My Story.

Below is the full interview I did with The Atlantic Magazine. They pulled from this for their December 18, 2019, article, “Why People Wait 10 Days to Do Something That Takes 10 Minutes.”

In the full interview below, I tell the story about how I got interested in neuroscience for my branding work and then went on to use what I’d learned to change one bad habit of mine after another, up to and including easily losing 90 pounds and keeping them off.

The Atlantic: What we're writing about is this very common bad habit of putting off tasks--stuff that people love to pretend they don't need to do until things get dire. So I wanted to talk with you because I was told about the tactics you used to stop your bad habits and those of others. I thought they were very interesting.

Betsy Burroughs: Sure. First of all I am a longtime Silicon Valley branding executive and I had some experiences with getting big insights out of the blue in the branding work I’ve done in my career.

The first time it happened in a big way was I woke up one morning and in a flash I had a fully-formed branding campaign come to me for a client my ad agency had just started working with. All the branding. All the positioning. All the ad messaging. Headlines, copy and layout. Even the tagline. Everything.

I knew immediately it was the right answer so that day I took it to my client—a Vice President at a leading tech company in Silicon Valley. When I showed it to him, we sat in his office and screamed for the longest time because we knew it was the answer.

And it was. It took that company from a 35% share of market to a 50% share of market virtually overnight. Their competitors didn’t know what hit them. People in Silicon Valley talked about it for years.

I soon joined that company as Chief Marketing Officer. While there I had lightning strike twice with an “aha!” insight that led us to doing a partnership with Paramount Pictures and their $100 million attraction they were building at the Las Vegas Hilton, called "Star Trek. The Experience.”

For that campaign I recruited the leading futurists in the world to be on the Advisory Board we’d created for it. I have to say, that was the most fun I ever had in my career.

After those two big “aha!” insights hit me, I wanted to figure out how to make such insights happen more often.

Everybody thinks it’s just the “muse” and you can't control it. But I got into researching about neuroscience to find out what was going on in the brain when those kinds of insights strike “out of the blue”.

Over the last 20 years, the more I researched it, the more I got into it. I wrote a book about my innovation techniques for business based on what I discovered about the Neuroscience of Insight.

I am definitely not a neuroscientist but I sure am passionate about it.

I've been using those techniques with my corporate clients really successfully for years. Then one time I was stuck with some kind of personal problem and I decided to apply those techniques to it and discovered that they worked extremely well for that too.

So I turned all my friends onto it and the techniques worked for their personal problems as well.

Using those techniques in my first book—and many more I developed since—I started changing behaviors and habits that I had been stuck in for years and years. Habits like procrastination and time management, keeping my loft clean, exercise, finances, relationships, organization, finishing a project and getting free from screens and so many more.

One-by-one I stopped so many bad habits! And stopping each one really was Easy Effortless Fun.

But my biggest problem was the most intractable: Weight Loss. The harder I tried to lose weight, the less I could—and the more weight I gained.

Eventually I was 62 years old and 250 pounds. I knew if I “hung on by my fingernails” just trying harder doing what I’d done before to lose weight that I could lose 30 pounds—yet again—and yet again, I knew some big (or little) stress would happen in my life and I’d start overeating again, gaining all the weight back and then some. I knew soon I’d be 300 pounds and more.

I was so done with that. I had to make a permanent change. And with all the research I’d done around neuroscience, behavior change and habit design, I finally knew how to do it in a totally different way.

All I’d learned taught me there was no way I was going to lose 90 pounds without it being “Easy Effortless Fun” to both lose and keep it off.

“Easy Effortless Fun" is a phrase I’ve used for years. I write about it in my first book on business innovation.

The bottom line is: Based on how the brain works, if stopping a bad habit isn’t Easy Effortless Fun, the bad habit won't permanently stop.

Yes, you can stop a bad habit without Easy Effortless Fun but, more often than not, it won't be permanent—especially when it comes to really powerful bad habits like the ones that made it impossible for me to lose weight.

The Atlantic: That sounds like a fascinating career arc.

Betsy Burroughs: It has been!