Professor Karen Pine shared her three behaviour change principles at today’s Meaning Conference.
1 Learn through doing
Not by thinking or reasoning. By having real experiences that are outside our normal range. we go back to what we were doing. The brain is a habit machine. Neural pathways are created by neurons coming together around actions. We default to those pathways. Hard wired for inertia. Action changes this.
Hard to make big changes but you can make small changes which can spark a ripple effect.
2 Break down old habits
Small changes can lead to big differences. They are doable in our everyday life. Need to be ‘behaiourally flexible’. We need to use the under-used behaviours that could serve us well.
3 Expand the person’s behavioural repertoire
Make change happen by doing one small piece of behaviour change at a time. Neural plasticity enables the adult brain to rewire itself but to do this it needs new actions. Cognitive responses follow from actions.
Prof Pine runs Do Something Different.
