“How do I change my behavior?” That’s the question one of my students asked after a GCC Money Talks session. It was the Fall of 2019 and Money Talks had just launched and this student was one of the first to participate.
It was a great question, unfortunately, I didn’t have a great answer. I did find a blog post with 5 Ways of Changing Your Financial Behavior but I knew that I needed a better answer.
Fortunately, I found that I already had a great resource on my bookshelf. The book, Change Anything is exactly that – a great answer and set of strategies for the question of how do we change our behavior?
I’ve leaned into this resource by bringing it into the GCC Money Talks session, Money: A New Start (now called The Wealth Secret) because I wanted to provide students with both understanding and strategies for changing behavior.
Later, I wondered, could the same resource be used to help students stay on track to graduate?
Let’s look at this resource and come back to that.
The coauthors of the book (Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler) say that when we want to change some type of behavior (quit smoking, lose weight, save money, etc) we tend to rely on willpower alone. But willpower is just one source of Influence. They’ve found that there are 6 sources of Influence and say that when we rely on willpower alone, we’re blind and outnumbered, because we don’t see the other influences and we’re fighting multiple influences with just one on our side.
What does this mean for us and for our students?
That we don’t have to rely on willpower alone!
So, let’s start looking at the different sources of influence. The 6 sources come in 3 pairs: Personal Motivation and Personal Ability, Social Motivation and Ability, Structural/Environmental Motivation and Ability.
Personal motivation is basically willpower and I’ll get into that after we explore the other sources of influence.
Personal ability is basically skills, what the coauthors call skillpower. I believe that information gaps also belong here (and sometimes the information gap is knowledge of one or more skills that can help and how to gain those skills).
Social motivation and ability are basically our positive and negative influences. Who’s supporting our goals and success and who’s pulling us away from our goals and success? How can we increase the positive influences and limit the negative influences? Do others provide help and resources at appropriate times?
Structural/Environmental Motivation and Ability are the ones that take a bit more explanation.
The environmental part is probably already understood as it means things that are in our physical environment.
For the structural part, think of things that can be set up in advance.
For example, to grow savings, set up so that a percent/amount of each paycheck automatically goes to savings. I like to say that this is how you can save automagically. I’m also reminded of something I heard recently that says, the best way to have willpower is to not need willpower. Setting things on automatic is often exactly like that!
But structural can also be things like scheduling time for certain tasks because we’re setting up a structure to support our goal(s) (though we’ll still need to follow through).
The motivation part has to do with making the environment/structure more motivating. This includes rewards and consequences as well as ways of gamifying the desired change.
The ability part is how can we change the environment so that the desired change is easier and the undesired behavior is harder?
For example, if you want to read more instead of watching TV, take the remote and put it in another room and put the book that you want to read where the remote normally is.
Now back to the question of using this to help students graduate. I took the same activity of going through these sources of influence that I was using in the Money Talks session (Money: A New Start/The Wealth Secret) and added it to the session on Keeping Student Debt Down (now Be A Smart Borrower). I call it the Student Success Roadmap and here’s what that looks like:
Personal motivation: First, I ask for their thoughts on how to increase their motivation to stay on track to graduate. Then, I share the following questions with them.
What will happen if you don’t get your degree/certificate? What will things be like when you do? I encourage students to use very vivid language and really get into how each will feel. I’ve heard a few times that we are more motivated to avoid pain than to move toward pleasure and that’s why I put the questions in this order. Ideally, students will turn their answers into a motivational statement.
Personal ability: I ask them what skills and information can help them. After they share, I suggest: study skills, note taking, time management, test taking and others.
Social influence: I ask how they can add positive influences and remove or minimize negative influences. I mention that while it may be uncomfortable, it may be worth having a conversation with someone who is pulling them away from their goal because the person may not realize and they may be able to get their support instead.
Environmental/Structural motivation: asks how can we get the environment to be more motivating. Here’s where we go back to the motivational statement from earlier – let’s put that in our environment, on our wall, our phone, as a screensaver. Perhaps a vision board or pictures that are meaningful. This influence also includes rewards and consequences as well as gamification.
Environmental/Structural ability: remember that this one is about how to change the environment so that it helps us to be successful. Again, I start with getting their thoughts and I’m glad that I do this because they sometimes have fantastic answers. During this segment, one student shared that she realized that she couldn’t get schoolwork done at home. So she made it her rule to go to the library and get schoolwork done before going home. For me, that’s a slam dunk! And that’s an idea that I’ve shared at every session since then.
Now, the reality is that I don’t know if or how much students implement and follow-through. But if even a few ideas can help, that’s still a win for me.
In my own life, I’ve come back to these strategies again and again to help make the changes that I want to. It’s not a magic wand or silver bullet. It still takes work and follow through. The authors also suggest that we turn bad days into good data – that is, when things fall apart, look at why so that you can modify your strategy.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the different sources of influence and how to change behavior. If (or when) there’s a behavior that you want to change, remember that you don’t need to rely on willpower alone. While it will take work, you can think through these different influences and explore how to put more of them on your side.