“How do I improve my life?” is one of the most important questions we can ask, but it is also remarkably broad! Each of us possesses countless attributes, and the fabric of our lives is extremely complex. So, when considering avenues that might help us make meaningful progress, it can be hard to know where to start.
The good news is, the subset of attributes that is actually relevant to helping you improve your life is relatively small. Our Behavioral Leverage Points Diagram is designed to help you identify many of them. It suggests levers you can pull to start seeing concrete changes in your life.
In this post, we introduce the diagram and explain how to implement it. We’ve explained it one layer at a time, because each layer provides the foundation for subsequent ones. Keep reading to see the full diagram revealed at the end!
Layer 1: Your Foundation
In the first layer are six foundational aspects that form the basis ‘you’:
These are important to understand from the outset as they are relevant factors for most self-improvement efforts.
They are:
Intrinsic values: What do you value for its own sake, even if it doesn’t bring you anything else (like status or money)? Intrinsic values are your ends rather than your means. You can figure out yours using our Intrinsic Values Test.
Relationships and social groups: Which people in your life are most important to you? What do different people or groups provide? You can also get a temperature check on an important relationship in your life using our Relationship Review tool.
Traits: These can include basic demographic traits like your age and gender, as well as important facts about you such as whether you have children, and the state of your physical health. Other key traits are the ones that make up your personality, which you can get more insight into using our ultimate personality test.
Resources: Everything in your personal inventory of supplies that will help you achieve your goals. These could be savings, housing or familial support.
Skills: The things you know how to do, and which you are particularly good at.
Needs: These are the things that every human requires so as not to experience a substantial impairment to their well-being, such as food, water, physical safety and social connection. These will be similar for everyone.
Layer 2: Your beliefs, goals and priorities
Now that you’ve established your foundation, it’s time to start planning how to improve your life – starting with identifying your goals and priorities. As you can see they are built on top of the foundation of layer #1:
You’ll notice that there are both blue and black arrows connecting layers of the diagram. Black arrows (labelled ‘cause’) are descriptive. They describe how things are, such as, for example, the fact that your relationships will (in part) cause your beliefs. Blue arrows (labeled “inform”) are prescriptive. They tell you how we think it’s useful for things to be. For example, we suggest that you take your intrinsic values into consideration when forming your goals and priorities so that they are aiming toward what you fundamentally care about.
(Note: We don't include every potential causal arrow since it would clutter the diagram - instead, we just focus on some of the most important ones.)
Starting in the upper left hand corner of the diagram above at beliefs, we see that it’s useful to have your beliefs inform your goals. Your beliefs are caused by a combination of your intrinsic values, relationships, traits, resources, and skills.
It’s useful to have your goals and priorities be informed by your beliefs, as well as all six of the factors from the foundational layer. Jot down some initial goals, and then consider:
Do they reflect your intrinsic values?
Will they help you maintain or forester the relationships that are important to you?
Do you have the resources and skills needed to accomplish them?
Will they allow you to meet all your needs?
Are there any self-limiting beliefs stopping you from setting more ambitious goals?
Layer 3: Your principles and plans
Once you have your goals and priorities in place, it’s time to start formulating plans for how you’ll actually achieve them:
At this stage, it’s useful to start thinking about your personal principles. Principles are distinct from values, in that values are things you care about, whereas principles are rules of thumb that you try to live by that guide your decisions. As you can see from the chart, your values should, ideally, directly inform your principles. For example, if you intrinsically value honesty, one of your principles might be never lying except in exceptional circumstances. If you intrinsically value knowledge, you might have a principle of always devoting some time every week to learning.
Using your beliefs, goals, priorities, and principles, you can start formulating concrete plans for how to pursue your desired outcomes. Our planning tool helps you create a customised plan that takes into account all of these unique factors.
Layer 4: Decide and act!
Adding the fourth (final) layer, we now have the entire Behavioral Leverage Points Diagram in front of us:
Your decisions should, ideally, be informed by everything we’ve discussed so far – and these, in turn, are used to inform your actions. However, you’ll notice that there are also other factors that impact your actions. Your environment will inevitably alter the actions you take. For example, your behavior might be influenced by good (or bad) role models in your life, or how healthy your diet is might be partially determined by your easy access (or lack thereof) to nutritious food. Your environment will not always be wholly within your control, but insofar as you can be smart about its design, you certainly should! You could make sure that you always have your house well stocked with healthy snacks, for example.
Many actions are also habitual. Habitual actions happen automatically without much conscious thought in the moment, but this doesn’t mean they are beyond our control! Our habits are dictated by our decisions, but these decisions are ones we’ve made in the past.
For example, if you have fallen into a pattern of checking your phone first thing every morning, this is the culmination of many past choices – the choice to repeat and reinforce this action until it became automatic, and the choice not to intervene in this habit formation by (for example, you could intervene by not keeping your phone by your bed). You can make the choice today to cultivate healthier habits that will positively impact your future decision-making. Our habit forming tool can help you do just this.
Finally, you will sometimes make decisions that are triggered by emotion. This isn’t always a bad thing, and your goal shouldn’t be to eliminate these decisions entirely. But it’s a good idea to try and be aware of when this is happening, and to make a conscious effort to base your choices on previous layers wherever possible. Emotions shouldn’t be ignored, but impulsive decisions informed by intense but temporary feelings can pull us away from our goals.
Using the diagram
One way you can use this diagram in the future is to locate your greatest personal leverage points for improving your life. These are the levers you can pull to start seeing concrete changes in your life.
For instance, reflecting on each of the white boxes, you might realize that your habits are not currently serving you, or that you don't really have plans in place right now for leading you to your goals. Insights like these can help you direct your efforts towards improvement.
For many of these leverage points we have free, interactive tools available designed to help, so you can choose the Clearer Thinking tool most suited for what your greatest personal leverage points are.