1.5: Taking Charge of your health - Making Healthy Changes

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Increase Your Opportunity for Successful Change

Behavior change is hard for many reasons. Here are some strategies to help increase your chances of successfully achieving your health and wellness goals.

Set approach goals instead of avoidance goals^[10]

Approach goals are goals where you are taking actions to meet a desired outcome, whereas avoidance goals are focused on not taking actions. Research has shown that we are more successful when we set approach goals rather than avoidance goals. For example, rather than setting an avoidance goal such as “I will not drink soda” the focus could be “I will drink water instead of soda.”

Set mastery (learning) goals instead of performance goals^[11]

A performance goal might be to lose 20 pounds, whereas a mastery (learning) goal would focus on the actions you are taking to lose weight, such as focusing on your nutrition or exercise. A mastery skill involves increasing existing abilities or learning new skills. Performance goals may be less effective than mastery goals. It is ok to set a performance goal, but it should always be accompanied by a mastery goal.

Find Your Why

Take a moment to think about why you want to change. How will this change make your life better? How will this change help you feel better, have better relationships with yourself and others, or help your family or friends? You might like to refer to this as finding or discovering your why.

Your Daily Action Plan

If you think about your SMART goal as your destination, how will you get there and what are the directions or what route will you take? Developing an action plan is a helpful strategy to increase your motivation. An action plan specifies the what (always a behavior), how much, how often, and usually when (which days and times), in other words it is the steps by which the SMART goal will be achieved. Your action plan provides you with your goal for each day allowing you to focus on your day-to-day actions rather than just on your long term goal. This allows you to be successful each day that you complete your stated actions in your action plan.

Boost Your Self Efficacy

Implementing a carefully and thoughtfully crafted action plan can help to improve health and build your self efficacy^[12]. Self-Efficacy is the confidence in one’s ability to achieve a specific goal, it is the belief in oneself that you can do it. Implementing and meeting the goals of your action plan is a great strategy for building your self-efficacy, which in turn builds your motivation to change.

A Positive Mindset

Having a positive mindset can also help to increase your self-efficacy. This might include focusing on positive self-talk whereby purposefully telling yourself that you can complete your goals. A positive mindset may also take the form of finding enjoyment in your changes. When the thought of your change brings you enjoyment, you are more likely to engage in the behavior change and stick to it^[13].