Pod Insights Change Wired 🍍The Cut Pineapple Principle: how to do the right thing without discipline About this episode A whole pineapple can ruin a perfectly good habit. Today we start with a real coaching case study on nutrition habits and why “I’ll just do it” collapses under real life. Then we translate the same systems thinking into workplace transformation and leadership: why telling a team to “use AI” or “give better feedback” rarely works, and what does work instead. Think: clear playbooks, tiny recipes, calendar time to practice, and scripts that remove hesitation so people can act ...
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, transformation, personal and collective growth, also your executive health and high performance coach 360 here on a mission and with obsession for helping you unlock more of your potential to create the most extraordinary life and create the most positive impact in the world you are capable of. Today, guys, we are talking about painables and building habits and creating systems
0:49 Speaker 00 which allow you to do a lot of things with already busy schedule and without the need for discipline. Today, you also gonna understand why when you don't use a systematic approach of system thinking, system design approach to your, to building your habits or changing the way you work, maybe the applications that you use, the way you talk to your coworkers, the way you give feedback to your teammates or people you hire. Today, you understand why so much change and transformation at workplace fails. Today, you're gonna learn why so many of your attempts to build habits, create new routines
1:31 Speaker 00 also fail and how to simply avoid all of that and set yourself up for more success. You're gonna understand the neuroscience of it and how to apply it simply in your life and in your work for, to ultimately get consistent with the things you need to get consistent with to grow and create new results, whether it's your health, your work, your leadership, your family life, your relationships, it applies absolutely everywhere. And I want to start with a simple story. A real story, a mini case study from my client. He was trying, well, we were working on creating balanced nutrition that he can consistently do no matter where he was.
2:14 Speaker 00 And one of the core principles everyone needs to understand in life to successfully change any habits and routines in already busy schedule and, you know, with overwhelmed brain and so many balls flying in the air and you trying to hold so many plates. So one of the things you need to learn is that systems that support your new behavior needs to come first. You need to think about making it easy before thinking about why it happens or before hoping for you to succeed and stick in your life and again in already busy life consistently. So with this client, we were working on a specific action, specific habit, eating more fruit and vegetables.
2:57 Speaker 00 And specifically, we started working on eating more fruit. And pineapple was one of the things that he liked. And we decided, okay, for the next week, we're gonna eat a serving of pineapple for breakfast. And he got the pineapple during his Sunday grocery shopping. And he got a whole pineapple, like with outer layer, you know, with all this like peels and green top. It looks fantastic. And he put it on the kitchen counter, you know, like I'm not gonna forget because it's right there. And the next week, when we saw each other on a call, pineapple stayed there. Nothing happened to that pineapple.
3:38 Speaker 00 It was just fine, but unready to be eaten, but unfortunately it stayed untouched. What was the mistake there? If you ever bought a whole pineapple, you probably know what a pain in the ass is getting through that pineapple.
3:55 Speaker 00 But you'd be surprised how lazy the brain is, even with simpler fruit. You don't wanna do the extra work on top of your busy schedule. Never, you already are too busy and all of your time is sort of occupied with things that you already do. So the next week, we decided to get cut pineapple, actually cut fruit balls. Not balls, but you know, those boxes which are made of plastic and you open it up and you can eat your pineapple, or whatever the fruit is with your hands or with your fork. So the next week, he got a couple of boxes of fruit, pineapple including. And he went through two boxes in, with no problem whatsoever. So what's the takeaway?
4:40 Speaker 00 The takeaway is to make the thing easy. Or the old thing or the wrong thing will get done instead.
4:52 Speaker 00 I call it the principle of cut pineapple. And I always tell the story to remind people that the brain is lazy first. And again, especially if you already have the busy schedule and most of us do have busy schedule. And there is, you know, you don't wanna do extra work and spend extra time on freaking pineapple. You just wanna have your breakfast and be done with that. But also think about work scenario. People come to work and they already have their schedules full. They already have a lot of to do lists and K P I's and thing they're accountable for. And if there is on top of that, you tell people, well, you know, use A I. Think about how you can reimagine your work with A I.
5:35 Speaker 00 Unless you make it super easy, you create the time, the space for everyone to perhaps do it together. For people to keep each other accountable, for people to create some capability, some simple space and time. And also not telling people, you know, do something, but actually telling them, hey, here is what you're gonna do. And that usually would fall on the shoulders of team manager, thinking about, okay, for my team. What makes sense to experiment, to play with and then creating a playbook. Maybe you already also have people who are enthusiastic about AI and have quite a lot of use cases. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna ask those people to write a mini manual, a recipe.
6:19 Speaker 00 Hey, try this thing to do that, you know, thing and put that on people's calendar. So that is cut pineapple principle applied to work. Make the right thing easy. Otherwise, people will forget, people delay, people will do something else, the usual thing. The thing that allows them to move in a predictable fashion forward with their KPIs, with their to do list. So that's how cut pineapple principle is applied to work scenario. Another work scenario is giving feedback, giving better feedback. So everyone universally gives feedback in the same way in your company, on your team.
7:00 Speaker 00 Or maybe communicates with customers, handling certain complaints or certain issues in a consistent manner. You don't tell people be customer centric, you cut the pineapple. And how do you do that in this scenario? You create simple scripts. Hey, this is how we give feedback. We say this first, we say that second, we say that third, and then we see how it goes. And we create maybe dashboard and create something fun to keep people accountable and measure and make things visible. This is how you cut pineapple. So if you're a leader, if you are a team manager, anyone who helps people to do the right thing. Your job is not to just tell people what to do.
7:41 Speaker 00 Your bigger job is to design systems to cut that freaking pineapple, to make the right thing simple and easy and understandable. So people don't have to make decision and second guess and figure it out. Like you how to cut that pineapple and get to what they actually want to do.
8:03 Speaker 00 I read an interesting research as well. Uh, I was writing an article, a blog, about how more choice creates the state where people don't wanna make any choice. So when there was a research where they gave people a choice between twenty four flavors of jams. And then in other, for the, for another group, they gave a choice of only six. Now, there were more people interested in twenty four flavors, but only three percent bought anything. And there were less people interested in six flavors, but thirty percent bought that jam. That choice, that paralysis by analysis is a real thing, especially in our day and time,
8:47 Speaker 00 where you have almost limitless options, like more choice, more options, play with it, is not good enough. Or just giving people that, you know, pineapple, that AI. No, you gotta cut it in pieces and explain every piece before people dig into that or bite into that. But I didn't want to talk about that research specifically. What I wanted you to, to think about is that I read another piece of research about how eighty eight percent of actions we take are taken out of habit. They're not intentional, not something people think about and make choices about and make decisions about.
9:30 Speaker 00 It's something habitual, so eighty eight percent of what people end up doing. And the principle of cut pineapple makes it, creates a, an opportunity to interrupt that habitual pattern. How does it do so? Because your brain is very much interested in doing the easy thing. And if you make something easy enough, then the person will do that, even if it's a new thing. So as a system thinker, as a system designer, as someone who oversees the choices and to do's for yourself or your family or your team or your entire organization,
10:15 Speaker 00 your job, again, is to make sure that eighty eight percent of those habitual actions are actually the right kind of actions. And you do it by Using a lot that cut pineapple principle, which stands for if you don't make the right thing easy enough, the old thing or the wrong thing will get done. So next time when you're thinking about strategic move, change, transformation, reimagining S O P or workflow, using new software, don't think about what so much. Think about how can you make this right thing as easy as possible.
10:56 Speaker 00 So people can easily slide into doing it versus having to struggle with old system, figuring it all out, making choices and decisions, uh, which can lead to mistakes, which people don't wanna do because they are accountable for all kinds of things at work and in their life. People don't like making mistakes in general. And if you make something super clear, super easy, make them understand that by doing so, they will not make mistake. But there are only gonna be gains, you're gonna be winning. And when it comes to your own schedule, when it comes to your own habits today, you know what I did yesterday when I looked at my week? And I'm working on my business a lot and I'm trying to grow sales.
11:40 Speaker 00 I asked myself, okay, I cannot control everything. I cannot control the outcomes, what people are gonna tell me, what opportunities I'm gonna get exactly. But I can't control how many hours I'm gonna dedicate each day to outreach to sales call, et cetera. So I'm like, okay, it's gonna be four hours of the outreach and then on top of that calls or uh, all the other work that I have to do. So four hours of sales outreach. And what I did next, I asked myself, how can I make the rest of my routines so easy? So I have no chance, but to stick with that commitment. How can I make that commitment easy? So what I did, I looked at my weekly schedule
12:25 Speaker 00 and I put, I made the time for those hour, four hours to happen. And I put them there in advance. So when I, something Comes up and it always does. And I need to plant other things on top of that. I can say yes or no based on my commitment to having those four hours of outreach. I removed everything that could interfere with that. I put my commitment in different places. I again made sure that the thing that I need to be doing more of is clearly defined with a time and space container.
13:08 Speaker 00 And everything else in my life works around it. And I have it on my calendar, so I don't have the opportunity to schedule something on top of that. And then worry about, well, you know, I don't have time now for the outreach because I scheduled this meetings or calls or something else that some running some errant on top of that. No, it's there. Nothing else can get into the time slot. And I know where I'm gonna do it. And I know what exactly I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do, because I also put it in my journal. My business journal where I put things like how exactly I'm gonna do the outreach to what kind of companies by what kind of medium, whether that's email or LinkedIn or something else.
13:54 Speaker 00 So I put that in advance, making it very clear, very simple. Maybe not easy, but super simple to understand when I'm gonna do, what I'm gonna do it. And and that's about it. That's the cut pineapple principle applied to work. But the same also with my nutrition and my workouts. I scheduled all my workouts. I know exactly what I'm gonna do. I shopped and prepped and did everything for my groceries. I made a plan with my nutrition, so I don't have to think about any of that. But to the area of my primary focus, which is sales and my business development.
14:33 Speaker 00 That is how you apply cut pineapple principle to your life, to your work relationships, to giving feedback, to achieving goals, to changing your habits, to pretty much everything. Once you figure out what it is that you wanna focus on, what it is that you wanna do, don't stop there. Ask yourself, did I cut my pineapple? Or is it still sitting whole on the counter, waiting for the better times or the perfect life? And that's the question I'm gonna leave you with today, dear listener.
15:10 Speaker 00 Before you jump off, don't forget to share this podcast episode with at least one other person who you might wanna learn with or apply this principle. Share this episode with some leader, with team manager, with someone who's struggling with helping other people do the right thing. Make them aware that it might not be the problem of the people or them, but in not having the system thinking system design in place, do making the right thing, the cut pineapple or the easy thing, so the old and the wrong thing doesn't get done instead.
15:47 Speaker 00 Share, review this podcast and what else? Till next time, guys. Keep cutting that pineapple and keep growing.
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