Главная страница Случайная страница
Разделы сайта
АвтомобилиАстрономияБиологияГеографияДом и садДругие языкиДругоеИнформатикаИсторияКультураЛитератураЛогикаМатематикаМедицинаМеталлургияМеханикаОбразованиеОхрана трудаПедагогикаПолитикаПравоПсихологияРелигияРиторикаСоциологияСпортСтроительствоТехнологияТуризмФизикаФилософияФинансыХимияЧерчениеЭкологияЭкономикаЭлектроника
Studies in transformation
|
|
A statistical study was conducted by researcher Nancy Mann to evaluate the level of rehabilitation in reformed drug abusers, and the adoption of a replacement behavior appears to play a major role even in this complex field of change. The first group in the study was forced to give up their addiction through some external pressure, often applied by the legal system. As we talked about in the section on leverage, external pressure rarely has a lasting impact. Sure enough, these men and women returned to their old habits as soon as the pressure was lifted, i.e., as soon as they were released from jail. A second group truly wanted to quit, and tried to do so on their own. Their leverage was primarily internal. As a result, their behavioral changes lasted a great deal longer, often as much as two years after the initial commitment. What eventually caused a relapse was suffering a significant amount of stress. When this occurred, they often reverted back to their drug habit as a way of getting out of pain and into pleasure. Why? Because they had not found a replacement for the old neural pathway. The third group replaced their addiction with a new alternative, something that gave them the feelings they had sought originally—or perhaps something that made them feel even better. Many found fulfilling relationships, spiritual enlightenment, a career that they could be completely passionate about. As a result, many never returned to the old drug habits, and the majority lasted an average of over eight years before any backsliding occurred. The people who succeeded in kicking their drug habits followed the first four steps of NAC, and that's why they were so successful. Some of them lasted only eight years, however. Why? Because they didn't utilize the fifth and critical step of NAC.
NAC MASTER STEP 5
Condition the New Pattern Until It's Consistent.
Conditioning is the way to make sure that a change you create is consistent and lasts long-term. The simplest way to condition something is simply to rehearse[48] it again and again until a neurological way is created. If you find an empowering alternative, imagine doing it until you see that it can get you out of pain and into pleasure quickly. Your brain will begin to associate this as a new way of producing this result on a consistent basis. If you don't do this, you'll go back to the old pattern. If you rehearse the new, empowering alternative again and again with tremendous emotional intensity, you'll carve out a pathway, and with even more repetition and emotion, it will become a highway to this new way of achieving results, and it will become a part of your habitual behavior. Remember, your brain can't tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and something you actually experience. Conditioning ensures that you automatically travel along the new route, that if you spot one of the " off ramps" you used to take all the time, now you just speed past them—in fact, they'll actually become difficult to take.
The power of conditioning can't be overestimated. I read recently that Boston Celtics great Larry Bird was doing a soft-drink commercial in which he was supposed to miss a jump shot. He made nine baskets in a row before he could get himself to miss! That's how strongly he's conditioned himself over the years. When that ball hits his hands, he automatically goes through a pattern that is aimed at putting the ball through the hoop. I'm sure that if you examined the portion of Larry Bird's brain that is linked to that motion, you would discover a substantial neural pathway. Realize that you and I can condition any behavior within ourselves if we do it with enough repetition and emotional intensity.
The next step is to set up a schedule to reinforce your new behavior. How can you reward yourself for succeeding? Don't wait until you've gone a year without smoking. When you've gone a day, give yourself a reward! Don't wait until you've lost eighty pounds. Don't even wait until you've lost a pound. The minute you can push the plate away with food still on it, give yourself a pat on the back. Set up a series of short-term goals, or milestones, and as you reach each one, immediately reward yourself. If you've been depressed or worried, now each time you take action instead of worrying, or each time you smile when somebody asks how you're doing and you say, " Great, " give yourself a reward for already beginning to make the changes necessary to ensure your long-term success.
In this way, your nervous system learns to link great pleasure to change. People who want to lose weight don't always see immediate results—usually losing a couple of pounds doesn't miraculously transform you into an Elle McPherson or a Mel Gibson. So it's important to reward yourself as soon as you take some specific actions or make any positive emotional progress, like choosing to run around the block instead of running to the nearest McDonald's. If you don't, you may find yourself saying, " Okay, I've lost a pound so far, but I'm still fat. This will take forever. I have such a long way to go..." Then you might use these short-term assessments as excuses to binge. Understanding the power of reinforcement will speed up the process of conditioning a new pattern. Recently I had the pleasure of reading an excellent book that I highly recommend to those who really want to make a thorough study of conditioning. It's entitled Don't Shoot the Dog! by Karen Pryor. This book sets forth some simple distinctions about modifying animal behavior that parallel my own distinctions gained in years of shaping human behavior.
What's fascinating is how similar animals and humans are in terms of the forces that drive our actions. Knowing the fundamentals of conditioning enables us to take control of those forces and create the destiny of our choice. We can live like animals, manipulated by circumstances and those around us—or we can learn from these laws, using them to maximize our fullest potential. Pryor discusses in her book how she learned to utilize pain to train animals for years: whips and a chair for lions, the bridle for horses, the leash for dogs. But she ran into difficulty when she began to work with dolphins, because when she tried to give them pain, they just swam away! This caused her to develop a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of positive reinforcement training.
" There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship."
MARK TWAIN
The first organizing principle of any type of " Success Conditioning" is the power of reinforcement. You and I must know that in order to get ourselves to consistently produce any behavior or emotion, we must create a conditioned pattern. All patterns are the result of reinforcement; specifically, the key to creating consistency in our emotions and behaviors is conditioning.
THE LAW OF REINFORCEMENT [49]
Any pattern of emotion or behavior that is continually reinforced will become an automatic and conditioned response. Anything we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate. We can reinforce our own behavior or someone else's through positive reinforcement, that is, every time we produce the behavior we want, we give a reward. That reward can be praise, a gift, a new freedom, etc. Or we can use negative reinforcement. This might be a frown, a loud noise, or even physical punishment. It's crucial for us to understand that reinforcement is not the same as punishment and reward. Reinforcement is responding to a behavior immediately after it occurs, while punishment and reward may occur long afterward.
Appropriate timing is absolutely critical to effective conditioning. If a coach yells, " Great! " when the basketball team executes a perfect pick-and-roll, it has a lot more impact than if he waited until they debriefed later in the locker room. Why? Because we always want to link the sensations of reinforcement in the pattern that is occurring. One of the problems with our judicial system is that when people commit criminal acts, they are sometimes not punished until years later. Intellectually they may know the reason for their punishment, but the pattern of behavior that generated this problem in the first place is still intact—it has not been interrupted, nor does it have any pain linked
to it.
This is the only way to truly change our behaviors and emotions long term. We must train our brains to do the things that are effective, not intellectually but neurologically. The challenge, of course, is that most of us don't realize that we're all conditioning each other and shaping each other's behaviors constantly. Often, we're conditioning people negatively instead of positively.
A simple example of this occurred with my daughter Jolie's ex-boyfriend. Jolie was very busy with school, dance, and a play she was in. He wanted her to call him every single day, and when she missed a few days and then called him, he gave her tremendous amounts of pain. He clearly wanted her to call more frequently, yet his strategy for reinforcement was to badger[50] and berate her when she did call.
Have you ever been guilty of this? If you want your boyfriend, girl- friend, spouse, or significant other to call you more often, how effective do you think it would be to nag them to call? When they finally do call, do you greet them with statements like, " Oh, so you finally picked up the phone! Will wonders never cease? Why do I always have to be the one who makes the call? " What you're doing is training him or her not to call you! You're giving pain right after they do the very thing you want. What will happen as a result of this? Pain will be linked to calling you; he or she will avoid it even more in the future. In Jolie's case, this pattern was continuous, going on for months until Jolie felt that she couldn't win. If she didn't call, she'd get pain. If she did call, she'd get pain. As you might guess, this pattern of negative reinforcement permeated[51] many aspects of their relationship and, eventually, the relationship ended.
If you truly want someone to call you, then when they do call, you need to respond with delight. If you tell them how much you miss them, how much you love them, how grateful you are to talk with them, do you think that they'll be more inclined to call again? Remember, link pleasure to any behavior you want someone to repeat. In my consulting with companies across the United States, I've noted that most companies try to motivate their employees by using negative reinforcement as their primary strategy, trying to use fear of punishment as its prime motivator. This will work in the short term, but not in the long term. Sooner or later, companies run into the same problems that eastern Europe has: people will live in fear only for so long before they revolt.
The second major strategy companies use is financial incentives. While this is an excellent idea and is usually appreciated, there is a limit to its effectiveness. There is a point of diminishing return at which all the additional incentives don't really induce a greater quality of work from people. In fact, most companies find that there's a limit to what they cando in this area. If one constantly reinforces with money, people begin to expect that when they do something of great value, they must have an immediate economic return. They begin to work strictly for financial reward and won't do anything unless they get it, surpassing and stripping the capacity of the business to keep up with the economic demands of its employees.
The third and most powerful way to motivate people is through personal development. By helping your employees to grow and expand personally, they begin to feel passionate about life, people, and their jobs. This makes them want to contribute more. They do it out of a sense of personal pride rather than pressure from the outside. This doesn't mean you shouldn't have an incentive program; just make sure you have the most powerful incentive of all, which is to help people expand and grow.
" Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided."
JOHN LOCKE
|
|