Moving forward with positive behaviour change – can new habits help?
Do you spend a lot of time focused on what you think you need to fix about yourself, your life or your business?
Do you spend more time focused on the things you aren’t so good at rather than the things you do well or the things that fill you with passion and joy?
There are many articles, videos, social media posts etc. about the power of positive thinking. There is a wealth of evidence that our thoughts don't just affect us psychologically, but they also have physical effects on our body. Positive thinking can reduce stress levels, lead to better overall physical and emotional health, longer life and higher resilience.
There are many practices designed to help people think positively, including:
· Focusing on the good things in life and practising gratitude
· Spending time with positive people
· Practising positive self-talk & affirmations
· Mindfulness and meditation
The focus of many practices start with our minds, can we develop a more positive outlook and experience by starting with our behaviours? Can identifying the things that bring you joy and make you feel positive, and the things that you're already great at, and doing more of these, create the personal and work life that you desire?
The concept of Viral Change, developed by Dr Leandro Herrero, is based on the principle of the creation of an epidemic of behaviours – the behaviours that will multiply and build the desired culture, through the informal networks that exist within the organisation.
So how does this apply to individuals? Can you adopt the same approach to improve your leadership capability or your life? Can we create our own, personal-epidemic of positive behaviours and habits that will create the life we want, where we do more of the things, we are good at, and that we enjoy?
If you believe that there is no change without behaviour change, and that behaviours are at the root of change, then the answer is yes. Rather than focusing on the negatives, and fixing what’s wrong, we need to focus on the positive things we want to create and the behaviours that will get us there.
I would like to share one of my favourite quotes:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space.In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
This quote often underpins my coaching conversations with clients. It's also been at the forefront of my own personal journey to manage my own thinking patterns and behaviours.
Coaching focuses on maximising the space between the stimulus, the thoughts and emotions this creates, and creating choice over the behaviours that result. So many of my coaching conversations focus on choice, and choice of behaviour above all else.
Is it really as simple as creating new positive habits?
Creating new habits, which you can sustain, requires repetition. It’s about consistency, replacing negative behaviours with new positive habits. Keeping this simple is important, the story you are creating for your future doesn’t have to be big, grandiose, or scary - this can just make the first step hard to imagine, let alone take!
So how can you start? –
1. Start by asking yourself a couple of questions:
· What brings you joy?
· where do you spend your time that has the best impact on you and your life, whether it's your personal life or business?
· where do you feel your values are most honoured?
2. turn these into behaviours – things you can do and repeat
3. Think about what will help you repeat and embed your new behavioural habits?
· Reminders on your mirror, front door or desk?
· Your future story or goals written in your journal or notebook?
· A daily check-in or reflection – which part of my day fitted best with my positive journey? Notice the small stuff too!
o What did you say differently?
o How did you feel different?
o What are you doing differently?
Recognising and recording your positive habit changes is important. It is inevitable that there will be times when we start to doubt our ability to create what we want to and start to feel like our efforts are in vain – we are hardwired with negativity bias.
A little aside…
Negativity bias is the tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us far more strongly than positive ones. We may find ourselves ruminating over a few words of criticism even though we've had many more positive comments about a piece of work; or find ourselves dwelling on past mistakes or the future potential for things to go wrong. This is negativity bias at work. It's an involuntary thought process and we all do it, it's part of the brain's learning system.
When we're starting to work on something new, like building a positive habit, it can be useful to remember negativity bias and recognise it when we start to see it pop up in our thinking.
There's also nothing wrong with the odd bad mood! When we are in a good mood, we may not feel the need to change anything, a bad mood may prompt us to analyse a little bit and focus harder on the positive change we want to achieve.
Its also worth knowing that as you step forward to change your life, an inner alarm can trigger. Homeostasis – the tendency to maintain the system- is a strong, universal force and your plans to make changes to your life may well tilt this well-oiled machine. All of us have a self-sabotaging inner voice — or voices! — that hold us back. Preserving the status quo is part of this gremlin’s job. So, it’s no wonder that when you plan to move forward in a different way, it wakes up the gremlin. The bigger the dream, the heftier the gremlins that you will be wrestling with become. Sometimes called the “inner critic,” negative self-talk, or the saboteur, your gremlin has all the reasons ready for why this plan is a stupid, dangerous, hopeless, or otherwise ill-advised course of action. The gremlin is particularly adept at taking a small piece of the truth and fabricating it into the blanket reason for stopping, or never starting. Identifying your gremlins and naming them, will give you a better chance at spotting them early and stopping them sabotaging your new positive habits.
Whether your goals are for increased income, having a more authentic impact, a more peaceful or simpler life, for travel or adventure – approaching these goals by identifying the behaviours you need to adopt to get there, built upon the strengths you already have, will increase your chances of success. Creating the habits of positive behaviour will also help you to avoid the magnet that trying to pull you back.
Enjoy the process of learning how to live and work in a more positive way and celebrate the wins along the way - every time you complete a new habit, maybe it's time to do a happy dance and recognise what you've done - if that's a step too far then jotting it down in your notebook works too. The point is not to let your success pass unnoticed - acknowledge it and use it to continue building on the positivity
Whether you're interested in organisational culture, with behaviours at the core; creating your own business in a way that honours your values or you want to create a life built upon the things that bring you joy and that you are good at, I hope that my thoughts about focusing on the positive and making this your norm, may help you along the way the way.