4 Steps To Change Habits and Behavior Lifestyle

Table of Contents

1. Change Bad Habits and Be Better
2. Personal Change Management
3. Strategic Psychological Tools Sustain Success
4. Why Small, Slow, Steady, Secret Steps?
5. Don't Forget The Treats

Changes in a person’s own set of habits, routine patterns and set behaviors is one of the most difficult areas of change.  Humans change on a regular basis as we grow and age, learn new skills and then forget some of the things we’ve already learned.  The difficult personal changes come when we want to modify behaviors in a specific direction. For instance, a person may desire to change bad habits. He may yell at his staff at work. He may want to stop that and learn how to step back, and calmly discuss a problem, not yell about it.

Another person may want to change habits, lose weight, lower anxiety or just stop watching so much news of the day. These personal change are possible but strategic change tools are required to get the job done.

This kind of focused, specific kind of change takes concentration, discipline, self-awareness and understanding of basic stimulus/response, the reward system in mammals that brings about change.

Adaptation

Human beings have an incredible capacity to adapt to external changes in their environment. This is a survival mechanism. Throughout the history and development of Homo sapiens, the ones who can adapt to changes in food supply, environmental conditions, external threats and the need for technological development are the survivors.

In a manner of speaking, Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest speaks to this. What he’s really saying is that the members of the species most able to make changes of adaptation are the ones most likely to survive and provide the dominant gene’s for the species’ continued survival. Once changes for survival and adaptation have been made, the reward and benefits of survival becomes the reinforcement that maintains the new changes and solidifies them into established behaviors and cultural patterns.

It goes without saying that members of a tribe or society or any group of mammals for that matter who cannot or will not adapt with changes that fit existing circumstances die away and do not survive. There are exceptions to this of course, but as a rule, adaptation equals survival and conversely, inability to change equals extinction.

Personal Habits of Extinction (Addictive Behaviors and Bad Habits)

Most of my clients come to me for help getting unstuck in non-adaptive patterns of personal behavior. In plain language I’m referring to habits in a person’s life which are not yielding benefits and that person wants to change those bad habits.  Unyielding habits which are reducing the quality of person’s life can be very discouraging. Not only is the bad habit hurting quality of life, but the person is spending extra energy trying to change the habit.

This eventually leads to a downward spiral of diminishing returns where the very effort the person is doing to change the bad habit makes the habit stronger.  This can have lethal results and now is the time to “lay down the shovel” and call for outside help (a good counselor) who can help with effective strategies to turn things around.

I’m talking about behavior patterns such as things we call addiction or ideas about morality and how family should be structured. It includes a lack of willingness to learn healthy and profitable communication styles necessary to build and sustain complicated intimacy in modern-day life. I am often asked to help a person find a way out of self-defeating behaviors that they recognize but seem to have no control over making those patterns change to better ones.

Here is a perplexing irony: some people are able to make necessary changes in how they live life and achieve success. Others, even with awareness that what they’re doing is not working seem under the spell of status quo and rigidity.

What makes the difference between these two kinds of situations?  One person appears to have control over their behaviors.  The other has lost all control, living at the mercy of bad habits and behavior patterns.

If you want to build a skyscraper that does not fall over, or an ocean going container ship that will not topple over and sink, you have to do it the right way. Period. How you try to change, the tools you use for change determine your success and whether or not the changes last. Period.