Small Move, Big Change

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Caroline Arnold. She's been a technology leader on Wall Street for more than a decade, and she's the author of a really wonderful book called Small Move, Big Change. Carolyn is a recipient of the Wall Street and Technology Award for innovation for building the auction system for the Google IPO and her name appears on technology patents pending. She is a managing director at Goldman Sachs and lives in New York City. Carolyn, thank you so much for making the time.

Caroline Arnold: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

Anita Brick: Well, this is very exciting. And I, as some people know, I'm a big fan of the concept of finding ways to do things incrementally. And to take those, as you put it, micro resolutions tell us at a basic level what is a micro resolution?

Caroline Arnold: A micro resolution is a small and absolutely achievable and sustainable behavioral change. And that's a change that has an immediate impact on your personal or professional life.

Anita Brick: Wow. Okay, I get it. So it's, It's funny. Is there a quiz? Are there a bunch of questions that we're, that students and alumni, and a bunch of them flow from that. So let's just jump in and an evening, week and evening student said, you suggest you make things easy, as you said, absolutely doable. I will freely admit that I am not comfortable with that. I really only value things that are challenging. How would you suggest resolving this and making something challenging but consistently doable?

Caroline Arnold: Okay, so I gave sort of the short definition of my resolution. Before I answer that question, let me just put a couple of other principles out there and then return to that question. So if you think about personal goals that we often make, like a New Year's resolution is a classic one. They tend to be stated in terms of if you listen to them, to be organized, to be assertive, to be slim, buy some.

Do you hear a lot of the word be to be to be somebody different than I am today? I call those wannabe resolutions. They're really closer to wishes than they are to specific actions: a call, a resolution to action. And we sort of posit that we're going to be somebody different in the future. And if you say to yourself, I'm going to be organized, when you wake up the next day, you are no more organized in your behaviors than you were the day before when you made your resolution.

But you're going to sort of just be on your own all day. Every time you touch anything that has to do with organization, you're going to be telling yourself, be organized. You know, when you touch your mail, be organized when you file something, be organized. When you open your kitchen drawer, be organized. And actually, those resolutions for 90% of people fail because they just sort of exhaust your will to change over time.

Willpower is a limited resource, and it shares a mental pool of resources. it's part of a mental pool of resources such as decision making and act of initiative. So when you draw heavily on your willpower, you're depleting it quickly, and you're also depleting your active initiative and problem solving and, and, and decision making capability that you need for very important tasks in your life.

And so there's this tension between trying to make a lot of change at once and get there quickly, and your ability to conduct your everyday life and be successful. So the purpose of a micro resolution is to narrow the focus to an achievable personal resolution of change in personal behavior that you can sustain forever. And we can come back to that and to nail that resolution on the very, very first try.

Now to go to your students and question big stretch goals. I'm not against them. I'm for them. I have them for myself. So we all have talents and things we do well that we're not, you know, that we apply towards these goals and we should work towards them every day. And sometimes those are part of just the second nature of how we do our job to, to, to, to strive to outperform them, to be looking for opportunities to contribute that we do that well.

But it's in those places that we feel we could improve, and shift our behavior or to better support stretch goals and to just improve ourselves as participants in the workplace and in our own personal life, that you need to focus on smaller behavioral changes. Any behavioral change is significant. I think the thing I found for myself and the book is full of, you know, my experiences and others is that there's no such thing as an insignificant behavioral change you make for life.

They're all significant, both in practical terms and psychological terms, because when you learn to do something different, you experience something different. And that experience shifts who you are. That gets to be a part. But you get there by experiencing something differently. And when we set ourselves up for such big goals that we never meet them personally, to be organized, let's say overnight, we rob ourselves of the practical experience of how we actually make change. So these are complementary to stretch goals. They don't replace them, but they should run along beside them, and they will enhance your ability to reach all those other goals.

Anita Brick: What makes perfect sense? Because if you think about it, when you do what you say you're going to do, you feel good and you want to do more of it.

Caroline Arnold: Exactly. Success is a habit. Success and personal change becomes a habit. Right now, I think most of us have a failure experience with New Year's resolutions, 90% of us. So we started out very strong, very enthusiastic and determined for a couple of weeks. It goes really well and you think, wow, this is so much easier than last year, right?

And then it becomes exhausting and it starts to erode. And then I got it. It's just the wrong time of year, you know, I'll do it later. And we sort of train ourselves into that cycle of a big burst of zeal to change a kind of, you know, flatlining in it and then backpedaling from it by doing these micro delusions, as you suggest, you train yourself to be successful every time. And so you get that feeling. I am in control. I can make these changes. I just need to focus on them, in a way that I can be successful every time.

Anita Brick: Okay. Got it. Well, there's someone who. Well, let me read it. This is an alum. And he said, I've been setting goals for a long time. Over the last three years, I've been working on gaining visibility. And that could be a little too vague. As an expert in my field of tech, and I've even used your approach of taking tiny steps, somehow I haven't been able to create enough momentum to sustain my efforts. What am I missing? What would you tell him?

Caroline Arnold: Okay, so first of all, one of the rules of a micro resolution is that it's absolutely personal and based on sort of this person is a tech person. It's almost like reverse engineering your own behavior. You observe your behavior and what works and doesn't work, and you pick a place to enter to make a significant chip. So I don't know exactly what this person's efforts have been, but this is what I would suggest.

visibility is a very broad term. Is that visibility at work? Is it, you know, industry visibility? Is it, you know, trying to create a brand for yourself outside of work? There's a number of ways to do that. So this person may have, you know, if you're if you're saying, well, I should be blogging, I should be tweeting if that's the kind of social media thing and you're not getting the time or the focus to do it, you might pick one of those channels to really go deep with and create a behavior you can sustain every week.

So for example, I myself, in writing a book, had to get myself used to tweeting regularly, like, how was I going to do that? How was I going to get material that was interesting for people? And it isn't. You can't say, well, I must tweet five times a day, right? You have to have a system for doing that.

and so without knowing exactly what it is, he's trying to gain visibility in how or if it's at work, if there is, if he says, well, I'm going to start a group at work that meets once a month to talk about a tech issue every month or, or something like that, that would be something he could do and actually hold his feet to the fire for and actually succeed at.

That does not mean, again, that he can't take a broader thing. Like sometimes I'm doing things on Facebook and sometimes I'm blogging and sometimes I'm doing it. It's only saying that for the thing you're going to measure yourself on the progress, you're going to measure yourself on, you're going to make it very narrow. So if you're going to blog every Saturday morning first thing in the morning, that's the thing you're going to measure yourself on.

You can blog 3 or 4 more times that week. That's great, but you're going to be very specific about what you're going to do. Just to say a few more things about micro resolutions, they have to be easy in that that means that they're doable, and they have to be very specific in terms of what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.

So just following along with this example, it doesn't work to say you're going to blog once a week unless you say what day you're going to do it and when, because on Monday you'll say Monday is not a good day. You say Tuesday will be better. Well, Wednesday will be better for these reasons. And by the time you get to Saturday, you can't figure out what happened.

If you say, I'm going to do it, you pick a day that you think is going to be the most supportive of your goal. I'm going to do it that day. Then you can actually measure. Did I do it or not? Why didn't I do it? What was it about it? You're listening on a very clear channel as to what your resistance is to doing it, or what are the obstacles, so that you can then tune it.

But what a lot of people do is they keep just forwarding their resolution to the next day. And that is sort of an anti-micro resolution. So you want to be very, very specific whether it's diet, fitness, getting more sleep, very specific about what you're going to do and measure yourself on it.

Anita Brick: Got it. So an MBA student and I thought this is kind of an interesting question. He said, I heard that you believe that if you set out to do something, there should be a path. I'm sorry. If you set out to do something, there should be a payoff upfront. I'm all for instant gratification. But how does that work? When you set goals and you need to take at least some action before you receive the payoff.

Caroline Arnold: Okay, so one thing about many goals is there are some day propositions, right? I'll be me someday. You know, I'll lose 20 pounds many months from now. the micro resolution approaches, you have to be able to identify the payoff you're going to get today. So in that sense, the behavior you're shifting is going to give you an immediate payoff, and it will give you payoffs you never thought of further down the line.

But the thing you're signing up for is the value you get today. So I'll take one example that isn't business related. And then I'll do a business one. So if I'm a slob and I want to really be neat, and my resolution is to make my bed before I go to work, learning to make my bed before I go to work so that it's mindless and as easy as tying my shoes before I get to work will take practice.

But the day I do it is the day I get the benefit. I come home and my bed is made, whatever that means to me psychologically, in terms of my environment, in terms of having a paradigm for neatness. So with a micro resolution, you're at goal the first day because you practice the behavior right away, but you have to be able to sustain it.

And this is where people trip up. They try to go on to the next thing saying, you're going to make your bed every day. It's not the same thing as learning to do it until the point it's part of your autopilot, which we haven't spoken a lot about, but we can't. It's the same thing, in a business goal, what is your immediate payoff?

If you say, when I get feedback from my boss, I'm going to and I'm defensive about it, and I know I'm defensive, I can hear myself explaining immediately or trying to say why it is that he thinks that I need, or she thinks that I need to improve in this way, but I don't really. What is one thing that I can practice when I get that kind of feedback, that's going to give me the space to hear the feedback and create a more mature profile of who I am with my manager.

It could be as simple as saying, I really appreciate you taking the time to give me that feedback. I'm going to think about it. You give me a lot to think about and just give yourself the space to think about it and let it absorb it. And you may not even want to come back and respond anymore except to say thank you for that feedback.

Now we say, well, what is that payoff? I'm not immediately not defensive. Well, you are in that instance, you didn't defend yourself. In that instance, you told your boss you were listening. And that instance you look mature because as if you can, you know, that part of growth is to get feedback. And so you may be defensive with colleagues.

You could be defensive with people, even potentially, who work for you, but you picked a narrow circumstance. When you practice being non defensive in one way it bleeds into other ways. You could be defensive with your partner. You know, over, you know, something that your partner says to you. Like, you know, you squeeze the toothpaste in the middle, whatever it is.

And these things become cornerstones of behavior paradigms in the mind that you can build on to take one really simple one. I mean, I did leave my clothes on chairs and I never hung up my coat when I got home. Right, hang it up later. And one of my micro resolutions was just to send myself the message.

Because some micro resolutions are actions and some are specific messages you send yourself that fire on cue. So my message to myself was when I came home to say when I took off my coat, it's really just as fast to hang it up. It's really just as fast to hang it up. I didn't force myself to do it, but I did start hanging it up and over time I experienced it really is just as fast.

To hang it up is to throw it in a chair and hang it up later. Now, I never made another micro resolution to hang up all my clothes in a chair, but over time it began to bother me to see the things in the chair, because I have this other experience of just taking care of it right away, and it just extended itself to that over time.

And then it became kind of, it's really just as fast to file it, just to throw it in this pile. So just doing one of these things and experiencing the success of it and practicing it until it's second nature and you don't have to think about it anymore. Create success today and more success later. So there is a kind of instant gratification.

As long as you sign up for what you signed up for. Now I signed up to be neat and all I'm doing is making my bed. You have to say I signed up to make my bed and that's what I'm getting. Or at work. I, you know, I signed up to put all my contacts immediately in my smart phone as soon as I got a new phone call so that I wouldn't have to hunt around and search amongst all these numbers that aren't labeled and voicemail messages trying to find a number for a call I need to return. I'm going to do it immediately. As soon as I get the call, I'm going to punch in the name enough to identify that call. You'll get an immediate payoff for that. You'll find the number quickly. If that person calls you, you can identify that that's the person who's calling. But that's not the same as saying, oh, look, I'm organized. No, you're organized in one aspect. So that's good.

Anita Brick: That's good, that's good. So you mentioned your reference cuz another alum asked the question. She said, I read that you believe it's important to find cues in our environment that move us along and help us change behavior. I am an entrepreneur and feel that there are so many cues that pull me in different directions, it's hard to isolate the ones that have the greatest influence. How do I separate them out to build a micro resolution, working with the cues rather than being controlled by them?

Caroline Arnold: Okay, that's a great question. Cueing is a great topic, and there's a whole chapter on it in the book because again, let's go back to that, not wanting to be defensive. As an example, if you're a very defensive person and.

Anita Brick: You let's not let's I mean, I actually I like to actually talk about this one. If you're an entrepreneur and you have so many different cues because you have your family pulling you, you have, you know, you have funders pulling you. You have so many different people pulling you. I feel like it's a little bit different. And you really answer this question, how would you address that? These multiple priorities, multiple cues in an entrepreneurial environment, how would you suggest that they prioritize and really find the ones that they can influence?

Caroline Arnold: Okay. So a cue is different from a whole list of things you want to get control of. So for instance, you named family funders. and it could be say advancing your product. Those are all big things you need to do to be exact. You know, to be successful as an entrepreneur, when you pick one behavior, you're going to shift, you have to figure out what is going to kill you and remind you to practice that behavior.

So I wouldn't actually consider these particular things cuz this party. So let's take one of them. So let's say funding is something that you're going to focus on. You would think in terms of a micro resolution. What is one way I can keep my focus on funding so that I don't lose track of that during the day when I'm pulled in many different directions?

either by, you know, product concerns or family. It could be, you say, okay, the first half hour of the day, I'm going to come in and only focus on a funding priority. And my cue then is at eight in the morning when I sit down, that is what I'm doing. Maybe it's better at the end of the day for adjusting activities the next day, depending on what your day looks like.

Maybe it's that you're going to pick a funding target, which is either you could be developing a pitch for that. You could be trying to develop a relationship for a funder, and you're going to make it very, very narrow as to what you're going to focus on for that particular area. You want that and you're going to make it specific and tie it to a specific cue.

In this case, since you're driving it yourself, you are going to pick the cue. The reason I was going to touch back on the defensive one is some things are cued from the environment and you can't predict. So when somebody says something to you that makes you feel defensive, cues coming from the environment, you don't have control of that cue.

In some of these examples or family was another thing you mentioned. You don't have control over your family and it's going to kill you a lot of times, to do different things. So I would say the first thing is the part that you do have control over, and you can manage yourself to pick the 1 or 2 things that are most important not to lose focus on every day.

Narrow them to the next step in that whether it's developing a relationship with a funder, developing a pitch, whether it's, you know, or developing your product, whatever it is, figure out where are you going to put that and control the cue yourself and hold your feet to the fire for that cue. If it is something else in the environment like your family and how you're going to respond to the tension of your family and you know, to try to achieve that balance, there are a number of things you can do to make you feel that you've accomplished that better.

So, for example, on the weekend where most of us get to spend some time with our family, there are things you can do to maximize the impact of your relationship with your family when you have it. So, it sounds like a silly thing, but if you are out with your kid and you're on your, smartphone all the time answering mails that can leave, you're not maximizing the impact you can have with your kid as they eat their grilled cheese, and you answer these messages learning to discipline yourself.

when your kid, if you're home, when your kid comes home from school, sort of understanding that might be the most important time of the day that that cue of your kid coming home from school and needing to unload, potentially. Or maybe it's as soon as you get home from work because you're not there to check in with that and say, that's I'm going to isolate that period of time and that particular cue of coming home to make sure this person feels heard and understood and responds.

So there is a difference between the kind of cues you drive for yourself, which are more like scheduling cues and the cues the environment serves up. You know, if you've got your earbuds in and someone important in your life comes into the room, you might develop a habit of removing your earbuds immediately. Just that will give you a richer experience of your relationships when you do have time, so that when you're under stress with all these other things we have to do, and sometimes relationships take a hit, at least the rest of the time, you're maximizing what you can get.

Anita Brick: Got it here. There's another question related actually to entrepreneurship as well, but I think that this person may be confusing a big goal with a micro resolution. So maybe you and I can help weed that out. So, we can be students. I have a business idea and need to write a business plan within two months, yet my ultimate goal is to launch the business.

I hope this doesn't sound naive, but how can I create a micro resolution that is complete and measurable in and of itself? Write the business plan by a certain date. That also leads me to my longer goal of launching the business, but it sounds like even the business plan is not a micro resolution. It sounds like that's a goal that maybe has to have some micro resolutions built for it.

Caroline Arnold: Yeah, so that's a great one. so the part that's the micro resolution part. Over time, behavioral changes sort of why do we procrastinate? But let's just assume there is a part in the book about one off projects and how you manage them. So doing your taxes is a one off project, right? You're not going to build a whole set of like resolutions to get your taxes up.

But the principles are the same. The principle in micro resolution is to never overwhelm your willpower so that you fail. And it's the same thing with something like, writing this business plan, in that it's a daunting exercise. And as soon as you start to think about it, you can feel overwhelmed and even depressed because you can't feel all the work that's involved, and it's a break from your regular routine.

So I'm going to just segue for a second. We never really talked about autopilot, which is all the things that run your life all day that are entrenched habits and values and preferences that allow you to do a lot of things really mindlessly. you know, everything from locking your front door to making coffee to you know, the way you respond to people, the way you, you know, the way you communicate.

A lot of those autopilot habits are very good because they preserve your act of initiative. What you need to write, business plan. Because if you had to think really hard to do some of these things every day, you would be exhausted. So autopilot. The good thing is, when you want to do something different, change your behavior in some aspect, you're going up against autopilot.

All of the autopilot is so efficient because it's mindless. And then when you try to be mindful about doing something, you know you need to pick a narrow place to enter autopilot, or you're just going to kind of come up against something that's too big to overcome, basically all the things that run your life. So when you have something like this business plan, it's out of the routine of what you normally do.

A lot of us come in and we answer the phone and we look at email. We go to meetings potentially, and then this is something to the side that we have to produce ourselves. We have to drive every piece of it. But the principle is the same. What is the thing I can do? My first step isn't going to overwhelm me.

So if it's let's say it's reading business plans of other people. so day one could be I'm going to go online and I'm going to find 1 or 2 business plans I really like and read them as model day two. I'm going to try to come up with one statement, which is what I really want people to take away from this plan when they read it.

What is going to excite them about it and make it think it's an opportunity? What is different, different about my product? What is different about what I'm or my service and how can I put it? And so you just make it so manageable that you cannot feel overwhelmed. Now you may do more on that day. You may research a couple business plans and get so excited that you write a whole section super fantastic.

But if you tell yourself, well, I'm going to do that, I'm going to research plans and I'm going to write the whole for section. You may end up procrastinating because procrastination is a behavior that's tied to feeling like, I can't do it. I don't have the energy to do it today. Oh, I'm so tired today. I'll do it tomorrow.

So you want to break it down into what's absolutely manageable now? Sometimes you don't have enough time. If you have to do it by the end of the week, your chunks will be bigger than those chunks, right? But you want to try to organize it so that you frontload the things that make you feel that it's doable, that you have enough scaffolding to get through the week, and that will be personal to you.

Some people are great outliners, and the thing is to outline first; other people can only get to an outline if they do work on the content, and then they start to work back and forth. So you have to know yourself a bit, but you want to give yourself time to stretch out. So if you've been procrastinating, come up with the very first step you can take.

Anita Brick: Got it. So this was an interesting question, and I feel like it's a little bit on the fringe of our conversation, but I think it's worth addressing. It's from an alum. And he said, I've been trying to make a career transition from one industry into financial services since 2007. Well, I appreciate the fact that I've been employed throughout the time. I've not been able to fulfill my career goal. The job market obviously has not been great, but I fear that things will not improve in time for me to make the switch given my age and experience level. When do you know it's time to give up and follow another path?

Caroline Arnold: Okay, so I would consider this more of a general question. maybe, to me, as someone who's been in business and finance for a while rather than necessarily a micro resolution thing, because this is very personal. If one has goals one would like to achieve that are, let's say, in this person's case, a shift in career and not being able to make that shift.

The first thing I would want to know is what has this person already done if they haven't been able to make the shift because they're not devoting enough attention to it or they aren't, you know, they haven't actually taken steps or all the steps they need to take. It's possible that you could isolate the things that are most important to do next.

So if it were the beginning, you know, again, it could be really finding 2 or 3 key relationships you could leverage and developing those it could be really trying to, understand exactly what your value proposition is going to be, to come into this and use and honing that message, any of those things. But I would just say that one, you know, it's very personal. What else interests you? Before I backed away from that, I'd try to spend some time myself and think, what are other things that interest me? What was it about finance that interested me? You know, do I really understand exactly what the benefits would be? Was it the salaries? Was it the type of work? Is it you know, is it because my family has been engaged in and trying to then think, is it if there is something else that will be more amenable to the skills you bring to the table, but that is a really big question about a career change.

Anita Brick: I Agree.

Caroline Arnold: You are. Obviously, you're going to want to talk to people that you trust, any mentor that you have. But what you can do from a micro resolution perspective, I think, is you want to ask for the most honest feedback you can get, and you want to make sure if you have not, if the universe has been sending you some messages through people and you feel like you can't absorb it, it may be that you know you aren't interacting totally with the information you're getting in the in the most profitable way for you.

And I would sort of examine, you know, do I listen, do I take it down, do I think about it later? Do I come back with questions and really try to concentrate for a period of time to make a decision about, am I going to go forward, or am I going to go laterally and try something different?

Anita Brick: It also sounds like, and of course, this person is more than welcome to email or call our office and make an appointment with one of us. But it almost sounds like the person has been pushing ahead, but not necessarily getting the kind of momentum that they want. And, I don't know, sometimes it's really difficult to find out if or to be honest with ourselves.

Maybe that's a better way to put it. It's very difficult to be honest with ourselves and find out what the underlying motivation is, is, is this our goal? Is it someone else's goal? Was it because all of my classmates were doing this? My family does this, like you said. And that level of honesty can be frightening because if you have a dream for a long time, it's hard to let go of it.

Caroline Arnold: It is, I think, the things that, you know, it's most comforting to understand if you look at so many people's careers, some people go in a straight line, but some people have the most amazing experiences doing things they never thought they would do. They start out saying they want to do X, they end up doing something different. That different thing gives them a different kind of experience that lets them up.

I mean, you want to be open. The thing is to use yourself and grow as a human being. I mean, yes, our jobs give us satisfaction and they allow us to live a certain way. But the most when people tell me I go do a lot of recruiting, you know, and I think that, you know, people think, well, what's my career going to be?

What's my career path? What am I going to get paid? Very important. But what's the culture you're stepping into? You know, even if you look at finance companies, they're so different from one to another. I mean, some are hugely empowering, self-starter cultures. Some are more, you know, you know, cautious of risk taking and, and, and more hierarchical.

And so one way to think about your future is also to think, what's the culture I want to be a part of? What is going to allow me to grow as a human being because you spend most of your time at work. And I think, right, often we think too little about the benefits of that and too much about kind of a generalized abstract, again, almost like a New Year's resolution. I want to be in finance. What do we really mean by that? We deconstruct it and find out what the gratification is. You're really looking for that.

Anita Brick: Well, and you know what a micro resolution around that could be something along the lines of, and tell me if this is too big because you're the you're the expert here. But a micro resolution could be to have coffee on Friday afternoon when you know that your time is lighter, your afternoon is lighter with someone who is in financial services, we're asking a couple of questions that draw our culture, because you may find over the course of the conversation, I remember working with a student and he called me one day.

He had an interview with a particular bank and he called on the phone. He goes, I need you to call this bank. They were horrible to me. I said, oh, okay, well, tell me about it. And he said, I had 22 interviews over a day and a half. Not unusual in banking, 22 interviews. The first 21 were challenging, but they were fair.

And people were, you know, they were. It was great. The last person asked me a question, I didn't answer it. He told me to get out of his office and got onto a smart phone and started answering emails. And I said, well, what if that's the culture? And he said, there was a long pause at the other end, and he said, then, I don't want to be there. I said, well, isn't it good that you found that out? So maybe that's the next step. And, would that be a micro resolution to have coffee on Friday afternoon with your person from. Okay.

Caroline Arnold: You could say that I'm going to reserve a slot each week where I go to coffee or have some kind of outreach with someone every week that can help me advance my understanding of either the culture or a company, or just to build a relationship. Hey, relationship building takes time.

Anita Brick: Oh my goodness.

Caroline Arnold: Yes, Nancy. Immensely valuable and I, even, even if you were to go on Linked In, it takes time to find people and connect to them and get accepted and maybe open up, you know, to some degree a dialog which doesn't have to be, hey, give me a job. But it could be asking a question about culture.

I'm so interested in the company, and you seem to be somebody, you know, who spent your career there. I wonder if you could give me a couple leads. You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised what you get back. I get a lot of these kinds of emails myself, and I. Not everyone takes time to answer them. But you'd be surprised at the kind of access you have.

But it takes dedication to do that. And people do get exhausted. You know, they get exhausted from getting up every day. So what are the 25 things I have to do today? Figure out what thing you're going to nail, and try to build it into your routine so that you can do it all. The other part I haven't talked about so much either.

It is a career. Obviously, that's a career discussion, but all the other areas in your life that you want to make progress in. Often we feel exhausted because we're not making it. We might be very good at doing the career part. We may be moving that along, but we want to lose weight. We want to be fitter. We want to have better relationships with people in our lives.

And micro resolutions are extremely good at helping you to continue to make progress on those things that you think. I'm just so career focused, I don't have time to lead a healthier life. Yeah you do, you do. Making one change. Making one change. If you decided not to eat after 8: 30 at night, if you're trying to lose weight, it would be, you know, it would be a game changer for you.

You would drop a ton of calories, you would sleep better, you would rebalance your hormones better at night because you'd probably go to sleep earlier because we eat to stay awake. A lot of times when you eat and you don't have a hunger pang at night, you're eating because you're tired. You go to bed, you get a better night's sleep, you wake up, you're hungry for breakfast, which is the most important meal of the day.

People tell me, oh, you know, I'm not hungry for breakfast. Well, because you ate until 1030 at night. All those things add up to a better life that will support you. You know, fitness, you know, walking to work once a week for, you know, getting into that habit of having one pillar in your life that is fitter will lead you to have an appetite for more and will support you in everything you do.

Sleep is so essential. I really feel I have to say something to everyone. Sleep is what restores your willpower. Sleep makes you more productive. Sleep makes you look better. Sleep makes you quicker off your feet. If you're staying up late every night in your job search because you don't pay any attention till you get home at night and getting up depleted, it's not going to help you land a job when you have 22 interviews to get through, no matter what that person behaved like at the end.

Which doesn't sound like very good behavior, but you want to be on your toes and people don't know how to get more sleep. They get on the computer at 11:00 at night to answer one email. They're on to one in the morning surfing around. They don't go to bed because they're too tired to get ready for bed because they didn't do it earlier.

So they sit on the couch watching television, sleeping until it's 12, and then they try to get themselves ready. And the books have many ways to make simple adjustments in your behavior that can give you seven hours, eight hours, ten hours more sleep per week. That's a game changer for everybody to have the will to follow through on anything.

You have to have enough rest. So I just want to make sure that in the career conversation, we pay attention to those underlying things like relationships, diet, exercise, organization at home that will give you the support you need so that you bring your best game to your career. Search.

Anita Brick: Yeah. Oh absolutely. If you're absolutely right. They are not disconnected. They are not, it's not effective to compartmentalize them. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Caroline Arnold: Oh absolutely.

Anita Brick: Okay. So in your book, this is an exact MBA student said in your book, you suggest that you you should only do two micro resolutions at a time while that makes sense to me, how do I make it work when I have goals in multiple areas of my life that need micro resolutions, and that number is greater than two?

Caroline Arnold: Okay, well, if you could change it all at once, you would have changed it all at once by now. So if I could say, yeah, I've got to be more organized and I've got to be neat and I got to improve my relationship with this key person and, you know, really got to lose 20 pounds and I've got to go to the gym.

If I could do all that at once, I would do it all at once. But you aren't going to do it all at once. And in some ways, you find it more comforting to think that one day you could do it all at once. Then settling. It might feel like settling for two behavior changes at a time, but two behavior changes at a time that you carry out for at least four weeks until they start to move into this autopilot, which means they don't require willpower anymore.

So even a small change requires willpower. I'm here to tell you, whatever you change in your routine is going to cost you some mental effort, no matter how small it is. If you decide to make a change, it costs you some mental activity to make that change, and you need concentration and focus to get those changes over the line into autopilot, where you never have to think about them again.

If you make two today and two in the next four weeks, and two in the next four weeks, they don't all turn out some, some might take five weeks or six weeks. But basically you can make 20 behavioral changes in a year that advance your goal. 20 changes is huge. The behavioral tenet of behavioral science, the behavioral science is based on goes like this.

Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time. Every once in a while, we do something new. Every once in a while we do something new. If you learn to respond to your partner in a different way, when they behave in a way you don't like, or that makes you feel defensive or makes you feel angry, and you adjust your own response and you practice it, it will have a huge effect on that relationship and the way you deal with other people.

That is a huge change. It's very hard for people. We talk about autopilot. Yeah, autopilot ties your shoes, but autopilot takes the last donut by the coffee machine automatically without thinking, and autopilot snaps at your child. When your child does something or your roommate or your boss. Those things to make shifts in our pilot are huge. Now, one thing also that's great about a micro resolution where you understand the benefit upfront.

Okay, so instead of saying to be neat, let's say that we go back to make the bed that has an intrinsic value and intrinsic value to make the bed. Maybe the next thing is to do my dishes after dinner immediately. Maybe I can't do them after breakfast immediately because I'm rushing out of the house, but I'm going to do those at a certain point instead of staying in the abstract space to be neat forever, where you're never 100% neat, you can go shopping for alternative resolutions.

Okay, I did those two things. I've got my bed made and I'm doing my dishes. I'm less interested in the next neat victory than I am in the next fitness victory, or the next diet victory, or the next organization victory or productivity victory. So by sort of really spelling out to yourself what the value is you're getting, you get smarter about which things you're going to do next and give your attention.

So it's not about perfecting yourself, it's about prioritizing change for yourself. And you will get such a lift when you realize you've changed. When you do something differently the first time and you realize you didn't have to think about it. You know, I turned around to make my bed. It's made. I wasn't defensive about this particular thing.

I did this very productive activity automatically. Without telling myself to do it. You say, oh my God, I've changed. I've literally changed myself. And your preferences and your attitudes and your values will align with this new experience of doing things differently. And you will actually move and change your identity bit by bit. We identify ourselves all the time by things we say, oh, you know, these are the books I like and, you know, you know, oh, I'm I'm always late.

oh. I'm so disorganized. You know, we are constantly labeled ourselves in a certain way or, you know, oh, I, you know, I'm an interrupter, whatever it is. But then when you say, okay, I'm going to shift those behaviors a bit, those tags you give yourself start to change too. And lo and behold, you're a different person. And it happens faster than you can ever imagine.

Because making one change creates a new mental experience, a new psychological and emotional experience of behaving differently. My year of behaving differently. You can think about it. This is my year of behaving differently, and each one of those behaviors will cause you to behave differently in other areas. You don't have to concentrate on it because you're building new patterns for yourself.

So don't think of them as small. They're huge, and don't get impatient with yourself. That's how people short circuit themselves, because they just take that limited willpower and put it up against the massive, ingrained habits called autopilot and expect to beat this autopilot in the line. You wouldn't be able to do your job and change all those things at once, because you need mental capacity to do your job.

So think of it as something that absolutely supports your goals, and will get you there over time. And if you have that big burst of zeal to go all the way to run a marathon, do it. Go for that. But you know you want to go on a crash diet. Go. But always make sure you're making permanent, sustainable changes at the same time as you may be going broke in other areas so that if it doesn't work out, you will never have a day without advancing personal change that's positive personally or professionally.

Anita Brick: Got it. So wow, this is great. I can't believe the time went by so quickly. And final question. I'd like to sort of give people some concrete takeaways, but even give you concrete takeaways the whole time. But just to kind of solidify it into maybe a micro takeaway. What are three things that someone can do right now to craft that next micro resolution?

Caroline Arnold: Okay. Well, focus in on an area that you've been wanting to change one of these, you know, whether it's your productivity which is usually related to organization, whether it's relationships could be being on time, could be getting more sleep. The one I like the best is the first one. It could be diet. Any of those observe your behavior with respect to something like diet.

What keeps you from going to bed? What causes you to overeat? What's one shift you can make? What's one organizational shift you can make that will make a difference? Really narrow it down. Make it as specific as you can remember. You're going to need to either drive the cue for it by saying it's something I do at noon, or that I do every day, or you're going to have to think about what comes from the environment that you can catch and narrow it down to one thing that you can do and sustain.

And others give a couple of examples. So we spoke about sleep again. If you made one micro resolution, which is not to do leisure computing after a certain time at night because it does wake you up. It's not just to stimulate and fun, it's that the light from the computer wakes you up that would get you to bed sooner.

diet people, you know, just shift one thing. It could be not eating late at night. It could be to only eat when sitting down. People stand and eat out of the refrigerator. They eat the stuff on people's plates. When they clear up and put them away, or they eat while they're cooking. It could be one thing, don't change everything.

Change one thing. and be very specific and see if you can sustain it. If it's an organization, it could be as simple as having only one place to put notes. But even that will take practice to become permanent. in relationships, it could be picking one sort of dynamic in a relationship that makes you feel very, satisfied with your own response, even if it's the other person that you think is instigating it and thinking about how you can respond differently so you don't carry all that baggage or resentment or unhappiness with your own response, and just work on your part of the dynamic and get your attention off what the other person can

do differently. Those are just some examples. There's so many in the book, not just mine, but from other people, you know, people who are at work already and they want to, you know, network more. It can be as simple as eating in the cafeteria instead of eating at your desk once a day. All these things, you know, people who want to be more accessible.

What is one thing I can do to be more accessible to my team? People. People that want to figure out how to get to the next stage in their career, and how they can be more productive in the things they do now to create capacity for that next thing, that thing they want to put out there that identifies them as somebody that can do more than what they're doing today. But small things are not small. Every one of them will lead to positive change and positive change is a big deal and everybody has the power to do it.

Anita Brick: One final thing as you were saying that and I agree with you, I am a big proponent of this approach. What if you set a micro resolution and you find out that it's you're still not doing it? Yeah. And it turns out that it wasn't small enough. How do you do two things, how do you mentally regroup and how do you choose again?

Caroline Arnold: Okay. Great question. So you need to take any micro resolution for a test right. The first couple weeks are the test drive period. and what you're looking for is of course they all take some effort and some practice. But you might find if you said, okay, I'm going to do this on Monday night. And you were absolutely specific that for a whole bunch of reasons, Monday night turned out to be the worst night.

You hadn't thought about it. One thing about being very specific about what you're doing. It's supposed to be very general and abstract, if you're listening on a very clear channel for what is in your way. You can feel what's in your way, because you're only trying to do a couple of things very specifically. So you might change the date or time.

You might think the cue that you picked an environmental cue is just not specific enough, or that you're trying to answer too many cues at once and narrow it down. It could be that you're trying to do too much. So if you say, I'm going to do 40 push ups and 40 is just too many, you narrow it back down to 20, you have to get it down to something that you can sustain.

Now people say, oh, but that's just a copout. Anybody can succeed. If you can narrow it down, well, you're in good faith and wanting to succeed and go further. So if you narrow it down, it's because you've experienced that you've set the bar in a place that is unsustainable at the moment. You'll be able to do more later, but the absolute key is to be able to do it repetitively and sustain it forever.

So if you find out in the first two weeks that it's either too big or it's not specific enough, or it's not timed right, tune it. Another thing you sometimes find that we haven't talked about is how you frame these resolutions to yourself is very important. And there's a chapter on framing because it's psychological. So one example from my own life is I knew I ate very fast, I was finished first and other people were enjoying their food, and I would eat out of the bread basket or get seconds.

And I really wanted to slow down. So I made a resolution to chew my food slowly. Well, if you hear that, I mean, it's just unappetizing to even think about doing your food. Never mind, never mind. Yuck. but I reframe that to be to dine leisurely and savor my food and drink. Same thing, but so much better.

Who would not want to dine leisurely and savor their food and drink? And you'll find that these resolutions, because they're things you're repeating to yourself. You're creating a mental space just the way your parents, if they told you, oh, the early bird gets the worm, the early bird gets the worm, or any of these things that you learned in childhood that sustain you today.

Your parents taught you behaviors through repetition and values through repetition. You teach yourself the same thing. So you want to make sure you're talking to yourself in a way that makes you want to follow through and be successful. So all of those things can happen in the first couple of weeks. Again, when your focus is very specific, you'll get a lot of ideas.

Again, when you say, okay, my, my resolution was to be organized and all week long I wasn't organized. You don't know how to tune it because it's just plain too big. But when you're doing something like just taking all your notes in one notebook, you could find out that the problem is the notebook is too small. There's not enough room. It's too big, it's too heavy to carry from place to place, whatever you get very good at tuning it so that you can be successful.

Anita Brick: That's great. This was wonderful. I admire you for finding the time this month. This book must have been a series of micro resolutions given as busy as you are and with family and everything. So thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today, and I really appreciate what you did this time.

Caroline Arnold: Oh, thank you so much. And, it's such a pleasure. My husband went to the University of Chicago. I love Chicago, of course. people in business school. I'm living in that world myself. So the chance to speak to an audience of people who are thinking about their careers and trying to move forward is just a great opportunity for me to reach people.

And anybody who has any questions that didn't get answered. I do have a website. small move, big change, dot com where you can drop me a note. There's a lot of resources there, to help you get started. And I really, really appreciate the conversation and it was great to talk to you.

Anita Brick: Thank you again so much. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.