weston culture » The Studio

How people change: Working with the stages and processes of change

trish — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:12:22 +0000

While archiving a journal recently, I found an old photocopied article wedged in its pages. Upon re-reading it, I was struck by just how relevant (and now, mainstream) the ideas in this article were.

The article, from the September 1992 edition of American Psychologist, was entitled “In Search of How People Change” and was written by James Prochaska, Carol DiClemente and John Norcross. In it, Prochaska and friends outline their “stages of change model” which has become de rigeur knowledge for change agents over the past 20 years. Based on their work in the field of addiction, the model proposes five stages that people go through when changing.

Pre-contemplation – where we see no problem with our behaviour or situation, and consequently have very little motivation to change
Contemplation – where we are thinking about change, maybe wondering what’s possible, checking out options but not acting on it
Preparation – where we seriously consider what needs to be done to bring about change
Action – where we do what’s needed to change
Maintenance – where we monitor and adjust our behaviour so that the change is sustained.

The Stages of Change are quite well known and often used as justification for why the cliche “a person has to be ready to change” is wheeled out when someone is resistant to change.

A less known part of the model is how it can inform the processes of change. Processes can range from consciousness raising and self-evaluation to helping relationships and stimulus control. Different processes help people move through the different stages.

For example, if you’re in Pre-Contemplation about your health, you’re quite happy to chow down at the greasy spoon for lunch everyday and not see it as a problem. But when you receive feedback from your GP (consciousness raising) that your cholesterol levels are above average, you may move into the Contemplation stage of “Maybe I should do something about my diet to improve my health?”.

It’s interesting but I’ve never read any coaching literature that explores what processes we use in relation to the stages. It’s probably because most of the people we work with are at the Preparation or Action stages and our processes help people get into action (and to a lesser degree, maintain change). I’ve been wondering how much better coaching could be if we gave more attention to what we could do in the other stages.

Revisiting Prochaska et al’s model has really opened my mind in relation to what’s possible with helping people change. I find this the mark of great research: it doesn’t just tell us how things are but invites us to explore what we can do with this knowledge.

The article is quite accessible and I’d invite you to read it for yourself and reflect on what it means for your own change or in working with those going through change. I’ve put a copy of it in the Studio.

This article was first published in the March edition of Design Notes, the newsletter of the Work/Life Design program.

Ditched the new year resolutions? Set goals that get results in 2010

trish — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:10:20 +0000

If we want to make real change in our lives, we need to move beyond believing in the ‘magic bullet’ of new year resolutions.

As a coach, I’ve achieved most of what I set out to do – except when it comes to keeping New Year resolutions. I still have my written resolution to learn the guitar in 2006 somewhere. It’s probably near the guitar I never learned to play.

And apparently I’m not alone. According to research in the US, only 15 to 20 percent of people achieve what they set out to do on January 1. In terms of strategies, I’d say this one isn’t very effective. And yet every year most of us participate in a ritual that routinely makes us feel like we’re failures.

You see, New Year resolutions don’t take into account how we change. We blindly believe that just by saying it (“Lose weight”, “Stop smoking”, etc) we will make it so on January 1. Our conscious thoughts can be powerful things, but they usually need a little help. When we make New Year Resolutions, we usually make them too vague (“lose weight”, but how much and how?), too negative (“I’m going to stop dating lying bastards like I’ve done the past five years”) and too overwhelming (“I want a hot body, hot partner, fame and a six-month round the world holiday”).

Just to make it harder, we joke about how long our resolutions will last and how spectacularly we will fail at them. Imagine if we treated our big life choices the way we treated our resolutions (“Yeah, I just got into uni; but I’ll probably fail, drop out, end up homeless and with a massive HECS debt”).

Now, don’t get me wrong; I think the beginning of a new year is a fine time to sit down and take stock of where we are in our lives, acknowledge the great things that have happened in the previous 12 months, perhaps give some consideration to how we’d do things differently if faced with some of the choices that gave us grief, and ask the question: What do I really want?

But if you’re really interested in changing some part of your life – and this time you want it to actually happen – then I challenge you to ditch the resolutions and start setting some goals.

What’s the difference between goals and resolutions?

Goals are about action and tangible results

You can say you want to make a million bucks this year, but until you get off the couch and do something, then it probably ain’t going to happen. Goals describe what you will be doing when you have achieved your intention – often quite specifically in a way that can be measured. You will be left with no doubt whether you attained it or not.

Goals have feedback built into them

You need to know if you are on track, or whether you need to change your strategy. And often the best way to do this is through the goal having a measurable component (such as “I will be exercising for 40 minutes a day, 3 days a week”) or even having people you can ask “Do you think this looks right?”

Goals create a path of “least resistance”

Goals have followup, support structures and excitement built into them so that you can actually achieve them. They acknowledge and work with the “path of least resistance”, which is your “natural” way of doing things. You thus encounter fewer obstacles. And goals have a support structure that pulls you toward them. This may be the way you structure your day or prioritise or it may be having people around you to encourage you as you make changes.

Goals are short-term, long-term and changing

Your goals will be with you for the entire 12 months. You will be visiting them regularly (sometimes daily, at least monthly) to see whether you’re still on track. Shock of all horrors, they may actually change over that twelve months as you realise that you didn’t really want to be a doctor anymore and joined the Sea Shepherds instead.

Goals challenge you

Goals are challenging (just out of your reach) but also not too far so you always have the belief that you can achieve it. Goals acknowledge what you’ve got to learn along the way. So you may have a long-term goal of finding a partner who you love to be with, but perhaps before that happens you’ll need to address your confidence in meeting new people generally.

Goals keep you in motion

Goals build your confidence by gradually moving you toward what you want rather than the ‘sink or swim’ approach. They acknowledge where you’re at, your skills, your beliefs and what really has to change. They are ongoing. You revisit them every week, every month and they change and grow with you.

Don’t set yourself up for failure in 2010 by talking about resolutions you know you’ll give up on after two weeks of suffering. Bring what you really want to life right now by setting some goals.

10 tips for achieving your goals in 2010

1. Ask yourself: Is this what I really want?

Your goals reflect your values and what’s most important to you in life. If you’re on holidays and would just like to feel this relaxed all the time, then perhaps it’s time to look at the work you’re doing or the way you are spending your working hours and ask “Is this what I really want to be doing? Is this what I really want to be doing in 12 months, 5 years, or 20 years? Do I need to change careers or change something about the way I work, or do I need to change myself?”

2. Be specific

Goals are specific and tend to be something you can measure (so you know when you get there). When you set goals for yourself – not your partner, your mother or your boss – you get the payoff everytime. Goals have a time-frame so you know when and if and what you’ve got to do to achieve them this month or this year.

3. Be bold

Confidence is the number one thing I work with people on. Even those who seem so sure of themselves in public have times of doubt. That’s healthy and part of who we are and how we process things; we’re looking for threats that impact on our safety and security. But most of the things we fear aren’t real. We are wonderfully resilient creatures, and it is only through putting ourselves in new situations that we learn and grow and find out that what we feared wasn’t as bad as we imagined. Public speaking, for example, can be an exhilarating experience.

4. Be positive

Goals that work are positive and things that you want rather than don’t want. For example, you may wish to leave your job, but your goal will be focused on identifying and attaining a job that you actually really enjoy. Elevate your mood, shift how you’re feeling and what you‘re thinking so that it‘s all moving you toward your goal in a positive way. The research shows that when you relax, keep positive, and do the things that make you happy, good health will follow.

5. Write it down

There’s something in the action of turning what’s in our head into words on paper. Whether it be writing your goals in a visible place where you can see them everyday, or journalling every day to keep your thoughts and feelings in flow; just write it down. Make it positive, share it with someone who you trust and make it yours.

6. Create a structure to stay on track

Look at where you give up and put something there to keep you on track (a reward, a buddy, a coach, an “appointment“ with yourself, etc). It’s no coincidence that, as life coaches, we coach weekly or fortnightly. Everyone has a certain cycle of change, and your goals may need that regular tweak to make them challenging again.

7. Feel your end goal

If you’re going to the gym with gusto for the first week or two and then start making excuses, it’s time to reconnect with what you’re doing this all for and make that emotional attachment to the end goal. Connect with the feeling of what it’s like playing footy with your kids and not getting puffed, or climbing those stairs without needing a break.

8. Look outside and inside

Use this time of year to re-connect with friends and re-discover passions and things you love that you’ve put aside while you’ve been busy with everyday living.

9. Don’t just do something, lie there

Achieving goals isn’t just about doing more, doing it quicker and doing it by yesterday. If your 2010 diary is already micromanaged in five-minute intervals, you may want to consider putting your batteries on recharge rather than burnout. Read a book, meditate, spend a day lying on the grass watching clouds. If you find it hard to figure out how to slow down, ask yourself WWYCD (What Would Your Cat Do)?

10. Celebrate what you do have

Use the time to acknowledge all the good stuff you already have in your life. If you have a roof over your head, food on the table and are working then you’re already doing better than 95% of the world’s population (!).

It’s your life. Live it.

Do you need Resolutions or (R)evolution?

Get support for your 2010 goals with the new Work/Life Design Program. You can find out more about creating a life and work you love at www.worklifedesign.com.au

Debunking the myth of 21 Days to a New Habit

trish — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:05:15 +0000

Have you heard the one about how you need to do something for 21 days before it becomes a habit?

It’s a myth.

There is no research that has found such a thing. I’ve scoured the psych literature and the internet looking for the source of this urban self-help myth and couldn’t locate any studies that provided evidence of the 21 Day claim.

I did come across Stephen at HDBizBlog website who has written about his own hunt for the source of the “21 Day Habit”. He found that it all seems to stem from a popular self-help book from the 1960s by American cosmetic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz. Maltz’s theory of 21 Days was based on his observation that it usually took about 21 days for a patient to “get used to his new face” after facial plastic surgery. He also stated that a “phantom limb” persists for amputees for about 21 days after surgery.

It all sounds a little bit anecdotal and hardly generalisable to any kind of change – especially since there seems to have been no research to support it in the almost 50 years since publication. I think I understand his reasoning though. He asks his readers to withhold judgement for 21 days – to just give the new behaviour a chance. I think this would work for some people but others might need to break it down to seven days or even a day or an hour.

That the ‘21 Days to a Habit’ claim is really a myth is in line with what we know from psych research – where there is no set time frame for changing habits because it depends on so many different factors. For example, from research in the area of addiction (because even with habits, I like to think big), psychologist Stanton Peele has developed five steps to change a non-serving habit into a healthy or life-enhancing habit.

1. Find a positive, enhancing habit that is more important to you than the one you want to leave behind.

2. Surround yourself with supportive people. And not just people who will nag you but people who will go for that walk with you, or drag you out of the house when you just want to sit around feeling fat and sorry for yourself.

3. Make changes to your environment so that it supports you rather than undermines your changes. Yes, it may even mean moving, making new friends, or not buying the jumbo pack of chips at the supermarket.

4. Get to know the new you. As you start acting differently, you’ll need to start thinking differently about yourself. It just won’t cut it to continue being your worst enemy. I always see it as becoming the person you always knew you were, but were too afraid to admit.

5. Acknowledge and celebrate your efforts, no matter how small. Get the feedback you need to know that it’s worth it. Your ‘evidence’ will come in handy when you find yourself slipping back into the old habit. When you see that you’ve exercised six days out of seven and only scoffed one packet of Tim Tams in a week then you’ll know you’re making progress.

It’s all to do with belief and action. Rather than continuing the loop of habit – feel bad – habit – feel bad, you start believing you are the person who lives with these great new habits. (This is in contrast to other approaches that put the focus on your seventh-day, binging self, and keep you stuck there as a consequence.) When you take action you are providing yourself with the evidence or the reality to support your new beliefs.

As you keep doing it, and finding ways to keep it going even when your body is screaming for a return to the safe and comfortable old ways, it becomes easier.

Back to basics: Daily habits log

I have a very simple daily habits log that I use myself. I’ve found that there’s no set time. It either becomes easy or you find another way. And you’ll do it in your own time – for some that will be a week, for others it will be six months. But you never know until you start. Now.

This week’s resource From The Work/Life Design Studio: Daily Habits Log

Next in The Studio, Understanding How Change Happens

Thank you to Stephen at HDBizBlog for scouring the web in search of the source of 21 Days to a Habit.

On Reflective Practice, or, Why I write.

trish — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:46:41 +0000

Using writing as reflective practice not only develops your communication skills but can also help you with those big (and little) life decisions.

Reflective practice. Means nothing to you? No, it probably wouldn’t unless you’d trained as a teacher or a nurse or a psych or a management consultant. It’s a shame it’s not more well-known because I find it the most helpful technique/ approach to improving not only my professional practice but also my life.

What is reflective practice?

In a nutshell, reflective practice is about looking at an incident or situation – usually one which has gone totally pear-shaped but it works equally well with peak events – and asks “What the heck was going on there?”

You describe what was said or done (the action or behaviour), the feelings that you were experiencing as this was happening, and the thoughts behind the feelings or the behaviour. Then you take it back to first principles, or your ‘truth’ or belief underlying the behaviour, and it can reveal whether your values-in-action are matching your espoused-values. (ie are your actions aligned with what you say?)

Once you have a little insight into the situation then reflective practice asks that you explore different ways to approach the situation in the future (ie How could I have done this differently?). You add the possible new behaviour to your kitbag that you can test next time you’re in the same (or even similar) situation. Then you reflect on it again. It’s a cyclical thing. Much like coaching, except you do it yourself.

It all sounds a bit cognitive when I put it that way, but it really is a quite gentle process. It comes from the assumption that we all have good reasons to do or say the things we do. Sometimes we misjudge the consequences, sometimes we forget about the consequences, but at some level there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for us doing daft things.

It’s all about learning

If you see change from a learning perspective (such as with Lewin or Kolb’s cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking and acting), reflective practice addresses (and makes explicit) the reflecting and thinking phases of the learning cycle that we may take for granted as we rush through life.

As mentioned earlier, reflective practice was developed in professions where it is important (often critical) to learn from your mistakes. What I like best about it is the simple act of sitting down and writing out the experience means that I have to stop and look at the consequences of my actions. It requires me to consider options I may not have previously rather than just blindly continue doing what I always do. In doing so, patterns of behaviour or thinking are revealed, different perspectives can be explored and it opens up a world of possibility.

Revive yourself for conscious living

It also brings a lot of my unconscious actions or beliefs into consciousness so that I know I have a whole swag of skills or options at my disposal when a similar situation arises again. Knowing I have this repertoire of responses does wonders for my self-efficacy (the belief that I can do something), which is one of the key players in goal achievement.

Reflective practice can be used in many situations such as post-training implementation, action research and learning at work – and even getting on better with your partner. And after you do it for a while, you’ll find it occurs naturally when you’re in the situation so that you get what they call reflection-in-action as well.

I use reflective practice as part of my daily journaling and I find it helps me get to the bottom of things that are bugging me. And you’ll see plenty of it here at westonculture as it’s my preferred writing style: I write for understanding and ultimately to find better ways of living and working.

If you’re interested in using reflective practice in your own work and life, then checkout my Reflective Practice worksheet. It was written for coaches but I think it’s still applicable across work and life situations.

Do It Yourself! Setting up a blog

trish — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:47:44 +0000

I thought it might be helpful to those who would like to setup a blog but have no idea where to start, or even the confidence, to write about the process as I go about setting up westonculture.

I’m doing it organically, so although I intend for it to make money, I’m not doing a business plan and I’m not really setting up many parameters for what it will be or how it’s going to do it. I have a fuzzy idea of what it’s about but other than that the rest is going to happen as I go.

So, here have been my choice points thus far:

1. Pick a name, anyname

Choose something witty that will adequately describe what the blog is about. Okay, I’m not sure if I have achieved this but I like it and most importantly, it’s good enough to start with.

First Rule: Good enough is good enough.

2. Register the Domain name

I had to go with westonculture.net rather than dot-com as the dot-com wasn’t unavailable. No worries. I might turn it into a network, and a dot-net suits my agenda for keeping it personal. I chose not to go with an Australian domain (that ends in dot-au) as I’m not particularly focusing on Australia. Also, Australian domains are more expensive, and they can be a bit pendantic about needing a registered business name that resembles the domain name. Too much of a hassle.

There are plenty of cheap, reliable domain registrars. I chose godaddy.com as it’s cheap (or was before the Aus dollar crashed), easy to administer, and comes with one email account that can be forwarded. Oh, and I already had an account with them and had been using them for years with no problems.

3. Find a host

If you choose to use a hosted blog, such as blogger or wordpress , then you won’t have to worry about the next few steps. You’ll be able to go there, setup your account and be blogging in minutes. So why would you choose to host elsewhere? I’m not sure how true it is, but I feel I have more control over my files by hosting on an independent server. Plus, I’m not restricted to doing a blog, I can do any type of website I want which might come in handy further down the track.

I already have a host for my business site www.worklifedesign.com.au which allows subdomains and I have plenty of databases spare on that account. So I’m hosting it there. I could regret this further down the track but for the time being it will work adequately.

4. Choose your blog or content management software

I’m going with Wordpress because I’ve used it before and it has plenty of functionality and support. I also considered Joomla and Expression – but just don’t know enough about these yet. It’s important for me to get up and running with minimal hurdles.

5. Setup Wordpress

I’ve setup Wordpress before but it was with a different host where they had Fantastico scripts that did all the setup for you. This time I had to go through the couple of steps myself. I used two easily available guides to do this:

· A Beginners Guide to Installing Wordpress written by gav at every day is election day

· Installing Wordpress which is the guide from the official wordpress support pages.

At this stage you will have a very ugly, but functional, blog of your own like this:

wordpress basic theme

Now it’s time to have some fun.

6. Get a theme and some plugins to pretty-up your blog

After you’ve installed Wordpress then it’s time to pretty it up and getting it doing what you it to do. If you go to the Wordpress support pages above you’ll see that there are thousands of things called themes and plugins.

Themes are, like they sound, what’s going to make your blog look pretty. Have a browse through the wordpress themes directory. I was after a very minimal look for my blog – just basic text and photos – so I looked through the directory and then googled ‘mimimal wordpress themes’. I came up with half a dozen that looked interesting. As per the instructions, you download the theme, unzip it (if it’s zipped) and then upload it to the wp-content/themes/ folder on your server. Then it’s just a case of going into the wordpress admin (by logging in on your blog’s main page) and having a look at each of the themes in action.

You can always tweek your theme later, so again, follow the mantra: Good enough is good enough.

Plugins are the little bits of code that are going to give your blog functionality. There are plugins for all sorts of things – from setting up mailing lists to search engine optimisation to avatar generators. Choosing and setting up plugins is a similar drill to that for themes – checkout the wordpress plugin directory. I actually did a google of “best wordpress plugins” and got a list of about a dozen plugins that bloggers think are essential. I’ve only installed a few of them – the add-to-any (feed subscriber, email page); feedburner; and the print page (which went awol on me so I’ve disable it until I can work out why it’s not working properly).

6. Seriously pretty it up with logos and images

The theme I chose, came with a generic image for the header. It just had to go. So I did up a little montage of my universe to put there instead. (That’s the little cube pictures you see at the top of this page.) Sure, it took a couple of hours but it was sort of nice going through images and picking out ones that were significant to me. Like I said, this is my personal blog so I can be indulgent. If this was a business blog, I probably wouldn’t have such personal images, but then again, maybe I would…

7. Write something

Anything. Just get rid of that first sample post and comments quickly.

8. Keep writing

Okay, I’ve had a bit of a problem with that one. I’ve posted two things in a month. Pretty slack, I know, but if this doesn’t fit in to my life then there’s no point doing it. So, when the posts are ready, they will appear. You have been warned.

Now, go to it. Any questions then just google it. You can do it.