We were in my Sticky Health Communications class, and we were talking about why New Years resolutions don't work.
There were a number of ideas thrown around by students, and there isn't really one right answer. But the professor, Dr. Brian Zikmund-Fisher, posed this as an explanation:
If you don't convince yourself that you're the kind of person that does something, you won't stick with it.
I have kept this idea with me for over a week now, and I have spent a little more time considering it than I should probably admit. I first tried to think about it in terms of my own behaviors, and previous attempts or successes in behavior change.
It wasn't hard to see how this idea applied to some things in my own life, like making the transition to not eating meat, the trials of committing to diet and exercise, something as simple as actually flossing every night.
So then I started looking for it to pop up as a theme in TV. Tuesday night it popped up right on The Biggest Loser. Not too surprising that this would be the first place I see it.
Some of the things I think this can be most easily applied to are:
- resisting food temptations, ex. "I am the kind of person who can walk away from the cookies in the break room at work, and know it's not worth it to indulge on low quality cookies"
- adding small amounts of exercise to your day, ex. "I am the kind of person that parks a little farther from the store to add some extra walking in to my day"
These are relatively simple behaviors, but unless you have convinced yourself that they are a part of you, it is sooo easy to say "well I just can't resist."
This by no means make this system flawless. You can end up off track. In my opinion though, every time you get off track and realize you need to work on it harder next time, you make yourself stronger in your convictions. You also learn what you should feel bad about, and what is really just a one-time indulgence that you know doesn't need to lead to other indulgences.
This all comes at a time when I realize I have gotten horribly off track for just over a week, after losing 12 pounds. Time to recommit, and get back on track, stronger than ever.
If anyone out there reads this and has a reflection of something in their life that took changing self-concept to change behavior, I would love to hear about it.
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Additional note: In my field we talk a lot about self-efficacy as a key predictor of behavior change. Self-efficacy is the belief in oneself to be able to perform a specific behavior, in a specific situation. I don't see the concept discussed above as being the same. I think this is much more self-concept/personal identity based.
