27 Feb Want to Change Your Behavior? Make These 2 Changes to Your Environment First
Happiness is very much about what YOU DO
But happiness is also very much about the environment in which you do what you do
Most often, we think of happiness (and health and wellbeing and success etc) as things that we determine by our own actions; and they are
But the context in which we live and work is also very important and often underestimated…
via Inc.com by Wanda Thibodeaux
In full disclosure, I’ve got quite a few behaviors I’d like to change–I like to down French fries when I’m stressed out, for example. And since you’re human like me, I’m guessing you’ve got some areas you’d like to tackle, too. You also might need to initiate change within your team to keep your company competitive in a rapidly shifting market.
But what, exactly, is the best way to get yourself or others to change behavior for the better?
In a June 2019 Ted Talk, Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, asserted that the answer isn’t just providing lots of information, even in the age of Big Data. And it’s not to try to get the people themselves to change, either.
The right approach, says Ariely, is to focus on changing the environment. That means doing only two things.
1. Reduce friction.
On one hand, this can mean simply reducing as many obstacles to the new behavior as possible, making the new behavior easier to adopt. For example, if you want you and your team to organize folders a particular way, you could ensure that all of the supplies necessary to do so are together in a single location, rather than scattered in different cabinets or closets.
But sometimes, reducing obstacles is not always possible to do. So more broadly, reducing friction means that you have to make the new behavior seem equal to the old behavior in terms of perceived risk, benefits and effort. For instance, you could have your tech support team ensure that a log-in process for a new application you want to implement is as similar as possible to the log-in process for the application your team is already familiar with. Once you’ve leveled the playing field like this, switching what you do isn’t as scary and seems just as reasonable as what you used to do.
But having two equal options isn’t necessarily going to move you to select one or the other, or even to take action at all. So what really tips the scale to behavioral change is the second point…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE