In your research, you say that there are three different types of way that you can motivate someone or yourself to change. What are the three? And then let's walk through them one by one.

So one is social proof, social incentives. What are other people doing? It is a relatively easy way to change behavior, highlighting the positive action of others. And let me give you an example of how this is done. Maybe we'll start on a large level, then we go into our personal life. Great. So the British government, they used to send a letter to people who didn't pay their taxes on time, and they said, It's really important to pay your taxes. And that didn't help very well. So then after that, they added one sentence, and that sentence said, 9 out of 10 people in Britain pay their taxes on time. They're highlighting the good behavior of others. And that increased compliance by 15 % and fought to bring the government 5.6 billion pounds.

That's amazing. So really easy. That's amazing. Okay, now let me ask you, though, because here's the thing. If I listen to that example, I think to myself, if I were to march in and say to my husband, Chris, Tali's husband is exercising every day of the week, and he looks really great. That would probably not motivate Chris. I don't think, but that's the social proof. How do you use social proof when you're trying to nudge somebody else in a positive way?

Okay. The other thing to think about when it comes to social incentives and social proofs is, again, we talked about this a little bit before, is that if you're trying to change a behavior, it's really helpful to model that behavior. You want kids not to be on their phones, and you're on the phone half the time. That's not good. Or you want them to eat well, but then you're not eating the apple. Well, that's not good. So you need to model that behavior. And so with getting your husband to go go out and run, you can come in and be like, oh, ready for a run, and then try to convince him to come along with you. Maybe it's more for you.

Got it. You know the joke of the example that I gave you is that Chris is the one that exercises, and I'm the one sitting on the couch. Another one of the three ways to motivate people is immediate reward. Can you give an example of how you can create an immediate reward from somebody else? And how do you even figure out what's a reward for someone else that they might respond to?

So one clear immediate reward that everyone loves is reinforcing them, social feedback. When they do something and you say, Oh, that's great. So a friend of mine, anytime when I ask him about, How are your kids are doing? Or I ask him about something that he told me he was having trouble with. He was trying to get over. There's sometimes a colleague that he was having a problem, and then a week later, I was asking, Oh, what happened? What he always says is, Oh, Thank you for asking. And by saying, Thank you for asking, that causes me to want to do that thing again, to be perceptive about what people are telling me to ask about it. So he's basically reinforcing this behavior by giving me an immediate reward. The moment I did this, he said, Thank you for asking, and that's my reward, right?

This is so fascinating, and I think it's really important. And so I want to see if I am tracking with you and go back into our living room where that unsuspecting person is sitting on the couch happily watching golf, and you walk in the room and you're really stressed out. And if we make what you just told us to do based on the research, if you were to do something negative and you were to pressure them, You should go, or whatever, I'm not going to let you turn on. That You're basically saying the brain doesn't even absorb it. They just tune you right out, and they are not motivated. But if you were to go, Hey, honey, it's beautiful outside. And if you go outside and you actually get your run in after this golf match is over, you're going to be so much more energized tomorrow morning that that would be a better way?

Yes, absolutely. I had someone tell me that they learned about this, and then they went back to their teenage boy, which usually they had a lot of struggles in the evening about when to go to sleep. They usually said, Well, if you don't go to sleep by 10:00 PM, you're going to be tired the next day, and so on. It didn't work. But then after reading the book, she went back and she said, If you go to sleep early, you'll look better and be more energetic for your girlfriend. And she said, That worked perfectly well.

Well, I mean, it's such a simple trick, but it makes so much sense. I'm even thinking about it with myself. I'm constantly shaming myself. Oh, I should get up. I should do this thing. I should do that other thing, versus thinking about, Well, what do I actually care about? If I were to do this, I'm going to feel better in an hour, versus, You know you And I guess that brings me to the next question, which is, we all know what we could or should be doing, right? You know that if you want to be healthier, you need to exercise today. You know that if you want to write the book, you need to be writing today. You know that if you'd like to be in a different job in a year, you better dust off your resume and do it today. Why is it so hard to make ourselves do those things? Why do we procrastinate when we know what that positive thing is that we do want?

So that positive thing in all the examples that you just gave, they're in the future, right? While the good stuff is just in front of you, right? So the chocolate cake is there. I can Have a bite now, and immediately I'll get a sugar rush. Immediately, it's certain. Or the drink is there, I'll drink it, and for the immediate time, it will make me feel good. Or I can sit on the couch and watch golf or Netflix show or whatever, and That will be an immediate gratification. The joy is immediate. For all the other things that you said, I will do the action now, but mostly the rewards will be in the future. So I write the book now. It will be published in two I exercise now. I will eventually fit into my jeans, but it's not going to happen immediately. There's this problem between it's a temporal gap between what we need to do, which we need to do it now, and the reward that we will get, which be in the future, Versus the stuff that's probably not good for us, but the reward is immediate. So that's a problem. And part of the problem is what's known as temporal discounting or present bias.

What is temporal mean?

Temporal is just time.

Okay, great. There's a huge There's a huge gap of time between the action I need to take and the long term benefit of taking this action right now. Right.

And there's this thing called temporal bias or temporal discounting, which is basically this phenomena, which makes sense, by which we value things in the present more than things in the future. It's not that we don't care about the future. You care about the future. But if, for example, I tell people, what would you rather have? $100 now or $110 next week? Most people will take 100 now. We discount the future to some degree, which if you think about it makes sense because the future is uncertain. Yes. Maybe I'll go to the gym and I won't actually end up being able to get into my jeans. Maybe I'll write the book, but it'll be a failure in the future. So The future is very, very uncertain. And plus, you've also taught us that we have this imperative, personally, to stay in control.

And so what is also in my control right now is the hundred bucks that you're about to hand me or the Netflix show that's on right now. And so is that playing a role in this, too?

Yes. I think because we have more control now, at least a perception of it. In fact, if I do something now, it will impact the future. So I do have some control over the future, but because it's relatively uncertain because there's so many days and everything can happen, maybe I'll die tomorrow. So I put all this work in, and then I'm dead in a week. So it's easier to just go with the immediate. It's more attractive. It's really effective.

And is there a trick to get yourself to act now and do things now that are hard, that actually make your life easy in the longer run?

The number one trick is to give yourself immediate rewards. What do I mean? Let's say, usually when you think about going to the gym, you say, I want to go to the gym. I don't want to, but I need to go to the gym so I can get these future rewards, which I'll be skinny and healthier and whatever in the future. But think about what will you get immediately, or you can do that for someone else. What will you get immediately if you go now to the gym? Not only what will you get to the future. So let's say for yourself, it might be someone told me, anytime they go on the treadmill, they allow themselves to watch a trashy show that usually they don't allow themselves. That's the immediate reward. Or you go for a run and you listen to a podcast. Immediately reward. And you can also give it to someone else. There was a woman who came to me after I talked, and she said she wanted to get her husband to go to the gym, and he didn't really like it. But then eventually he went one day, and when he got back, I don't think it was intentional, but she touched his arm and was like, Oh, I can really feel your muscles.

And she said, Well, that did it. That caused him to go back the next day. So that was the immediate reward.

You know what else I'm gaining from your research is that if the mistake that we've been making by pressuring, judging, guilting, all that other stuff highlights the bad behavior, then when you give your love and attention appreciation to calling out the good behavior, you are really now helping them move toward that. Instead of creating that paralysis, you're actually fueling the tank, so to speak. That's super cool.

Yeah. And make sure to do that. For some reason, our automatic reaction is to focus on, Oh, they're not doing that enough. And when people do do, we might in our head say, Oh, that's nice. But we have to actually verbalize that. My daughter, for example, she, in general, doesn't eat much or doesn't like to eat anything that's healthy for sure. We went out and she ordered a sandwich that had vegetables in it, and I was like, Oh, Yeah, well done. I'm so proud of you. So you have to highlight that when people do do these things. Yes.

A lot of people read that condescending, though. You know how sometimes if somebody is... I don't I don't know if there's any advice or research on this, but I find that sometimes when people are really defensive, or at least that scenario with the kids, when our son finally started eating things that were green instead of a chicken nugget and a French fry, and I'm like, Finally, that's great.

When did that happen? Because I don't know when.

Double digits, at least. We were way into the double digits. No, I had one.

One is eating fine, but the other one's not.

But so there's probably before you let it out of your mouth, and it's calling out the, Finally, you're doing it, it's, I'm really proud of you.

The way that you do it with adults, for example, my husband has this new thing where he gets up, he doesn't wake me up, he gets the kids ready to school, he takes them to school, and I just get to sleep. And how amazing is that?

How did you train him to do that?

I don't know why he decided one day to start that. And he knows I don't like mornings. And if I can sleep just like another hour without anyone waking me up, that's great. But I make sure to say like, Oh, my God, thank you. That was so great. And I think that's good for everyone.

Of course. The third way you can motivate people to change that we've talked about is progress tracking. How do you use that if you're trying to help somebody get better with money?

Okay. So a lot of progress tracking. I mean, there's a lot of apps for all of these things. There's a reason why lots of these apps, whether you're tracking your steps or you're tracking your expenses. There's apps for all of these things. Maybe You don't need to track everything. I don't know what it is, the goal, but think about what the goal is, and then you can track the specific elements that are related to that goal.

How does the progress fuel into your motivation to keep going? Because there must be a connection based on the research.

Right. So it's just the joy that we feel from progress. When we see that we're progressing, that is really what's causing us the joy. When we do well, that is It's also joyful, but it is doing better that is even more joyful. Imagine you're running a marathon and you're doing really well. You do like 3:30, like 3 hours, 30 minutes, and then the Next year, you do 3 hours, 30 minutes. It's still very good. But imagine it's like, oh, now it's 3 hours and 28 minutes. It's so much better because there's some progress. We really like seeing ourself. And in fact, even if we're in the top of our game, if We are not progressing. We're just maintaining. That can actually be extremely demotivating. We always need some progress in our life. And it makes sense that our brain has evolved to be like that. Because what that does, it causes us to try to progress. It causes us as an individual, but also as a species to go ahead. Because imagine, think about your first entry-level job. When you got it, you were probably really happy. But But of course, after a while, you are hoping for something else.

You're hoping for that promotion. You want to see some progress. It's just a way that we are wired up, and there's a good reason for it. One of my favorite experiments actually that show this is about handwashing. We all know that handwashing is really important, and especially important to avoid the spread of disease, and that's especially important in hospitals and in restaurants. In a hospital in New York State, a camera was installed to see how often medical staffs actually wash their hands before and after entering a patient's room. Oh, man. I don't know if I want to know this. They found that only one in 10, only 10% of the medical staff wash their hands before and after entering a patient's room. Now, this was before the pandemic. Okay. Hopefully, numbers are different now, but still 10%. Okay, so they put an electronic board. Also, to be clear, the medical staff knew knew that the camera was installed, right? It's not like it was a nanny camera situation. They knew the camera was installed, and yet it was only 10% that actually washed their hands. Then they made one change. They put an electronic board that told the medical staff how well they were doing.

Every time they washed their hands, immediately, they got positive feedback saying, Well done, good shift. They could see it. The electronic board was above the patient's door. And they saw the numbers going up of the current shift rate and the weekly rate of people washing their hands. And the compliance, so the number of people who have washed their hands, went from 10 % to 90 %.

Holy cow.

Which is huge, and it stayed there for quite a while. I mean, it was such a big effect that they wanted to make sure that it was real. So they replicated it in another division in the hospital. And here they found something very similar. Started at 30 %, so one in three, wash their hands, put the electronic board with the feedback, the well done, good shift, and went up to 90% again. Why does that work? It works for all the reasons that we just discussed, which is the normal approach is just to tell the medical staff, If you don't wash their hands, there will be bad things in the future, illness and disease. So They have to wash their hands. A, it's in the future. B, it's something bad, so it doesn't cause me to act. So now they flipped it over. And now you're washing your hands to get a positive message, which is immediate and it's positive.

And how about the fact that you're also seeing that other people are doing it? Does that impact your desire to move toward it and adopt this positive behavior?

Right, absolutely. There's two other really important things here. One is it's social proof. I'm seeing that 60%, 70%, 80% are doing it. I don't want to be the one who doesn't. I want to do the good stuff, which is what other people are doing. This is very helpful. I know that sometimes when you take one of these city bikes, there's actually a little electronic board telling you how many people have taken these bikes today in the city. That makes you feel like, Oh, A, I'm part of this big group, and B, a lot of people are taking bikes, being green. That motivates me to do the same. So that's social proof. And the other nice thing about it, the numbers keep going up. And the same thing with the bikes. They kept going up because people are taking bikes all over the city, right? So you're there, you're about to take a bike, and you see the numbers going up. And when you take one, the number goes up as well. So that's very gratifying. Yes. And same thing with the handwashing. You wash your hands, numbers go up, you see it going up. There's progress.

So you're a parent. How the heck do we apply this to our life? How do I use this to maybe get the kids to do chores, to get everybody to help out? How do we apply this?

So in fact, I would say with kids is the easiest thing to do. Okay. Right? So first of all, let's start with the very beginning. You don't want to control or give them a sense that they're in control, that you're telling them what to do. For example, let's say you want them to eat vegetables. Instead of saying, Here, eat your carrots, say, Do you want carrots or would you like cucumber? There's a choice. Or even better, make your own salad. They're in control. Or a lot of times you may ask, Do you want me to choose what your vegetable or do you want to choose yourself?

That's sneaky. I like that one. Every single one of us has somebody in our lives we love, but we would love to have them change.