When you find yourself in a familiar place, repetitive behaviour leads your brain to learned reactions without really thinking. The problem is that the brain cannot tell if this reaction is good or bad. The bad habit could hinder what you want to achieve.
Groups also have their own habits - learned sequences of behaviour among members of the same group. This applies to anything, from how individuals dress, through phrases and clichés to their efforts, which they are able to develop for customers or mutually with group members.
The habits of others affect our own habits in a chain of subtle influences. We adopt habits from our environment, partly because we are consciously comparing ourselves. This is how fashion works: we each wear a certain style of clothing. Clothing and style of conduct are specific to specific generations and can affect their view of what is "normal" throughout their lives.
How can a long-term habit change? In the 1960s, US surgeon Maxwell Maltz observed that it took approximately three weeks for patients who had undergone an amputation to stop feeling a missing limb. He came to his well-known theory that 21 days is enough to change a habit.
The truth, however, is that different habits require different times and effort. However, Anne Graybiel's work at MIT University has revealed how nerve patterns are formed in the basal ganglia that affect habits and actions. In her experiment, she had rats look for chocolate in a maze. It emerged that at first brain activity was high as the rats' brains learned their way to reward. Over time, brain activity remained high only at the beginning and end of the journey. It turns out that everything in between did not really require active thinking or learning.
Individuals learn when they face new experiences for the first time. They learn to walk through a maze to find chocolate, and then they stop learning without realising it. That's why organisations can seldom change on their own. The bad thing is that you can do things in your life that are not useful, healthy or appropriate without even thinking about their impact. You become stuck in routines.
In order for individuals or groups to acquire new habits, the first step is new experiences. Their brains engage in activity because things are new to them. This must be used. The experience must be new enough to engage and engaging enough to evoke new ideas. If it is a new idea delivered the old way, such challenges tell the brain to stop thinking.
At the same time, these engaging new experiences need to be presented repeatedly until new habits develop to replace the old ones. Likewise organisations cannot function without automating certain processes and behaviours.
It is also necessary to realise exactly what a new habit looks like, when it will occur and what will happen as a result. This is because the brain needs to create a path from a comfortable, soothing, familiar old habit to a new behaviour that may initially seem awkward and unreliable.
Habits are associated with goals. We want chocolate, so follow the path through the maze. Therefore, engage people by thinking about connecting what they want with what they do and the result. If old habits do not have an effect, then new behaviour can be built on the basis of desire. Visualise new goals for your staff. This method will make it easier for the mind to create new patterns that become new ways of behaving at a given time. This will then give birth to a new habit.
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