Behavioural change dichotomy

Why do people find change so difficult, especially changes in behaviour? Like changing eating habits, stopping smoking, changing our work habits despite us knowing they are for the better? I believe the answer is confidence.

Our resistance to change is a survival technique. If we feel confident it is safe to say that we are happy with many of the decisions that we’ve made that have led up to this point – and so change is easier.

If we are unconfident our body interrupts that as the fact we have made some poor decisions – and so it believes our ability to make good ones may be impaired, so it makes change more difficult for us; so our level of certainty about change needs to be greater and change becomes difficult.

But what is change? I believe it is feeling the urge to do one thing, and doing something different. Change is resisting our habits to form better ones.

This highlights one of the major problems in the way we interact with those around us. We often criticise if we believe behaviour is inappropriate despite only wanting to help? We may focus on the negatives hoping to scare that person into changing. Of course the effect of criticism often erodes confidence – and with less confidence change actually becomes much more difficult. Are we helping?

What we really want to say is “I agree with all the choices you have made up till now. Going forward I believe the direction you will find most appropriate is this…”.

Think of our lives as journeys – perhaps driving your car. You don’t want to find you’ve driven for hundreds of miles in one direction only to be told it’s the wrong way. Better to be simply told the route to get to your destination from that point. In fact, when you have found that you’ve travelled in the wrong direction do you simply stop and drive back the way you came or take an alternative route? If you are like most, the U-turn feels like the last resort.

If you really want someone to change you need to boost their confidence so they can change themselves. With confidence people can make the right decisions in life – change their jobs, give up smoking, improve their eating habits. Without confidence, habits good or bad, will always rule.

Why do people smile?

I’ve often wondered why people smile. What is “happy” and why do we demonstrate it in such a fashion. We don’t often smile on our own; it’s more of a social function. The other day while playing with a friends new born child I was fascinated by its smile and the effect it had on its audience. Adults would perform various antics in an attempt to get the child to smile. It would smile when someone performed a new antic or new sound and I felt compelled to join in. It occurred to me that a child is using a smile to provoke us to interact with it. To help its development. When it stops smiling people try harder. When it smiles people repeat or continue their behaviour until the child stops smiling. So it seemed reasonable to assume that a child smiles at the unexpected – something it has not learnt or does not expect. If we think about ourselves as adults – we smile at jokes when the punch line was unexpected; showing those around us that we've learnt something new encouraging them to continue to teach us. So perhaps the smile is saying to people “I can learn something from you”. It encourags people to continue. Perhaps the ideal strategy is to smile all the time? Maybe it is. But often it's involuntary; something difficult to control. Although some people do seem to smile a lot more than others - take the people of Jamaica? There is something that also inhibits our smile - social hierarchies. People often smile at their superiors; subconsciously showing them their interest to learn, yet people in senior positions often smile less often at their subordinates.