Six Keys to Changing Almost Anything

From Tony Schwartz on the HBR Blog: Six Keys to Changing Almost Anything

Everyone knows that change can be hard. Tony Schwartz posits that:

Most of us wildly overvalue our will and discipline. Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation.

In order to make change that lasts, we must rely less on our prefrontal cortex, and more on co-opting the primitive parts of our brain in which habits are formed.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

Here are Tony’s six keys for change:

• Be Highly Precise and Specific
• Take on one new challenge at a time
• Not too much, not too little
• What we resist persists.
• Competing Commitments
• Keep the faith.

For the full article, and an explanation on each of the six keys, click on the link below:
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/01/six-keys-to-changing-almost-an.html