Shaping your surroundings can help you achieve your goals.
Key points
- Adjust your environment to guide behavior instead of relying solely on willpower to achieve your goals.
- Remove small barriers to make tasks easier and more convenient, boosting consistency in your habits.
- Use visual cues to trigger desired actions, making it easier to form habits and stay on track.
- Leverage curiosity and temptation bundling by pairing enjoyable tasks with necessary ones to boost motivation.
If you’re looking to make a change in your life, even something simple like regularly taking the stairs instead of the elevator, how would you approach it? When I ask this question to students, they often suggest practical, well-known strategies: set specific goals, read up on the benefits, or commit to doing it with a friend.
While these can certainly work, they depend heavily on internal motivation and willpower. But there’s a simpler approach: find a building where the elevator is out of order. It might sound funny, but when the elevator is unavailable, people don’t just stay put—they take the stairs.
Rather than relying solely on willpower, we can shape our surroundings to push us toward the behaviors we want. As the saying goes, “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
Here are three suggestions to help you adjust your environment to achieve your goals:
Focus on Convenience and Ease
Two executives, Tania Luna and Jordan Cohen, introduced the concept of the “Banana Principle” to illustrate a quirky yet powerful insight they’ve witnessed repeatedly in corporate break rooms. Faced with the choice between bananas and oranges, employees almost always choose bananas. It’s not because bananas taste better, but because they’re more convenient and less messy. Even small barriers, like peeling an orange, can influence our decisions.
You can apply this principle by removing small obstacles that stand between you and your goals. A friend of mine began exercising more regularly after she started changing into her gym clothes immediately upon returning home from work, even if her workout wasn’t until later. Previously, she would change into comfy clothes after getting home, which made it harder to get motivated to switch to gym gear later. By eliminating that small barrier, she saw a significant difference in her consistency.
Red Level, an IT services provider, also applied this principle to enhance productivity and collaboration. In their open-office environment—where impromptu Nerf gun battles sometimes occurred—they wanted to balance collaboration and fun with uninterrupted focus. Rather than convincing employees of the importance of focused time, they modified the environment to make it easier. Each desk was equipped with a light that signals availability: green for available, yellow for away, red for busy, and purple for “do not disturb.” By making availability clear and visible, they made the desired behaviors simple and intuitive.
Build Cues for Action
Michael Phelps has openly shared the challenges he has faced in life, including his struggles with mental health. During one particularly tough period, his therapist suggested that he repeat a positive affirmation every time he walked through a doorway. Reflecting on this habit, Phelps noted that, since he passed through so many doorways each day, it became a constant, reinforcing reminder to affirm himself.
Using cues as motivators or reminders is a powerful tool. Researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, demonstrated its effectiveness in an experiment with 500 café customers. After leaving the café, half the customers were given a regular coupon for use a few days later, while the other half received the same coupon with a twist. It featured a quirky alien figurine and a note stating that the figurine would be placed on the cash register to remind them to use the coupon. The researchers found that the group who received the coupon with the visual cue of the alien was more likely to redeem the coupon than the group with the generic coupon. The cue spurred action.
I’ve applied a similar strategy to spur action in my own life. As a behavioral scientist, I understand the importance of practicing gratitude, yet I struggled to make it a regular habit. I could never keep a gratitude journal for more than a few weeks. Eventually, I decided to use a visual cue instead of a journal to prompt moments of gratitude. I chose one of my favorite colors, golden yellow, as a cue to pause and reflect on gratitude whenever I saw it. While it’s not foolproof, I often find myself noticing a golden flower or a yellow road sign and using that moment to practice gratitude.
Leverage Intrigue and Curiosity
In a study conducted at a business school, researchers spent two months encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the elevator. In the first month, they posted placards that highlighted the benefits of using the stairs and promoted stair usage as a social norm. Using an automatic counter installed in the stairwell, they found that people took the stairs nearly 32,000 times that month.
In the second month, they changed the placards to feature trivia-like questions, instructing people to take the stairs to discover the answers, which were posted along the stairwell. During that month, over 35,000 people took the stairs—a 9.8 percent increase. The researchers referred to this strategy as a “curiosity lure,” where the desire to uncover the answer motivated people to make a different choice.
I’ve applied the curiosity lure in my own classroom. I often struggled to get students back to class on time after breaks. Lecturing on the importance of timeliness wasn’t effective, so I started displaying a question on the screen before the break. The answer was the first thing we discussed when class resumed. Remarkably, far fewer students returned late.
Researchers at Wharton similarly leveraged intrigue by holding students’ most addictive audiobooks “hostage” at the gym to encourage exercising. These audiobooks were only accessible while working out, and as a result, gym attendance increased by more than 50 percent. This idea, known as temptation bundling, has shown that when you pair something that intrigues or excites you, like a captivating audiobook, with something you need to do, like exercising, you’re much more likely to follow through.
Ultimately, creating meaningful change in your life doesn’t have to rely on willpower alone. By adjusting your environment and leveraging tools like convenience, cues, and curiosity, you can build a system that naturally guides you toward your goals. By pairing what you need to do with what naturally captures your interest or makes things easier, you’ll find it far more effortless to stay consistent and motivated. Rather than pushing yourself harder, try designing your surroundings to pull you toward success.