How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Katy Milkman

You know your goals should be specific and measurable.

power of positive thinking and incremental progress.

You know it’s helpful to have a s...

it’s critical to size up your opponent

and develop a strategy tailored to overcome the particular challenges you face.

you must match your approach to your opponent.

Know and understand what we face

you’ll take advantage of the fact that specific opponents have specific weaknesses.

But you’ll get further faster if you customize your strategy: isolate the weakness preventing progress, and then pounce.

40 percent of premature deaths are the result of personal behaviors we can change.

attempt to solve problems by first identifying the obstacles to success.

using specifically tailored strategies to defeat each opponent in his path. And the wins added up.

If we hoped to effectively promote behavior change, of course we would need to understand when to begin.

if you want to change your behavior or someone else’s, you’re at a huge advantage if you begin with a blank slate—a fresh start—and no old habits working against you.

rather than perceiving time as a continuum, we tend to think about our lives in “episodes,” creating story arcs from the notable incidents, or chapters, in our lives.

labels matter to our behavior.

it influences how we act, not just how we describe ourselves.

Labels create our new identity and new start

Last year you couldn’t cut it at work or failed to quit smoking, but “that was the old me,” you think, “and this is the new me.”

Human in common need a moment for creating new starts for transform their life

new beginnings offer a kind of psychological “do-over.”

Moments for new starts matters

We’re more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation: the sense that we’ve failed before and will, thus, fail again.

These new beginnings can also lead us to pause, reflect, and think about the bigger picture, which makes us more likely to consider trying to make a change.

Bob realized that he loved coaching tennis. He declined the steady job as an attorney and started a tennis academy in 1973 with just a handful of students.

Passion: enjoying what do you do for work either for life

But research suggests it could just as easily have been a cross-country move, a promotion at work, or perhaps even something as mundane as a disruption to his commute.

We need specific moment that pivotal for changing our mind and our life value to create new start.

statistics suggest that when we’re seeking to change, the disruptions to our lives triggered by physical transitions can be just as powerful as the fresh starts spurred by new beginnings on our calendars.

Beside new starts from calendar, our minds create suggestion about disruption demand in our life.

When we hope to change, we have an opportunity to try reshaping our environment to help us disrupt old routines and ways of thinking.

“resets” associated with cross-league trades represent a kind of fresh start for the players—a literal clean slate for their statistics.