How to make serious changes in your life

In this article, I share some helpful steps for making serious changes in your personal life. These steps will help you make serious changes in your life to achieve the most important accomplishments and wishes that you dream of.

Behavior modification

1- Create a behavior modification plan.

If you really want to make serious changes in your life, you can't just say that you will and leave it alone. You need to commit. A behavior modification plan is a practical way to test and monitor your commitment to change. Behavior modification means exactly what you think it means - it's a way to change the way you deal with specific stimuli in your environment.

Behavior modification techniques allow you to replace undesired behaviors with desired ones through a combination of methods. One of the most popular techniques is positive reinforcement, which is the process of increasing a specific behavior by adding a reward when it occurs.

Behavioral modification is a psychological concept that can be used for nearly all the behaviors that you want to change either by eliminating them altogether or increasing the number of times you perform them. You can use these principles to quit smoking, lose weight, wake up early, or end the problem of procrastination.

2- Observing and describing the behavior.

Behavior modification requires you to fully understand the unwanted behavior in order to replace it. You can ask yourself any or all of the following questions to get a better treatment of the behavior: When / Why / Where / How does it happen / When do you do it? / anytime? / How long does it take? / Who would normally be present when this happened? How does this person influence the behavior? / What are the things in the environment a few minutes before they happen? What things are in the environment a few minutes after they happen?

For example, in order to lose weight, you may want to reduce the amount of junk food you eat each week. First you will need to know how much junk food you are eating, and under what conditions.

3- Measure your baseline.

Just jumping directly into a behavior modification plan without gathering any data beforehand can put your findings at risk. Spend several days or weeks carefully examining the occurrence of the behavior you want to change and answering some questions that help describe it. Measuring methods might be calculating the amount of fast food you eat each week, in addition to determining exactly what you order and how much of these meals (such as burgers, fries, and milkshakes for a total of 1,238 calories)

4- Create an alternate behavior.

Since you are looking to make a big change in your life, you likely want to stop some unwanted behaviors. As such, it can be helpful to make a list of alternative behaviors that you can do to help the transition process. Once you closely understand why you engage in the unwanted behavior (by describing and observing it), you can then find healthy behaviors that satisfy the same motivation or stimulus. For example: if you realize that you always eat fast food on the days you work late, you can prepare a snack or pre-prepare some healthy meals to suit this purpose. If you want to stop drinking and tend to drink anything socially, you can skip some internet sessions or ask your friends to meet for coffee instead.

5- Watch your progress.

When you begin your behavior modification plan, you will want to continue gathering data all the time. Doing so helps you identify patterns or even new stimuli that reinforce the unwanted behavior that you were not aware of. On the positive side, writing down how much the unwanted behavior has occurred and how often the new replacement behavior has occurred can show you whether you have actually reduced The possibility of it happening.