What's the Payoff to Your Behavior?

A couple of years ago my business partner and I made the decision to give up professional coaching. We had a pretty strong practice coaching individuals in organizations and it was a nice revenue stream for our business, but it was driving us both nuts. What we could not figure out was why so many men and women engaged in destructive behaviors, vowed to stop and yet continued even in the face of honest feedback and eventually disasterous results. And yet, I can’t judge them because I also have behaviors that get in the way of my achievement or having a great life and I don’t change them. So what is the problem?

The problem is that no matter what behavior we’ve developed we’ve done it because it pays off in some way. We are getting something out of it. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine is smart, funny, attractive and passionate about what he does. He is also a real drama queen. Nothing is ever normal; everything is over the top. The guy pops Xanax like candy because of the “bad” days he is having. And it pays off for him. How? He gets attention, tons of it and I’m sure that is what he wants. He has read the positive psychology books I’ve offered him and is constantly stating that he wants to be more positive, but why should he? He gets what he wants from his behavior.

What I’m finally learning about adult behavioral change is that until we see the benefits of the change as a greater payoff than the current bad behavior we won’t change a thing.  So, the potential health gains in the future from eating salad instead of fries are not enough of a payoff for me to avoid fries now. I just love the taste; screw the “healthy” future.  I guess I need more evidence to weigh against the wonderful, immediate taste of the fries.

The first step to change any behavior is to ask ourselves what we gain from it. Every behavior, even a very destructive one, has a payoff and once we identify what that is, we can examine ways to achieve that same result with healthy behaviors. This just takes some real honesty on our part because our reasons for doing things sometimes links to the real difficulties in our lives that we are coping with. We have to keep asking the question “what am I getting out of this?” until we hit a rock-bottom reason. Then we can begin to build the alternate positive behavior that will bring the same results.
 
This is not that easy to do, but anything worthwhile in life is not that easy. However just the awareness of why we do something can be the key to unlock a behavioral change. But I’ve got work to do.  I’m still trying to determine what is better than an order of super sized fries.