277. How Small Choices Shape Better Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: When it comes to communication and life, big things come from small things. My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Eric Zimmer. Eric overcame personal battles with homelessness and heroin addiction at the age of 24. And then had a very successful career in high tech. He later became a behavior coach and an award-winning podcaster with his show, The One You Feed. Eric has spent over 20 years studying human transformation and habit formation. His latest book is called How A Little Becomes A Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. Well, welcome Eric. Thank you for being here. I'm excited to learn from you today. 

[00:00:50] Eric Zimmer: Hi, Matt. I really appreciate you having me. I'm excited to be here also. 

[00:00:54] Matt Abrahams: Should we get started?

[00:00:55] Eric Zimmer: Please.

[00:00:56] Matt Abrahams: Alright, let's start with your personal story. Can you share how your journey from addiction to sobriety has really helped form who you are and informs what you do?

[00:01:07] Eric Zimmer: Yeah. It would be almost impossible for me to imagine what I would be like without it. At 24, I was a homeless heroin addict. I weighed a hundred pounds. I had Hepatitis C. I was looking at going to jail for upwards of 50 years, and I was fortunate to get sober at that age. And what I learned through that process is just so deeply embedded in the way that I view the world that, as I said, I can't imagine a different way of viewing the world, right? We just get to a point where we all see the world the way we see it, and that's a pretty embedded part of my story. And so I learned a lot through all of that, as you might imagine. And it turns out that a lot of that is relevant not just to people facing serious, a life threatening addiction, but to life in general. And we live in a more and more addictive culture in so many different ways today. That's the start of things for me. 

[00:02:06] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Thank you for that. You often leverage the two wolves parable. Can you share with us what this story is and the lesson you'd like all of us to take from the story?

[00:02:17] Eric Zimmer: Sure. Many of your listeners may have heard it before, but it's a story that says we all have these two wolves inside of us that are always at battle with each other. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandparent is telling this story to their grandson. They say, we have these wolves inside of us, and the grandson wonders which wolf wins. And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So the great thing about a parable like that is the minute I say it, you get it. On one level, you're like, oh, I see. There are choices that I make that encourage the better parts of me. There are choices that I make that encourage the less good parts of myself.

[00:03:02] Which do I want to do? What I love about the story, particularly though, is I think it points to a deep truth, which is that we are motivationally complex creatures. We want many different things. We value different things, and these things are often in conflict with each other. Two wolves is almost an oversimplification for it, right? But it speaks to the fact that we all intimately know that feeling of being pulled. You know, I wanna do this, but I also wanna do that. I value this, but I wanna do that, right? That feeling of being pulled is part of being human and it doesn't go away. It's what we do with it. And by recognizing that we are motivationally complex and recognizing that we are always making choices, that we're able to make better ones. 

[00:03:51] Matt Abrahams: It's a a very powerful story for sure, and I appreciate the awareness that it brings to us, that at any moment we have choices to make. And by making that conscious aware, we can have some control. As you well know, we focus on communication. I'm curious, have you in your own life, or have you coached others or seen others who have made conscious choices to feed some value or some action to help them be better in their communication versus others? I can imagine finding myself in a conflict situation or a negotiation situation where I might react in one way, but really should be reacting or want to be reacting in another way. I'm curious your experience of how this applies in communication. 

[00:04:33] Eric Zimmer: I think that one of the core skills that underlies all the work that I do, and also underlies communication, is awareness. It's the ability to be able to pause, see what's happening inside of us, see what's happening around us, and then think, what choice do I want to make? What do I want to do here? We often operate on autopilot to a great degree and autopilot's a lovely thing. In many ways. It's great that as humans, we can drive home while I think about something, great, that's a good use of it. But when autopilot is operating, and it often does in communication, that's not the time we want it to work. We want our communication to be thoughtful and conscious, and so building the awareness, what am I thinking? What am I feeling, right now, is a core skill that underlies everything that I do. 

[00:05:25] Matt Abrahams: How did you train yourself to find that awareness? You know, many of us are so busy or we have so much information coming at us at once. How did you learn to do that? It's a valuable skill, but one that can be challenging for many. 

[00:05:40] Eric Zimmer: My book is called How A Little Becomes A Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. So you'll recognize that my answer is you don't get it all at once. You get it a little bit at a time. And in the book I have something that I think is unique to what I do, which is it's a method for working with and changing our habitual thought patterns. There's a lot of information out there about what to think. Think this, don't think that, take this perspective, don't take that perspective. But there's very little about how do you actually do that?

[00:06:13] And the way that you have to do it is by frequent repetition. So I have something I call still points, and a still point is just something that we engineer into our day. So imagine a still point being a when and a then. The when could be like every time I go to the bathroom, my then could be, I ask myself what am I thinking and feeling right now? If you go to the bathroom five times a day, you just take that time and go, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? I check in, no big deal.

[00:06:43] Any one of them on their own, so what doesn't matter, but a lot of them done consistently, over time in the same direction, you'll become more aware. You'll find yourself naturally being more aware because you've woven it into the fabric of your day. And it's a lot more likely that at dinner that evening when you're having a conversation with your spouse, that you're gonna recognize what's happening inside of you if you just reflected on it four times earlier today. So that's the mechanism, particularly with these thought patterns, or something like being aware, that we can train it.

[00:07:19] Matt Abrahams: I love this idea of training our awareness and the when then paradigm is really useful. I wanna talk about the knowing doing gap that you discuss, and I'm curious to learn more about what is this framework and how does it help us show up well in all our situations. 

[00:07:40] Eric Zimmer: I think we all have some aspects of our lives in which we want to be doing something different. We may even know exactly what we want to do different. We may even know how to do it. We just find ourselves not doing it. It could be eating. It could be exercise, it could be meditation. It could be conversations with our partner, whether at work or at home. So there's this gap. And the book is really a response to how do we bridge that gap? And I can't put it all into a single sentence, but the little by little approach is at the heart of it.

[00:08:14] And by little, by little I mean something specific. I mean low resistance actions, meaning something you'll actually do, done consistently over time, again and again, in the same direction. We often are trying to fix four or five different things at any one given time in our lives, right? And so we're doing a little of this, a little of that, and it's all over the place. But when we take small things that we do consistently, in the same direction, we bridge that knowledge to action gap. 

[00:08:43] Matt Abrahams: Yeah, so we have knowledge and then how do we get that knowledge into action? And by doing so, first is awareness, and then finding the little things that we can do. And I know you have a great acronym for this. I'm gonna ask you about it because many people listening know that I, I'm a martial artist. As part of my training, I spar with people. You learn a lot and you get a lot of instantaneous feedback when you are in a ring with somebody. And you use the acronym SPAR as a way to help us get at the core of what you're talking about. Can you break down what SPAR means and can you apply it to an example related to communication so that we can maybe use it directly and help ourselves? 

[00:09:22] Eric Zimmer: So I wanna start by saying I think that there are two competencies we have to get in order to change something. The first I will call structural. This is what SPAR focuses on. It's really about planning. The second is an inner component. So the inner component is you might know exactly what to do, you might remember to do it, and then you don't do it, in the moment, and that is usually some sort of inner emotional type thing. So SPAR is all the structural, and so it stands for, S is for specificity. What am I doing? Where am I doing it? How am I doing it? So let's take communication. It's one thing to say like, well, I want to communicate better with my children. Okay, what does that mean?

[00:10:09] Oh, I want to make sure I have 10 minutes a day that I talk to them, and I really, really listen. That's some degree of specificity. Now, I would take it further and be like, well, when is that 10 minutes going to happen? Because while we're trying to build a new behavior, ambiguity is always the enemy. We wanna have all our energy go to doing the thing. So specificity. The P stands for prompts. How do I remember? So I'm gonna spend at dinner every night, I'm gonna ask my children a question about their day that's thoughtful and I'm gonna share something from my day. How do I remember to do it? Maybe I just need a little thing that I set down next to my dinner plate that says, like, remember to ask X. It sounds silly, but we're so busy.

[00:10:52] Our brains are full of so much stuff. We frequently just forget. So P stands for prompts. A stands for alignment. And one of the things, if we asked all behavior scientists in the world to come together and agree on one thing, it would be hard to do, but I think the thing they would say is, don't rely on willpower or discipline any more than you have to. Set up your environment to make it likely you do it. So alignment is about doing that. So what's an example for communication? Part of our environment is other people. So I might, if I have a spouse, I might say, can you help me remember? That's setting up my alignment. Or saying to them ahead of time, this is something I wanna do every evening, would you support me in doing it?

[00:11:35] Alignment. And then finally, R stands for resilience, which basically means planning for what is going to go wrong or could go wrong. So what am I going to do? If I'm not at home for dinner, is there still a way that I could have that conversation that I want to have with my kids each day? Maybe there is. Maybe I say, oh, if I don't make it home for dinner, I'll do it with them before bed. Or if I'm traveling, maybe I'll send them a text where I ask them the question. And so SPAR allows us to get everything set up and have clear plans for what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, what we're gonna do when we're unable to do it. Then we can put all our attention into the actual doing. So that's SPAR with an idea around communication. 

[00:12:18] Matt Abrahams: I love it. It sets us up for success and it makes us more thoughtful and intentional in what we're doing. So many of us could just be frustrated that we don't have the connection with our kids that we want to, for example. And this becomes a very clear action plan that is likely to succeed. One, because it's defined, and two, because we align it with others and our situation. And I really like the resilience point, which is in some ways contingency planning. What do I do if I can't execute on this? So specific, have prompts, alignment, and resilience. Thank you. And you said that this is one part of the equation. This is the framework side. The internal motivation side, talk to me a little bit about that. You know, I can have the desire but not the will. Curious, how do we get that motivation? 

[00:13:06] Eric Zimmer: I don't love to talk about motivation a ton because it's a feeling and feelings just come and go. They change. Now, I do think it's important that we're clear on why something matters to us. So, if we're going to say, I'm going to do X, Y, or Z, why does it matter? We wanna get to the heart of that and we wanna understand it emotionally. But waiting to be motivated is often a trap because you don't have to be motivated to do something. I exercise many, many days when I am very far from motivated. I do not feel like doing it at all, and yet I do it. So the emotional side is, let's stick with the example we've got. You are there and you want to ask the question, but your teenager tends to be like, oh dad, you know, or they just don't really like to do it.

[00:13:55] And so you're like little tentative about wanting to do it. And so it's easy in the moment, okay, I should do it now, but I'm not going to do it 'cause it makes me a little bit uncomfortable. That's the emotional inner aspect of it. And what we don't need to do is solve all the discomfort. All we have to do is figure out, what is it that I need to do to get me over the hump in that moment? And that's what SPAR does, is it puts us at a choice point. And at a choice point, we either act the way we want or the way we didn't want to. If we didn't do what we wanted to do, we can zero in right in on that moment. What was I saying to myself? So I identify in the book what I call the six saboteurs of self-control.

[00:14:38] One saboteur of self-control is the insignificance trap. It means that we don't connect the dots between the little things we do today with the big picture. So it's very easy to be like, ah, I'm just not gonna do it tonight. I mean, what does it really matter? One night's not a big deal. 'Cause we emotionally don't wanna do it 'cause it's a little uncomfortable for us. If we're in that, we need to say to ourselves, wait. Every chance to connect with my child is important to me, and I know it's gonna be slightly uncomfortable. I also know that this is very aligned with what I value, and so I'm gonna be uncomfortable. I can still do it. That's an example of just taking that moment and rescripting what it is we're saying to ourselves. So if we can identify what is it that's getting in the way, we can learn to talk to ourselves and essentially coach ourselves to take the action. 

[00:15:30] Matt Abrahams: That's a very powerful idea, the rescripting. And the rescripting comes from an awareness, and the awareness comes from the discomfort, you know? So it's a natural cascade. Where am I feeling uncomfortable? Where's the discomfort? What might be leading to it? And that requires us to self-reflect and to understand our values and how we're not aligned. And then from there, think about the rescripting.

[00:15:55] Eric, this has been a fantastic conversation. So much of what you say is directly applicable and aligns with a lot of the things that I think about. I'd love to wrap up as we always do. I ask three questions at the end. One I create just for you and the other two I've been asking all along. Are you up for that?

[00:16:11] Eric Zimmer: Yes.

[00:16:12] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. You host a podcast. 

[00:16:15] Eric Zimmer: Yep. 

[00:16:15] Matt Abrahams: Share with me something that's surprised you as you've done this, in terms of things you've learned or uncovered as a host or interacting with your guests.

[00:16:25] Eric Zimmer: It's very tempting when doing it to have someone on, I'm gonna have you on the show, for example, so it's gonna be very tempting to get you to say a lot of smart things that are gonna help our listeners, and that's important. I've also realized though, that a big part of communication is not exactly the things that you teach. It's the spirit in which you teach them and the way that you make people feel like you understand them, they understand you. And so I think for me it's been, I've recognized more that, yes, I wanna get the good ideas out of the people that come on. I also wanna create an environment where I connect with that person, they connect with me. We have a genuine conversation, and I'm also trying to, in a sense, think about my listener as I'm going, and think of them as that other part of that conversation, I think, is one of the things that I've just gotten better at over time. 

[00:17:20] Matt Abrahams: It is an ever evolving skill, isn't it? I find the conversations wonderful, but I also find the learning that I have. What I heard you say is it's really about connection beyond content. That's so true for me as well. I'll be curious to get your answer to our second question. Who's a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:17:40] Eric Zimmer: There are so many great communicators, but when I saw this question, I thought of someone named David Whyte. David Whyte is a poet and an essayist, and what I love about David Whyte is he is willing to be very spare with what he says and doesn't feel the need to overexplain it, which part of what poetry tends to do, it lays something out there and lets it work on you. David does that in essays, and I've interviewed him a few times for the show. He's incredibly articulate, incredibly smart, has a wonderful Irish accent, you could listen to him for days.

[00:18:18] It takes me a little while to downshift into David's pace, but when I do, I just feel like there is this sort of stunning luminosity to what he writes. And so he's an example of a type of communicator for me that shows how they pay attention. It's what I love about poets. They teach me how to pay attention to the world differently. They're observing the ordinary in a way that I'm generally not. So they are communicating, but they're also teaching me how to see, and David is one of the best examples of that to me. 

[00:18:59] Matt Abrahams: How poetically put yourself. You've learned a lot from him and others, but a communicator you admire is one who teaches you how to see things differently. And I also heard in that they help you downshift, in this case to resonate at their level. And like you, I can be moving, at least mentally, in a frenetic pace, and some of the best communicators and best communication I've had is when I slow down and connect. So thank you. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:19:30] Eric Zimmer: I think intention. What is important about this conversation? What do I want to happen in this conversation? What matters here? Is a really, for me, in conversations that are important, clarity is really useful. Kind of back to what we talked about with SPAR, then I think it's attention. We often think that good communication means all our attention is on the other person. I don't think that's true. I think that, yes, we have to be very focused on the other person, but I think a certain amount of attention has to be to what's going on inside of us as we're having the conversation, because otherwise we are always reacting internally. If we're not aware of it, if all our attention is out there, then everything's getting churned up back here and I don't know what it is. So I need to keep some part of my gaze what's going on inside me so that I can work with it. So I think intention where I want the conversation to be in general, attention on me and the other person, and then, I think for me, there's always a pause element. There's always an element of slow down and pause. 

[00:20:42] Matt Abrahams: So intention, directionality, attention, both externally and internally, and slowing down, being present, pausing. I completely agree. If those are in alignment, the communication is successful. Well, Eric, I appreciate all the insights that you have shared specifically around how we can change and align ourselves with our goals, how it's little things that lead to big things. And it's choices we make. What do we feed? How does it align with our values? Thank you so much, and best of luck with your new book and continued success with your podcast. 

[00:21:18] Eric Zimmer: Thanks so much, Matt. It's been a pleasure. 

[00:21:22] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about behavior change and personal growth, please listen to episode 86 with BJ Fogg. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. With thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, Matt's AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of the Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community.