You just want to make the change, but it is just not working out for you. There's a variety of strategies and techniques, believe me on that. Today's 5 Minute Friday is all about 3 easy to do techniques that can be readily adopted to getting yourself into gear when it comes to your own goals.
Here are the key techniques:
Social Incentive – In this Ted Talk – the example used was energy usage from the utility company – where they compared her usage to her neighbors.
I never even considered the energy company’s attempt to influence constrained energy usage based upon that ‘year to date you have used…’ graph. Makes sense though.
If you are intending to make a change, and you are struggling to make the change happen – you may want to bring in another person or a a few friends to cultivate the social incentive-based pressure to drive home your change. An even more effective approach is to enlist a third party such as an accountabiity coach to keep you honest. I have done this very thing for myself, and I have also been an accountability coach for others as they move through their change journey.
When I told my son a couple years ago that I would be hitting the weights radically, I used this technique.
Immediate Rewards – By default we value rewards that we can get our hands on now, rather than a promised future reward. What this Ted Talk summarizes is this – by rewarding people right now for taking actions that will help them down the line will trigger behavior change.
Quitting smoking was cited as a provocative example.
Tali Sharot – the speaker – highlighted that with an immediacy reward in play – smokers were able to quite at a 32% success rate, as opposed to the control group rate of 9%. This is compelling.
So if we play this out, and you give yourself a reward for hitting the gym – such as a really nice coffee break later that day – you will more than triple your chances of continuing on with the change. Compelling science.
Progress Monitoring – Our brains are very adept at processing the progress in the behavior change, rather than the decline or deprivation. For example, if you highlight the effects of stopping smoking to someone that is also an athlete, they are much more likely to quit smoking as compared to someone that just wags a finger and lectures.
Also, if you have a visual way in which to track your progress on a daily basis – this can do wonders for motivation. This is one of the main reasons why I bought a wall calendar to being with. I have to admit that I am a couple months off on updating that wall calendar for my four key daily habits – but I did do it religously for the first three months of the year. During that time – this technique was kind of like a game for me. I did not want to break my color coded streaks of success that tied out to my continuing to drive change across those four habit areas.
For me, progess monitoring is very effective – both home and at work. KPI’s at work and habit graphs on my calendar – both are equally compelling to me.
So there you go – 3 proven ways in which to push your desired change if you are up for making some changes:
- Social Incentives – bring others into your change journey
- Immediate Rewards – if you are early on in your change cultivation journey – this will do wonders for you
- Progress Monitoring – make it a game, and have some fun with it.
Get started with a single, little, turtle step if you must – just get started, and consider weaving in a couple of these techniques to keep it going!
