277. How Small Choices Shape Better Communication

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It's career coaching you choose for yourself. You answer a few quick questions, get matched with a vetted coach, and in many cases, you can start within 24 hours. You choose the coach, you decide the goal, and you get to talk honestly about what actually matters, whether that's a promotion, a pivot, burnout, or even leaving. There's no HR involved, no performance review lens, and if it's not the right fit, you can switch coaches. What I appreciate is the sense of agency. When you're feeling stuck, waiting rarely helps. If you've been thinking something needs to change, you don't need permission to explore that. Go to Strawberry.me slash TFTS. It's coaching focused on you. Think of it as therapy for your career. When it comes to communication and life, big things come from small things. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast. Talk smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Eric Zimmer. Eric overcame personal battles with homelessness and heroin addiction at the age of 24 and then had a very successful career in high tech. He later became a behavior coach and an award-winning podcaster with his show, The One You Feed. Eric has spent over 20 years studying human transformation and habit formation. His latest book is called How a Little Becomes a Lot, the Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. Well, welcome, Eric. Thank you for being here. I'm excited to learn from you today. Hi, Matt. I really appreciate you having me. I'm excited to be here also. Shall we get started? Please. All right. Let's start with your personal story. Can you share how your journey from addiction to sobriety has really helped form who you are and informs what you do? Yeah, it would be almost impossible for me to imagine what I would be like without it. At 24, I was a homeless heroin addict. I weighed 100 pounds. I had hepatitis C. I was looking at going to jail for upwards of 50 years. And I was fortunate to get sober at that age. And what I learned through that process is just so deeply embedded in the way that I view the world that, as I said, I can't imagine a different way of viewing the world. We just get to a point where we all see the world the way we see it. And that's a pretty embedded part of my story. And so I learned a lot through all of that, as you might imagine. And it turns out that a lot of that is relevant not just to people facing serious life-threatening addiction, but to life in general. And we live in a more and more addictive culture in so many different ways today. That's the start of things for me. Excellent. Thank you for that. You often leverage the two wolves parable. Can you share with us what this story is and the lesson you'd like all of us to take from the story? Sure. I know some of your listeners may have heard it before, but it's a story that says we all have these two wolves inside of us that are always at battle with each other. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandparent is telling this story to their grandson. They say, we have these wolves inside of us. And the grandson wonders which wolf wins. And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So the great thing about a parable like that is the minute I say it, you get it. On one level, you're like, oh, I see. There are choices that I make that encourage the better parts of me. There are choices that I make that encourage the less good parts of myself. Which do I want to do? What I love about the story, particularly though, is I think it points to a deep truth, which is that we are motivationally complex creatures. We want many different things. We value different things. And these things are often in conflict with each other. Two wolves is almost an oversimplification for it. But it speaks to the fact that we all intimately know that feeling of being pulled. I want to do this, but I also want to do that. I value this, but I want to do that. That feeling of being pulled is part of being human. And it doesn't go away. It's what we do with it. And by recognizing that we are motivationally complex and recognizing that we are always making choices that we're able to make better ones. It's a very powerful story for sure. And I appreciate the awareness that it brings to us that at any moment we have choices to make and by making that conscious aware, we can have some control. As you well know, we focus on communication. I'm curious, have you in your own life, or have you coached others or seen others who have made conscious choices to feed some value or some action to help them be better in their communication versus others? I can imagine finding myself in a conflict situation or a negotiation situation where I might react in one way, but really should be reacting or want to be reacting in another way. I'm curious about your experience of how this applies in communication. I think that one of the core skills that underlies all the work that I do and also underlies communication is awareness. It's the ability to be able to pause, see what's happening inside of us, see what's happening around us, and then think, what choice do I want to make? What do I want to do here? We often operate on autopilot to a great degree. And autopilot's a lovely thing in many ways. It's great that as humans we can drive home while I think about something. Great, that's a good use of it. But when autopilot is operating and it often does in communication, that's not the time we want it to work. We want our communication to be thoughtful and conscious. And so building the awareness, what am I thinking? What am I feeling right now, is a core skill that underlies everything that I do. How did you train yourself to find that awareness? Many of us are so busy, or we have so much information coming at us at once. How did you learn to do that? It's a valuable skill, but one that can be challenging for many. My book is called How a Little Becomes a Lot, The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. So you'll recognize that my answer is you don't get it all at once. You get it a little bit at a time. And in the book I have something that I think is unique to what I do, which is it's a method for working with and changing our habitual thought patterns. There's a lot of information out there about what to think. Think this, don't think that, take this perspective, don't take that perspective. But there's very little about how do you actually do that? And the way that you have to do it is by frequent repetition. So I have something I call still points. And a still point is just something that we engineer into our day. So imagine a still point being a when and a then. The when could be like every time I go to the bathroom. My then could be I ask myself what am I thinking and feeling right now. If you go to the bathroom five times a day, you just take that time and go what am I thinking, what am I feeling, I check in. No big deal. Any one of them on their own, so what? Doesn't matter. But a lot of them done consistently over time in the same direction, you will become more aware. You will be more self naturally being more aware because you've woven it into the fabric of your day. And it's a lot more likely that it dinner that evening when you're having a conversation with your spouse that you're going to recognize what's happening inside of you if you just reflect on it four times earlier today. So that's the mechanism, particular with these thought patterns or something like being aware that we can train it. I love this idea of training our awareness and the when then paradigm is really useful. I want to talk about the knowing doing gap that you discuss. And I'm curious to learn more about what is this framework and how does it help us show up well in all our situations? I think we all have some aspects of our lives in which we want to be doing something different. We may even know exactly what we want to do different. We may even know how to do it. We just find ourselves not doing it. It could be eating, it could be exercise, it could be meditation, it could be conversations with our partner, whether at work or at home. So there's this gap and the book is really a response to how do we bridge that gap? And I can't put it all into a single sentence, but the little by little approach is at the heart of it. And by little by little, I mean something specific. I mean low resistance actions, meaning something you will actually do done consistently over time again and again in the same direction. We often are trying to fix four or five different things at any one given time in our lives. And so we're doing a little of this, a little of that, and it's all over the place. But when we take small things that we do consistently in the same direction, we bridge that knowledge to action gap. Yeah, so we have knowledge and then how do we get that knowledge into action and by doing so first as awareness and then finding the little things that we can do. And I know you have a great acronym for this. I'm going to ask you about it because many people listening know that I'm a martial artist. As part of my training, I spar with people. You learn a lot and you get a lot of instantaneous feedback when you are in a ring with somebody and you use the acronym spar as a way to help us get at the core of what you're talking about. And what spar means. And can you apply it to an example related to communication so that we can maybe use it directly and help ourselves? So I want to start by saying, I think that there are two competencies we have to get in order to change something. The first I will call structural. This is what spar focuses on. It's really about planning. The second is an inner component. So the inner component is you might know exactly what to do. You might remember to do it and then you don't do it in the moment. And that is usually some sort of inner emotional type thing. So spar is all the structural. And so it stands for S is for specificity. What am I doing? Where am I doing it? How am I doing it? So let's take communication. It's one thing to say like, well, I want to communicate better with my children. Okay. What does that mean? Oh, I want to make sure I have 10 minutes a day that I talk to them and I really, really listen. That's some degree of specificity. Now I would take it further and be like, well, when is that 10 minutes going to happen? Because when we're trying to build a new behavior, ambiguity is always the enemy. We want to have all our energy go to doing the thing. So specificity, the P stands for prompts. How do I remember? So I'm going to spend at dinner every night. I'm going to ask my children a question about their day that's thoughtful and I'm going to share something for my day. How do I remember to do it? Maybe I just need a little thing that I set down next to my dinner plate that says like, remember to ask X. It sounds silly, but we're so busy. Our brains are full of so much stuff. We frequently just forget. So P stands for prompts. A stands for alignment. And one of the things if we asked all behavior scientists in the world to come together and agree on one thing, it would be hard to do. But I think the thing they would say is don't rely on willpower or discipline anymore than you have to. Set up your environment to make it likely you do it. So alignment is about doing that. So what's an example for communication? Part of our environment is other people. So I might, if I have a spouse, I might say, can you help me remember? That's setting up my alignment or saying to them ahead of time, this is something I want to do every evening. Would you support me in doing it? Alignment. And then finally, R stands for resilience, which basically means planning for what is going to go wrong or could go wrong. So what am I going to do if I'm not at home for dinner? Is there still a way that I could have that conversation that I want to have with my kids each day? Maybe there is. Maybe I say, oh, if I don't make it home for dinner, I'll do it them before bed. Or if I'm traveling, maybe I'll send them a text where I ask them the question. And so SPAR allows us to get everything set up and have clear plans for what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, what we're going to do when we're unable to do it. Then we can put all our attention into the actual doing. So that's SPAR with an idea around communication. I love it. It sets us up for success and it makes us more thoughtful and intentional in what we're doing. So many of us could just be frustrated that we don't have the connection with our kids that we want to, for example. And this becomes a very clear action plan that is likely to succeed, one, because it's defined and two, because we align it with others and our situation. And I really like the resilience point, which is in some ways contingency planning. What do I do if I can't execute on this? So specific, have prompts, alignment and resilience. Thank you. I think that this is one part of the equation. This is the framework side, the internal motivation side. Talk to me a little bit about that. I can have the desire, but not the will. Curious, how do we get that motivation? I don't love to talk about motivation a ton because it's a feeling and feelings just come and go. They change. Now, I do think it's important that we're clear on why something matters to us. So if we're going to say I'm going to do X, Y or Z, why does it matter? We want to get to the heart of that and we want to understand it emotionally. But waiting to be motivated is often a trap because you don't have to be motivated to do something. I exercise many, many days when I am very far from motivated. I do not feel like doing it at all, and yet I do it. So the emotional side is let's stick with the example we've got. You are there and you want to ask the question, but your teenager tends to be like, oh, dad, or they just don't really like to do it. And so you're a little tentative about wanting to do it. So it's easy in the moment, okay, I should do it now, but I'm not going to do it because it makes me a little bit uncomfortable. That's the emotional inner aspect of it. And what we don't need to do is solve all the discomfort. All we have to do is figure out what is it that I need to do to get me over the hump in that moment. And that's what SPAR does is it puts us at a choice point. And at a choice point, we either act the way we want or the way we didn't want to. If we didn't do what we wanted to do, we can zero in right in on that moment. What was I saying to myself? So I identify in the book what I call the six saboteurs of self-control. One saboteur of self-control is the insignificance trap. It means that we don't connect the dots between the little things we do today with the big picture. So it's very easy to be like, I'm just not going to do it tonight. I mean, what does it really matter? One night is not a big deal because we emotionally don't want to do it because it's a little uncomfortable for us. If we're in that, we need to say to ourselves, wait, every chance to connect with my child is important to me. And I know it's going to be slightly uncomfortable. I also know that this is very aligned with what I value. And so I'm going to be uncomfortable. I can still do it. That's an example of just taking that moment and rescripting what it is we're saying to ourselves. So if we can identify what is it that's getting in the way, we can learn to talk to ourselves and essentially coach ourselves to take the action. That's a very powerful idea, the rescripting. And the rescripting comes from an awareness and the awareness comes from the discomfort. You know, so it's a natural cascade. Where am I feeling uncomfortable? Where's the discomfort? What might be leading to it? And that requires us to self-reflect and to understand our values and how we're not aligned. And then from there, think about the rescripting. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire and pay expert freelancers across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent so you can move quickly, fill key gaps and scale your work without taking on full-time overhead. 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So it's going to be very tempting to get you to say a lot of smart things that are going to help our listeners. And that's important. I've also realized though that a big part of communication is not exactly the things that you teach. It's the spirit in which you teach them and the way that you make people feel like you understand them, they understand you. And so I think for me it's been, I've recognized more that yes, I want to get the good ideas out of the people that come on. But I also want to create an environment where I connect with that person, they connect with me. I want to have a genuine conversation. And I'm also trying to in a sense think about my listener as I'm going and think of them as that other part of that conversation, I think is one of the things that I've just gotten better at over time. It is an ever-evolving skill, isn't it? I find the conversations wonderful, but I also find the learning that I have. What I heard you say is it's really about connection beyond content. That's so true for me as well. I'll be curious to get your answer to our second question. Who's a communicator that you admire and why? There are so many great communicators, but when I saw this question, I thought of someone named David White. David White is a poet and an essayist. And what I love about David White is he is willing to be very spare with what he says and doesn't feel the need to over-explain it, which part of what poetry tends to do. He lays something out there and lets it work on you. David does that in essays, and I've interviewed him a few times for the show. He's incredibly articulate, incredibly smart, has a wonderful Irish accent. You could listen to him for days. It takes me a little while to downshift into David's pace, but when I do, I just feel like there is this sort of stunning luminosity to what he writes. And so he's an example of a type of communicator for me that shows how they pay attention. It's what I love about poets. They teach me how to pay attention to the world differently. They're observing the ordinary in a way that I'm generally not. So they are communicating, but they're also teaching me how to see. And David is one of the best examples of that to me. You've learned a lot from him and others, but a communicator you admire is one who teaches you how to see things differently. And I also heard in that they help you downshift in this case to resonate at their level. And like you, I can be moving at least mentally in a frenetic pace. And some of the best communicators and best communication I've had is when I slow down and connect. So thank you. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I think intention. What is important about this conversation? What do I want to happen in this conversation? What matters here is a really, for me, in conversations that are important. Clarity is really useful kind of back to what we talked about with Spar. Then I think it's attention. And we often think that good communication means all our attention is on the other person. I don't think that's true. I think that, yes, we have to be very focused on the other person, but I think a certain amount of attention has to be to what's going on inside of us as we're having the conversation. Because otherwise, we are always reacting internally. If we're not aware of it, if all our attention is out there, then everything's getting churned up back here. And I don't know what it is. So I need to keep some part of my gaze. What's going on inside me so that I can work with it? So I think intention, what I want the conversation to be in general, attention on me and the other person. And then I think, for me, there's always a pause element. There's always an element of slow down and pause. So intention, directionality, attention, both externally and internally, and slowing down. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast. Talk Smart.