Willpower as a Tool for Change

What if the biggest lever to your happiness isn’t found in your big decisions, but in the small, automatic things you do every day?

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author Charles Duhigg joins Lee C. Camp to explore how habits quietly shape our character, our choices, and our capacity for authentic human flourishing. Drawing on Aristotle, neuroscience, and his book The Power of Habit, Duhigg unpacks the classic “cue–routine–reward” loop, keystone habits, and why willpower alone so often fails us. He then turns to his book Supercommunicators to show how changing the way we speak and listen can transform our relationships, our communities, and our search for meaning and purpose.

Key Ideas:

• Habits shape character: How Aristotle’s vision of virtue and excellence as “what we repeatedly do” connects with modern habit science and the quest for a flourishing, ethical life.

• The roadmap of habit formation: The habit loop of cue, routine, and reward—and why lasting change comes not from white-knuckled willpower, but from redesigning our cues and rewards to support authentic living and habits for happiness.

• Keystone habits lead to other better habits: Keystone habits like exercise, making your bed, or food journaling that trigger chain reactions in finances, procrastination, self-control, and our sense of identity and agency.

• You should experiment with your life: The difference between stated and revealed preferences: why we can sincerely want to live with purpose and yet keep acting against our own values—and how gentle “self-experiments” help align our behavior with our deepest commitments.

• Classifying types of conversations can help you connect: From Supercommunicators: the three kinds of conversations (practical, emotional, social), the “Matching Principle,” and the looping-for-understanding practice that can heal conflict, deepen empathy, and nurture flourishing relationships.

• Understanding cues for connection: How laughter, curiosity, and deep questions signal “I want to connect with you,” and why Duhigg believes anyone can learn practices of communication that contribute to the common good and true happiness.

⁠ ⁠⁠Show Notes, Resources and Transcript⁠⁠ for abridged episode with Charles Duhigg

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No Small Endeavor: An award-winning podcast that asks what it means to live a good life. Through conversations with leading thinkers across theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and the social sciences, we explore human flourishing, meaning and purpose, faith and culture, science and religion, virtue and character, community, and the practices that help shape a good life grounded in truth, beauty, and goodness.

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Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@leeccamp ⁠

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