Changing Behaviour Patterns

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Do you have to consciously think about your poor behaviour to get it to come up or does it just turn up out of the blue without an invitation?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence and our Behavioural Self-Control by talking about changing our behaviour patterns.

You and I have been doing things a certain way for many years. And as we've learnt over the many weeks that we've been together now that our beliefs, the meanings we put on things, the experiences that we've been through, and all the conditioning that has gone on over the years that we've been on the planet have created a set of neural pathways in our brain that says, "When this happens, I do that."

Has there ever been anything that you've decided that you want to change? Whether it be your health and vitality, whether it be the way that you operate at work or the way that you work with these certain people, whatever it is, whatever behaviour. It could be becoming a non-smoker or changing any type of behaviour and you've found it difficult to make the change.

The reason for that is that you are fighting against a deeply ingrained pattern in your brain, backed up by limiting beliefs and thoughts that you have around certain things that are not serving you. So, what I want to do today in this short video is just give you the process, a logical process that you can take yourself on whenever it is that you're wanting to change your behaviour.

Now, this is a four step process and I've attached some alliteration to it because I find, for me, it makes it easier for me to remember and bring up when I need to. And what I want to do today is teach you the process, the procedure, and then as you practice, that it will become one of the newly ingrained neural pathways in your brain and it'll happen automatically.

The key to anything that I've been teaching you over the last few weeks comes not in the information that I give you, but in the implementation of you putting it into action. So if this is an area that you really want to work on in your life and you want to change some certain behaviours, it's not enough to just hear a motivational talk from me. So, let me take you through the process.

The process is a series of four R's and the end result of this process is another R and that is to rewire our brain. Through neuro-plasticity, we know that at any age, we can relearn things. So, the first thing we need to do, as we've talked about before, is unlearn the things from the past so that we can relearn the new stuff. This process works on doing that in a logical sequence so that you get the result that you want.

Step one in the process, the first R, is recognise.

So, what is it that we want to recognise? We want to recognise that the thought pattern, the belief, the mindset, the behaviour that we are currently using is not serving us. It's not actually giving us the result that we want. Now, as we go through this process of recognising this, we're going to have that mini-me that we learned how to reprogram a few weeks ago shouting at us and going, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not true. What you're recognising there, that's fake news."

We don't want that because that means that when we recognise it, we're going to change it. And at this point, we've still got a belief that it is serving us. So, you may need some help from a coach to help you to go through this process if those beliefs and behaviours are really ingrained, but let me be your coach right now and help you to go through it and at least get the pattern in place.

So if I've got a belief that says that I can't do something, that belief is definitely going to stop me from doing something. So if I recognise that that belief is the first thing that's holding me back, that's the first step. If it's a behaviour, like I talked about a couple of weeks ago or last week, whenever it was, if I recognise that me tooting the horn at someone three cars in front of me, who is totally oblivious to me being there anyway, is only creating more anger and frustration for me and for the people in the cars in front of me, then I'll want to do something about it. So, step one is to recognise the behaviour that's not serving you.

Step two and the second R is to reject.

This one's a little bit more unfamiliar, a little bit more challenging because it's one thing to recognise the behaviour, but unless we reject it, we're not going to do anything about it. So, we need to have that conversation with our inner dialogue, with our current belief system, and we need to go, "No, no, no. I know you think that it was doing this for us, but it's not."

So, I need to reject it before I'll do anything about it. So, we've recognised what it is. We'd now rejected it as being something that we need in our life, something that we want in our life, something that we want to continue to do. It's gone.

Step three, the third R, is to replace.

Now, here's the thing: if we recognise something and reject it, but we don't have anything else that we can do instead, we'll very easily go back to what we were doing before. So, we need a new behaviour, a new thinking, a new strategy that we can replace the original one with.

When I do work with a lot of clients around different areas of their life, addictions they might want to get rid of, let's say they're wanting to become a non-smoker, then what I'll help them to do as they're going through that process, because that's a chemical addiction, is get them to have some carrot sticks. And when they feel like having a cigarette and they've now recognised that it's not helping them and they've rejected that, what I'll get them to do is to reach for one of these carrot sticks and put that in their mouth instead.

So, we're doing a break of the behaviour pattern in a more subtle way. And over a period of time, we'll be able to wean ourselves off that as well. So, we talked about last week in those triggers and the behaviour that came out of them what would be a different response and they are things that we would replace the original behaviours with. So, step three, now that we've recognised, we've rejected, is to replace. Give ourselves something else to do, instead of the old behaviour.

Step four is repetition.

So, step four is to repeat the process, the new behaviour that you've replaced it with over and over and over again, so that you then rewire that part of your brain, that pattern that in the old days, when you did this or thought this, it would lead you that way, it now is going to take you down a new path. So, you've now got a neural pathway that's built stronger than the old one and that only comes with repetition and that's how neuroplasticity works.

So, we've got a four part process: recognise the behaviour, reject it as being useful, replace it with something that's resourceful and is going to give us the results we want, and then repeat that process over and over again so that we rewire our brain. It's been said that the definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. What we now have with this process is the ability to change our behaviour.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week when we continue this conversation around managing our behaviour and our responses, our Emotional Intelligence by talking about two critical elements that we need to be able to make all these changes, and that is support and accountability. I'll see you then.