You can affect influences that govern your behaviour to put the power to change anything back under your control. A clearer understanding of the science behind personal change should help you to become better at changing anything. When you read this book, you’ll learn how to apply the science of change to any personal change problem. #change #anything #success | Change Anything doesn’t offer you a one-size-fits-all solution to your challenges. Instead, it shows you how to tailor a handful of simple strategies so that you can create your own success story.” At Zappos, one of our core values is to ‘Embrace and Drive Change.’ This book—Change Anything—shows how adapting one’s life or career for the better can be done in a new and powerful way.” |
I will try to summarize everything and attempt to show how this can be done step by step. Those who succeeded in changing a behavior have this thing called Agency: The capacity to control our own behavior. You need to create your own plan. What works for others may not work for you. You need to understand what influence your behaviors. First, identify your crucial moments: You are not tempted 24/7. Identify which time, place, and/or people makes you most tempted. Second, create your vital behaviors: What do you HAVE to do when you are at risk. (If you can refocus your behaviors, not succumb to the urge, for just 3 or 4 mins, then you can get back to wanting to do your own behaviors.) Third, in order to achieve this every time, you need to engage all 6 sources of influences (or at least engage most of them). The 6 sources of influences: 1. Personal Motivation- Do I want to? Am I motivated? (How much do I want to change and why? E.g. Sharman used a card to keep reminding herself when faced with food temptations.) 2. Personal Ability- Can I do it? If not, can I learn a skill to achieve it? (E.g. AJ knew her Dad was a stumbling block she had to overcome. She would succumb whenever he offered a cigarette to her. She learned how to talk to him about this issue.) 3. Social Motivation- Do I have encouragement and support? Someone who keeps me on track? (Identify friends from accomplices. If you can’t turn accomplices to friends, i.e. they are not serious in helping you, stay away from them!) 4. Social Ability- Do I have someone to coach me, give me feedback to improve? 5. Structural Motivation- Do I have any rewards or incentives to keep me going? 6. Structural Ability- Am I in an environment which helps to control my space? Is it possible to make my good behavior easy and my bad behavior hard? (E.g. Get rid of junk food in the house. Make healthy food easily available and junk food out of reach.) Remember, it's not a willpower problem, it's a maths problem. No. 1 and 2 derived from yourself. No. 3 and 4 derived from external help. For no. 5 and 6, you need to make plans in advance to create the environment. Finally, the last step is to make bad days into good data. To prevent relapse, you have to plan for what happens if you ever failed to control your behavior. Understand what went wrong, analyse it, talk to someone about it, know what to do about it, etc. "A plan is not a plan, until it specifies how you deal with setbacks."