The Secret to Achieving All Your Goals: An Advanced Course in Personal Achievement by Roger Dawson

Author:Roger Dawson [DAWSON, ROGER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gildan Media Corporation
Published: 2016-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

The Vocabulary of Behavior Shaping

So that you can take full advantage of behavior shaping techniques, I’m going to teach you a new vocabulary for describing your behavior. You’ll find the effort it takes to learn it is well worthwhile. Once you understand behavior shaping and what it can do for you, you’ll gain greater control over every aspect of your life. Instead of feeling that things are just happening to you, you’ll see that everything you do is part of a chain of antecedents, behaviors, and consequences that you can easily identify and which go logically from one to another. By choosing to make adjustments at the correct point in the chain, you will automatically change your behavior. Remember that the only way you’re going to become all you can become is to change what you’re doing. Sure, changing the way you think is important, but unless it leads to changing the way you behave, nothing’s going to change for you.

Some of the terms I’m going to teach you will seem completely wrong until you take time to think about them and apply them to your behavior and the behavior of those around you. And the first principle I’m going to teach you is one that seems all wrong when you first hear it.

The first principle is that behavior is a function of its consequences. As I explained in chapter five, behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To analyze the behavior and the reason for it, you also have to consider what happened just before the behavior and just after the behavior. Do you remember which one is more important? What happens before or what happens after? I wouldn’t blame you if you said that what happens before the behavior influences it more. Something happens and we react to it, so it seems obvious that behavior is a product of what has just happened. However, you’d be wrong. That’s what Ivan Pavlov believed, but Burrhus Skinner proved him wrong. He taught us that behavior is a function of its consequences—that what happens after we do something is what controls our behavior, not what happens before.

Remember the horse-training story that I told you in chapter four? The horse could choose to join, or not join, with the trainer. If it chose to join, then the trainer would reward it with strokes and pats. If it chose not to join, the trainer would make it run around the ring again. The act of joining or not joining was the product of its consequences. It wasn’t reacting to something that had happened previously. It was reacting to what it was learning would be the consequences of its actions. Understanding this point is important in learning how to shape our own behavior, and the behavior of others. We relish dieting if we know that it will lead to a desired loss of weight. What we hate doing is depriving ourselves when we’re not sure it will work. When we’re unsure of the consequences, we’re far less motivated.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.