The Safety Link Podcast by Kenyon Manley

Harnessing the Power of Habits: Insights into Formation, Reinforcement, and Transformation with Stephanie Crowe from Learn.net

• Stephanie Crowe • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Have you ever pondered about the power of habits and how they shape our everyday lives - from the good ones to the seemingly harmless yet subtly harmful habits? We've got just the right episode for you! Join us and our inspiring guest, kenyana, as we navigate the fascinating world of habit formation and learning. Embark on a powerful journey as kenyana shares her story about her father's determination to learn typing with two fingers and how it transformed their family's future.

Hanging on to old habits can be as addictive as munching on that packet of chips after a long day. Have you ever wondered about what triggers such behaviors? Our exploration takes us into the role of dopamine in creating habits and how it's linked to addiction. We also discuss good habits like wearing a seatbelt and the potential role of artificial intelligence in reinforcing such habits. Ever heard of cognitive dissonance? It's that conflicting feeling you get when trying to kick an old habit, and we've got interesting insights on that too.

Finally, we delve into the intricacies of habits and their formation. Despite logical thinking, sometimes we find ourselves indulging in habits that could potentially be harmful - like eating a cheeseburger while driving. We look at how employing positive reinforcement can help redirect these habits towards a healthier path. Our discussion also highlights the contextual nature of habits and the importance of safety training in inculcating safe habits. We wrap up by discussing the concept of undistracted driving, the importance of continuous learning, and recommending two illuminating books - "The One Minute Manager" and "Atomic Habits". Tune in to our episode to learn more about the power of habits and their transformation!

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Stephanie Crowe:

you Well. Thanks, Kenyon, I really appreciate being here. Learn. net just to give you some idea, we're on a mission to empower the most critical professional habits and make them permanent, so we're really dedicated to learning and creating learning that is going to make performance change. So, we're just delighted to be here. On Safety Link, well, I'm coming to you from Atlanta, Georgia, and I have lived all over though New York, dc, Portland, San Francisco, Philly and London so a few different spots around, traveled around quite a bit myself, but in every place, I've taken the opportunity to really dedicate myself to learning. I've been the head of learning and development on the customer side and on the employee side for several different organizations and throughout my career. Really, to me, the impact that people can make in their own lives, their communities and their companies is what I've been dedicating my career to. So, when I saw the opportunity to come to learn. net and impact an even larger audience, help some more people have a great impact with their learning. That's why I'm here. I think it's my upbringing. I think we shared a little bit about this when you and I got to know each other.

Stephanie Crowe:

I was raised in a small town in Vermont and I didn't even mention Vermont. Shame on me. And growing up, you know, we didn't always have what we wanted, but we did have what we needed, and the reason is because my parents really dedicated themselves to making sure that would happen. When I was little apparently they would you know my dad had come back from serving in East Asia and got married and had a couple of daughters and, you know, had a few jobs to be able to make ends meet. So he and my mom would pull out the big old popcorn bowl each month and throw the bills in so that they would figure out which one they could actually pay off that month. You know it was a little hard to make sure they could make ends meet. His third job was being a janitor at a local office complex and he saw a listing one day that said if you can type 35 words a minute, you can have a job at IBM. It was the early 70s and it was hard to get tech staff in Vermont, and so he decided he was going to figure out how to do that.

Stephanie Crowe:

Now, what I haven't told you is that my dad grew up in the backwoods of Maine and his family of five lived in a small cabin that at one point didn't have running water but had like a single light bulb from the ceiling and such, and they heated the place with a fireplace and they cut their own wood. And one day when his brother and he were chopping wood, my dad was holding the wood, his brother was chopping and he missed. So really all his life my father has been missing one and a half fingers. Now I'll remind you, this particular job he was ready to get was required typing, and that means he would have to do that without all 10 fingers. And I would say that one of the things he did was he figured it out. He taught himself. He realized that learning to type 35 words a minute was going to be a difference between what his family currently had and what they could have. So he figured out how to do it with his two middle fingers. Literally, to this day he still types with his two middle fingers. Going after that, and by golly he did it. He figured out how to type 35 words a minute. The thing about that experience that changed my understanding of learning is that this one learning experience changed our family's trajectory for the rest of our lives. So he got that job at IBM, he got a professional job. He then learned more things, became a network telecommunications analyst and eventually a project manager and a program manager. His daughters ended up both going to college and getting graduate degrees, so this really changed our fortunes forever, and for me that means that learning changes your capacity as an individual, and it's really why I believe so much that learning is where we should be putting our efforts.

Stephanie Crowe:

Motivation is a funny thing. A lot of people think that it's up to a manager or someone outside yourself to motivate you to do something, and I often I mean I mentioned I worked with a lot of different organizations and those teams often would say hey, we're the training team, our job is not motivation, our job is to create training materials and, quite frankly, I disagree. I do think that the learner needs to come motivated. Right when we think about why why are you pursuing training or why are maybe you're being forced to show up, I'm not sure, but truly motivation comes from inside a person and I think that we can embed learning experiences with motivation. That's what we do in our software. We create rewards and game-based things at leaderboards and stuff to make it fun, and then we reinforce challenges, whether you get them right or wrong with feedback, so that you can get motivated to do better next time.

Stephanie Crowe:

But I do think that when you consider what your motivation should be, create a positive future vision of what happens after that learning experience, set a goal and say what am I trying to accomplish? And then, what learning is it going to take for me to get from where I am to where I'm going? And that, to me, is whether you know if you focus on something that's difficult or traumatic. This is, I would say, also something that I learned from my father's experience. If you focus on what is the negative or the traumatic, you're going to stay there. But if you instead say, what can I learn from this in order to go forward, then you have the thing that you, the gift from that experience that you can take forward, and then you know, move forward with the learning. That's a great question.

Stephanie Crowe:

So we discovered at one point we had a client challenge us many years ago. They said here's the thing we can't pull people off their jobs anymore. We've trained and trained and trained. We can't spend more time training, but we need them to perform better, and in this case it was preventing fraud and financial services. And I'll get to safety in a moment but so the most important critical top of mind issue they had was to make sure they were always preventing fraud and protecting consumers. And they said can you give me more performance with less time? And, believe it or not, we took that challenge and we said, ok, we'll try. So what we did is we actually focused right down into where learning really happens, which is during performance, right, when you challenge yourself, that is when learning happens.

Stephanie Crowe:

So what we do at Learnnet is actually we build habits by challenging usually on a daily basis for most of our clients it's for during the weekday and to be able to keep whatever those new skills, behaviors, processes or policies top of mind. You get a challenge on a daily basis, and so we combine brain science, which is that challenge based learning, with AI heuristics, so we use some artificial intelligence to be able to redirect which challenges you get, based on how fast you're learning, the different components you want to learn, and it becomes somewhat invisible to you. So that's really what Learnnet does. Is we provide habituation, or creating habits for skills, processes and policies that are the most important ones to keep top of mind? Sure, absolutely.

Stephanie Crowe:

So you know we live in a distracted world and I don't know about you, but constantly distracted by the phone and what's going on in the news and the emails and that everything else the phone calls. It's just gotten really intense. There's a lot of distractions. So the challenge then becomes how do we learn and make it permanent when we're so distracted all the time? So the way it works for folks, for example, in a role where safety is relevant, right, if you're on a manufacturing floor, if you're in a construction site, if you're working on a roadway, anywhere where safety is relevant to you and I'll just use this as an example I mentioned the fraud prevention before, but for safety it's a critical, top of mind issue. Right, it prevention is the thing you want. You can't say afterwards you know, oh, we just had a safety issue, right, that's far too late.

Stephanie Crowe:

So what we do is we actually send a challenge like a question could be a multiple choice question or maybe a little vignette video and you have to reflect on it, say, is that true or false? Is that the right policy? What happened here? And you get that challenge on your phone or on your email, depending on your role, and you just answer it that day and over time you might be talking about procedures on you know when to wear your hard hat, when to rope in for climbing on a ladder or clip in, you know, in terms of the critical four issues right related to OSHA, the fatal four. So those are things we want people to be watching out for all the time, right, always.

Stephanie Crowe:

So we create that habituation, we create that habit each day so that when it comes to a point where you're saying, oh, I know, intellectually, I know logically it makes sense, I should clip in there. But I just answered that question the other day and I'm not going to miss it, right, because I did get reminded and get reminded on a regular basis. So that's really how any given person experiences it. It's very subtle. It's just responding to a challenge each day and then over time it becomes just part of who you are. It's your habit.

Stephanie Crowe:

So let me talk a little bit about how habits are formed, partly because I think that the audience will love this, because people want to know what about my bad habits, but they also want to know how can I create good habits. So let me talk a little bit about what I call the anatomy of a habit, so the way a habit gets built for good or for ill and I'll tell you a funny one. For me you have to tell me some of yours. Is that all right? So you have three pieces to have it when it's created in your brain. So the first part is called a trigger or cue it's. The second part is the behavior and the third part is the reward. When you have all those three things present, they hook together in your brain and move something from the front of your brain, which is the logical part that thinks through things, and it pushes it back to the back of your brain, actually in your Madhula Oblongata, the sort of older part of your brain that is more permanent and that when you think, the first thoughts go through the older part of your brain and it's only when you slow down that you can think intellectually with the front part of your brain. So we're trying to push things into the habit area.

Stephanie Crowe:

So how do habits get built? I don't know about you, but after a long day of work and I'm tired and I come home, I will grab a beverage, sit down in front of the TV and I want little salty potato chips to go with that. So every evening I think, oh, wouldn't it be nice to have some potato chips with that. So think about the behavior, which is the grabbing the potato chips that's in the middle. The trigger or the cue is both a feeling of tiredness at the end of the day, it's timing, meaning after I come home at the end of the day, and then there's also a location in front of the TV. Those three things are reinforcing the. When these things happen, it makes me want potato chips because I've had behavior. And then, after that behavior, I get that satiated, satisfied feeling and that creates chemicals in my brain that reinforces it Because I've got those three things. It reinforces it. So every time I do it, it makes it harder to not do it the next day. That's how habits are built.

Stephanie Crowe:

Do you have one? Do you have one One? Yes, so the dopamine itself is the same dopamine. There are other factors in place and I am certainly not a health practitioner, right, or a medical professional. So there are other factors in place with addiction that increase it.

Stephanie Crowe:

But at the beginning, at the beginning of addiction, it is similar because you're creating a habit. If you think so. My father was a smoker for most of his life, so I noticed that it was when I'm taking a break from work. I go outside, I chat with my buddies, I have a cigarette right, there's a lot of habituation to that. There's also nicotine, which is an addictive substance. There's also also also also right, there's also other things when you have addictive substances. But the beginning of the habit is absolutely you get the reward, which includes in your brain's own dopamine, to make your point, since I hadn't mentioned that before. You're actually creating dopamine and then, if you add excitement, you're also getting norepinephrine, right, and adrenaline. So, yeah, so it's fleeting, right. So that's why it makes you want to do it again, more and more and more.

Stephanie Crowe:

No, no, no, you created a habit. I wouldn't give it a label of good or bad. Now I have a goal to shed a few extra pounds, so therefore my potato chip habit is a bad habit. However, having a piece of chocolate as a habit help you settle in, like if it's your settle down routine, and then and by the way, there is some good chemicals in chocolate as well, right, and then it helps you settle down and it helps you move into sleep. That's a good habit. You've told your brain. You know there's location, which is your bedroom. There's time, which is the evening. There's the. I'm going to have my piece of chocolate and then I'm going to settle down. If it's not harmful to you, it is not a bad habit, kenyan. So that is something when you think about. Hey, is it a bad habit every morning to have coffee? If it doesn't hurt you and you don't have problems with caffeine, it's not a bad habit. So now think about when you go to work, when you put on your safety vest, when you put on your hard hat. Those things are good habits. And now I would push.

Stephanie Crowe:

When you hop in your car and you automatically put on your seatbelt. I don't know about you, but when, if the car is moving these days and I do not have my seatbelt on, I don't feel right because I have a habit of automatically putting that on. That's a good habit. We want that habit. So when you're walking a site, just imagine that feeling. If you feel like there's something over you, like you're about to walk under an arch and you don't have your hard hat on, you probably feel uncomfortable. You're like wait, there's something wrong. I don't feel right. That's good. You've created a habit that if there's something above you, you should have your hard hat on. Good. Yep, yes, all right, you don't want to break the habit, right, exactly, all right, okay.

Stephanie Crowe:

So the way we do it in our software is that if, for example, driving, safe driving habits, including wearing your seatbelt, is relevant to the job role, then it would be included in the habits. And so what happens is, while you're assigning your whole job role set of habits the ones you know well and you do well in the software is learning how you learn, and it says, oh, you've got personal protection equipment covered. You understand that whole competency. We call it a competency, but in driver safety, that person may be not doing as well. So what the software does and this is where the artificial intelligence comes into play is it realizes that, as you're answering different questions, driver safety is one where you need a little more work. You're getting some more of those wrong, which is okay, right, because we're teaching through feedback. And it's saying it's giving you maybe some statistics about how more likely it is for you to die if you're not wearing a seatbelt, if there's an accident, and so then, as you respond to those things, it's going to present more challenges in that category, under that competency, and it's going to reinforce it over time. Now, what I love about this is it gives you another piece.

Stephanie Crowe:

Since we're talking about human learning, I'll share this with you. Is that, even if you knew the right answer and you answered it correctly and the next day you started trying to behave differently for whatever reason like you said oh, you got us all in the backing it out you actually experience a conflict in your brain when you try to behave differently than the way you answered in the system. The big word for this is cognitive dissonance. So you experience a conflict in your brain when you've answered correctly, but you're trying to behave differently. And that's one of the other very subtle things about our software. So I'll tell you one other story.

Stephanie Crowe:

We're delighted to working with a nonprofit called let's See 43. And we've collaborated with them and other learning professionals around the nation to build what's called undistracted driver. It's originally targeted at teens, because it turns out that distracted driving is actually the number one killer of teens in the US. It's horrendous. I don't know about you, but people's driving behaviors have been pretty bad right Distracted by texting and who knows what else.

Stephanie Crowe:

So one of the things that you know in the front of your brain if I said, kenyon, should you be eating a big cheeseburger while you're driving? And he's like, no, we shouldn't be. But then you'll probably tell me a story. Or I'll tell you a story about that time when I had a really short lunch break so I ran through one of the drive-throughs, grabbed a cheeseburger and was eating it on the way back right, stuff falling, whoops, you know. Okay, something falling into your lap or only having one hand to drive. So, logically, it makes sense. I know in the front of my brain that I shouldn't be doing that, but I'm still doing it anyway. Right? People know smoke is bad for them, they still smoke.

Stephanie Crowe:

However, if you're on the undistracted driving habit builder and you've just in the last week or couple of weeks or even month, answered the question that says that shows you the picture about the person eating cheeseburger and you're like no, you shouldn't do it, and I know I've answered it. I had a colleague do this. They said I went and got my cheeseburger but I couldn't eat it because I just responded to the question. I'm like I can't. I just can't pick it up because what have I done? I've responded to that challenge in the software. It's reinforced the chemicals in my brain that says if I do this I'm more likely to crash, if I do this I'm more likely to be distracted, if I do this and something happens, I can't respond. And those reinforcements are not letting me pick up that cheeseburger, just like you couldn't not put on your seat belt while you were backing the car out a few feet.

Stephanie Crowe:

So this is what we mean by saying we're intentionally creating a conflict between what we know and what we're doing, so that we recognize these are the behaviors I should be doing and we behave better. Yes, yes, we lie to ourselves all the time. Right, I know I should, but this is what I'm going to do anyway. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. So let me ask you this Do you hike at all, kenyon? Okay, so imagine, you know, in the woods, the first time somebody walks in the woods, there's no path, right, you take a certain way, but then two or three or ten people take that path or more, and they start to create some reinforcement, right, and so then, when more people come to the woods, rather than going a different way, they say, oh look, there's a path here, and they reinforce it more and more and it gets things out of the way, puts down more solid ground, and that becomes the path.

Stephanie Crowe:

So that's what happens as we build either good habits or bad habits. So when I was saying that, we take the intellectual thing that we know in learning and we push it back to the back of our brain and then we reinforce it with the chemicals. So every time we reinforce that habit, we send more chemicals down that same path, and that path is the cue or trigger, plus the behavior, plus the reward right Path, path, reinforce, reinforce. And so in order to change a bad habit this is why it's so hard to change bad habits is that we have to stop doing the habit in order to stop reinforcing those chemicals, which is the path or the pathology, the way in which we are always thinking and doing. So we have to create a different path. We have to say when this, then this. So this is described in some of James Clear's work when he talks about personal habits.

Stephanie Crowe:

Obviously, we work on habits across large groups of people, but what you're trying to do is to say, if this is the cue or the trigger, do this instead. Right, and reward yourself for doing that other thing instead. Create a reward system, whether it's a feeling or a piece of chocolate or whatever it takes to positively reinforce. Let me ask you this how many times would you say in the last? Maybe you do it, I don't know, but in the last week or month did somebody catch your guys doing something right in terms of safety? Hey, way to go with the hard hat. Good job with the PPE I see you clipped in there. Good job, I appreciate you. We're not giving each other rounds of applause for good behavior. We're just assuming that good ought to be and we're only punishing when things go wrong.

Stephanie Crowe:

So, firstly, that's too late. But also it doesn't create any sort of reward system for the thing we're trying to replace and this is the other issue I have, if I may, with once a year or only when onboarding training. Because, firstly, we forget For time, we forget these things, and you may train one day or one week, but what about the other 364 days? Or what about the other 51 weeks of the year? The further you get from that training, the less you're reminded of what you're supposed to do.

Stephanie Crowe:

But also, most training doesn't include context, unless you're doing walking around and saying okay, you see this here, this is what you want to do here. I want you to be aware of this here and I'm sort of referring to things that might be above me or below me or around me they're situational, they are context-based. So we talked about when you get in a car, put on a seatbelt. So that's context-based. But when you get on a lawn mower, do you put on a seatbelt? Does it feel enclosed enough to you to make you want to put on that seatbelt? Or do you figure I'm okay? And then you get going and it goes a little fast and you say, whoops, what about an ATV? So most habits are contextual.

Stephanie Crowe:

The behavior comes after a cue or trigger. So when we train and we don't give people enough of the context, or in the real world, a policy or a process or a procedure needs to be done in multiple contexts. You know, based on your experience, kenyan, you've been in so many different environments that you could walk inside a building and say this is the situation here. It's the same as the situation when we were over on the highway over there, the same as the situation when we were around a bunch of large equipment over there. But those are three different contexts and our behavior occurs and our learning has to be applied in different contexts, which is why I like getting challenges on a regular basis over time, because you're answering a question again but you're realizing, oh, this applies in this new context. I'm in in the new site, in a new, with a new client, with a new customer, with a new environment. Absolutely, oh sure, right, no recognition for the minimums.

Stephanie Crowe:

So there's a piece of the one minute manager. If you're familiar with that book, catch him doing something right on a regular basis, and I'll add a funny one. You know, I send my kids out every day and I say give away five compliments. So the question is are we making a point to make sure we recognize good behavior and reward good behavior, rather than waiting for somebody to get it wrong so that we can catch him out? And certainly there's corrective coaching, right? Hey, in this situation this is what we need to do and here's why, and hopefully we've caught that before something goes wrong.

Stephanie Crowe:

So the measuring of safety, I think, has two ends, right, on the one end we say did you attend the training? Or maybe you passed a test after the training, which is great, okay, that's on the very beginning end. And on the far other end, there was an incident. But what about in between? What happens in between, where we might have some opportunity to correct, to reward, to recognize? That's one of the reasons why the habit building works so well is because they get a little dopamine hit every time. They get something right and they can say, yes, that's when you clip it and yes, that's when you wear a hard hat. Yes, that's, in fact, you've identified the dangerous condition in the video you just saw. So that is a positive reward and recognition. We've got one client who the owner of the company challenges their entire employee base to do better than him on the habit builder and then he gives a financial reward at the end of the year for every person who does better than him on the habit builder. So at the end of the day that actually costs him less than the incidents would cost and he gets to send his people home as whole as they were when they arrived at work and he gets a good reputation and people want to work for him because they know he cares about safety.

Stephanie Crowe:

It's tough. Nobody knows when they've prevented something. They only know when they have not. But you know what? Congratulate yourself every single day. That was incident free, thank you, sure, so I'm going to use an old proverb for this one. It's not mine, of course. It's a very old proverb.

Stephanie Crowe:

The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now. So get started. That's the short answer. The longer answer. I would certainly invite any leader of an organization to explore the transformational nature of learning. I think we discussed last year. This last year I've had the opportunity to publish 10X Leader, which is a book about the transformative nature of learning with a lot of examples of companies that have changed the game for their employees, their customers and their markets through learning. The other is I would actually invite anyone here.

Stephanie Crowe:

I mentioned undistracted driver. We would like also to end distracted driving in the US. So between now and the end of the year, if you would like to try undistracted driver, just go to learnnet, slash habits and we'll get you signed up and any company that is signing up with learnnet. We want to give them undistracted driver complimentary with their habit builder, because we feel the more people who are driving safe, the more we'll achieve our goals. So those are a couple of ways that they could get started.

Stephanie Crowe:

Okay, so I mentioned the one minute manager. I'm a huge fan and I definitely think that one is worth a read and it's not long and has very actionable things to do as a leader and safety leader. The other would say is pick up James Clear on habits. Okay, let me reflect on that for a moment. I think it's valuable that we talked about behavior. We didn't talk about overall job roles and being able to progress and help talent and the people in your organization move forward from role to role based on learning. We focused a lot on, in a given role, being able to create good habits and good behaviors. So I would say the even better next is considering that learning really changes the capacity of all the people in your organization and a rising tide rises all those. So investing in learning for your organization helps you to be more productive, more efficient, more profitable and certainly attract and keep the very best talent.

Stephanie Crowe:

Oh yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, most certainly, most certainly and quite frankly, you know, unless you're done with life, you should always be learning. So once you achieve that next goal, set the next one. Thank you, it's my pleasure. I appreciate that. It's my pleasure. I hope I am officially now a member of the village. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Thank you, thanks, kenyan, have a great one. Thank you.