Design Your Habits

This workshop teaches how to apply design-thinking to personal and professional life. The workshop will use the Tiny Habits framework by the Stanford professor BJ Fogg to design habits that will help the participants to see the most transformation in their lives with the least amount of effort.

The workshop will cover key concepts of the the Tiny Habits approach: Anchor, Tiny Action and Celebration. The participants will get to reflect on the areas of their lives where they would like to see change and design several habits. They will then be able to workshop them in breakouts to receive feedback on their design. In the break between the sessions, the participants will practice the habits they have designed.

The second part of the day will begin with a reflection to see which habits are working and which aren't. We will then break into groups to re-design the habits that need adjustments. After that, there will be offered an activity that will strengthen the skill of celebration, which is typically, the most difficult area in habit-formation, yet, the most impactful. In the second part of the workshop there will be introduced the concept of "pearl" habits that will help reframe a regularly occurring negative phenomenon in one's life such as anxious thoughts, an interaction with a difficult person etc, and make it into a foundation for a positive habit that supports mental health or other aspects of well-being. The workshop will conclude with forming accountability groups to support new habits.

Facilitator Bio

Liza Mankovskaya is a PhD candidate in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and a co-founder of an international academic writing and productivity services company "You Should Be Writing." On the Princeton campus Liza has served in a variety of roles that support writing, research and scholarship communication across disciplines. Since 2017, she has served as a Graduate Fellow at the Princeton Writing Center, led dissertation-writing groups and organized workshops on scholarship communication at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning. Liza is also a science writer for a scholarship communication outlet Princeton Insights. Since 2020, Liza has become involved with the Keller Center for Entrepreneurship through a University Administrative fellowship under the mentorship of the investor and board director Dr. Anita Sands. Since then, Liza has participated in a number of Keller programs, including the TechStars Innovation Bootcamp and had an opportunity to work with several EdTech startups at Princeton and beyond as a communications and PR consultant. This fall at Princeton, Liza is an Assistant Instructor for courses "Blazing a Path: Gender in the Startup World" (prof. Anita Sands) and "Entrepreneurial Leadership" (prof. Derek Lidow) where she trains students to self-assess and communicate skillfully to make successful entrepreneurial decisions.