Changing Your Behavioral Algorithm

I want to say thanks again to all of you who have joined this newsletter. Maybe you found me from a post on youtube or Connect or maybe through the the WW strength training app I made, or through a workshop. Either way, thanks so much for being here. If you think anyone you know would benefit from this go ahead and send them this email/newsletter!

Early in my career, I was a strength and conditioning coach at a division three school. We were good. One of my teams had won a national championship the year before. Still, every week the coaches sat through a meeting with the athletic director, and every week he found a way to tell us we needed to win more. One meeting he looked right at me and said, "Justin, you're doing great with the kids, but your job doesn't win us games."

I think about that line a lot, not because it stung, though it did, but because of what it revealed. It made me realize that my work was appreciated a lot less than I had calibrated it to in my head. 

The gap between what I thought my value was and what my perceived value to my organization was immediately widened. That triggered a desire to change and the next year I left my job to start my PhD. 

That gap between where things are and where you want them to be is the engine behind almost every behavior you either do or don't do. And once you understand how that gap works, a lot of your own "why can't I just do this" moments start making a lot more sense.

There's a concept from engineering called control theory. It was originally used to explain things like thermostats. You set a reference value, say 68 degrees. A sensor called a comparator checks the room against that number constantly. Below 68, the heat kicks on. At 68, it does nothing. The whole system exists to close the gap.

Psychologists borrowed this idea because people run the same way. You carry an internal standard for how you want your life to feel: energized, present, taking care of yourself. Your comparator is constantly checking your actual life against that standard, and when there's a gap, you feel it as discomfort. That discomfort is supposed to push you toward closing it.

For example, if I thought my value at my job was the same as 68 degrees and that comment was akin to bumping the temperature up to 90 degrees instantly. When that happened, something kicked in. 

But here is the thing. Sometimes instead of closing the gap, we lower the standard. That would be like me saying I’m okay with my boss saying that to me, i’m okay sitting in 90 degree heat.  

Most of us start expecting not to feel rested or healthy. It’s because rather than working on closing the gap (which can be really challenging!) we lowered the standard. 

I want to introduce the model I use to explain all of this, because once you see it, you will understand your behavior.

Your behavior isn't random and it isn't purely about motivation. It comes out of a personalization algorithm, all the inputs that are true about you right now, feeding into what you're most likely to do next.

Think about how Netflix works. It tracks what you watch, how long, what you skip, and uses all of it to predict what you'll want next. Your algorithm runs the same way. Except the inputs aren't viewing history, they're your schedule, your energy, your environment, your relationships, your history with the exact behavior you are trying to do. 

So when you skip the workout you fully intended to do, your algorithm ran and it produced the most likely outcome given everything that was actually true about you in that moment.

That reframe changes the question. It's not "why do I have no willpower." It's "which input broke down, and can I fix that specific one."

Where do those inputs actually come from? I think about it in four layers, working outward from you. Your inner life, your emotions and energy on a given day. 

Next is your social network, the people who help or hurt you. The people who signal what is normal.

Third is your physical environment, whether the gym is on your way home or twenty minutes out of the way. 

I worked with a member, Ana, a single mom of two. Before kids, before COVID, she had a great early morning gym routine. Then COVID hit, then her first child, then her second. Her routine was disrupted for five straight years.

But something changed. She got a job that let her work from home. She got equipment for her house. Her family started helping with school pickup. She found part time childcare. Nothing about how much she wanted to exercise changed during those five years, not really. What changed was the system around the wanting. Once the layers around her shifted, so did her behavior.

The mistake people make is that they try to fix the wrong input. They think they need to get more motivated. When that doesn’t happen they make an assumption about who they are as a person (i.e. lazy, uncommitted) that then tanks whatever motivation they actually did have. 

I worked with a member who wanted to exercise, bought a gym membership, and went twice in three months. She told me she "just couldn't find the motivation." When I asked more questions, a different picture showed up. Her gym was twenty minutes away in traffic. She had two kids under five. Her husband traveled constantly. She'd tried and quit before, so she doubted herself going in. And she'd never actually scheduled a time to go, she was waiting to "feel ready."

She wasn't unmotivated. She was operating inside a system built for failure. And the input she kept trying to fix, motivation, was the wrong target, because motivation fluctuates constantly. It moves with sleep, stress, mood, whatever conversation you had at breakfast. You cannot build something reliable on top of the least reliable input you have.

There are four types of inputs worth knowing. Stable ones: your environment, your schedule, your access. Fluctuating ones: mood, energy, how busy today feels. Developmental ones: habit, identity, skill, things you build over time. And disruptive ones: the real shocks, a move, a new job, an injury.

Most people don’t need more motivation. They need to develop their stable inputs, equipment at home or a gym that is close by, a specific scheduled time, and support. They need to build the developmental ones, habit and identity, over time. Then they need to know that when those fluctuating inputs are low, they can reduce how difficult the task is. Once those were in place, the daily fluctuations stopped deciding everything.

Pick the behavior you keep intending to do and not doing. Then ask what is currently working against you.

Then sort what you find. Is the problem stable, something you could permanently change? Is it fluctuating, something you should stop trying to white-knuckle and instead build around? Is it developmental, meaning it just needs more reps? Or is it disruptive, a real shock that needs its own plan?

Pick one stable or developmental input to change this week. That might mean asking a friend to go for a walk or putting your dumbbells close by. Or it might mean focusing on technique. You are not trying to force more motivation on a Tuesday. You're trying to change the structure so Tuesday's motivation matters less.

If you come up short this week, try replacing "what's wrong with me" with "which input wasn't aligned." It's just a far more solvable question.

I'll be running my own algorithm through some real disruptive inputs soon, with a newborn in the house and a lot less sleep than I have right now. I'll let you know which stable inputs actually hold up!