‘Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny’

Lao Tsu mapped the progress from habits of thought (and we would add habits of feeing) towards the truth of what we become.

In this episode, we map the core science of what makes our habits move from simply things we do once, to things that we do without thinking them… that then have a core impact on who we are and how we design our energy through the days, both as individuals and as a culture.

We look at the absolute basics of reinforcement (positive and negative) and how habits become enduring – by becoming easy, obvious, attainable and definable and having four distinct parts: a trigger/cue that tells us this behaviour needs to happen now; a desire; the behaviour; and the reinforcement or reward.

Taking a particular behaviour of listening to a 5 minute visualisation we look at how to anchor this as a habit within our existing behavioural sequence, with a deeper dive into the nature of intrinsic reinforcement. We look four of the main internal reinforcers: Dopamine, Serotonin Oxytocin and Endorphins.

We explore clean loops, backchaining and real world applications of habit-building.

The music that book-ends the podcasts is created by Caro C and is called ‘Sense Ability’ – you can find it here.