Changing for Good: Transform Your Life with Positive Habits | Self-Improvement Books & Personal Growth Resources for Daily Motivation | Perfect for Home, Office & Gift Giving

Unless you are (or think you are) the ultimate, paradigmatic exemplar of Peter Drucker's "Effective Executive", you can probably think of a thing or two you would like to change about yourself. Certainly, CEOs and other top executives tend not to be heavy drinkers, heavy smokers, or simply very heavy, so you may be looking to change one of those behaviors. Or perhaps you find yourself making poor decisions because of long-standing impatience, arrogance, or inability to tolerate uncertainty. Perhaps an executive coach has identified a characteristic that you agree is less than optimal for your own career and for your organization's performance. Yet, like organizational change, personal change is hard. Reliable guidelines have been lacking for either kind of change. The authors of Changing for Good make a strong case for having developed a more scientifically sound approach to personal change.Clinical psychologist James Prochaska and his colleagues studied the many strategies self-changers used to quit smoking, stop drinking, and lose weight. These researchers faced a challenge in figuring out what works and what doesn't for people attempting to change: over 400 distinct systems of psychotherapy now offer a helping hand. Each school relies on at least one, but often several, specific techniques. One group of people who were quitting smoking, Prochaska discovered, were using more than 130 different techniques. Anyone wanting to identify the most effective methods to change an unhealthy behavior would quickly become overwhelmed with options and confused by competing claims.In 1975, Lester Luborsky, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, had published research showing that all generally accepted psychological therapies produced practically equivalent positive outcomes. Prochaska thought that if he could uncover what the therapies had in common, perhaps he could integrate them. After puzzling over his transtheoretical data, Prochaska realized that all those energetic disputes over causes, and all the diversity of techniques, concealed an underlying simplicity in the processes of change which described how change is produced. His final roster of processes of change included nine members: consciousness-raising, social liberation, emotional arousal, self-reevaluation, commitment, countering, environment control, rewards, and helping relationships.By tuning in to what self-changers told him, Prochaska also discerned several distinct stages of change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. Enduring success at change requires that you know what stage you are in for the problem you want to overcome. "The key to success is the appropriately timed use of a variety of coping skills." The right processes should be used for each stage of change. Knowing the stage for the change at issue is the crucial element. Once you know that, you can deploy the relevant process, each of which can work through a variety of techniques such as observations, bibliotherapy, policy interventions, psychodrama, role playing, value clarification, imagery, decision-making therapy, logotherapy, relaxation, desensitization, environmental restructuring, contingency contracts, and social support.As Prochaska and co-authors explain in detail, self-changers who tried to apply a technique suited for one process would be frustrated if that process were irrelevant to their current stage. You wouldn't get anywhere applying reinforcement techniques brilliantly designed for the process of reward if you were still in the precontemplation or contemplation stages. On the other hand, behaviorist techniques of reward and environment control could be effective if you were in the maintenance phase. If you were in the contemplation phase, where you accept that you need to make a change but still need to understand more about it, you should use change processes associated with the experiential, cognitive, and psychoanalytic traditions. These would include methods for self-reevaluation, countering dysfunctional thoughts, and emotional arousal. Improving the chances of successful change, Prochaska had shown, depended on matching processes and stages of change--a discovery whose breakthrough nature has been proven repeatedly ever since.