Episode 129. Changing Behaviour: Strategies for Success.
Episode 129. Changing Behaviour: Strategies for Success.
Today we discuss behaviour change, the process of modifying or altering a specific behaviour or set of behaviours. We explore the most effective ways of changing behaviour, including setting clear and specific goals, self-monitoring, creating an action plan, using positive reinforcement, changing the environment, modelling, and seeking professional help. Remember, changing behaviour takes time and effort and different techniques may work for different people. It's essential to understand the underlying causes and motivations that lead to the current behaviour. Join us as we dive into the best ways of making sustainable changes.
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Hello my friends, welcome back to the Insitu Health and Fitness podcast. It's me, Mac and I'm here all by myself today and I'm going to be helping you identify how you can change your behaviours.
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So firstly, let's define what I mean by behavior change. Behavior change simply refers to the process of modifying or altering a specific behavior or set of behaviors, AKA your habits. There are there are a variety of reasons that you may want to change your behavior such as personal growth, health and Wellness, fitness to to achieve a specific goal. So what actually is the best way to change your behaviour? Well, the answer is it depends, but bear with me. Behavior change is a complex process and it can be influenced by a variety of factors, including your personal motivation, the amount of social support that you have around you, and your environment. So let's just dive straight into some of the most effective ways of changing behaviour the 1st. Point that I wanted to speak about was. It's very obvious and I'm sure we've already spoken about a lot this year, but it is important and that is setting clear and specific goals. Clearly defined and measurable goals can help you focus your efforts and help you stay motivated. So for example, say you want to exercise for 30 minutes three times a week. Or maybe you want to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day if you have these clear defined goals. It's easy for you to identify or not whether you are hitting these goals each day. Think about it like. If you don't have a target, but you're aiming out in the open, you're never going to hit the bullseye right? So you need a target so that you can practice hitting that target. Now the second point I think goes hand in hand with setting clear and specific goals and that is self monitoring. So keeping track of your progress through self monitoring allows you to see your progress. If you can't see your progress, it is extremely hard for you to stay motivated and. Continue working towards your goals. So a simple example of self monitoring or
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monitoring your clear and specific goals that you've decided on is simply just getting a habit tracker. You could even draw a habit tracker up, write it on a scrap piece of paper and stick it to your fridge. But on the habit tracker you would put in 30 minutes of exercise and then you want to put a tick or cross next to that habit. Three times that week you could write. 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day and you want to ideally put a ticker across next to that habit every single day. So then at the end of the week, or even the end of the month, you can look back on your habit tracker and you can clearly see whether or not you are progressing towards your overall goal. You can see how many days out of the month you actually managed to get an exercise. You can see how many days out of the month you actually manage to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables. And it's very clear to you whether or not like the setup you have, the environment you have, the social support you have. Is working for you or not? And then once you have that evidence, it's much easier for you to either decide to keep going with the same goal, or to change and try something different that might work better for you. The Third Point that I have is creating an action plan. So having a plan of action to achieve your goals, including strategies and contingencies, they can help you stay on track and overcome the obstacles, because there is no doubt, absolutely no doubt that you're going to face obstacles. That's just the way life is. So for example, this could mean that you have to schedule your exercise timing on your calendar and make it a non-negotiable like. You wouldn't schedule a meeting in and then just decide at the last minute I'm not going to go to the meeting. You need to be thinking about your training sessions just like that. Once they're scheduled in, sure, maybe they can move around the calendar, but you cannot just delete
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them from the calendar. You could also do something similar with your meal planning for the week. You can sit down and write down all of the meals that you plan to have. That's going to make shopping a lot easier. It's going to make simple meal prepping a lot easier. And obviously it's going to make cooking when you get home from work a lot easier. Now, your action plan doesn't have to be putting things in your calendar. It could be something as simple as like at 5:00 o'clock. This is the process I go through to get ready for dinner on Sundays. This is how we get ready for the week so that we always make sure we have enough time for the gym and we have enough food. It's just having like having a moment to actually identify the process that you need to go through to get your goal or. To do your habit every day makes it so, so much more likely that you are actually going to achieve that habit. Because once you've thought about the actions that you have to take in order to get to that, there's a lot less resistance when you actually come up to the time of doing the habit because you've already thought through it. And it doesn't actually seem as daunting or time consuming or hard as you thought it would be because you have thought through all of the actions you need to take to. Achieve that habit or goal or daily behaviour. The 4th point I want to discuss is something that we talk about endlessly in my psychology degree, because it is without a doubt one of the most powerful ways to change behaviour, and that is using positive reinforcement. So positive reinforcement such as rewards or recognition for a desired behaviour, they can help to increase the likelihood of that behaviour. Reoccurring. For example, rewarding yourself for sticking to your exercise schedule, or rewarding
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yourself for reaching a certain number of servings and fruits and vegetables can and will increase the likelihood of that behaviour reoccurring. Now, with health and fitness, I think that there is a fine line between reward and reward, if that makes sense. So obviously if you're going to reward yourself for doing your training session on schedule and for 30 minutes, you don't necessarily want to reward yourself with like a big bowl of ice cream covered in cookies, because that isn't that reward isn't going to act in your favour towards a reaching your goals. So your reward also has to like still be satisfying and quote UN rewarding. But you also want it to be. Like under the same like helping you progress towards the same goal. So an example would be maybe you want to reward yourself for training for 30 minutes by watching your favorite TV show while you eat dinner. Or you want to reward yourself by listening to your favorite song. Or reward yourself by having a cup of tea and a small chocolate, something that feels satisfying and that you enjoy. Try pairing that with the. The behaviour that you were trying to add into your schedule, because then it's a lot more likely for you to want to exercise because you subconsciously you'll think, OK, if I do 30 minutes of exercise, then I can go home and I can watch White Lotus while I eat my delicious pasta for dinner. And it just it's a lot easier for you to get through that 30 minute session of exercise if you know that a reward is coming at the end, #5 is changing your environment, changing the environment. Can make it easier, or it can make it more difficult to engage in certain behaviors. For example, if you keep a gym bag in your car,
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it's going to make it more convenient for you to head to the gym straight after work. Or if you place the your fruits and vegetables at eye level in the fridge and you place the chocolate and. I don't know what other junk food people eat. Chocolate and beers maybe on the bottom shelf at the back where you can't see them. As soon as you open the fridge, it's much more likely that you will grab a piece of fruit as a snack than. I don't even know what junk food you keep in the fridge, but the candy bar or something like that. So there are a lot of there are a lot of small things that you can change in your home environment, your work environment, any environment that you spend a lot of time in that are going to help you change your behaviors. Because our environment is honestly just full of triggers. A lot of the time, we don't want something until we see it. So just think about that. Do I? Want to see this bag of chips when I get home from work tonight? Maybe you don't feel like the bag of chips in the morning because it's early and you just had your coffee, but. When you come home that night, you're probably going to be hungry and tired, so try to use your I guess. What's a good word for it? Your more rational self. To plan ahead for your less rational self that is going to undoubtedly come around in the afternoon or the evening.
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So simply moving things or even adding things into your environment that are going to support you in changing your behaviors is a really great way for you to use your environment as a tool to help you reach your goals is modeling. Now you're probably thinking, what the heck do I mean by modeling? So observing and learning from others who have successfully changed similar behaviour can be such a powerful tool for changing your own behaviour. So think about like kids do this. All of the time for the first, I don't know, probably 21 years plus of their lives. And we as adults do it probably without even noticing. You know how when you hang around A and you friend or when you first start spending a lot of time with your partner, you tend to pick up like the way that they speak some different terms, that they use behaviors that they have, even interests that they have. You can actually use that in your favor to help you change your. Behavior. So think about friends or family members or acquaintances that have successfully reached the goal that you are trying to reach, like weight loss, exercising regularly, having a healthy lifestyle and start to pick up on the small things that they do. Even talk to them about it. Try and spend more time with them. If you want to be more like somebody else, spending a lot of time with the person
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can do. Now, I'm not telling you to change your personality, I'm just telling you to. Find someone that has the behaviors you desire and spend more time with them because in the long run. If they are where you want to be, you're probably going to get along with them a lot better than. Your other friends that are maybe still drinking every weekend and partying and doing the behaviours that you are trying to get rid of. So try to learn from others who have successfully changed similar behaviors to you. The last point that I have got is seeking professional help. I think that this is underestimated, especially in Australia because we tend to have. Tall poppy syndrome and asking for help can sometimes, in some cases, mean that you can't do it by yourself or you're a failure, and that can be embarrassing. But I highly recommend if you are struggling to change your behaviour or your habits, or you just you. You've listened to this and you still have no idea where to start. You have no idea how to stay consistent. You don't even know what the goal or habit that you should be changing is. Consider talking to some sort of professional it. Would be a personal trainer and nutrition coach, a nutritionist, anyone that's going to be there to support you, give you guidance, and has expertise in addressing specific areas of behavior change relating to exercise and eating healthily. I love, love, love helping my clients change their behavior. Behavior change is one of my absolute favorite things to work on with people because simply changing the behavior. Of going to the pub every weekend and getting drunk and swapping that with going out for brunch or and going to the gym, I made that sound super pretentious. I didn't mean for it to sound that pretentious, I promise. But swapping a simple behavior like that
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can drastically improve someone's life. It can improve your mood, your energy, your ability to communicate your feelings properly, your motivation in life, your ability to focus and concentrate at work. Your happiness levels. I just cannot recommend highly enough. Spending a little bit of time on trying to change the. I don't want to use the word bad negative. Maybe behaviors that you have into more positive behaviors that are going to help you live a better life literally, and probably live a longer life as well. So let's wrap it up. It's important to note that changing behavior can take you a lot of time and it does take effort, and that different techniques may be effective for different people. So don't just assume that what works for somebody else is definitely going to work for you. You might have to try a few of these. Things that I've spoken about today in combination and just see what sort of sticks. It's also really important for you to remember that the most effective way to change your behavior is by understanding the underlying causes and motivations that led you to the current behavior. Is it a feeling of comfort? Is it a feeling of safety? Are you trying to get rid of an emotion? Experiencing anger, anxiety when you perform these behaviors, is it a lack of time? Is it stress? Is it the environment? There's a lot that goes into behaviors, and we spend a lot of subconscious time building up behaviors. And they are very hard to change because they're ingrained in us. We do them daily. We do them without even thinking about them. So I really don't want you to get disheartened when you try to change a behavior of yours and it takes a while because honestly, you are literally changing the communication systems in your brain when you are changing a behavior. So it's going to take
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a little bit of time. And of course, if you want support, I am beyond happy. To help you. Like I said, behaviour change is my absolute favorite area to work with people on. So please, please, please feel free to send me a DM. My Instagram handle is Mac_in situ. Or you can even go to the Insitu collective website and send an inquiry. Or just go to the contact US page. And I would love to have a chat with you about how I might be able to help you change your behaviors. Everybody thank you so much for hanging around if you're still here. This long, we truly appreciate every single one of you supporting the podcast. If you've got anything out of this episode, I would be beyond grateful if you could share it on social media. Send it to a friend or family member who you think would benefit from it, and I will see you in the next episode.
