Six ways to help people change

by Rubi Ahsan Associate S.E.O Consultant

You often try to help other people in life change. Whether you act as a well-intended mentor, father or spouse, expect to exert a positive influence and help someone achieve their goals. What is the best way to do this?

If you want to influence the behavior of others, you must build trust. The core of trust in convincing interactions is authenticity: the extent to which people think that the audience they have adopted fits in with what it really is. When people feel that you are telling them things that you really believe, chances are that they will be skeptical about their interactions with you.

That is why you must see yourself as others see you. What do people see of your motivations? Behavioral change is hard enough to achieve when people are willing to participate in the process. If they have reasons to avoid it because they are concerned about your motives, then you have made it even more difficult.

Although all of the suggestions below to help others work to some extent alone, combining them is even more effective.

1. Set the Right Example

If you want other people to change, start with yourself and make sure that the things you want to change about yourself are things that you do effectively. "Doing what I say and not what I do" is not a formula for success. But that is just the first step.

It is important to visibly participate in the objectives that you want them to meet. If you lead by example, your actions will be a source of contamination for other people in your area. Your actions help people see how a goal can be successfully achieved.

I know many teachers who work in their office with open doors. They would probably be more productive to keep their doors closed or even work from home. They would do more things if they were interrupted less often. The purpose of visible working, however, is to give students an idea of what is needed to succeed in the academy. To balance the lessons, the research, the writing of papers, the evaluation of papers for journals, the writing of scholarships and the provision of administrative services for the university, most professors I know work hard. Teachers talk to their students about the importance of dedication this time, but it is easier for students to internalize the efforts needed to succeed when they see their mentors at work.

If you become involved in the same behavior that you expect from others, you display the highest level of authenticity.

2. Set Goals

An objective is a final state that offers an approximation of your motivating energy. Goals that are close by get more energy than goals that are far in time. The more active the goal, the greater the influence on behavior. Consequently, he is capable of doing things that are worthwhile in the long term when there is another activity that he can now do to achieve a short-term goal.

So if you want to help someone change, it's your job to help them formulate short-term daily goals that will ultimately lead to long-term success, and then help them remember those goals. Think like a company that sells a product. Most companies would never survive if they only sold a product once to a person. The actions of people are driven by specific circumstances. If you show people the circumstances in which the product is used, for example through an advertisement or a product location in a movie, they are reminded to use the product in those situations when they find it later. The same applies to drinking less alcohol or exercising more: the goal is important, but it helps to remember it constantly. This may mean that you leave small notes in the fridge ("Drink less beer!") Or hang the sports bag in the lobby of the house.

3. Enter the correct comments

Feedback can influence the mentality that people adopt about behavior and motivation. People often give comments to others who, without realizing it, reinforce an 'entity mentality' that describes performance due to fixed traits. If you see a friend on a diet at a party eating a small plate of fruit, you could say, "Wow, you have remarkable willpower, I couldn't do that." At first glance, this is a compliment. However, this statement is based on the idea that willpower is an entity that cannot be changed. The dieter may show great willpower in that circumstance, but does he mean that he is tempted in another circumstance that he has then reached the limits of his willpower?

It is better to give positive feedback that does not reinforce the mentality of an entity. For the same diet you say: "I am impressed that you have managed to avoid all these tempting desserts. What is your secret?" You still give a positive message, but you do not assume that there is a fixed capacity for willpower. Instead, he invites you to tell you about all the strategies he has developed to support his success in maintaining his diet in difficult circumstances. This type of feedback promotes an incremental mentality, which recognizes that most skills are skills that are fed.

The incentive you provide must also adapt to the change phase of a person. Research by Ayelet Fishbach and her colleagues at the University of Chicago shows that positive and negative comments have different influences on people. Positive feedback helps people to commit more to one goal. Negative feedback is especially good to encourage people to move forward.

When people start changing their behavior, positive feedback is valuable because it helps them feel more involved in the goal they want to achieve. These early stages of behavioral change can be a fragile moment, so it is useful to strengthen engagement for change. Over time, however, people change their thinking from their general dedication to the goal to their sense of progress. At that moment 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 behavioral change, people still receive more positive responses than they would like to receive negative responses. But in the final stages of change, positive feedback is not as motivating as negative.

Although it can be difficult to give negative feedback, it is important to disturb people when they work with them to change behavior. If you help people manage their careers, you can use the inconvenience to motivate them to seek promotion. Studies suggest that when you focus people on the contribution they made at work, they are happy with their current job, but are not actively looking for a promotion. If you focus people on what still needs to be achieved in their career, they feel bad for their current job, but they are motivated to move up. Remember that giving negative comments to people who are already committed to behavioral change can encourage them to improve.

4. Support good habits

In his book The Manifesto of the Checklist, the surgeon Atul Gawande praises the virtues of the checklists in different situations in which the same task must be performed repeatedly. He talks about how an important source of infection occurs in hospitals when an intensive care (IC) employee has to place a central line, a long, thin tube that is inserted into a vein in the chest so that medication can be administered. Delivered directly into the bloodstream. When these lines become infected, this can seriously endanger ICU patients (who are already quite ill).

As Gawande notes, if the IC staff covers the patient with a curtain when the line is inserted and uses chlorhexidine soap, the incidence of these infections decreases dramatically. The hospitals in Michigan picked up a manufacturer of medical equipment to group the curtains and soap into a single set and then gave ICU staff a checklist to check if they performed each step in the same order every time. This combination of changes in the environment and routine created a consistent mapping that was often repeated. It reduced the incidence of central line infections to almost zero, which greatly improved patient outcomes.

If you want to change the behavior of the people around you, think about how you can make consistent assignments in the environment. Are there methods for people to reorganize their environment in ways that support the creation of habits? Can you influence people to perform an action often enough to acquire a habit?

5. Take advantage of laziness

People want to minimize both the amount of time they spend thinking about their behavior and the amount of effort needed to act. You want to perform desired behavior the easiest and difficult to perform unwanted behavior.

The easiest way to make this happen is to have control over the environment of people. California prohibits smoking in the workplace and, in fact, in any public space. As a result, employees have to walk a lot to smoke a cigarette, which makes smoking very difficult in many circumstances.

There are other ways to manipulate environments to encourage desired behavior. The city of Austin has installed a number of dog hygiene stations throughout the city. These stations consist of a garbage can with a liner and a dispenser with plastic gloves that can be used to collect dog waste. These stations facilitate the cleaning of dog owners after their dogs, which reduces the number of people who don't.

6. Develop supporting networks.

Generating communities around a process is an efficient way to engage people in changing their behavior.

That is the role of groups such as Toastmasters International, whose purpose is to help people improve their public speaking skills. Giving public conversations is usually mentioned as one of the most stressful events in people's professional lives. This fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the stress of giving a speech adversely affects people's performance when they get up to do it. Toastmasters organizes groups of people who meet, give presentations and feed each other. The atmosphere is professional but relaxed, so the community works to help others feel more comfortable talking in public. Many people helped by this group continue to attend meetings to help new members improve their skills. In this way, Toastmasters works as a source of mentors and partners in behavioral change.

That is ultimately the recipe for a successful support community:

Find a process that involves a group of people.
Focus on creating a neighborhood around that process.
Add experts who can give people good advice to help them reach their goals.

Social relationships are a crucial part of behavioral change and conversations are a crucial part of relationships. Parents of school-aged children are often closely involved in the education of their children. A community of other parents who face the same challenges can be a great source of support. With such groups, behavioral change can be made as part of a broader process, such as upbringing. Conversations in the playground or at PTA meetings can change the behavior, organically growing from discussion-based networks.

We are intensely social beings, and of course the conversation is a two-way street. Your own behavior is constantly being shaped by others! To really understand how to help people change, it is valuable to think about the ways in which other people try to influence their behavior. Because much of his behavior is determined by habits, there are many actions that he performs daily that he does not consciously choose. To the extent that other people influence their environment, their neighborhood and the development of their habits, they may have given them control over their behavior.

By understanding the ways in which people can manipulate their motivation system, they can recognize when others are influencing their actions. Therefore, even if you are not interested in influencing the behavior of others, you can use these tips to identify when other people are influencing your behavior. At that time, you can decide for yourself whether your influence brings you closer to your goals or whether you move further away from them.

Please support Mr. Sanjit Bakshi, he is honest man gets help all people always doing a good job his life, Sanjit Bakshi Leads Oriental Structural Engineers, Central Park and Oriental Infratrust as a Director. Instrumental in growth and strengthening of the company’s profile. Responsible for conceptualizing, analyzing and successful implementation of the BOT-PPP business model based Projects in Oriental.