When It Comes to Habits, There Are Four Types of People. Which Are You? | Gretchen Rubin

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.6 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2022

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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The New Year is approaching and this is a time when many of us think about making and breaking new habits. So today we're bringing on one of the smartest people when it comes to habits, best-selling author and speaker Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen's contention is that before you embark on a self-improvement project, it's crucial to have some self-awareness about what kind of person you are. She has devised a framework called the Four Tendencies, which helps you identify your personality type in order to gain powerful insights into how you make or break habits.

Rubin is a lawyer by training and began her career clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Gretchen then went on to write a series of books that examine small and doable ways to boost our happiness in everyday life. These include: The Happiness Project, which spent two years on the bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide, and Better Than Before. We initially conducted the interview you're about to hear back in 2017, when Gretchen released a book called The Four Tendencies.

In this episode we talk about:

How and why Gretchen developed the Four Tendencies framework
How Gretchen's framework can give each of us a recipe for successful habit change
Breaking down the Four Tendencies: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, or Rebels
How these Four Tendencies are an overlapping Venn diagram
What "obliger rebellion" is and how to spot it in your relationships
The value of forming an accountability group
And why Gretchen sometimes calls herself a happiness bully

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/gretchen-rubin-99-rerun

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% happier podcast.
0:06.3	I'm Dan Harris.
0:11.2	Hey gang, New Year's is fast approaching and this is a time when many of us start thinking
0:15.5	about making and breaking new habits.
0:18.9	So today we're bringing on one of the smartest people I know when it comes to the subject
0:23.0	of habits, Gretchen Ruben.
0:26.4	One's contention is that before you embark upon some big self-improvement project, it
0:31.2	is crucial to have some self-awareness about what kind of person you are in this regard.
0:36.4	She has devised a framework called the Four Tendencies.
0:39.9	This is a methodology that helps you identify your personality type in order to gain some
0:44.8	pretty powerful insights into how you make or break habits or more specifically how you
0:50.0	respond to inner expectations of yourself, such as keeping a New Year's resolution or
0:55.2	how you meet outer expectations from other people, such as meeting a work deadline.
1:00.6	A little bit about Gretchen.
1:02.4	She is a lawyer by training.
1:03.7	She began her career, clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
1:08.6	Gretchen then went on to write a series of books that examine small, doable ways to boost
1:13.0	your happiness in everyday life.
1:14.9	They include the Happiness Project, which spent two years on the bestseller list and sold
1:19.9	more than 3.5 million copies around the world, which she then followed up with a book called
1:24.7	Better Than Before, which is about behavior change and habit formation.
1:29.1	And then after that, she wrote a book called The Four Tendencies, which is the subject of
	...

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