Pod Insights Change Wired Systems Beat Willpower: the quiet secrets of high performance. Do less hard - Accomplish more awesome. About this episode If doing the “right thing” still feels like a daily arm wrestle, you don’t need a pep talk - you need better systems. Today we dig into systems that make good choices easy and consistent, drawing on Angela Duckworth’s research on grit and practical behavior change to show how environment, routines, and scheduling can carry the load so willpower doesn’t have to. We start with a simple truth: humans, young and old, choose the path of least resistance. Phones...
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in change, transformation, personal and collective growth, more positive impact and just figuring out how to unlock more of our human potential every day, every day use more of it to create the most amazing life experience for ourselves, creating great things in the world that improve other people's lives and just make the world go around. Today, guys, we are talking about one of my favorite topics to talk about, systems over willpower.
0:52 Speaker 00 By the end of this podcast, you might reconsider a lot of the things that you feel are hard and you need to get disciplined about, from your lifestyle to your work ethic, to just simply getting more work done.
1:10 Speaker 00 How these podcasts usually come to be, just a little bit of an insider view in my process of creation. Usually, I read things, I coach my clients, obviously, I talk to people, I live my life. And then during these conversations or while reading, there is going to be a moment of this aha, I didn't know that people looked at it differently. Or ah, when I'm reading something in the book, I didn't know that you could look at the world or a specific concept in the world in this way. And then, I think, in order to process better and include it into my new process of upgraded process of thinking, decision making and doing, then I write about it, I talk about
1:55 Speaker 00 it, create content and then think about how can I use this knowledge in my life to make better outcomes, whatever that means, happen. So this podcast was a...
2:10 Speaker 00 Compilation of things. Yesterday, I was, I think that was the last trigger. I was listening to Angela Duckworth. If you don't know who Angela Duckworth is, she is a very prominent scientist based in the US, I think Penn University. And she studied, she dedicated her life's work to studying willpower and greed. She wrote a book with this title, Greed, one of the most popular book on the subject of perseverance, like how it works, why it works, what we need to do to do it better. And when it's not necessarily time to persevere, but maybe pivot. So Angela Duckworth has her Instagram and on her Instagram, she shared this short clip
2:53 Speaker 00 when she was talking about kids at school preferring using their phones more often than, let's say, listening to their teacher teaching them math or other demanding subject or difficult, complex things. And she was saying about this fact that we shouldn't be expecting kids to be more willpower, if you like, than adults and choose something hard and complex and uncomfortable, like learning math, which you don't understand, over something super easy, like easy to consume videos or whatever, you know, the, the thing that kids are consuming on their phones.
3:36 Speaker 00 So she was saying, we shouldn't be asking for kids to do this impossible thing that even we adults can't really do. Like otherwise, people wouldn't say, like adults wouldn't say, oh, you know, I struggle with managing my social media or, or I overwatch Netflix or something else. We wouldn't struggle with that ourselves. So why are we requiring our kids to do that? Instead, we need to create the environment where the right behavior is easy, is simple, is a norm. Like, for example, leaving your phone in a, probably a lot of schools already do that in a special place. So kids don't worry about looking at their phone. Or maybe you leave your phone for the day. You enter school and you're without the phone there and you use some other ways to work with.
4:20 Speaker 00 Technology that you know are not that addictive and are well managed instead of requiring kids to train their willpower. And actually, before that, a couple of days before that, I listened to Angela Duckworth on a podcast of Katie Milkman, who does indeed a lot of work around behavioral, how to change behavior, especially consistently and at scale. Also, very prominent scientist who dedicated her life's work to behavior change. And these two actually good friends, and so Angela Duckworth was on the podcast of Katie Milkman. And there she was also saying the same thing, you know, she was saying, people think that I must be like this
5:05 Speaker 00 very will-powered person to, you know, do this great work and do other things. But actually, she said, I just create systems that help me to do the thing that I need to do. Help me to make it easier. Like, for example, she shared that she often would struggle to before to go to bed on time, even though she knew that, you know, good rest is important and it helps you to do your best work and feel great and it's great for health, etc. But she would just get carried away with things in life, email, etc. And she said, well, I programmed my Alexa, you know, this dot or Echo Dot by Amazon, to tell me every time at nine P M, Angela, it's time for bed.
5:49 Speaker 00 And she, she said that your, you know, your whole, whole family has like makes fun of her often, but she says, it works for me. It reminds me that, ah, you know, it's time and I've decided in advance that I'm gonna prioritize sleeping. So she would then wrap things up and go to bed. And so that is her system for sleep. And that what prompted this whole podcast, that is about systems that make things that you know you wanna do, that you gotta do, that you truly, again, they committed to doing, and yet somehow you fail to do that.
6:28 Speaker 00 Like, one of the things, yesterday or the day before yesterday, I was talking to a client and we were working on his protein intake, how to get more protein in his meals. And he was just, we were talking about his breakfast and he shared a picture where there were eggs and fruit, vegetables, a protein shake.
6:50 Speaker 00 And he said, oh, you know, it doesn't require much time of cooking at all. Once I decide to do that, I just boil eggs and it takes, you know, under ten minutes while I'm preparing my fruit, veg, etc. And then I said, well, eggs, you actually don't have to cook every day at all. I just pre-boil mine for the whole week ahead. And he said, well, you know, I didn't actually think about that. That makes things even easier, especially on the busy days when I can just, you know, grab stuff with me or eat on the go. You know, sometimes those things happen, sometimes more often than we'd like to. And then he went even further. He looked up this recipe when you put boiled eggs into this like soy sauce of some sort and the eggs stay there.
7:33 Speaker 00 And when you scoop them out, they are just so delicious. But anyhow, he boiled a huge bunch of them up. So that is another system. And a lot of people would ask me or when my clients come to me, they think that I'll teach them how to be super disciplined about food or exercise. Instead, the whole process, we are learning how to build better systems, how to make things that they wanna do easy to do in their life. Not in my idea for their life. I don't tell them what to prioritize, how to live their life. I'm helping them to figure out a way to combine the way they like living their life
8:13 Speaker 00 with the other things that they want to do for their health, fitness or their productivity and high performance. And it's all about, again, helping them to see that they just don't have the right systems. It has nothing to do with their willpower. It has nothing to do with how much time they have. There is always a way to make the right things happen if you focus on building the right systems. In fact, when you see someone doing seemingly a hard thing consistently, you might think, oh, they might be disciplined, but actually.
8:52 Speaker 00 From my experience, learning from a lot, a lot of high performers, it's not the willpower or discipline. They designed the systems that help them to do the right thing on autopilot consistently. You know, the definition of the system, one of the definitions of the systems is a set of processes or the set of behaviors or steps that are, that can, that create a whole process, which usually delivers this consistent result much faster with less energy, willpower or spending other resources, right?
9:36 Speaker 00 So you have a system for things that you need to run consistently. And the reason why it's important, because life will always challenge you. There are going to be, especially if you're an ambitious person, trying to make certain things, build certain things, you know, out of thin air, almost. You need to embrace daily challenges, which are unpredictable and will require a lot from you. So you need to build systems. So you, so the things that need to happen consistently, like your sleep, eating or your energy levels. So they run on autopilot, so that your thinking, your decision making, your energy is then spent for things that matter.
10:22 Speaker 00 Taking a sip of water. I'm not an AI, so I do need to do those things.
10:29 Speaker 00 So, systems allow you to have resources to take on more without your health, mental resilience, emotions, the rest of your life's suffering, right? So you can go through intense periods of work with no burning out or getting sick after, or really compromising a lot of aspects of your life, when you have systems in your life. And those systems can also be for relationships or for getting things done faster and easier without working more. Like, for example, another system that I'm sharing with you, because a friend asked me
11:13 Speaker 00 about a post that I made about this, what I call smarter scheduling. And she was very curious, like, how did it work? And why did I decide to post about that? So the gist of it is our biology is designed that way. Like, as long as you are a human living on this earth, you are designed this way. You have a circadian rhythm, the sleep-wake cycle, which is governed by the sun cycle on earth and many other things, and also your biology. And so in the middle of the day, somewhere between one and four, if you're a super early bird like myself, might be somewhere between 12 and 3.
11:54 Speaker 00 But somewhere in that time, again, for majority of people, it's between one and four, your brain naturally switches gears. Your cognitive performance declines. Your decision-making worsens. You are not that focused. You are sleepier, especially if you didn't have good night's sleep or ate a heavy lunch. That's why heavy lunches are not recommended. That gonna be even worse. And that's where people start munching on things or drinking coffee to bring that up. But actually, what would be a lot smarter is to schedule your essential tasks before that period and after that period.
12:36 Speaker 00 The first part of the day for early birds usually is the most productive ones. Some people who are genetically wired to be night owls, there might be later part of the day, but the middle, like, that middle part, it's actually good for nothing. So also try not to schedule your important medical procedures or other important things with other people, because they are also people and they follow the same trajectory. Judges, for example, make the worst decisions, least favorable to you usually, or during that time. So that time is good for things like napping or doing emails or doing any errands, or, you know, even if you wanna go and work out or take a break. That is the time well spent for that.
13:21 Speaker 00 And then you do a lot better work in the morning and in the later afternoon, again, especially in the first few hours of your, of your day, where you'll deliver more of the work. You're gonna do it with less mistakes. You're gonna do it faster and a lot of things is gonna come together into, in your mind a lot clearer.
13:45 Speaker 00 And where a lot of people get it wrong, who's high performers already noticed that, is that they schedule a lot of non-essential meetings in the morning or just stuff of like with email. No, actually, aligned with your biology, you need to do your most essential work and allow your team and your whole company perhaps to do their most essential work in the mornings. Do not schedule those meetings in the mornings. And then do the maintenance stuff, the meetings that are not, again, the most essential, do that in the middle of the day and then allow people also to finish off strong. If it's an important meeting, it's a negotiation, it thinks that you really need to think through things,
14:27 Speaker 00 then those meetings, yes, they are better for the morning when you are your sharpest, most positive, strongest, most willpower, just feeling good about your things, work, and also have your most energy and just sharper and go through things a lot faster. So that is another system. I call it smarter scheduling. And again, I worked through that with a lot of my clients who are trying to do a lot of work. And again, and it's so very helpful because then you do work faster. And so instead of trying to push through in the afternoon and things really dragging out,
15:08 Speaker 00 you can do that same amount of work in either
15:15 Speaker 00 two acts, less time or more, depending again on the task and what you're doing, on how well you slept, etc. Sometimes afternoons are just not possible to do anything. So that is another system that I share with each of my clients. So we talked a system for food, we talk around the system for your business, your productivity, for your productivity. Now let's talk about your business. Another system is at the beginning of each week, it's more for, again, business or getting some project shipped. At the beginning of the week, you ask yourself, and this process is also a system,
15:58 Speaker 00 you ask yourself, what will success look like for me this week? What needs to happen?
16:04 Speaker 00 And then you write it down and you ask yourself, how do I need to prioritize my schedule to give this objective more chance to happen? And then you schedule things accordingly, things, you know, certain things you you put away, certain things you cancel, certain things, again, also take into consideration the smarter scheduling system as well, and you put stuff in order. And that is another system for having more chances to get to the goals, the outcomes that you want at the end of the week. And when you, you know, stack this week, stack this week, week after week after week for the whole year, what is it, like fifty four weeks or something? It's gonna produce tremendous, tremendous result and result and momentum.
16:48 Speaker 00 Not everything gonna be perfect, but you are so much more likely to hit like your stride and and find breakthroughs. So that is another system that I work on with all of my clients when we start working together. And again, uh, like the whole process of coaching, yes, accountability is also a huge part of coaching. You're gonna feel more up for a challenge, more disciplined to do things because you just know someone like your coach who you pay to gonna be waiting for you each week, asking about, you know, the things that you said you wanna commit. So that also works. But what works equally important is the coach helping you to create systems in the
17:30 Speaker 00 areas of your life or your business or your relationships where you struggle. And that's probably the biggest value in coaching. Coach helps you create the systems that you lack to make things that are needed to happen on autopilot happen consistently. And also, the coach usually has some domain specific knowledge, which you might not have, which helps you to create even better systems that you by yourself wouldn't be able to create just because you lack the knowledge or understanding. Maybe you didn't know that. Your biology naturally dips and your brain works the worst in the afternoon. So now you know, build system around that.
18:12 Speaker 00 And on that note, we're gonna conclude our podcast, Systems Over Willpower. We started our conversation with talking about the work of Angela Duckworth, one of the top researchers in the world on greed and willpower, and how she promotes, advertises in all of her content, "Systems over willpower: Train your willpower less, create systems that help you do what you wanna do." We have more or less willpower discipline in different arenas. So where you have the least discipline, you need the most systems. And you need your willpower for other challenges that life gonna throw at you. So we started there. We then talked about systems for food,
18:56 Speaker 00 like boiling your eggs, cooking your carrots. I also shop once a week. I plan all of my meals and all of my workouts once a week. And then I just don't think about that. It just happens. I have my shaker bottle preloaded with protein powder that I can just put in my bag and be on my way for the whole day, knowing I'm gonna be hitting my protein targets no matter freaking what. So we talked about systems for smarter scheduling, how to schedule the tasks so you get to accomplish more faster and of better quality with less struggle. And we talked about systems for hitting more business goals or whatever goals you're trying to hit by simply asking yourself
19:39 Speaker 00 at the beginning of the week, what it is that I wanna achieve? And how can I change my schedule to give myself better chance to do just that? Thank you, guys, for tuning in. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed my solo 100% human episode today. Don't forget to share this podcast episode with at least one other human who wants to do their absolute best and might be liking some of the systems that we talked about today. So let's change the world together. And till next time, keep changing, keep growing,
20:20 Speaker 00 and keep being your best self, or at least giving it an honest try.
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