Six Ways to Help People Change
If you want to help someone reach their goals, follow
these steps.
Often in life, you may find yourself trying
to help other people change. Whether you’re acting as a mentor, a parent, or a well-meaning
spouse, you hope to exert a positive influence and assist someone in reaching
their goals. What’s the best way to do this?
If you want to influence other people’s
behavior, then you need to develop trust. The core of trust in persuasive
interactions is authenticity—the degree to which people think that the public
face you have adopted fits who you really are inside. When people feel you are
telling them things you truly believe, they are less likely to be skeptical of
their interactions with you.
Thus you have to see yourself as others see
you. What do people perceive your motivations to be? Behavior change is hard
enough to accomplish when people are willing to engage in the process. When
they have reason to shy away from it because they are concerned about your
motives, then you have made things even more challenging for yourself.
While any one of the suggestions provided
below for helping others change will work to some degree on its own, combining
them is even more effective.
1.
Lead by example
This essay is adapted from Smart Change:
Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others (TarcherPerigee, 2014).
If you want other people to change, start
with yourself and make sure the things you want them to change about themselves
are things you do effectively yourself. “Do as I say and not as I do” is not a
formula for success. But that’s only the first step.
It is important to engage visibly in
the goals that you want them to adopt. When you lead by example, your actions
will serve as a source of goal contagion for other people in your environment. Your actions
help people see how a goal can be accomplished successfully.
Many professors I know make a point of
working in their offices with their doors open. They would probably be more
productive keeping their doors closed or perhaps even working from home. They
would get more done if they were interrupted less often. The point of working
in a visible way, though, is to give students a sense of what is required for
success in academia. To balance teaching classes, doing research, writing
papers, reviewing papers for journals, writing grants, and doing administrative
service for the university, most faculty I know put in long workdays. Faculty
talk to their students about the importance of putting in this time, but it is
easier for students to internalize the effort needed to succeed by seeing their
faculty mentors at work.
If you engage in the same behaviors you
expect of others, then you’re exhibiting the highest form of authenticity.
2.
Suggest goals
A goal is an end state that provides a focus
for your motivational energy. Goals that are near in time get more energy than
goals that are distant in time. The more active the goal, the bigger the
influence on behavior. Consequently, you are biased against doing things that
will pay off in the long run when there is some other activity you could do now
to achieve a short-term goal.
So if you want to help someone change, your
task is to help him or her formulate daily short-term goals that will
ultimately lead to long-term success—and then help them remember those goals.
Think like a business selling a product. Most businesses would never survive if
they sold a product to a person only once. People’s actions are driven by
specific circumstances. If you show people the conditions in which the product
is used—through, say, an ad or product placement in a movie—then they will be
reminded to use the product in those situations when they encounter them later.
The same is true of drinking less alcohol or getting more exercise—the goal is
important, but it helps to be constantly reminded of that goal. That could mean
leaving little notes on the fridge (“Drink less beer!”), or hanging up the gym
bag in the foyer of the house.
3. Give
the right feedback
Feedback can influence the mindset people
adopt about behavior and motivation. People often give others feedback that
inadvertently reinforces an “entity mindset,” which describes accomplishments as the result of fixed
traits. If you see a friend on a diet at a party eating a small plate of fruit,
you might say to him, “Wow, you have remarkable willpower, I couldn’t do that.”
On the surface, this is a compliment. However, underlying this statement is the
idea that willpower is an entity that cannot be changed. The dieter might be
exhibiting great willpower in that circumstance, but if he gives in to
temptation in some other circumstance, does that now mean that he has reached
the limits of his willpower?
It is better to give positive feedback that
does not reinforce an entity mindset. For that same dieter, you say, “I’m
impressed that you have managed to avoid all of these tempting desserts. What
is your secret?” You are still providing a positive message, but you are not
assuming that there is some fixed capacity for willpower. Instead, you’re
inviting him to tell you about all of the strategies he has put together to
support his success at sticking to his diet under difficult circumstances. This
kind of feedback promotes an incremental mindset, which acknowledges that most
abilities are skills that can be nurtured.
The encouragement you give also needs to be
tailored to a person’s stage of change. Research by
Ayelet Fishbach and her colleagues at the University of
Chicago shows that positive and negative feedback have different influences on
people. Positive feedback helps make people more committed to a goal. Negative
feedback is particularly good for spurring people to make more progress.
When people are first starting to change
their behavior, positive feedback is valuable because it helps them feel a
greater sense of commitment toward the goal they want to achieve. These early
stages of behavior change can be a fragile time, so it’s helpful to reinforce
commitment to change. Over time, however, people shift their own thinking away
from their overall commitment to the goal to their sense of progress. At that
point, they are motivated by negative feedback, which reminds them of the
distance between where they are now and where they would like to be.
Of course, this negative feedback does not make
people feel good. Even in the later stages of behavior change, people still
enjoy getting positive feedback more than they enjoy getting negative feedback.
But at the later stages of change, the positive feedback is not nearly as
motivating as the negative feedback.
Although it can be difficult to give negative
feedback, it is important to be willing to make people uncomfortable when
working with them to change behavior. If you’re helping people manage their
careers, then you can use discomfort to help them get motivated to seek a
promotion. Studies suggest that when you focus people on the contribution they
have made at work, they are happy with their current job but they do not
actively seek a promotion. If you focus people on what still remains to be achieved
in their careers, then they feel bad about their current job but are motivated
to move upward. Remind yourself that giving negative feedback to people who are
already committed to behavior change can spur them to improve.
4.
Support good habits
In his book The Checklist
Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande extols the virtues of
checklists in a variety of situations in which the same task has to be
performed repeatedly. He talks about how one significant source of infections
in hospitals comes when a staff member in the intensive care unit (ICU) has to
put in a central line, which is a long thin tube that’s inserted into a vein in
the chest so medicines can be delivered directly into the bloodstream. When
these lines get infected, it can put ICU patients (who are already quite sick)
in serious danger.
As Gawande points out, if the ICU staff
covers the patient with a drape when the line is being inserted and uses
chlorhexidine soap, then the incidence of these infections goes down
dramatically. Hospitals in Michigan got a medical equipment manufacturer to
bundle the drapes and the soap in a single kit and then gave staff in the ICUs
a checklist to make sure that they carried out each step in the same order
every time. This combination of changes to the environment and routine created
a consistent mapping that was repeated often. It lowered the incidence of
central line infections to near zero, which greatly improved patient outcomes.
When you want to change the behavior of the
people around you, think about how you can create consistent mappings in the
environment. Are there methods of getting people to reorganize their
environment in ways that will support the creation
of habits? Can you influence people to perform an action often enough that
they’ll acquire a habit?
5. Take
advantage of laziness
People want to minimize both the amount of
time spent thinking about their behavior and the amount of effort required to
act. You want to make the desirable behaviors as easy as possible to perform
and the undesirable behaviors hard to perform.
The simplest way to make this happen is to
have control over people’s environment. California bans smoking in
workplaces—and indeed, in any public space. As a result, employees have to walk
a long way just to have a cigarette—which in many circumstances makes smoking
very hard to do.
There are other ways to manipulate
environments to encourage desired behaviors. The city of Austin has installed a
number of dog hygiene stations all over town. These stations consist of a
garbage can with a liner and a dispenser with plastic mitts that can be used to
pick up dog waste. These stations make it easier for dog owners to clean up
after their dogs, which cuts down on the number of people who fail to do so.
6. Develop support networks
Generating communities around a process is an
efficient way of engaging people to change their behavior.
That is the function of groups like
Toastmasters International, which aims to help people improve their public
speaking skills. Giving talks in public is routinely listed as one of the most
stressful events in people’s work lives. This anxiety becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy, because the stress of giving a talk hurts people’s performance when
they get up to do it. Toastmasters organizes groups of people who get together,
give presentations, and give feedback to each other. The atmosphere is
professional but relaxed, so the community works to help others get more
comfortable with speaking in public. Many people who have been helped by this
group continue to attend meetings to help new members improve their skills. In
this way, Toastmasters functions as a source of both mentors and partners in
behavior change.
That is ultimately the recipe for a
successful support community:
·
Find a process that engages a group of people.
·
Focus on creating a neighborhood around that
process.
·
Add experts who can give people good advice
to help them achieve their goals.
Social relationships are a critical part of
behavior change—and conversations are a critical part of relationships. Parents
of school-age children are often deeply involved in their kids’ education. A
community of other parents facing the same challenges can be a great source of
support. Groups like this enable behavior change to be made as part of a larger
process, like parenting. The conversations they have on the playground or at
PTA meetings can change behavior, growing organically out of networks that are
built on discussion.
We are intensely social creatures—and, of
course, conversation is a two-way street. Your own behavior is being shaped by
others all the time! To really understand how to help people change, it’s
valuable to think about the ways other people try to influence your behavior.
Because so many of your behaviors are driven by habits, there are many actions
you take on a daily basis that you do not consciously choose to take. To the
extent that other people are affecting your environment, your neighborhood, and
the development of your habits, you may have ceded control of your behavior to
them.
Understanding the ways that people can
manipulate your motivational system will allow you to recognize when others are
affecting your actions. So even if you have no interest in influencing other
people’s behavior, these tips will allow you to recognize when other people are
affecting yours. At that point, you can decide for yourself if their influence
is bringing you closer to your goals—or pushing you further away from them.
By Art Markman
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_to_help_people_change?utm_source=GG+Newsletter+Mar+9%2C+2016&utm_campaign=GG+Newsletter+Mar+9+2016&utm_medium=email
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