Behavior change

I think, yeah, I think a really interesting point around sort of behaviour change generally, and like say sort of someone setting that as the goal, is...

if there's something you're struggling with from a behavior change perspective, like understanding what it is that you are getting from doing the behaviors that you're currently doing.

And that's something that I quite often find, um, sort of with clients when I'm coaching them, we come up to, uh, against as a, as a bit of a barrier.

So say like you're, you're trying to get someone to change their nutrition to be like, cause they want to get leaner, but yeah, every week they end up making the same excuses or not doing that thing.

Combi tells us that behavior depends on three interacting conditions, capability, opportunity, and motivation.

We have covered the Combi model in a previous episode where we looked at its links to the behavior change wheel and some agricultural examples.

So we won't repeat all of that here.

Instead, let's use the Combi as a practical design tool for more effective workshops.

We need clear messages, good facilitation, practical activities, peer discussion, and time for reflection.

We also need to avoid the trap of filling every minute with content.

If the aim is behavior change, people need time to process what the information means for their own farm, business, team, or community.

After the workshop, the final 40% is where many events lose their impact.

Employers should not confuse faster output with stronger capability.

Behavioral Change New beliefs are not enough on their own.

Daily work habits also must change.

Employees need repeated opportunities to question AI outputs, compare alternatives, identify flaws, and decide when human intervention is necessary.

And that actually brings us to our mission today for this deep dive.

We've got a massive stack of late August 2026 sources covering the absolute frontier of health tech, behavior change programs, and of course, artificial intelligence.

Yeah, some really fascinating stuff in here.

It really is.

We've completely mastered data collection.

The actual pivot we're seeing in health tech right now is the realization that, well, gathering the data was the easy part.

The real bottleneck is behavior change.

I feel that bottleneck personally, to be honest.

We met recently at the NYU Coaching and Innovation Summit.

I was really intrigued by some of what you guys were showing there, and we're going to get deep into that and a bunch of related topics as it relates to AI coaching and culture change, behavior change, and all kinds of interesting topics.

So yeah, really looking forward to diving in.

Before we do that, I thought I'd give each of you an opportunity to introduce yourselves, and then we'll hear a little bit about your founder's story.

So, yeah, let's dig into LQ and listening intelligence because I just think this is a fascinating area that people may not know much about it.

Certainly when we talk about transformation, we see headlines left and right where people are really struggling.

And some of it is just not learning basic lessons that we've learned over the last couple decades when it comes to social transformation, digital transformation, things of that nature, and that it all comes back to people and behavior change.

But just knowing that doesn't mean that you're going to be successful at doing it.

If year one's frontier was genetics, year two's is metabolic health, and one guest in particular turns out to matter more than anyone realized at the time.

I think the next frontier is gonna be seeing really doing this with our digital tools and how can these be agents of positive behavior change in our lives? 'Cause fundamentally, we're not gonna revert our chronic disease epidemics if we don't change the way we're living, and I'm interested in how tools can scale for that.

And hopefully, that they will actually help people tap into really understanding their bodies and getting into a whole renewed sense of somatic awareness.

So I think it's gonna be like a boomerang.

I needed to find a way to help leaders remove the self-sabotage patterns that create that false ceiling.

The challenge of lasting behaviour change, your autopilot.

We all know that changing a habit is challenging.

The average person needs to practice a new behavior for at least 66 days before it completely becomes automatic.

And so we took the reverse of that and said, okay, if that's where the outcomes occur, then we've got to create and pioneer a new form of care.

You're leveraging technology that is evidence-based to basically help you participate and take care of yourself through behavior change every day or every other day for a few minutes or for an hour, whatever works for you to make small changes that end up racking up to big outcomes.

And so that's what we've done.

We've used technology to scale that.

And we use the signs of behavior change to make sure that happens.

And we do that, of course, people with that risk of diabetes, diabetes, hypertension, musculoskeletal conditions, cholesterol, high blood pressure.

And then, of course, if you have one, you unfortunately generally have the others.

If there's no trust between Omada's care team, our coach, and the patient or member, then when that coach provokes you to set a new goal, to push you just a little bit out of your comfort zone, That number of patients is being like, you don't know me.

Yeah

... wrap it in a pretty bow by saying, like, it is about behavior change.

Like, with getting-

Yeah

AI can be helpful to guide you in the right direction.

That's another thing I will give it, right? So a lot of the people that we speak with, a lot of the women, they'll have, like, the right concept down of, like, you know, I, I think I need more muscle, or I think I'm not eating enough, I thi- But this is really where you bridge that gap of, like, okay, now here's what that looks like for you.

Or you might have that self-awareness, but it's, it's the behavior change that needs to happen, quite frankly.

So it's like emotional eating, stress eating, mindless eating.

We talk about the tyranny of the handicap, the role of social connection, the fascinating relationship that there is between golf and brain health, and even some of the research around what happens in your brain when you simply grip a golf club or make a slow-motion swing.

We also get into behavior change and habit formation, why meaningful change takes time, why we're so attracted to quick fixes, and how small, consistent actions can ultimately lead to much bigger outcomes.

Perhaps most importantly, Charlie and I come back to a question that sits right at the heart of what we do here at Golf Yourself Happy, which is, how can we make sure we're not just playing more golf, but actually getting more from the golf we play.

So with that, let's get into my conversation with Professor Charlie Foster.

it kind of makes you work even harder at, at doing the same thing.

So that's why even in our, our Golf and Society sessions, we get people to hold golf clubs or even putters, for example, and we get them to do slow motion swings because we know that that is gonna have a very good cognitive impact on their brain.

How do you think behavior change plays out in a, in a, in a golf context, Charlie?

Well, I suppose it kind of depends on what we're trying to achieve.