The Power of Habit - Behavior Change

Happy "almost" new year everyone! 

I would like to talk about a topic that sits in the very HEART of what most of us do together. When looking to make a significant change in your life, something needs to happen to create the change, making it sustainable in the long term. Mastering the art of behavior change can be the key to your success! 

How To Make A Behavior Change? How can we break those pesky old habits? And how do we make our new habits stick?

We’re all trying to change one behavior or another in order to help better ourselves. Whether you’re looking to improve your health, increase productivity or even reduce stress, these tried and true behavior change strategies will help get you to your goal. Regardless of the desired result, the journey to the finish line is all the same. It all comes down to behavior change!

Before we dive in we MUST discuss "The Power Of Habit". Habits are extremely powerful. Think about your morning routine, the way you do your laundry, or even the way you cook your food – our habits are seamlessly weaved into our daily lives. They allow us to go through the motions without having to use ample brainpower for every minute task. The success of a behavior change is heavily reliant upon our ability to break and reform some of these habits. Albeit tricky, there are a few steps you can take to make the process go a bit smoother.

Step 1 - Determine The Habit You Need to Break First, determine the habit you need to break. For example, say you’ve decided to break your afternoon baked good habit, where you run over to the bakery across the street from work around 3:00 pm every day.

Step 2 - Replace The Old Habit Now, what is the new habit you’re going to form in place of the old one? This is very important. If you’re left with no replacement, the chances of you caving and reverting to old habits are very high. For our purposes, let’s say you’ve decided to bring a snack from home instead of going to the bakery.

Step 3 - Work Through The Details Lastly, we need to work through the details involved in forming the new habit.  We’ll have to determine what we’ll have for a snack, when we’ll prepare the snack, how long it will take to prep the snack, etc. The more thought you put into establishing the new habit, the easier it will be to execute. If it’s going to be a habit, it has to become second nature. This takes time.

Habits eliminate the need for willpower when you perform the behavior. In the beginning, it will be extremely hard to resist reverting back to old habits. Yet over time, your new habit will eventually be so ingrained in your daily routine that you won’t even think about the bakery across the street.

Be consistent, stick to a routine, and make that habit stick.

Self-efficacy And Behavior Change:  If we don’t believe in ourselves if we’re consistently thinking about the negative components, the drawbacks, the difficulties along the way, our chances of succeeding diminish. Your internal motivators, self-efficacy and self-regulating skills are key to successfully changing behavior. For some people, this will be second nature. For others, you will need to work at this. As you’re creating a plan for changing behavior, take some time to reflect. Think about why you want to make the change, what outcome you are seeking, how you will feel once your goal is achieved.

Spend some time with yourself and build a relationship with yourself, one that will allow you to become in tune with your thoughts, goals, ambitions, and decisions. Learn to trust yourself and your instincts. Building a relationship with yourself takes time, but it is worth the benefit you will gain in the long run. A great way to do this is through journaling. Take a small amount of time per day or even per week to reflect on your goals, your weaknesses, your pain points. As we learned above, simply putting pen to paper can make all the difference.

Define Your Weaknesses:  We all have strengths and weaknesses. The better we understand them, the more likely we are to succeed in changing a behavior. Acknowledge and determine what your weaknesses and triggers are. If you’re trying to make healthier food choices, at what points do you usually make unhealthy choices? When you’re stressed? If you’re with certain people? When you’re feeling sad or lonely? Determine these pain points and game plan how you will prepare for these situations. 

Is there a stress-management tactic that you could try? Could you speak to the people you’re frequently around about your goals and your ambitions? The more you plan ahead the better prepared you will be. With that being said, it’s also extremely important for you to anticipate some failure. I know I know, that’s not exactly what you would like to hear right now, but you absolutely need to. There will be some speed bumps down the road that you aren’t able to glide over. You may stumble, fall or slip up. And that is perfectly fine. Prepare for failure, accept it, and keep on trying.

If you forget to put gas in your car and your car stalls on the way to work, are you going to throw your hands up and say “oh well, I guess I can’t use my car anymore”? I didn’t think so. Congruently, when you slip up or have a misstep, don’t beat yourself up or give up. Accept it, try and understand why it happened, then move on and keep on keeping on.

Stay Accountable: We all need to be held accountable. Some people are able to do this on their own, they know how to hold themselves accountable and monitor their actions. For others, support is needed. Studies have shown time and time again that there is a positive association between communicating goals with others and successful behavior change. More specifically, when participants frequently update others with their progress, their success was higher. 

If accountability is a piece that you struggle with, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Help can be in the form of a friend, a health professional (a.k.a. ME) or any other expert who specializes in the behavior you are trying to change. Time and time again I find that accountability from a knowledgable professional is the final piece clients need to reach their goals. If the behavior change you are trying to make involves eating or lifestyle habits, wellness coaching may be the right fit for you.

Now let us put this into practice! Determine what stage of change you are in, define your pain points and tackle them. When combined and modified to suit you and your specific needs, these tools will hopefully allow you to take control of your habits and make the changes you seek!

I hope all of you were able to take something from this and are ready to move in 2020 with a STRONG sense of determination and clarity! I am here to discuss this topic with each and every one of you on a grander scale if you are so inclined as behavior change really is the crux of what we do together! Lifestyle change is created by dedication to habit and behavior change, you cannot have one without the other! Let's Go! 

All my love, 

Brooke