It’s said that change is the only constant in life. Even without planning it, it’s happening: our bodies grow, seasons change and the world keeps spinning forward. And yet somehow when you want to change something, it seems that the change is harder to begin or commit to.
Whether it’s taking a relationship to the next level, or breaking a bad habit, what makes some changes easier to start and complete, while others can take months or even years to move forward? Is there a secret to making one kind of change as opposed to another? Or are some people better at making changes than others?
There has been a lot of scientific investigation done, and it turns out there’s no secret: we all go through a similar process when we make important changes.
Noted psychologists Prochaska and DiClemente studied thousands of individuals making one of the most difficult behavior changes some can imagine: quitting smoking. What they found revolutionized the way we think about how successful changes happen.
The theory they came up with, called the Transtheoretical Model (TTM), identifies six stages of change that occur that we all encounter. The sequence of stagesthey describe are:
- Pre-contemplation – when you don’t think there’s a problem but someone else had pointed it out;
- Contemplation – an awareness of an issue and beginning to weigh pros and cons of making a change;
- Preparation – making plans and identifying steps to enter into change;
- Action – taking the plunge and trying the change out;
- Maintenance – keeping up new behaviors.
The sixth stage – termination – has also been adapted as relapse, to recognize that even as we’re moving away from a behavior, part of the process of changing it is that we return to it. (And you thought you just didn’t have any will power).
TTM is radical on a number of levels. Rather than describing change as moving in a linear fashion from point A to point B, their model recognizes change is a process involving several specific discrete steps, and we move from one stage to the next in a cyclical manner (think of a corkscrew). They also found that most people who go through the stages multiple times (for smokers between 3 and 7 times!) made the change permanent, indicating effort over time rather than a quick fix. And lastly, the concept of ambivalence was an essential part of the process.
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