What if struggling to stick with a habit isn't only about willpower or discipline — but how well the habit has been designed?

In this episode of The Practice Ground, Ken and Kari explore James Clear's four-stage habit loop from Atomic Habits — cue, craving, response, and reward — and what it can look like to deliberately design and train that sequence in real life.

Ken turns the conversation into a case study, asking Kari to deconstruct her experiment with running: Could she design the sequence well enough that running became not only easier to initiate, but rewarding enough that she wanted to keep repeating and training it? 

Said differently: Can a desired behavior be trained until it becomes predictable?

And what does designing a behavior even look like?

What you'll hear inside the episode:

• how the cue-craving-response-reward habit loop can be used as a framework for designing and training habits
• why designing a habit and training a habit are two different parts of the process
• Kari's real-life experiment with designing and training a running habit
• why Kari deliberately designed the response to include not only what she would do, but how she would respond to mental chatter and physical resistance before, during, and after the run
• what happened when she began training zero mental negotiation rather than allowing thoughts and resistance to determine whether she followed through
  why the reward may matter not only after a behavior, but in whether we want to repeat it
• how repetition can begin changing what we expect ourselves to do when a familiar cue arises
• why observing, testing, and refining a habit sequence can be more useful than judging yourself when it doesn't work

Cited in this episode:

Book |  Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Podcast |  The Diary of a CEO - Steven Bartlett's conversation with James Clear

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Ken Li is a confidence coach. Connect with Ken on LinkedIn, where he regularly shares mindset tools, resources, and strategies to help professionals who second-guess themselves feel as confident inside as they look.

Kari Watterson is a mindset and habits coach. Connect with Kari on Instagram (@theadhdhabittrainer). where she shares her ongoing series, The Habit Training Diaries.

Can taking the time to record three wins each day really make that much of a difference?

In this episode of The Practice Ground, we explore an idea from entrepreneurial coach Dan Sullivan and organizational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy: much of our dissatisfaction may be a measurement problem.

In their book, The Gap and The Gain, Sullivan and Hardy distinguish between measuring ourselves against an ideal that is always somewhere ahead of us — “the Gap” — and measuring backward from where we are now to where we started — “the Gain.”

We explore what can happen when we put that idea into practice by deliberately identifying three wins each day. Rather than continually noticing how far we still have to go, can we train ourselves to notice evidence of progress we've already made?

What you'll hear inside the episode:

• the difference between measuring progress from “the Gap” and measuring from “the Gain”
• why continually measuring yourself against an ideal can leave you striving without ever feeling like you've arrived
• why Dan Sullivan recommends identifying three wins each day — and three wins for tomorrow
• what can happen when you practice looking for evidence of progress day after day
• why the timing of the Three Wins practice may create benefits that carry into the next day
• why personally testing an idea can be more persuasive than simply learning about it
• Ken's connection between “Gain thinking” and James Clear's idea of getting 1% better each day
• how the Three Wins practice can change the way we relate to our past, present, and future selves
• how to begin turning Three Wins from an exercise into a habit you actually want to repeat  

Cited in this episode:

Article | Three Wins: The Most Important Habit You've Never Heard Of | Have you heard of making 1% improvement each day? This is how you do it by Ken Li

Book | The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever's Guide to Happiness, Confidence and Success by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Commencement Address | Admiral William H. McRaven - University of Texas at Austin (2014)

Ken Li is a confidence coach. Connect with Ken on LinkedIn, where he regularly shares mindset tools, resources, and strategies to help professionals who second-guess themselves feel as confident inside as they look.

Kari Watterson is a mindset and habits coach. Connect with Kari on Instagram (@theadhdhabittrainer). where she shares her ongoing series, The Habit Training Diaries.

Why can making a decision feel so difficult — even when we know there may not be one “right” answer?

In our first episode of The Practice Ground, we explore why decision-making can feel so complicated — especially when uncertainty, competing priorities, values, and the desire to make the “perfect” choice all enter the equation. 

We talk about analysis paralysis, the temptation to keep gathering information, and what can change when we stop treating every decision as something we have to get “right.”

Along the way, we explore:

• why getting clear about what you actually want can simplify a decision
• how uncertainty can keep us searching for more information instead of choosing
• the difference between reversible and more consequential decisions
• why choosing not to decide is still a decision
• what Cate Osborn calls the “Dr. Strange-ian quandary”: the awareness that choosing one path means letting go of other possible versions of our lives
• how making decisions — including imperfect ones — can become something we practice
• the Gary Parker Rule
• what changes when we consider the possibility that there may be no “wrong” decision

Part of our conversation was inspired by Cate Osborn’s interview with decision scientist Dr. Mark Shrime on the Sorry, I Missed This podcast. We were particularly struck by their conversation about uncertainty, values, and the “Dr. Strange-ian quandary” — and Dr. Shrime’s reframing of what it means to choose one path when we know other possible paths exist.

Cited in this episode:

Sorry, I Missed This Podcast Episode: Decisions, Decisions: ADHD and the Trap of Analysis Paralysis with Cate Osborn and Dr. Mark Shrime

TEDx Talk | Putting Purpose Over Path by Dr. Mark Shrime

Song | 100 Bad Days by AJR

Find Ken Li on LinkedIn

Find Kari Watterson at Instagram (@theadhdhabittrainer)