Habits are hot right now.
If you walk into any bookstore or scroll through leadership or personal growth content online, you’ll find an endless stream of advice about building better habits.
The idea has become one of the dominant frameworks for thinking about change.
And for good reason.
James Clear’s Atomic Habits has sold over 25 million copies and helped countless people rethink how small, consistent behaviors shape their lives. His work, along with many others, draws heavily from the research of BJ Fogg at Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab. Fogg’s book,Tiny Habits, helped popularize the idea that small actions, repeated consistently, can lead to sustainable change over time.
These are excellent books, and I highly recommend them.
But over the years, I’ve come to see behavior change a little differently.
The habit conversation tends to focus on what we do.
The systems we build. The cues we pay attention to. The routines we install.
But all of that lives in the external world, and when you stop to think about it, something has to happen before any behavior can ever take shape.
Behavior doesn’t change simply because we act our way into it. It changes when something inside of us shifts.
That internal shift is what makes new behavior possible.
In other words, habits belong to the outer game.
Subtle shifts belong to the inner game.
The outer game is visible. It includes the actions we take, the routines we build, and the systems we design to support them.
The inner game is less obvious. It lives in our attention and our assumptions, and requires a high degree of self-awareness to make it explicit.
The things we notice and the assumptions we carry about those things determine what we do and what we achieve.
So the inner game quietly shapes everything that follows.
So here is the Subtle Shift
Shift your focus from forming habits to shifting your state.
One of my mentors once told me that state matters more than substance, and when it comes to behavior change, I couldn’t agree more.
Habits are the substance.
State is the substrate.
While James Clear is correct that “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become”, I believe that you will only become the type of person you wish to become when something shifts inside of you.
And here is the good news. That shift can occur long before you build a habit.
Before actions accumulate into habits, something changes in our internal state, and when that internal state changes, behavior begins to move with it.
This is why I wrote Subtle Shifts, and I think it serves as a nice companion to Atomic Habits.
I hope you will pick up a copy and share it with anyone you know who is trying to make a change!
