Got any change?

You wake up one day and realize that you’re not satisfied with where you are. Ten years ago, you had dreams and knew where you wanted to be. Now you’re faced with the realization that you’re not there.

You’re not alone here; it happens to everyone. I know it happened to me a couple years ago. I’d hit a really low spot and knew that something had to change. I knew that I wanted something better and that I was determined to never get anywhere near that again. It’s easy to say you’re going to change things.

It’s way harder to actually do it.

Though it isn’t the most scholarly of online publications, there is an entry on About.com called The Stages of Change that cites more work that deals with the psychology of change using a model that requires changing in steps. All of them come back to actually doing something. The question then becomes what to do.

Once you’ve identified that behavior or habit you need to change, you may like to think through what you have to do. You like to explore your options, then more options. Before you know it, you’ve got too many options to know what to do. Congratulations, you’ve discovered analysis paralysis.  There’s a pretty good article from Business Week about this problem and how to avoid it. Being a business magazine, the article is skewed toward paralysis at the corporate level but it’s got a lot of spillover into preventing it from happening in your personal life. The problem here is too much information.

My way of dealing with that is to use the Well Formed Outcomes Model for goal-setting. Yes, this is another piece from NLP (brought up in my last post). This is another one of the more useful pieces of that particular field of inquiry. In essence, it gives you an inventory of what you have, what you want, what you need to get there, and makes it imperative that you set something quantifiable and concrete so that you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you’ve hit that mark. You either accumulate a specific amount of money or your scale has a specific number.

The most important part of all of this is actually doing something about it. You can plan all you want but you will need to begin making progress toward that big goal. You can do this by setting up milestones. If you want to lose 100lb, it’s a lot less daunting to think about losing 10 at a time.

Now, it becomes a little different (but not a lot!) if you’re looking to change a behavior or if the behavior is the underlying cause of the problem you’re trying to change. For example, if you’re an emotional eater, that’s probably going to explain a lot of why you’re overweight. Dealing with that behavior of eating because of emotions is important. Substituting better options is only masking the problem. Creating new habits is always going to be superior.

This is just behavior modification through classical conditioning, creating a response to a stimulus. It’s the same way to learn a new habit. I’ve found that it’s easier to replace a habit with a better one than to completely remove a bad habit. Learn to recognize the stimulus that triggers the habit. Then decide to do something else. Have a specific behavior in mind. To go back to the emotional eater example, when the stress stimulus is noticed, the person would normally go straight to a vending machine and throw down a candy bar. Instead, the person can learn to recognize what causes that stress response and decide to go outside for a walk instead. This isn’t going to tackle the underlying emotional issues causing that behavior (which should be handled by a professional) but it can put the individual into a better mindset.

This all comes back down to having a plan and executing it. The execution is up to your personal discipline and motivation but having a well defined goal and a good plan to get there is going to make things a hell of a lot easier for you to get going.