Behavior is a complicated process. Think about all of the things that go into your behavior – your environment, the way you were raised, your mood, the outcome of your actions and countless other things. The way you act at home probably isn’t the same as your behavior at work, and it probably shouldn’t be.

After attending a productivity seminar, I was amazed at the expectations for those in the group as well as the presenter. The seminar was about embracing an entire system and was presented to an Executive level audience. There were some great points in there, and I was happy that most of them I’ve already written about either on this blog or in my ebook. The striking point for me though was that the presenter was asking a group of successful people to change the entire way the approach their day and their work. The audience was presented with a specific tool set, a naming convention, and a basic set of rules to follow for every situation. The presenter then asked everyone to “try my system for 2 months” and observe the results. In my opinion, the audience was being set up for failure.

Here’s what I mean. You take a room of successful individuals and ask them to completely change the way they approach everything from email to conversations to the tools they use. I’m sure that they’ve built quite a few different habits getting to where they are today. Please note that this is entirely my opinion. I’ll present the science to back it up, but there are counter opinions that have their research backing them up as well.

The most basic concept of the Behavioral Approach is that behavior is learned.

The Behavioral Approach in psychology is based on the concept that behavior is learned and we should focus on the observable aspects of behavior – actions vs thoughts. Since behavior is learned, behaviors can also be unlearned. Taken a step further, development of an individual is constant and doesn’t stop. Some of the most famous behavioral psychologists are Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner. Pavlov was able to prove behavior is learned through conditioning. Skinner took that further and found that he could get people to respond more predictable by using reinforcement. Pavlov and Skinner explained behavior as learned over long periods of time.

Complex behaviors are learned over time by making incremental changes to existing behaviors. – B.F. Skinner

The top 3 New Years resolutions for 2015 are lose weight, get organized, spend less save more. Those are 3 pretty complex goals. Let’s just look at what it takes to spend less and save more. You need to create a budget, plan for spending, track expenses, organize different funds, and consistently update your budget. 45% of Americans make New Years resolutions and 38% of Americans say they “absolutely never” achieve their resolution. That means that 7% of us are making our New Years resolutions. Yes – these are terrible goals, but the biggest reason they fail is because we try to do too many things at once. We try to make very complex behavior changes in a very drastic way. Changing behavior takes time and it needs to be intentional. It’s a discipline that requires patience, persistence, and hard work.

Through a system of reinforcement, people can learn a desirable behavior.

The concept of classical conditioning is pretty well known. Think Pavlov and his dogs. Presenting food makes the dogs drool. If you ring a bell while presenting food, the dog will link the bell with the food. After that you can ring a bell and the dog will drool. Further down the chain is operant conditioning. It’s a more complicated approach for behaving change involving reinforcement and punishment to increase desired behavior or decrease undesired behavior. The strongest indicator for change is a positive reinforcement. The important thing to remember is throughout behavioral psychology, all behavior is learned over time. Waiting and maintaining the discipline to see the end goal is the hardest part.

Napoleon Hill said “Patience, Persistence, and Perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” Be wary of any system trying to side-step any one of the three principles.

Measure, track, and commit to incremental change.

I’m not going to sustain every change that I learned at the seminar if I try them all at once. Modifying existing behaviors is something that has to be done over extended periods of time. It took me 30 years to get to where I am today. The concept that I can completely change how I approach my day overnight goes completely against everything I’ve learned about behavior. Instead, I’m committing to incremental changes because behavior is learned over time.

Photo: cea +