#45 — Build Strong Habits with Samuel Salzer

Sponsor: RePowerU -- a free fitness practices assessment (a 10-minute questionnaire) Build strong habits to find the consistency you need to create the life you want to live Our Guest Today -- Samuel Salzer https://www.samuelsalzer.com/ Samuel Salzer is a habit expert and experienced Behavioral Designer, specializing in creating scalable behavior change solutions. Co-author of the book Nudging in Practice - How to Make It Easy to Do The Right Thing and one of the world’s first Chief Behavioral Officer's in tech. He's co-founded the Habit Coach Professionals, providing the first certification dedicated to helping coaches level up their coaching business using tools and insights from behavioral science. Changing behavior is hard. Generating engagement, increasing adherence, improving retention, maintaining growth — online or offline, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard. The good news? Behavioral Design makes it easier. Sam is a expert in applying insights from Behavioral Science and Behavioral Economics to fuel habit formation and digital behavior change. Sam wants to make the world a better place, one good habit at a time. To that end, Sam provides help to coaches and value-driven organizations make their products and services better using the latest Behavioral Design tools and insights. Show notes:  not a transcript but a rough but thorough description of what was discussed and the points made People struggle to make changes in their lives.  Sometimes for a long time.  People want to improve themselves in some way.  They have a good intension but when they seek help, the world gives them a terrible solution that either doesn’t work at all or only provides short term benefit, and sometimes provides harm. Samuel’s fuel is to take the science behind behavior change to turn it into actionable advice and tools for regular people to use in making their lives better. Samuel has worked on solutions that have helped millions of smokers seeking to break the habit, and for weight management interventions, and he has provided 1-on-1 coaching as well. I now know that behavior change and habit formation is a skill that any of us can learn.  So we are not helpless if we care to get control over ourselves to install good habits that will allow us to do the things we want to do consistently. I originally started the Wise Athletes podcast with Dr Glen Winkel in order to talk to experts to discover what would make a difference for the older athlete looking to both improve performance AND to extend the time in life I could be a strong athlete.  My initial idea was that if I only knew what to do, that would be enough, but I was so wrong. There are 3 obstacles: (1)  what IS true, what should older athletes like me know in order to make good decisions about improving performance, staying healthy, and extending the window for being a strong athlete.  But quickly I came to understand that: (2)   there are too many things that are true and relevant to my goals.  I had to find a way to prioritize, to apply an 80/20 rule, a way to be sure to do the behaviors that will have the biggest impacts for the smallest efforts… https://www.wiseathletes.com/applying-an-80-20-rule-the-fitness-practices-assessment/