Purposeful Growth

Successfully changing harmful behaviors, such as over-eating and smoking, can be difficult. Knowing the processes of change and when to use each will help.

Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is the hard part. Just

ask the person who’s lost fifty pounds–over and over again, and still weighs as much or more than when he started. It’s the same with smoking, drinking, or any life behavior we try to change. The difficult part is not changing the behavior, the difficult part is changing the behavior for good. 

Has this been your pattern of weight loss, smoking cessation, or drinking in moderation? Have you gone through repeated cycles of vowing to change and making the change, only to fall back into your old behavior? If so, there’s still hope for you. You’re not lazy. You don’t lack willpower, motivation, or resolve. You’re not a failure, nor a hopeless case.

James Prochaska, psychology professor and co-author of Changing for Good, explains that you may just be using the wrong process for your stage of change. Prochaska defines six cycles of a successful life change:

His research shows that there are nine processes that are used in successful life changes, but that these processes are not effective if they’re used at the wrong time. For example, most change programs are action oriented: stop smoking in one week, lose thirty pounds in ten weeks, etc.

These programs, by design, are geared to the person who is in the Action cycle, which is the fourth stage of change. But, and this is the reason we fail, most of us have not moved through the first three stages. We just jumped, or were pushed, into the action stage and we’re not ready for action. So we lose a few pounds, but put it all back on, and then some.

Prochaska describes each of the six stages of successful change and each of the nine processes for successful change. There are easy self-assessments to help the reader determine where they are in the change process.

This article first appeared in the Personal Development Topic at Suite101.com.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Change, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.