🍍The Cut Pineapple Principle: how to do the right thing without discipline

A whole pineapple can ruin a perfectly good habit. 

Today we start with a real coaching case study on nutrition habits and why “I’ll just do it” collapses under real life.  

Then we translate the same systems thinking into workplace transformation and leadership: why telling a team to “use AI” or “give better feedback” rarely works, and what does work instead. Think: clear playbooks, tiny recipes, calendar time to practice, and scripts that remove hesitation so people can act without second guessing.  

We also unpack the psychology behind stalled action, including choice overload and why too many options can lead to no choice at all, plus the neuroscience of habits and automatic behavior. You’ll leave with practical habit building and productivity tools you can apply to health routines, time management, feedback culture, and change management, especially when you have a busy schedule and zero extra bandwidth.  

If this helps, subscribe to Change Wired Podcast, share it with a leader or teammate who’s trying to drive change, and leave a review so more people can learn how to cut the pineapple and make the right thing the easy thing.  

Transcript

The Pineapple Habit That Failed

Making Workplace Change Easy

Feedback Scripts And Simple Playbooks

Choice Overload And Habit Neuroscience

Time Blocking To Protect Priorities

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Changewired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in change, transformation, personal and collective growth. I'm also your executive health and high performance coach 360 here on a mission and with obsession for helping you unlock more of your potential to create the most extraordinary life and create the most positive impact in the world you are capable of. Today, guys, we are talking about pineapples and uh building habits and creating systems which allow you to do a lot of things with already busy schedule and without the need for discipline. Today you go you're also gonna understand why we when you don't use a systematic approach or system thinking, system design approach to your to building your habits or changing the way you work, maybe the applications that you use, the way you talk to your coworkers, the way you give feedback to your teammates or people you hire. Today you'll understand why so much change and transformation at workplace fails. Today you're gonna learn how why so many of your attempts to build habits, create new routines also fail, and how to simply avoid all of that and set yourself up for more success. You're gonna understand the neuroscience of it and how to apply it simply in your life and in your work to ultimately get consistent with the things you need to get consistent with to grow in creating new results, whether it's your health, your work, your leadership, your family life, your relationships, it applies absolutely everywhere. And I want to start with a simple story: a real story, a mini case study from my client. He was trying, while we were working on creating balanced nutrition that he can consistently do no matter where he was. And one of the core principles everyone needs to understand in life to successfully change any habits and routines in an already busy schedule and you know with overwhelming brain and so many balls flying in the air and you trying to hold so many plates. So, one of the things you need to learn is that systems that support your new behavior needs to come first. You need to think about making it easy before thinking about why it happens or before hoping for it to succeed and stick in your life and again in already busy life consistently. So, with this client, we were working on a specific action, specific habit, eating more fruit and vegetables. And specifically, we started working on eating more fruit. And pineapple was one of the things that he liked, and we decided okay, for the next week, we're gonna eat a serving of pineapple for breakfast. And uh, he got the pineapple during his Sunday grocery shopping, and he got a whole pineapple, like with outer layer, you know, with all this uh like peels and green top. It looks fantastic, and he put it on the kitchen counter, you know, like I'm not gonna forget because it's right there. And the next week when we saw each other on a call, it pineapple stayed there. Nothing happened to that pineapple. It was just fine, but and ready to be eaten, but unfortunately it stayed untouched. What was the mistake there? If you ever bought a whole pineapple, you probably know what a pain in the ass it is getting through that pineapple. But you'd be surprised how lazy the brain is. Even with simpler fruit, you don't want to do the extra work on top of your busy schedule. Never, you already are too busy and all of your time is sort of occupied with things that you already do. So the next week we decided to get cut pineapple, actually, cut fruit bowls. Not bowls, but you know, those boxes which are made of plastic, and you open it up and you can eat your pineapple or whatever the fruit is with your hands or with your fork. So the next week he got a couple of boxes of fruit, pineapple including, and he went through two boxes in with no problem whatsoever. So, what's the takeaway? The takeaway is to make the thing easy, or the old thing or the wrong thing will get done instead. I call it the principle of cut pineapple, and I always tell the story to remind people that the brain is lazy first. And again, especially if you already have the busy schedule, and most of us do have a busy schedule, and there is you know, you don't want to do extra work and spend extra time on freaking pineapple. You just want to have your breakfast and be done with that. But also think about work scenario. People come to work and they already have their schedules full, they already have a lot of to-do lists and key AIs and things they're accountable for. And if there is on top of that, you tell people, well, you know, use AI. Think about how you can reimagine your work with AI. Unless you make it super easy, you create the time, the space for everyone to perhaps do it together, for people to keep each other accountable, for people to create some capability, some simple space and time, and also not telling people, you know, do something, but actually telling them, hey, here is what you're gonna do. And that usually would fall on the shoulders of team manager, thinking about okay, for my team, what makes sense to experiment to play with, and then creating a playbook. Maybe you already also have people who are enthusiastic about AI and have quite a lot of use cases. So, what you're gonna do is you're gonna ask those people to write a mini manual, a recipe. Hey, try this thing to do that, you know, thing and put that on people's calendar. So that is cut pineapple principle applied to work. Make the right thing easy, otherwise, people will forget, people delay it, people will do something else, the usual thing, the thing that allows them to move in a predictable fashion forward with their KPIs, with their to-do list. So that's how cut by nipple principle is applied to work scenario. Another work scenario is giving feedback, giving better feedback. So everyone universally gives feedback in the same way in your company, on your team, or maybe communicates with customers, handling certain complaints or certain issues in a consistent manner. You don't tell people be customer-centric, you cut the pineapple. And how do you do that in this scenario? You create simple scripts. Hey, this is how we give feedback. You so we say this first, we say that second, we say that third, and then we see how it goes. And uh, we create maybe dashboard and create something fun to keep people accountable and measure and make things visible. This is how you cut pineapple. So if you are a leader, if you are a team manager, anyone who helps people to do the right thing, your job is not to just tell people what to do, your bigger job is to design systems to cut that freaking pineapple, to make the right thing simple and easy and understandable. So people don't have to make decisions and second guess and figure it out, like how to cut that pineapple and get to what they actually want to do. I read an interesting research as well. Uh, I was writing an article, a blog about how more choice creates the state where people don't make any choice. So when there was a research where they gave people a choice between 24 flavors of jams, and then in other for the for another group, they gave a choice of only six. Now, there were more people interested in 24 flavors, but only 3% bought anything, and there were less people interested in six flavors, but 30% bought that jam. That choice, that paralysis by analysis is a real thing, especially in our day and time, where you have almost limitless options, like more choice, more options, play with it is not good enough. Or just giving people that you know pineapple, that AI. No, you gotta cut it in pieces and explain every piece before people dig into that or bite into that. But I didn't want to talk about that research specifically. What I wanted you to think about is that I read another piece of research about how 88% of actions we take are taken out of habit. They're not intentional, not something people think about and make choices about and make decisions about. It's something habitual. So 88% of what people end up doing. And the principle of cut pineapple makes it uh creates an opportunity to interrupt that habitual pattern. How does it do so? Because your brain is very much interested in doing the easy thing, and if you make something easy enough, then the person will do that even if it's a new thing. So, as a system thinker, as a system designer, as someone who oversees the choices and to-dos for yourself or your family or your team or your entire organization, your job again is to make sure that 88% of those habitual actions are actually the right kind of actions. And you do it by using a lot that cut pineapple principle, which stands for if you don't make the right thing easy enough, the old thing or the wrong thing will get done. So, next time when you're thinking about strategic move, change, transformation, reimagining SOP or workflow, using new software, don't think about what so much. Think about how can you make this right thing as easy as possible so people can easily slide into doing it versus having to struggle with old systems, figuring it all out, making choices and decisions, uh, which can lead to mistakes, which people don't want to do because they're accountable for all kinds of things at work and in their life. People don't like making mistakes in general. And if you make something super clear, super easy, make them understand that by doing so they will not make mistakes, but they're only gonna be gains, you're gonna be winning. And when it comes to your own schedule, when it comes to your own habits, today, you know what I did yesterday when I looked at my week and I'm working on my business a lot and I'm trying to grow sales. I ask myself, okay, I cannot control everything, I cannot control the outcomes, what people are gonna tell me, what opportunities I'm gonna get exactly, but I can control how many hours I'm gonna dedicate each day to outreach, to sales call, etc. So I'm like, okay, it's gonna be four hours of the outreach, and then on top of that, calls or uh all the other work that I have to do. So four hours of sales outreach. And what I did next, I asked myself, how can I make the rest of my routines so easy so I have no chance but to stick with that commitment? How can I make that commitment easy? So, what I did, I looked at my weekly schedule and I put I made the time for those our four hours to happen and I put them there in advance. So when I something comes up and it always starts, and I need to plan other things on top of that, I can say yes or no based on my commitment to having those four hours of outreach. I removed everything that could interfere with that. I put my commitment in different places. I again made sure that the thing that I need to be doing more of is clearly defined with its time and space container and everything else in my life works around it. And I have it on my calendar so I don't have the opportunity to schedule something on top of that and then worry about well, you know, I don't have time now for the outreach because I scheduled this meetings or calls or something else that some running some errand on top of that. No, it's there, nothing else can get into the time slot, and I know where I'm gonna do it, and I know what exactly I'm gonna do I'm gonna do because I also put it in my journal, my business journal where where I put things like how exactly I'm gonna do the outreach to what kind of companies buy what kind of medium, whether that's email or LinkedIn or something else. So I put that in advance, making it very clear, very simple, maybe not easy, but super simple to understand when I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do it, and and that's about it. That's the cut pineapple principle applied to work. But the same also with my nutrition and my workouts. I scheduled all my workouts, I know exactly what I'm gonna do. I shopped and prepped and uh did everything for my groceries. I made a plan with my nutrition, so I don't have to think about any of that, but to the area of my primary focus, which is sales and my business development. That is how you apply cut pineapple principle to your life, to your work relationships, to giving feedback, to achieving goals, to changing your habits, to pretty much everything. Once you figure out what it is that you want to focus on, what it is that you want to do, don't stop there. Ask yourself, did I cut my pineapple, or is it still sitting whole on the counter waiting for the better times or the perfect life? And that's the question I'm gonna leave you with today, dear listener. Before you jump off, don't forget to share this podcast episode with at least one other person who you might wanna learn with or apply this principle. Share this episode with some leader, with a team manager, with someone who's struggling with helping other people do the right thing. Make them aware that it might not be the problem of the people or them, but you know not having the system thinking, system design in place, do making the right thing, the cut pineapple or the easy thing thing, so the old and the wrong thing doesn't get done instead. Share, review this podcast, and what else? Till next time, guys. Keep cutting that pineapple and keep growing.