10:20am | Edwin Romero won the 2011 Long Beach Marathon with a time of 2 hours, 19 minutes and 8 seconds, averaging 5 minutes and 34 seconds per mile. An obese person just waking up may be thinking, in the amount of time it takes world-class marathon runner to pace a mile, it takes the same time to summon the motivation to tie my laces and leave the house. It’s a stark contrast.
Some folks may feel lost in the disparity when comparing themselves against those they wish to emulate. However, psychology helps us understand our own mental processes and implement established theories to correct what needs to be corrected.
One psychological theory suggests change happens slowly, and must do so through a series of stages. In other words, change is an evolutionary process.
I won’t. I can’t. I might. I will. I am. I still am. All of these words serve as preludes to statements that represent different stages of behavioral change. The stages of behavior change are: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. The first step in changing a behavior is identifying what stage you are in.
To help you familiarize yourself with the stages of behavior change, I will provide an example of what I have witnessed in real life. I can personally remember going to support groups for various bariatric surgery clinics and hearing stories from patients of how pounds were being put back on. Even after having a doctor surgically shrink the size of their stomachs, patients were gaining weight back. How?
Come to find out, many patients were still drinking regular soda. The high sugary liquid was small enough to permeate the diameter of the gut.
“I can’t give up soda,” was a belief that was expressed by more than one of these bariatric patients. The phrase I can’t is the bottom-most level of behavioral change, representing the pre-contemplation level. In this stage the imagination is weak, personal beliefs are dulled, and the intensity of motivation is in paralysis. So, how do we transcend to the more triumphant stage of maintenance, a stage when positive habits have been formed for six months or longer?
As the American College of Sports Medicine suggests, “A number of techniques can help you move from not thinking, to thinking, to planning, to doing, and to continue doing.”
Whether it is yourself, a competent friend, or someone you choose to hire, some stimulus must evoke the contemplation stage, a level where you at least see benefit in the change. The only way one can do this is to list the pros of changing the target behavior (i.e. stop the consumption of soda) and list the cons of changing the behavior as well. But this mere listing of pro’s and con’s won’t be enough.
The pros must outweigh the cons both in number of reasons (quantity) and substance (quality). The person must see truth in this obvious unbalance. This outweighing should silence the ambivalence or the internal conflict that may or may not be being expressed by the person.
Having enough “why’s” to do something always leads to the creative forces that shape strategy. Let 2012 be the year to form enough “why’s” in your own life.