There are countless reasons we get stuck. We get too comfortable, we wait for a crisis to force us to change, we fear failure. I walked through each of those traps in why change is so hard. This one is about climbing out of them.
Taking action is only part of the battle. Discipline and beating yourself up do not work on their own, and figuring out how to motivate yourself has more to do with design than with willpower. It takes hard work to change your life, but without strategy, that effort goes wasted.
Lasting change gets easier when you understand incentives, motivation, and choice architecture. One small nudge can be all you need to start moving in the right direction. Do not let fear keep you from fighting your way out. You can build your own catalyst for change.
Incentives rarely land the way you planned
It is easy to simplify incentives. If you pay someone to do something, that thing gets done. The outcome is never that linear.
I always think back to a story from the economist Steve Levitt about potty training his daughter. She was resistant to the process, so he had the idea to pay her in M&Ms every time she used the toilet properly.
It worked great for the first few days. Eventually she broke the system and started faking trips to the bathroom just to collect more M&Ms. As you might guess, the behavior stopped the moment the incentive was removed.
The same thing happens in a group. Say you run a nonprofit with a team of ten volunteers. Everyone does great work and is happy to donate their time.
You decide that hiring a paid employee would make things more efficient. That person is happy to work for their paycheck, but you just changed the math for everyone else on the team. They were glad to volunteer for a good cause until money entered the picture.
New incentives rarely have the clean impact we imagine. These supposed solutions turn into perverse incentives fast.
Transactional vs transformational motivation
Payment incentives are especially hit or miss, whether the payment is cash or candy, because they create a transactional relationship. Why should I keep working if you stop paying me?
There are all sorts of apps and businesses built on paying people to change: get paid for every day you do not smoke. Those incentives work great at getting someone to take the first action. They do very little to create lasting behavioral change.
Transformational motivation is much harder to instill. It is intrinsic, so it does not fade the same way.
This is where people start to demonize transactional motivation. If you really want to change, you need both.
Inertia is hard to overcome. Transformational motivation is powerful, but the transformation itself sits a long way off. You can be genuinely excited by the vision and still fail to push through the hardship between here and there.
Sometimes you need a little transaction to jumpstart things. For me, the promise of some craveable fast food works great at getting me to do work I do not want to do. Purpose, service, and personal development are the motivators that sustain the transformation once you are moving.
Nudge theory: small cues, big behavior shifts
Small adjustments make a big impact. Richard Thaler, who wrote Nudge with Cass Sunstein, shows how designs can be adjusted slightly and produce outsized results. Most of us try to brute-force behavior change when the right nudge would do far more work.
In Nudge, Thaler describes a hospital that could not get employees to wash their hands. They posted reminders, held meetings, and talked through the safety concerns. Nothing changed.
The nudge that finally worked: they swabbed hospital surfaces that were too dirty, photographed the bacteria cultures that grew, and set each computer background to one of those pictures. A quick, unavoidable reminder of the invisible threat the team had been ignoring.
Design the environment to make the right choice easier and the wrong choice harder. That is the whole idea.
Carrots and sticks both lose value with use
Transactional incentives come in two categories: carrots and sticks. Both have the same problem, it just shows up differently.
The more a transactional incentive gets used, the less value it carries. Every subsequent use has marginally less perceived value, so the carrot or the stick has to get bigger each time.
- Overuse the carrot and you get soft. You start expecting the reward without feeling any need to put in the work.
- Overuse the stick and you burn out. You feel overwhelmed, so you get less done, so you beat yourself up, which makes the next round worse.
The key is being self aware enough to recognize which end of the spectrum you are on. If you tend to beat yourself up, use the carrot. If you tend to treat yourself too much and you can feel yourself getting soft, use the stick (but not too hard). Right tool at the right time gets better results.
Choice architecture: make the right choice the easy one
The other concept Thaler writes about heavily is choice architecture, which means making the right choices easier and the wrong choices harder.
One great example is the shift from opt-in to opt-out. Most people, when polled, say they want to save more for retirement, and then they do not do it. We tell ourselves we will start saving when the next raise comes through, the check arrives, and we forget.
Thaler had the company he was working with make one change. Whenever an employee got a raise, their retirement withholdings automatically increased unless that employee opted out of the program. The program already existed, but it had been opt-in only.
Anyone who did not want to save that extra amount each paycheck still did not have to. Significantly more people wound up saving than would have otherwise.
That is what recognizing someone's situation and designing it properly looks like. Make the right choice the easiest one.
People also struggle to decide when they are handed too many options, and that is a big part of why we get stuck. There are an infinite number of things I could do with my life, so how do I pick, and how do I pick the right one?
Life is infinitely complex, and living inside that complexity makes it easy to freeze. Simplify your options so action gets easier. A yes-or-no question is much easier to answer than a free-response question.
How to motivate yourself: the four pieces of a catalyst
When you design your catalyst, four pieces do the work:
- Accountability. Social pressure is powerful. Telling your friends, family, or colleagues about the change you want to make is a great way to keep yourself honest.
- A commitment device. These take all sorts of shapes, but the mechanism is simple: some punishment is waiting if you do not get the job done. Paying for a workout class is a good example, because skipping it means wasting your money. For me, it is my daughter's childcare at the gym. If I do not go work out, I pay a cancellation fee. There are more creative versions too. One classic is writing a check to a cause you hate and instructing a friend to mail it if you miss your goal.
- Nudges. What small changes make the choice easier or harder? Wasting too much time on your phone? Leave it in the other room. Struggling to get to the gym early? Lay out your gym bag the night before.
- A reframe. How can you make this choice easier on yourself? Can you turn it into a simple yes-or-no decision? Do not get bogged down by perfectionism. Just get started.
Combine all four and you dramatically improve your odds of creating change that lasts.
Work smarter while you are working hard
Change is hard. Even with the right framework, it still takes real work and discipline.
People do not always respond to incentives the way you would expect, and that holds true when the person you are working on is yourself. Transactional incentives are great at getting you started, and transformational motivation is what carries you over the finish line.
Small design changes create big behavior shifts, so do not overlook the power of one small adjustment in your life. Do not beat yourself up too much, and do not let yourself get soft either. Change requires you to balance the carrot and the stick.
Change gets harder when it is complicated, so simplify the process to improve the result.
If you are feeling stuck and want help creating lasting change, apply to join the Steel Men Tribe, where I coach this every week with a room full of leaders who will hold you to it. For more stories on creating change, watch my video on designing a catalyst for change, and subscribe to the 10x Your Team podcast for the weekly leadership lessons that come out of the Tribe.
Do not just bang your head against the wall and expect things to change. Work smarter while you are working hard, and that change will last.
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See the Steel Men TribeFrequently asked questions
How do I motivate myself when discipline is not working?
Stop relying on willpower and change the design instead. Add accountability, set up a commitment device, build small nudges into your environment, and reframe the decision as a simple yes or no.
What is the difference between transactional and transformational motivation?
Transactional motivation is an external trade, like cash or a reward, and it works well for getting started but fades when the reward stops. Transformational motivation is intrinsic, built on purpose, service, and personal development, and it is what sustains the change. You need both.
What is a commitment device?
A commitment device is any arrangement where a punishment is waiting if you fail to follow through. Paying in advance for a workout class, owing a cancellation fee, or writing a check to a cause you hate and giving it to a friend to mail if you miss your goal.
What is choice architecture?
Choice architecture is designing the situation so the right choice is the easiest one. Thaler's opt-out retirement savings change is the classic example: employees who did not want to save could still opt out, but far more of them ended up saving.
Why do incentives sometimes backfire?
Because they change the math for everyone involved. Paying a child in M&Ms for potty training produced fake bathroom trips, and hiring one paid employee onto a volunteer team can make the volunteers reconsider donating their time.