The Weekly Circle #1
Welcome to the first episode of The Weekly Circle. A free Circles in Time newsletter released every Sunday.
Hey everybody,
We just completed the first public version of the Circles in Time programme. The programme ran over the course of eight weeks and involved participants from every corner of the globe!
So far the feedback has been very encouraging, with most of the participants making significant behavioural changes to their daily lives (impact evaluation report coming soon). I was also happy to hear participants reflect, with such detail, on all the ways they have learnt about themselves; their motivations; their typical failure patterns and what personal system features work well for them.
If you’re interested in joining the next cohort (starting August 29), you can apply below.
If you would like more context on the upcoming programme, you can click the link below to learn more.
NB: In order to keep the live workshops intimate enough for discussion, the programme will be intentionally limited to 60 seats. Perhaps in the future, I will find an effective way to scale it, but for now, the quality of synchronised discussion and feedback is more important.
WORLD VIEWS
Here are the ideas I’ve been circling around this week.
The World Around Us
The author Jonah Berger recently published another excellent behavioural change book called the Catalyst.
The key idea is that if you want to change someone’s behaviour (or in our case one’s own behaviour), you shouldn’t focus on driving up motivation. Instead, focus on removing frictions, making things easy, and prompting people to self-question.
Jonah wraps his practical suggestions into a neat mnemonic: REDUCE
If you want to read the book you can grab it here. I also enjoyed this interview with Jonah, by Gayle Allen on her Curious Minds podcast.
“What successful change agents do is they lower the barrier to change. They figure out an alternate way to make the same change occur with less energy, not more.” ~ Jonah Berger, Curious Minds Podcast
The World Between Us
Katie Mehr, Katy Milkman, Angela Duckworth and others, recently published their findings on a new kind of nudge to promote goal achievement. The nudge is called a ‘Copy-Paste Prompt’, and as it implies, the nudge encourages people to seek out and mimic a goal-achievement strategy used by an acquaintance.
It is always exciting to add a new evidence-based tool to the applied behavioural science toolkit. Especially when it comes out of such a robust study (n=1028, pre-registered, longitudinal, field experiment).
If you want a deep dive you can access the study here. Otherwise, here is a useful overview of the study design and a key takeout from the paper:
“In a large, longitudinal, preregistered study of exercise behavior, we found that a brief and virtually costless copypaste prompt improved goal-directed outcomes over the following week. Specifically, this nudge led to greater increases in the amount of time spent exercising than did passively receiving a strategy of similar quality, highlighting the value of actively finding goal-related strategies among one’s peers.”
The World Within Us
Biologists distinguish between a person’s chronological age (number of years they have been on the planet) and their biological age (often referred to as a human’s epigenetic clock). A person’s biological clock can lag behind or exceed their chronological age.
A recent clinical study, published in Nature, has revealed that it is possible to systematically reverse a person’s epigenetic clock. Essentially, scientists have shown that by providing people with three commonly used treatments, it is possible to make them younger (in this case 2.5 years younger, after 1 year of treatment).
It doesn’t take much contemplation to realise the enormous potential long term implications of this research. From the physiological, psychological and medical to the philosophical, moral, ethical and perhaps even spiritual.
As a collective society, are we ready for this?
WISE WORDS
Quotes I’ve been circling around this week.
“Learning to be ok with being uncomfortable and not having an immediate need to resolve that uncomfort is a superpower. In situations like this, most of the time we make suboptimal decisions to make us feel better in the moment.” ~ Shane Parrish
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” ~ Paul Bataldan
“Think of a flabby person covered with fat. That is what your mind can become—flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover. It loses its alertness, its aliveness, its flexibility and goes to sleep.
What are these layers? Every belief that you hold, every conclusion you have reached about persons and things, every habit and every attachment. In your formative years, you should have been helped to scrape off these layers and liberate your mind.
Instead your society, your culture, which put these layers on your mind in the first place, has educated you to not even notice them, to go to sleep and let other people—the experts: your politicians, your cultural and religious leaders—do your thinking for you.
So you are weighed down with the load of unexamined, unquestioned authority and tradition.”
~ Anthony De Mello
COMMUNITY
The beginning of August marks the launch of the Circles in Time Community Space. The community features will only be available to those who have already been through the online programme. The reasons for this are two-fold:
Competencies - Many of the community activities require a base-level understanding of self-applied behavioural science concepts, frameworks and practices.
Quality Assurance - Going through the programme is a good signal that the participant is serious about the subject, and has an interest in actively contributing to the community conversations, constructively.
For those who have been through the programme, this is what it currently looks like:
If you have completed the programme and are interested in joining the community space, you can subscribe* here:
Simply click the button above can select the monthly subscription option. Once you are activated on the system I will provide you with access to the features mentioned.
*As always, I don’t want costs to be a barrier to participation. If you are unable to pay the monthly subscription at the moment, email me directly and we can make a plan. Your inclusion is the most important factor for me at this point.
Take care,
David