New Week Resolutions

A new year.  A new month.  A new week.  A new day.  

I am always curious at the goals people set for themselves for the new year; setting the course for an entire year.  Quit smoking, lose weight, go to the gym more, stop eating donuts (okay...that last one may have been mine).  If you're thinking within the time frame of a year, those are some high expectations.  Expectations, that if not met, then make it look like you have failed.  That's not being very fair to yourself, now is it?  Instead of 'go big or go home', a more fair way would be to just go home and figure out what rate you are already performing at and then go small.  This is often referred to as gathering the baseline data.  If 'quiting smoking' is your goal and you're currently smoking 25 cigarettes a day, expecting yourself to go down to zero in a day may be too big of a change in rate.  Instead, I'd aim to cut your smoking by 1-2 cigarettes a day for a few weeks and see how you're doing.  Or, if you've never set foot inside a gym (i.e., baseline is zero), then setting a goal of once every two weeks may be more realistic.

The nice thing about setting the bar at a much more realistic level, is that once the goal has been met, you can always increase/decrease it further.  On the other hand, setting the bar too high and then never reaching it sure doesn't feel good.  This is where people often give up.  Why bother?  I can't do it!  That is why I propose a new trend in goal-setting: new week resolutions or new day resolutions!  For me, this means eating only one donut a week.

There's obviously much more to setting and attaining your goals than just a smaller time-frame or a close-to-baseline rate of behaviour (and the answer isn't more willpower either).  It's more than I can get into in one blog post - hence the reason for this whole blog in the first place!  But some other goal-setting tips:

• Be specific and concrete as possible (e.g., texas style donuts don't count)
• Word your goal in the positive - what you WILL do, versus what you WON'T do.  
• And in some cases, if you're trying to decrease a particular behaviour of yours, it also helps to define what may replace it.  For example, to stop nail-biting, you may need to replace it with 5 minutes of using a stress-ball or giving yourself a finger massage.  The theory behind this, is that time spent doing the replacement behaviour, may either take away from the target behaviour or fulfill the same consequences as the target behaviour.

We're less than three hours away from 2011.  I wish everyone a happy new day, week or month of goals and resolutions ahead.  Keep them small, specific and positive and remember to find yourself replacements and it can be a positive and prosperous new year!

Afraid of Change?

We hear it time and time again: nobody likes change.  It sends some people into panic mode.  Others act stubborn while holding on to the same old way of doing things.  And why not?  You already know what to expect with the same old things.  With the same old things, you can reliably predict that reinforcement is coming your way.  Day in and day out, these 'things' have signaled to you that good things are about to happen.  Now all of a sudden, someone wants to change things and you don't know what to expect.  Will the same good things happen?  Does this new thing signal a reinforcer or a punisher is coming my way?  I suspect that this unknown factor is behind the resistance to change.  Having not gone through the sequence of  'new thing' → new behaviour → consequence (I use the word 'thing' here to stay away from the technical term known as 'stimulus discriminative') it is difficult to predict whether a good or bad outcome will follow.  Sometimes people don't know what to do with themselves when things change and there is a valiant attempt at securing what once was.   All people are trying to do is ensure that a reinforcer comes through.


People are expected to just deal with change.  Kids especially are just supposed to "go with the flow" - do what the adults say.  While it is a hallmark skill of maturity and emotional regulation to adjust and adapt, we could all help people deal a little better with the change that is about to occur by recognizing it takes a few more practices and a continuous rate of reinforcement to set out on a new track.  I believe this is what we would refer to as demonstrating patience.  

So, the lesson here: when things change, all we need is just a little patience.  We will eventually learn that most of the new things we're doing turned out alright.