How to Change Behaviors (by Tali Sharot)
A couple of days ago, I was watching ted talks about behaviors. Tali Sharot is a Professor of cognitive neuroscience. She was share about how to motivate ourselves to change our behaviors. I wanna share with you what I get from this ted talks, but if you wanna watch by yourself, here is the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp0O2vi8DX4.
So, how could we get motivated to change our behaviors?
People are more like to hear good information than bad information. When we or someone wants to change bad behaviors, we usually use warning sentences, such as stop smoking because it’s terrible, unhealthy, dangerous, etc. Its use at first, but then we might search for rational reasons to refuse the warning sentence. So, warning sentences have a limited effect on change behaviors.
So, how to change behaviors?
- Give ourselves little rewards after we act good behaviors.
When we give a little reward to ourselves, we will have a bit proud of ourselves. We were satisfied that we could change ourselves a little. I know it’s still far our behaviors can change in the future. But we might be uneasy and lazy if we think about the future goal that was uncertain. And it might make us focus on our goal, not the process, even though the process is more important because it made us be the better version of ourselves.
- Comparision ourself to others who have good behaviors that we want.
When we compare ourselves, we will have two thoughts: I’m better than they or they are better than I. When we thought ‘I’m better than they,’ we will smile and proud to ourselves. We will believe that we are good enough as far as now. Meanwhile, when we thought ‘they better than I,’ we will have challenging feelings; we want to be better. So, while we act good behaviors and compare ourselves with someone worse than us and better than us, we will have those thoughts. We will be grateful and feel challenging.
- And see our progress so far.
As already mentioned before, when we see someone worse than us, we will believe that we are good enough. It makes us grateful for our progress. But we will be more grateful and feel more challenging if we could see our progress. When we see our development, we will be proud and spurred to act more than that. Have you noted your improvement?
So we could changes our strategies give ourself from warning statement to others way. First, we could provide a little reward to ourselves. Second, compare ourselves (but please not too much because it could make insecurity in ourselves). And last but not least, we could see our progress to know that we are evolving to have good behaviors. I hope this summary could help us to be a better version that we want. Thank you for reading till the end, and see you in another summary or story!
