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“When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework or eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of what’s happening is that you’re changing how you think. People get better at regulating their impulses. They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal.”
“When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self- regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.”
Starbucks taught their employees how to handle moments of adversity by giving them willpower habit loops. One of the systems we use is called the LATTE method. We Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred.
How willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.
“When people are asked to do something that takes self- control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons— if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else— it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster.
Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self- discipline they brought to their jobs.
firms are guided by long- held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of
employees’ independent decisions. And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.
Routines provide the hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to operate. They provide a kind of “organizational memory,”
Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.
