Behavior change is nearly always difficult to manage. Our old habits and behaviors tend to linger well past their usefulness, and new ones are notoriously difficult to establish and lock into place.
That’s why people often set up systems to help them make these transitions. For example, many years ago I set up a simple reward system to help me develop an ability to concentrate on my work for long periods of time without a break. It worked great.
I instinctively set it up to reward myself for doing the behavior I wanted to encourage – concentrating for long periods of time without a break – and I purposely left out any punishment for the times I took a break from my work too early.
This emphasis on the positive is smart, but not always easy to maintain.
Because emphasizing the positive in changing your behavior is so effective, however, I’ve collected the following ideas to help you:
Define the Behavior You Want
It’s hard to hit a target if you don’t know what or where it is. That’s why your first step along the road to behavior change must be to develop a clear picture of the new, improved behavior you want to start exhibiting. It’s better if you state this behavior in purely positive terms, such as:
“I will walk 8,000 steps every day.”
“I will praise myself for work I do well.”
“I will accept compliments graciously.”
or whatever.
It’s also helpful if you start from a position of accepting the desirability of exhibiting this new behavior. If you have questions or doubts about its value or utility, your motivation to develop this new behavior will falter, and you’ll too often find excuses and opportunities to stick with your old behavior instead.
Set Up the Rules for Earning Rewards
Having a target behavior is great. However, it’s not enough. You must also establish rewards for behaving the new way, along with rules that tell you when your behavior has earned a reward and when it hasn’t.
For example, in my concentration-building regimen, I earned rewards within the system for concentrating over long periods without a break, and the rules awarded me more rewards, faster, the longer I stretched my ability to concentrate.
There’s nothing ground-breaking about these suggestions. They’re standard operating procedures for managing the parts of your work and your life you’d like to improve.
However, what is different in this advisory is that we’re discarding any notion of negative consequences – which I admit I’ve described in other advisories, including forced contributions to a cause you hate whenever you fail to exhibit the behavior you’re trying to cultivate.
Here, the emphasis is entirely on the positive, so much so that I’m going to include a wrinkle that helps you turn failure to exhibit the new behavior you want into another positive reward.
Benefit from the Negative, As Well
The trick to staying entirely positive about your attempted behavior change is to avoid the common tendency to punish yourself when you fail to live up to your new standards. And the best way to do this is to find something positive to celebrate instead.
My suggestion is to think about why you didn’t exhibit your new behavior when the opportunity arose – taking that walk, praising your work when appropriate, accepting compliments when deserved, or whatever else you’re trying to learn to do.
There’s usually a good reason, such as:
- There was too high a threshold to get over,
- The old behavior was too tempting and rewarding,
- You weren’t certain exactly what to do, or
- You felt too much fear or worry about the new behavior.
By uncovering the reason you didn’t exhibit the desired new behavior when you had the chance, you open the door to making changes that smooth the way toward the desired behavior in the future.
That’s a very positive step.
Finding the positive in the negative this way is metaphorically very much akin to weight lifting or other physical exercise. When you lift a weight, you obviously give your muscles a chance to grow stronger. But if you carefully and slowly lower the same weight back down, you give your muscles a separate, second chance to get stronger.
In the same way, by defining the behavior you want to exhibit, establishing rules and rewards that incentivize you into doing it, and considering the reasons why you don’t do it when you could, you enter into an entirely positive process for changing your behavior and thereby making yourself more productive and successful.
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