To change, replace, rather than eliminate

When I was working on my masters in instructional design, one of the required courses involved change management, managing change in our lives and our organizations.

We were studying this because the purpose of much of education is to get people to change what they are doing. Think of all the education our state departments of health do to get people to change: change from smoking to not smoking, change from eating junk food to eating healthy food, change from being sedentary to getting exercise.

Change is also what we deal with in self motivation, making a change in our lives that will make our lives so much better. We call this desired change our vision.

Change management is a very important discipline with lots of research being done, tons of data collected and analyzed. Out of all the information given to me, the one point that stuck with me more than anything is if you want to make a change in your life, don’t eliminate a non-desired behavior; replace it with a desired behavior.

As an example in my life, my wife thought we were eating too much animal protein. She wanted to institute a policy of two “non-meat” days. That sounded rather harsh to me, and sort of like a judgment. I suggested instead that we institute a policy of two vegetarian days.

There seems to be several reasons why we want to replace rather than eliminate:

1. nature abhors a vacuum
2. elimination feels like deprivation
3. elimination feels like we are doing something bad
4. if you just eliminate a behavior, who knows what will replace it
5. replacing opens you to exploring possibilities; elimination doesn’t

It sounds like it shouldn’t be important, but when I phrased the negative “meatless days” in the affirmative as “vegetarian days” I immediately started thinking of different recipes we could use to implement this new policy. No longer was I complaining, “No more meat.” Instead I was saying, “Let’s see if we can’t make that tofu curry with pineapple that we always order at the Thai restaurant in Sarasota.”

It reminds me of what I always hear about affirmations – always express them in a positive way. Don’t say “I won’t lose my temper.” Instead say, “I am calm and in control.” The rational for doing this is that we attract what we think about and talk about. How much better it is to attract calmness and control, than a lost temper.