Sustaining Change…Effortlessly, Part One
by Jon Gan of Habit Shift
The joy. The pain. The anticipation and the regret. The attachment and the freedom. Change is all of these and more. Ironically, even though it is required for survival, most of us haven’t found cultivating our change-ability an easy task. We struggle with the voice of “If only.” “If only the world would slow down. If only other people weren’t so…what…human! Then I could manage all the changes.”
Don’t feel like the odd one out. Join all the rest of us who are struggling with change. Good and bad. Too much or too little. Isn’t what we long for is balance? “Sure, I like change. I want change. But, I want it where I want it, when I want it, where I want it, in the way I want it.” Right. When does that happen?
Before you become too hard on yourself, allow me to offer you another way to look at change: Give your self more credit! Don’t sell yourself so short! You have actually changed your self thousands and thousands of times! You! You have done it! Own it!
Unless you are the same person you were when you were born, in which case, your attention span has long ago wandered away from this article, you have changed your self and quite successfully. Do you have the same eating patterns you did as a kid? Do you go to the same restaurants you did 25 years ago? Do you have the same skills you did 5 years ago? Do you feel about yourself exactly as you felt 2 years ago? The answer: unequivocally no.
So the question really is, How do I change? What is the method I use when it works and what do I do when it doesn’t? Here’s another interesting question: How do I make some of these changes so blasted effortlessly and how do I make some of these changes so agonizingly painful?
Well, one tip is to mentally separate the habit you want let go of from the habit you want to acquire. A second tip is be sure to cultivate both a desire to stop the status quo as well as a desire to start something different. Quite distinct elements, actually.
And the letting go might be the hardest part of change. There’s the Buddhist story of the great teacher, who when approached by a follower with a complaint, offers only “And to what are you attached to?”
Looking at the work of James Prochaska, PhD, author of “Changing for Good,” we all change in the same way. Whether we know it or not or plan it or not. And he’s done the research to back up the claim. Decades of research with tens of thousands of subjects. His model, the Transtheoretical Model, is commonly known as the Stages of Change. Heard of it? There are five or six stages depending upon the change you may be making.
The Stages are formally called Pre-contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action, Maintenance, and Termination. I call them What Problem?, Oh, That Problem!, Ready…Set…, Go!, and Keep the Fire Alive. More on the sixth stage another time.
But the Stages are just the tip of the iceberg. They only give you a system for placing yourself along the continuum of a particular change. You can be going gangbusters with one change and firmly ensconced in the “What Problem?” Stage with another. Parallel realities.
The real key is this – and remember it well. Prochaska found that once you find your place along the Stages of Change, you can then identify specific behaviours, processes, or, what I call Strategies, that successful self-changers deploy during that specific Stage of Change, whether they know it or not or plan it or not. That’s the meat (substitute tofu, according to preference) of the model. What you do during the Stage is what makes all the difference.
There are 10 of these Strategies. I call them People, Knowledge, My World, Emotions, Culture, Commitment, New Me, New Choices, Reminders, and Carrots and Sticks.
How you use these, the importance of readiness, self-efficacy, and decisional balance, techniques for sustaining change effortlessly, and many other practical ideas will be the subject of future articles. Please stay tuned to this space…
Submitted by Jon Gan of Habit Shift. Larry Birckhead, author of the workshop, Habit Shift, www.habitshift.com, can be reached at (604) 261-9792 or at larry@habitshift.com.
