Question for people with experience in Mental Health/ Coaching/ Behavior change

[Byun Sean]

I am doing a research project on behavior change in university.

I was wondering what answers people had for this:

What are the top determining factors or obstacles that allow someone to successfully change their behavior?

Any replies are much appreciated.

[LastThursday]

Super briefly:

• Environment
• Social matrix
• Mental health / therapy
• Self-awareness
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs

[Carl-Richard]

Identifying with the change. You can have the belief that working out is better for your health, but if you don't care about health (which if you truly question it, maybe you do, but let's assume a surface-level understanding of health like "not being fat, weak, out of breath or living shorter") or other things associated with working out, then you probably won't start working out.

But if you start caring about the things that is associated with working out, maybe by expanding your definition of health (to include mental well-being, emotional stability, bodily comfort, higher functioning in everyday life), then you might start to care enough to start working out.

But even if you know all these things intellectually, even if you think you care about these things, if it doesn't resonate organically or intuitively with your very body or being, then it's not necessarily going to happen. It has to be identifying with the change on an authentic "karmic" level, you must simply be ready to do it, or wanting to do it. And this is less easy to pin down when or how it happens.

For example, I've observed my little brother go from not caring much about working out, to caring about it on an intellectual level, to then finally embodying it on a more intuitive level and then actually starting to work out on his own accord (before, he needed to go with his buddies). My mom was always like "how do we make him start working out?".

And I was telling her ever since the beginning that he simply has to start wanting to do it on his own accord, it's not ultimately something you can force from the outside (but outside influences help, of course, but it's not something you can easily pin down exactly what will help or how to make the change truly happen). He already knows so much about the benefits, it doesn't really help him to tell him about those again and again, and he knows he cares about many of those benefits. He must simply get to the point where he feels moved to actually manifest it. And not long after, he came to that point.

And it could happen perhaps after seeing how he feels on a physical or mental level after he has trained vs not training, that he starts to make the connection intuitively that this is something that his body and mind wants, and then over time, the shift happens that way. So small experiences like that can start pulling you in that direction. But all experiences do this in their own way. It's in the end simply a question of time.

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard