Tim Riddle Case Study

Hi, I'm Tim Riddle, and I own a marketing company called Discover Blind Spots, and the name was inspired by a book that I wrote and titled, Blind Spots, What You Don't See Can Hurt You. My primary work for our team is that we work with financial advisors, helping them communicate to their clients and prospects using their voice as opposed to having to default to canned content.

My first encounter with Tiny Habits was on a walk one day. It was at the end of a day, and usually in our neighborhood, I might take a walk just to clear my head of all the things that went on that day. And I was headed out and I put my headphones on. I was searching for a podcast to listen to, and as I was scrolling through, I saw this gentleman named BJ Fogg was being interviewed about his book, Tiny Habits. I didn't know who he was, but the idea of Tiny Habits, that phrase was interesting to me. It intrigued me. So, I thought, hey, let's listen. So, it intrigued me enough that after I listened to that interview, I went out and, and I bought the book. I bought the audible version first, and I decided over the next several weeks, I would just listen to the book as I was taking my evening walks. And one of the first things that I noticed about the book was this fresh perspective about habits. It was totally different than what I expected. I consider myself fairly disciplined and, and sort of goal oriented. And most of my previous experience with habits was focused on the idea of working harder, climbing more hills, getting up earlier, all that good stuff. And if I failed to accomplish maybe a goal or something that I wanted to, I had bought into that idea that I wasn't disciplined enough or that I wasn't focused enough, or maybe that I wasn't motivated enough.

In essence, I needed to add more things to my plate, to accomplish more, climb bigger mountains and so forth. And I remember also when I was listening to the book, because that was my first experience, was listening to it. I remember how visual it was to me. You know, as BJ talked, I could almost see the words, you know, as he was describing something, it was almost like I could see him writing on a whiteboard or whatever. And the methodology that he was talking about made so much sense. I mean, it was just so practical and really a fresh perspective.

After reading the book, I decided to, you know, maybe read more about habits from other authors, and I found most of those readings aligning with that kind of, that try harder method. Because I wondered, you know, is this something that's kind of a new phenomenon? Or, or is everybody saying the same thing? And, and I remember there was one book that I read when I got to the end of it, I thought, wow, I just felt like they yelled at me the whole time and told me that I need to be better and work harder and, you know, just get up earlier or whatever.

BJ's Tiny Habits approach was just so refreshing. I've done some leadership coaching in my career and I recalled when someone was, you know, kind of down or discouraged and maybe they're not performing at their best. The last thing it seems that they wanted to hear was, you know, Hey, you're not trying hard enough, or you need to be more focused, or you need to be more motivated. You don't, you know, have enough motivation. Um, that just seemed to pile on maybe more discouragement. And it was interesting to hear BJ say, you know, you don't accomplish things by feeling guilty enough about it, or at least that's not a sustainable process. So shortly after that, I decided to implement Tiny Habits and to my life. So, I said, hey, I've read the book, I get it makes sense in essence, now I just want to try it out. So I started with the Maui Habit. You know, the one that a lot of people probably start with. And my version was, when I wake up in the morning, one of the first things I'll do is I'll say, “God, thank you for this great day today”. Now, I can't say that anything magical happened overnight. You know, suddenly it was like this, this transformation took place, but here's what happened.

It helped me understand the process. It also helped me think differently. That process was so simple, you know, that recipe was so simple that I began to say, wait a minute, I could implement this in other areas of my life. One of them was around the habit of diet. In other words, I had been traveling a lot, and even though I exercised daily, I'd allowed my eating to get a little bit out of control. And, and so I had a process of sort of tracking my diet and so forth, but it just seemed like it wasn't working. So I said, well, how could I use the Tiny Habits Method and tweak it a little bit? And it was, to be honest with you, it was just a really small change, and it centered around when I logged the food that I ate, and it was kind of changing the anchor that I had used before although I didn't understand that terminology.

And in about 60 days, I lost the weight that I wanted and was down to where I wanted to be. And at the end of it, I found that it was easy. It wasn't like a radical, you know, life-changing thing that I had to do, to where I got to the weight I wanted to get to, but I don't know that I can keep doing this. So, it just seemed like it was more of a natural progression of just rearranging some of the things that I was already doing but doing them in a slightly different way around the idea of habits.

So, this whole idea of tiny was becoming a very powerful concept for me. So shortly after that, I decided to dig a little bit deeper into BJ's work. And I remember I was just sort of Googling and looking at some things and reading some articles and so forth. And I found this Tiny Habit Certification program, and I read through it, and I thought, wow, this is interesting, and this might be something that I want to pursue. I wasn't sure if I was going to implement it, you know, as a coaching deliverable in my business for my clients, but I had already seen the benefit in my life. So I guess I would say I just wanted to continue that journey a little bit.

So, I started the certification course and completed it in 2023. The certification course was great. It was awesome. What I loved was that it was extremely personable. In other words, I met people that inspired me and challenged me. I heard some stories where I would go to the classes that we had each week and I'd walk away with a totally different perspective than what I had going into it. I've done some certifications in my day, and most of them focused on sending you a bunch of videos and go watch the training and then take a test maybe at the end and so forth. But these classes each week, were live. In other words, they were real people. And the amount of time that we spent each week was about perfect. The total length of the certification was also about perfect. It wasn't overwhelming, but it was enough to make things stick each week. The homework was about the right amount. It didn't consume me where I had to stop everything, I was doing to get through it, but it was enough to make things start to be a little bit stickier, you know, into my brain. And I began to develop my own narrative, my own language to be able to explain what I was doing.

If Tiny Habits, and this certification helps me continue to remove those blind spots in my life to allow me to be the best husband or father or grandfather, business owner, or coach that I can be, then by far it's more than paid for itself.