concept I talk about is domino habits. And domino habits is something that I stumbled upon by accident when I was creating my own good habits and stopping ones that no longer serve me. So think of when you line up dominoes, if you knock over the first one, what happens to the dominoes behind it? They fall over too.

So what is a habit that will help you with other subsequent habits that you either want to start or stop? So let me give you the real-life example of my domino habit, which was drinking alcohol. When I was drinking, here are some of the things that were going on in my life that were tied to it: I would be shopping on Instagram, often not remembering what I was buying until it would show up at my house because I was drinking to inebriation. I often felt sluggish, I was gaining weight, I had a really hard time waking up in the morning, I didn’t eat as well as I could have, I was anxious, I was on edge, I had some marital strain, I was also spending a lot of money on alcohol. So there were all of these factors that were becoming less than ideal simply because I was drinking. So what happened when I quit? Every other area of my life got better, life was way better. Now, one thing I do want to tell you though, I mean, I give this as an example to illustrate. However, I want you on your habits journey to start with adding a good habit versus subtracting one that’s not great for you. It is much easier to add than it is to subtract, and when you add in a good habit, you are going to get that satisfaction, that success that will fuel more success, more forward momentum, and that is a great place to be when it comes time to tackle the harder stuff and subtract bad habits.

What’s also going to happen when you do that? I am willing to bet if you’re anything like me, you are eating better, you’re not ordering DoorDash as much, you’re drinking more water, you are sleeping better. There’s all these other things that come into play once we do one positive habit. So keep this concept of domino habits in mind and think about what yours might be. We’re not doing anything yet. I’m going to walk you through the basics of behavioral design first, but just remember, there are levers that you can pull in

the way of these dominoes. Okay. So flipping over to the meat of this, my favorite part of habits is behavior design. And the reason I like it is because I often feel and have noticed that when either myself or clients cannot make the changes that they want to make, they look at it as if they have a character flaw, that it’s their fault that they can’t make themselves do this thing.

I’m here to tell you it is not a you problem. It is a behavior design problem. And so there are 4 components of every single behavior that becomes a habit that we can tweak and play with for you to create habits that will actually last and that you can actually stick with. So you can remember these in a very apropos acronym, which is ACTS, a c t s. The ‘A’ stands for ambition. Do you want to do the behavior? Do you have the ambition to do it? ‘C’ is for capability. Can you do the behavior or not? More on the or not in a moment. The ‘T’ is the trigger.

What is the prompt or the cue that makes you do the thing, do the behavior, do the habit? And then finally, ‘S’, ‘S’ is satisfaction, and that is the reward that you get from doing it. And the way that we wire in any habit is by tapping directly into our brain’s reward center. So more on this here in just a moment. Alright. So these go in order, depending on the behavioral model and theory that you look at there are others where these might be in a slightly different order that is honestly better explored in the book where I break them down. But what I believe is the very best way to engineer your habits is to keep them in that order. So you have the desire to do it because if you don’t want to do something, the odds of you actually doing it are not so good. So we do want to have a level of ambition there.

But really where we focus our efforts, we focus them on capability, number 1, that is the most important factor by a mile, as well as the trigger. Until a behavior becomes automatic, the trigger in the form of the prompt or the cue to do it is paramount. No trigger, no behavior. So let’s go through these in a little bit more detail. First, ambition. Let’s talk about this real quick. The example I give in the book is that ambition and the motivation to do something can be very fleeting and it can be a fair-weather friend. So while we want to design behaviors that we actually have the desire to do, we don’t want to bank on the desire to do them because it can leave us when we need it the most.

Here’s an example every single person can relate to either firsthand or secondhand, and that is going to the gym come January. New year, new you. Right? You sign up for the gym membership, and what happens? You probably stop going. In fact, I looked up the data on this. So data from exercise apps suggests a drop-off in exercise by the 3rd week of January after a spike on the 1st days of the month. So if you have had a hard time sticking with the New Year’s resolution, you’re not alone. The motivation leaves you. And here’s the other thing, You might have competing desires.

For example, in January, if you’re in the United States, most places, it’s pretty cold. So when that 3rd week of January rolls around, are you feeling more motivated to go to the gym and to do all the things that come with it, getting up when it’s cold maybe inside your house, scraping off the ice from your windshield, or are you more motivated to stay in your warm and cozy bed? And it’s okay if you’re more motivated to stay in your warm and cozy bed. That is why these things fail and why we do not engineer our habits around ambition. We engineer them instead around capability and making it easy to do. So let’s talk about what that looks like. Okay. So capability. This is my favorite part to talk about.

There are so many pieces to it that we can play with, and it’s largely within our control. You probably gathered this from listening to any episodes of the show and what I shared in the very beginning about perfectionism. I love to be in control of things. I do. Look. I try to relinquish as much as I can to the universe because I know it’s got better plans than I do, but at the end of the day, your girl still loves to be in the driver’s seat. And this is also why capability is a really good place to build your habits from because, ultimately, you are the one that can control how easy or not something is, and I’ll show you how that is because there are multiple factors that we can engineer for when designing habits. So the first thing is

that you need to make this as simple as possible because any level of friction or difficulty will make you not do a behavior.

This is the example I give in the book, and most things are this simple that this tiny bit of friction will keep you from doing it. So ever since I’ve been in high school, I have had really gnarly shoulder pain from working at a computer, from using a mouse, from typing on the keyboard, all of that. Right? It came to a head recently. In fact, I would sleep on my right side and I would wake up in the middle of the night because my hand would be numb. It would have fallen asleep. So then I’d roll to the left side and then the left hand would fall asleep. And there were a couple of days where I did not get feeling back. I mean, some of it, but not all of it for, like, over 24 hours, and I started to get freaked out.

So luckily, I figured out, thanks to my wonderful husband, Jeff. So Jeff, who nearly has a PhD in kinesiology, he was a physical therapist before he got into biotech. He like, there’s nothing that this man can’t do or doesn’t know, it seems like. And he pointed out to me that I probably was dealing with pseudothoracic outlet syndrome because my muscles were so tight that they needed to be stretched. So how did he help me do that? Well, being a former PT, he showed me some foam rolling techniques and some stretches that I could do to open things up. Okay. So knowing how to foam roll and actually doing it are 2 different things. And do you wanna know the stupid thing that kept me from foam rolling? And this is, like, case in point of why it takes almost no difficulty for you to not do something.

I would not foam roll in the morning when it when that was, like, my time to do it. That was, like, the part of my day it fit into. I wouldn’t do it because I have long hair that I pretty much always wear down. And if I foam rolled with my hair down, it would get caught under the foam roller and it would be really painfully pulled. So when you find yourself not doing a behavior, the question you ask yourself is WTF. No. Not the one you’re thinking. Where’s the friction? So the friction for me was my hair getting pulled.

Okay. So what could I instead do to keep my hair from getting pulled? Well, the answer is obvious. I could put it up. I could put it in a ponytail. I could clip it up. So where was the friction? Why wasn’t I doing that? The answer is because I would need to walk down the hall to our bedroom, to our bathroom where I keep hair ties and hair clips. And, look, we’ve got a beautiful home, but it’s not a sprawling estate like Versailles. That’s how I describe it in the book.

I mean, without exaggeration, it’s probably a 15 second walk from from the kitchen to the bathroom. So how how do you solve for this? You keep a hair tie or a hair clip close to where you’re gonna foam roll because that would remove the friction. So I began doing that, and what do you know? I began to foam roll. So there are what I call the r cube factors that will either make you able or unable to do a behavior. I call them that because they encompass 3 buckets. So the first star is resources. Resources include time, money, tools, knowledge and skills, and assistance. The second r bucket is rigor.

So that is how much work is it to do this on a mental, physical, or emotional level. The final r of the r cubed is reach. Is this within reach of your current routine? So let’s go through all of these r cubed factors 1 by 1 so that you can see how you can begin to evaluate the the things that are getting in your way of doing a particular behavior. So we’ll use my phone roll example here. So the first category for r is resources. So let’s look at, at time first. Was it a time issue? It wasn’t because it takes me less than 5 minutes and I do it while I make my coffee in the morning. Easy peasy.

Was it tools? No. I already had a foam roller. Was it money? No. I did not need to buy anything. Was it knowledge or skills? No. Because I knew how to foam roll because Jeff had taught me. Was it assistance? Nope, I could do this on my own, but also it bears mentioning that if you need Okay. So it was not a resource problem.

How about a rigor problem? So was it the amount of physical rigor and it was the physical rigor and III kinda laugh as I say this because is it rigorous to walk from

my kitchen 15 seconds down the hall to my bathroom to get a hair tie? No. But it did present enough physical rigor to be the the issue, the issue that was making this not easy enough. Now it just added a tiny bit of friction, but that’s all that it takes. And I sometimes I just wanna, like, sidebar and, like, underscore here. I think oftentimes, we don’t we don’t we don’t give ourselves enough, grace for these tiny little pieces of friction really throwing things off. We think that, oh, like, that’s so easy. Like, I should be able to get myself to do that, but I tell my clients all the time, stop shoulding on yourself. Stop shoulding on yourself.

You have enough going on, enough plates are spinning, a tiny bit of friction is all that it takes to keep you from doing something. So it might be as simple as this when it comes to capability and why you’re not doing something. So let’s run through the rest of the factors. There’s just a few more just so that you can see the troubleshooting process here. Okay. So how about mental rigor and the foam rolling example? Well, if I was not married to Jeff, a former former physical therapist who taught me and showed me how to do these foam rolling techniques, this also would have been an obstacle because I would have had to go online, I would have had to find the stretches, I would have to watch the videos, I would have had to try to figure out if I was doing them correctly or not without anyone to tell me if that was in fact the case. So this would have played into if it hadn’t been for Jeff. How about emotional rigor? No.

And this is not always going to apply, but let me give you an example of how it can. A habit I would love to put into practice is breath work. I have not made breath work a habit because emotions come up every time and, quite frankly, I usually don’t want to deal with them. I don’t feel like I have the time to deal with them, and I don’t do it. So if something is emotionally rigorous, it could even be let me give you another example. I sent off an email today that I had been delaying. I need to withdraw from a program I’m in because I just don’t have the time for it, and I have delayed and delayed and delayed doing this because emotionally, it makes me feel like shit to decline and go back on commitments that I’ve made, but sometimes you need to do it. So emotional rigor can really be a big one when it comes to not doing something.

Okay. And then finally, is foam rolling in reach of my current routine? So, yes, because it’s I do it in the same room, we have, like, a huge, kitchen family room adjoined into a great room, So I do it in the same place that I make the coffee, like, 10 yards away. Hi, Mila. Hi, Mila. How’s it going? Here. Aw, I love you. Mila, so I’m sick with the cold today. Yeah.

Yeah. And you’re being so good while I record. Today at school, No. I can’t go to school today because I’m sick. But I felt sad today because today in French club, there ain’t been much. I know. You’re missing French club, but you can go next week. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. Alright. I’ll be out in just a little bit. Okay, sweetie? I love you. Oh my god. She’s so sweet. Oh, yeah. So this is in reach of my current routine because I am already in that room and the coffee is brewing.

Like, what else am I gonna do in those 5 minutes? Let me give you examples of where this would have fallen out of the current routine. So, let’s say that I’m in the habit of, waking up, making coffee, and immediately going into my office to start working, and I just couldn’t get myself to foam roll in the morning while the coffee was brewing for whatever reason. Well, maybe this would be a habit better inserted into another part of my day in another routine. So it’s foam rolling, so maybe I do this while I’m at the gym or maybe I do it before bed or something like that. So you need to find the pocket of your day that things will fit, because if it’s causing you to upset the apple cart and do something in a much different order than you’re used to, it’s probably not gonna get wired in. It could, but, again, you’re just adding that level of friction. So as you can see, these are all factors that can keep you from being able to do something. I will say physical and mental rigor can be pretty easy to solve for.

Let me let me give you an example. This is

in the book too. So let’s let’s use the example of lifting weights since we’re on the the note of the gym. Let’s say you wanna bench press £200. Well, you gotta work up to that. Right? It would be too physically rigorous for you to do that out of the gate. So what could you do? You could start with maybe just bench pressing the bar, which is, like £45 or maybe it’s bench pressing some dumbbells that are lighter, working up and making things less rigorous to start with. So starting really, really small and then getting stronger.

If it’s mental rigor, how could you make it less complex? Can you break it into smaller pieces? Can you take it in, like, bite-sized chunks? Make it simple. What can you do to make it less rigorous factors can be solved with resources. So this is rigor factors can be solved with resources, so this is a really good example. Let’s say you wanna bench press, and you can bench press £200, but you have a really bad callus that’s come open and it’s physically painful for you to bench press right now. Well, here’s where the resource of a tool in the form of weight lifting gloves might be something that could allow you to continue bench pressing. So if something is too hard, is there a tool to physically hard, is there a tool to make it easier And so on. Alright. So whenever you are looking at bricks or whenever you’re looking at a habit or behavior that you wanna be doing that you’re not, look at what’s making it difficult, ask yourself WTF, where’s the friction, and then run through those r cubed resource, rigor and reach factors.

So, again, they are, time, money, tools, skills, knowledge, assistance. Then there’s mental, physical, emotional rigor. And then finally, is it in reach of your current routine? Alright. Let’s move on to trigger. So the 3rd component of every single behavior is the trigger or what prompts or cues you to act. This could also be the opportunity presenting itself for you to choose or make a choice. I said this in the beginning, but I’m gonna say it again. Until your habit becomes wired in and automatic, you’ve gotta have a trigger.

And let me give you a really good example of why this is. Let’s say that you are, expecting a package and you have to sign for it. Well, let’s go through these four factors. So, you are outside in your backyard gardening, and the delivery guy comes to the door, rings the doorbell to get the signature, but you don’t hear it because you’re in the backyard. So you had the ambition to answer the door. You wanted to answer it. You wanted to get the package. You had the capability of answering the door.

You were home. You were there. You could have. And you would have had the satisfaction of getting that package. You really wanted it, but you missed the trigger, and so you could not perform the behavior of opening the door. This is something that we don’t utilize enough. Most of the time we think, oh, I should be able to remember that. This is something I wanna do.

But you have so many other things going on you’re not gonna remember. And it’s really unfair to put that pressure on yourself and to think that you can. I mean, maybe you can, but are you gonna reliably remember and be cued to do something all the time? I give the example often of my own struggle to do something as simple as taking my antidepressants and my vitamins at the same time every day or even taking them at all. The way that I’ve had to do this, I had to put them on a really pretty plate in the kitchen where I would see it in the morning by where you guessed it, the coffee pot. That was my prompt. If something’s we say out of sight, out of mind, this is why. If you don’t see it, if you’re not prompted in the form of an alarm, a reminder on your phone, a notification, a phone call, you name it, you’re not gonna remember to do it. So put up post-it notes, do whatever you gotta do, put the thing that you wanna take or do front and center, but you gotta you gotta do the trigger.

You gotta prompt yourself. Okay. Oh, and also, let me just quickly say one other thing. If you wanna stop doing a behavior, remove the trigger and or make it harder to do. So we talked about capability, add friction to get yourself to stop doing something. Alright. Final component here is satisfaction. This can take on different forms.

It could be that you get an external reward, It could be, like, you know, an attaboy or attagirl, pat on the back, a gift, money, you name it, or could also be

that you avoid punishment, judgment, any type of pain. Both of these could be satisfaction. I do wanna make something really clear, though. Let’s just say that so, like, I I say more bad words than I honestly should. I’m and, oh, I just shitted on myself. Okay. Let me rephrase. I would like to say fewer curse words.

Okay. It’s something I’ve, like, always been working on and just can never quite get there. And, And, again, this is why I teach habits because I need this stuff. But let’s just say that my reward if I can go 30 days without swearing is that I get to go on a shopping spree at Nordstrom. Okay. That sounds pretty good. Right? But it’s actually not going to help me from the habit perspective. What I would actually be way more successful doing is instead, every time I am about to swear but catch it and make a different choice not to, I do an internal celebration.

And I pat myself on the back or say, yeah. You did it. You picked another one. I know that this sounds kind of insignificant, maybe even stupid, but it really works because it hacks your brain’s reward center. And the way that this works is when you feel good, when you have positive emotions, you are releasing dopamine. And if you do it as you remember to do a behavior or not do it in this case, while you are performing a desired behavior or immediately, and I mean, like, milliseconds after doing a behavior, what happens is your brain is like, oh, I got my hit of dopamine, what was I doing to get it? And that way it makes the link, it makes the association, and you’re gonna be so much more likely to wire this in as a habit because you’ve wired it in as being pleasurable. So, yeah, the the shopping spree in Nordstrom, that sounds really great, but it’s too delayed. It’s too far out for you, for your brain, for your reward center to tie that in with the behavior.

A great example of this is anyone who has had a dog, you know, when you’re training them, the moment that they do something you want them to do, You need to reward them, praise them, pet them, give them a treat so that they tie the positive behavior to the reward. I remember learning, when I first got Daisy, if your dog has, like, an accident in the house and then you see it hours later, it does no good to punish them or say, you know, bad dog because they don’t have any idea what they’re getting punished for. They’re not linking it. Instead, you gotta, like, catch them peeing or pooping on the floor and be, like, no. No. No. You know, whatever it takes to get them to stop doing that because that is how they learn, oh, I can’t do that. Otherwise, it’s like the moment has passed and it ain’t happening.

So make sure you celebrate at the moment that you make the choice that you want, that you remember to do it or immediately, like, again, milliseconds after doing it. So those are the 4 components. Now you can play with these and adjust to see what would work. Again, I would always do ambition or the motivation and desire to do something as the last lever you pull. I would use capability as the primary lever. Make sure that you have a prompt to trigger or cue you or remind you to do it, and then celebrate when you do it. Super, super, super important. But, yeah, leave ambition to last.

It is truly last resort. So we’re at 30 minutes. I could keep going, but I’m not going to. Like, my I had a, one of my best best bosses I ever had, Thom Wright. Shout out to Thom Wright. This is when I was selling a specific product at Salesforce, and he would always say, don’t spill all your candy in the lobby. Right? We don’t wanna give you all the goods, but I feel like I gave you enough that you can really get rolling with behavior design, and then you can read the rest in the book. So the rest that’s in the book, I give you, you know, the So the rest that’s in the book, I give you specific examples around how ambition and capability they have a relationship where one can make up for the other if they’re in a high enough quantity and the other is low.

So for instance, you know, how can 2 teenage girls in Oregon lift a 3,000 pound tractor? I talk about that example in the book. And how a great deal of ambition or desire to do something can make up for low capability, while high capability can make up for very low ambition and desire. Very inaccurate in terms of how you stop doing something. So we go through

that. I walk you through the whole behavior design process in a lot more detail. So, hopefully, today’s episode was helpful. The book will be out, hopefully I shouldn’t say hopefully. It’ll definitely be out in June.

I just don’t know if it’s gonna be early June, mid June, late June. Things keep moving, which is one of the interesting parts about self-publishing a book. You don’t have a publishing house that’s like, okay, this is the do or die date. This is happening. Like, things can kinda be a bit fluid, which, you know, that’s fine. At the end of the day, you’re gonna have a much better book. And I have to say, like, I don’t wanna toot my own horn, and I know that there’s gonna be people who read this book and think it sucks, but, really, I think the vast majority of you, and thank you to those who have pre-ordered, the vast majority of you who read this book, I think are really gonna like it. I read the whole thing cover to cover this weekend on, if you’re watching the video, you can see me holding this up, 169 pages, single-spaced, so it’s kinda long, But I gotta say, like, I’m really proud of it.

I think it’s a good book. I think it’s gonna be very helpful. I think it’s gonna meet you where you are, wherever that might be, and that you’re gonna enjoy reading it and you’re gonna enjoy who you become while you read it even more. So, if you haven’t pre-ordered yet, I’m gonna do a few more signed copies on pre-order because I don’t wanna be signing and shipping 100 of books. I’ve already sold more than I thought I would, so I’m gonna be capping that here pretty soon. But you could visit alessiacitro.com slash book to get your pre-ordered copy. And I will be back next week for the very short part 5 of this, which is Ascend and Amplify. That is part 5, stage 5 of the process, and it’s one of the most satisfying and happy parts of this process.

It’s where you get to really stand back and say, damn. Look how far I’ve come and be really, really proud of it. So I’ll see you back here next week, and then I’ve got a whole series of amazing interviews and conversations to share with you. Oh, my gosh. I cannot wait for you to listen to what’s coming. So with that, have a great day. If you got benefit from this episode, share it, share it on the gram, share the link with a friend, whatever feels aligned, but I will see you back here next week, and thanks for listening.