At Klafreit, we believe that personal development work should be treated like any other job. And jobs usually get paid, right? Well, your job of keeping a healthy habit in the Klafreit Habits course certainly will. You lose money if you do not stick to your pronounced new micro habit. But let's start from the beginning:

 

Participants of the Habits Course make an investment into their new habit at the very beginning of the course. Everybody is free to choose the amount of their wager freely. It's like they are betting on themselves. The higher the sum of the bet, the more pressure and urgency they will feel to stick to their habit.

 

All the money from the participant's investments goes into a shared virtual fund among the participants. Each group member gets back the entire sum of their invested money by the end of the course after 7 weeks...but only if they stuck to their habit for the entire course length. If a group member does not complete a week's total streak, the wager for that week (full wager amount/7) is split equally among the other group members.

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Here is an example: Imagine a group of 5 participants in the next Klafreit Habits Course. Now let's look at one of those 5 participants: This person invests 70,- € in their 7-week habit streak, so their weekly return on investment would be 10,- € (70,-/7 weeks). Every week this group member and the assigned accountability partner decide if this person has completed their streak for that week. If that is the case, the person gets paid back their weekly investment of 10,- €. If not, the 10,- € gets split equally among the other group participants that have completed their streak that week. If all of the other five group members had completed their streak, that would mean every group member gets 2,50 € from that person's weekly wager (10,- €/4 other participants).

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Now, if you do the math, chances are the amount of money one can win for keeping their streak won't be enormous. Thus, it is not so much about the money you can possibly win in the course. It is about the money you can possibly lose. And this makes sense: Money, ultimately, is an investment of energy. When you link money to keeping your habits, as we do in the course, not sticking to your habit becomes much more tangible. Lose your streak, lose your money/energy. In this way, we use the already socially ingrained reward connection between money and well-being for our benefit. It is important to most of us to not lose money. What if losing your streak becomes as important to you?

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The most important takeaway with this gamified reward system, however, is not winning or losing money. It is the neuroplasticity that will do its work while participants accumulate days of keeping a habit. After a while, new emotions will be assigned to change. Emotions carrying the feeling of actually getting richer through the cultivation of carefully chosen habits. Investing real money is just the means to an end here. The most important is the psychological connection of "I actually win each time I install change" and, therefore, disrupt the old belief system of "change means losing something".