4 Steps to Lasting Behavioral Change
Learn From Your Own Experience
-- By Dean Anderson, Behavioral Psychology Expert
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Although the basic concept of weight loss (eat fewer calories than you burn) is remarkably simple, putting it into practice is not. Whether you're learning how to figure out how many calories you are actually eating and burning up; trying to discover why you have such a hard time doing the things you know you should; or simply looking for that motivation you had yesterday but can’t find this morning, your weight-loss journey is going to be an ongoing experiment. It requires constant learning and the skillful application of what you learn in order to adjust your goals, strategies, and behaviors.
Some of this will be “book" learning—the facts, figures and concepts, such as those that you've read on SparkPeople. But the most important learning you need to do involves
learning from your own experience. This takes a whole different set of skills than those involved in absorbing what other people can tell you.
The ancient Greeks had a word for this other form of learning:
praxis. Praxis is a four-stage process of:
- Observing your own actions and their effects
- Analyzing what you observe
- Strategizing an action plan
- Taking action
Then you start over at the beginning again, observing the effects of your new actions. Each of these four stages in the praxis process has its own core learning skill.
