Tag: Goals

Changing Bad Habits, Creating Healthy Ones

Posted on January 30, 2018 by - , , , , , ,

Old habits can be hard to break, and new habits hard to make, but with these six basic steps you can develop new, healthy behaviors that stick.

Can You Retrain Your Brain?

Make your list and check it twice. This time you’re going to kill it:

  • Make a healthy snack
  • Go to the gym
  • Don’t waste time on cell phone
  • Read a classic novel
  • House train your pet

We all know habits don’t change overnight — not for simple doggies and not for big-brained human beings.  But there’s good news: research shows that just like Rex can learn that he should go potty outside instead of on your gym bag, you can rewire your brain to change your own habits.1 But we humans need a subtler approach than a few treats and “good boys” to change our ways.

Here’s how you can better understand how habits form and how to replace bad ones with good.

6 Steps to Changing Habits

    1. Identify Cues.
      Something has to trigger a habit, and a cue can be anything. Maybe stress makes you crave chocolate, or the sound of your alarm triggers you to hit the snooze button. Identifying cues helps you understand what puts your habits into motion.
    2. Disrupt Once you know the cues, you can throw bad habits off track. If the alarm cues you to bash the snooze button every morning, put the alarm clock on the other side of the room. Trekking across the cold floor will likely disrupt the snooze habit.
    3. Replace.  Research shows that replacing a bad behavior with a good one is more effective than stopping the bad behavior alone.2 The new behavior “interferes” with the old habit and prevents your brain from going into autopilot. Deciding to eat fruit every time your mind thinks “cookie” substitutes a positive behavior for the negative habit.
    4. Keep It Simple.  It’s usually hard to change a habit because the behavior has become easy and automatic. The opposite is true, too: new behaviors can be hard because your brain’s basal ganglia, (the “autopilot” part), hasn’t taken over this behavior yet.3Simplifying new behaviors helps you integrate them into your autopilot routines.
    5. Think Long-Term.  Habits often form because they satisfy short-term impulses, the way chewing on your nails might immediately calm your nerves.  But short-term desires often have long-term consequences, like nasty, splintered, chewed up fingers.  Focusing long term while trying to change some habits will help you remember why you’re investing the effort.
    6. Persist.  Research has shown that what you’ve done before is a strong indicator of what you’ll do next. This means established habits are hard to break. But the good news is, if you keep at it, your new behaviors will turn into habits, too.4Persistence works — at first it might be painful to get up at 5am for that jog, but soon it will be second nature.

Give it another go with all these tips in mind. This time, toss the chips and replace them with veggies; when your brain craves salty, fried potatoes, it found carrots instead. Promise yourself that when you have the urge to kill some time on your cell phone, you’ll disrupt the urge by picking up good book instead.

Finally, keep your gym bag in the car so you don’t forget it — the first step toward forming a new 15-minutes-on-the-treadmill-during-lunch habit.

So, habits can be changed, and with a bit of time and some effort, healthy behaviors can become second nature. Now get on it, so you can be Healthy For Good!

 

Sources:

1 Putting habit into practice, and practice into habit: a process evaluation and exploration of the acceptability of a habit-based dietary behaviour change intervention, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2014
2 Breaking Habits with Implementation Intentions: A Test of Underlying Processes, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011
3 The role of the basal ganglia in habit formation, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2006 
4 Theoretical explanations for maintenance of behaviour change: a systematic review of behaviour theories, Health Psychology Review, 2016

Last Updated: January 11, 2018

Copyright © 2018 American Heart Association, Healthy For GoodTM, heart.org/healthyforgood

Thought Leadership

Posted on January 15, 2018 by - , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Thought leader” is a popular term going this year. It sounds impressive and timely, even if we’re not sure what it means. At one level, the term is meaningless. If you aspire to be a thought leader, does that mean you’re currently a thoughtless leader? Joking aside, “thought leader” has come to refer to an expert in a given field who’s been able to monetize that expertise. Some look at the reference as the result of inflated ego, but also as a useful marketing tool for increasing visibility and recognition.

Whether about acclaim, expertise, money or hype, thought leadership is a growing industry. It’s no accident that this is happening even as cyberspace suggests faster is better, anonymous counts — and civility does not. The term’s popularity reflects the increasing rare blend of communication skills, expertise, emotional intelligence, vision and implementation know-how. While this skill set is not entirely unfamiliar to leaders, it’s a combination that is withering on the internet vine.

Ironically, social networks are seeing a rise in thought leadership groups. They attempt to support emerging thought leaders and embed the term into the general consciousness in the process. Group members are doing a community service by translating the skill set into digestible, actionable quick reads. Here are several quotes from thought leaders in one of these groups.

“Thought leadership requires being able to leverage your own ideas into frameworks made simple for others to follow.”

“Thought leadership means being able to voice ideas, concepts or life questions in ways that help others make sense of them and/or contribute to a better understanding, development or actualization of an organization or community.”

“A thought leader is a conscious leader with a high level of emotional intelligence, serving and growing at a higher level.”

Based on these quotes on thought leadership, how does an organization develop training that produces an/or nurtures these leaders? How do they create what are essentially futurists who can communicate complex ideas, demonstrate emotional intelligence and actively contribute to the organization’s growth and success? The answer lies in a four-step process with each stage being both stand alone and sequential.

1. Communication: Leaders must be aware that every detail of communication matters. Each detail changes the context, the perception and the response in an interaction. Whether written, verbal or nonverbal, or just the tone of voice, we are always on stage. Further, the cultural expressions and idioms we use every day are shorthand for the full range of our beliefs, traditions and values. Awareness of and sensitivity to an organization’s culture are the building blocks of cultural competency. Without such cultural awareness and sensitivity, A lack of awareness and sensitivity can lead to a train wreck on the knowledge highway between team members, customers, and vendors.

2. Emotional intelligence: Some call it learning to work outside of your comfort zone, others refer to this as conflict management. Thought leadership requires self-awareness that is nuanced, in-depth, and disciplined. There needs to be multiple levels in our comfort zones. The levels become a commonly shared metric not only of inner discomfort but of the severity of interpersonal conflicts. Blend awareness of inner and external stressors and crises can be anticipated and redirected.

3. Vision: Change agents, futurists and innovators are at a premium today. These innovators’ expertise is fundamental to their talents, but it does not stand alone. To be believable and actionable, a vision should also be trustworthy. Visionaries must establish and continually reinforce their dependability, accountability and responsibility along with the traits of empathy, hope and fairness. An impactful vision not only draws on the logic of ideas, but also on the faith and values of beliefs.

4. Action plan: When communication expertise, emotional intelligence and vision are folded into the planning process, thought leadership emerges. The decision-making matrix of goals, objectives, tasks and timelines blends the three elements into an actionable reality for team building, engagement and collaboration towards a common goal.

As we assess the past year and look to the future, thought leadership becomes our most valuable asset. We put together the story of our 2017 accomplishments and communicate it with emotional intelligence, honoring the expertise that made our achievements possible. We also put together the story for 2018 with a vision for the year and a plan for attaining it. The new year is a time for thought leaders to model being thankful and gracious and demonstrating actionable hope that the best is yet to come.

Deborah Levine, an award-winning author and trainer/coach, is editor of the American Diversity Report. Contact her at www.americandiversityreport.com This article first appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, January 14, 2018.