Everyone wants to skip to step three.
Behavioral change has four phases. Awareness, exploration, implementation, and integration. Most high-performers treat the first two as optional. They identify a problem, decide on a fix, and move straight to action. Fast, efficient, exactly how they operate in every other area of their life.
And then nothing sticks. Or worse, it sticks for two weeks and falls apart.
Here is what actually happens when you skip awareness and exploration. You implement the wrong solution with full commitment. You feel the awkwardness of doing something new, which is normal, but because you never built the foundation, you read that discomfort as evidence that it is not working. So you quit. And you walk away believing change was not possible, when the real problem was the sequence.
The awkward phase is not a signal to stop. It is the process working. The people who quit there lose everything they were building toward.
Awareness first. Exploration second. Then and only then does implementation have any leverage.
Which phase are you currently trying to skip?
Transcription:
Okay, so now to address this question first, the main thing you wanna remember is that any form of behavioral change requires four important things. Awareness, like you have to be aware that the behavior that is happening is not the behavior that you want, and it’s not achieving the outcomes that you want.
So there has to be that awareness, and then you’re gonna need some awareness of when. That behavior happens when, in this example, when that person isn’t engaging with the family, when this person isn’t possibly meeting your needs as a spouse and a partner in that relationship. So that’s some awareness that needs to happen for both members.
’cause remember, this is a partnership in a relationship. The next part in any behavioral change is about exploration. Okay, so now we have awareness. What are we gonna do with that? And the doing with that is to actually explore, do research, be more specific about what might be the issue and what you wanna change in that.
The third part, and this is the part everybody always loves, is actual action and implementation. Notice that wasn’t one or two. First we gotta become aware, then we’ve gotta do some research and, and really start to understand what we’re asking for. And then we take action and implementation. The key and fun thing with that is when at first you start to implement these things, they feel awful.
They feel awkward. It doesn’t feel right. It goes against all natural instincts in some ways. And so you wanna push back and you wanna quit. That’s normal. Take the next action. Learn from that. Say, okay, officially was all of this terrible, or was just one little element of it. Needing to adjust, but you don’t bail on the whole thing, but trust me.
Oh, you want to. And a lot of people do. And that is where you lose out on so much growth. So we’re working on our behavioral changes. And then number four is you actually implement it and you have this new behavior and you actually live it out every day. That’s a whole. Different space. That’s a whole, that’s just all different.
And that’s exciting and fun, but it’ll be different and it will create different outcomes and people around you will react a little differently to things. And again, you’ll need to adjust to that and you need to be aware of that. So the first part of that question. Wow is the fact, wow, you’re talking about somebody’s behaviors changing.
They’re fairly enrooted. Absolutely. That can happen. But that takes awareness, that takes exploration, that takes these four steps, action, and then really embracing that new behavior, that new way of being. So I, I have to start the conversation there to then give the answer to. In this person’s particular position.
What I would actually recommend,