Happy 2018 everyone, welcome to the new year. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea and today's episode we're going to actually be re-earing a previous episode of Developer Tea and it's relevant to the new year. We're going to be talking about the anatomy of change today, one of last year's most popular episodes. We're talking about this because so many of you and including myself at the beginning of a new year you set goals for the year and whether it's a cliche or not it doesn't really matter. That goal setting process that's something that a lot of you are doing and as you're thinking about setting those goals I want you to be thinking about change and how change occurs and so that's why we decided to re-eare this episode today. If you're listening to this podcast for the first time and you like the challenges that we present here on the show I recommend that you join other developers like you and subscribe to this podcast. We're going to be growing this community much deeper, much deeper connections hopefully this year than any year previously and I'd love for you to be a part of that if you are a driven developer. That's who we're targeting on the show. Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get back to this episode from last year the anatomy of change. Today we're going to be talking about something that a lot of you are already thinking about and we talked about it last year as well and that is some kind of resolutions. Hopefully you kind of saw this coming when we said that we're bringing in the new year by talking about change and so many people in the beginning of a year for whatever reason many reasons we can talk about a few of those in a minute but this is the time where people are trying to commit to some sort of change and a lot of times people end up failing at that and part of what I want to do here on this podcast is help you make commitments that you can keep, help you make commitments to change that you can keep and commitments to change. That is a very broad discussion to have. There's so many different types of commitments you can make, so many different types of resolutions, we talked about goals needing to be concrete whereas values are the things that drive those goals. So values are not concrete but goals are concrete and measurable. It's an incredibly important part of making these resolutions in the beginning of the year. And again there are many different ways that people fail at this, many different types of failure. One of the types of failure is simply never starting, never actually taking the first step to do whatever it is that you've resolved to do. That underlying word resolve, that means you've made the decision you've decided to move forward but you never actually take a step of action. Another type of failure is of course falling off of that action train after a certain period of time. A lot of people will resolve for one or two maybe three weeks and then for whatever reason whether it's a will power issue or maybe they get sidetracked, they don't have a way of staying accountable to themselves, they end up not continuing that action that they resolved in the beginning of January to continue. Another reason a lot of people end up not following through with these resolutions and this is kind of a strange one, a lot of people end up not sticking to their resolutions because they feel like since they didn't start on the exact day, whether that's January 1 or maybe December 31st, whatever arbitrary day that you've chosen, because you didn't start then you've already broken it. Because you started late or maybe because you broke it on one day because maybe you were traveling and it was difficult to stick to that resolution, maybe you're recuperating after the holidays. There's really a myriad of reasons why this time of the year is volatile for a lot of people. That's another reason why people end up not following through with their resolutions. Obviously, there are so many other reasons people don't follow through. Sometimes they don't follow through because they've set too lofty of a goal and pretty much out of the gate they realize that it's impossible. So why try to do something that's impossible? On the other hand, there are some resolutions that are ultimately boring. They don't inspire the person who has actually made the resolution. And there's a lot more out there that you can go and find. You can go and read and listen to the stories of your friends and look at your own past, determine the reasons why you didn't follow through with your own resolutions. I certainly have done this as well. Last year we talked about having resolutions that you follow up on in a more structured format, more specifically shorter term resolutions, perhaps a month-long resolution rather than a new year's resolution. And today's episode, we are going to talk about how to make good resolutions. We've already covered some of that and there's a lot of good content online. We may talk about that at a later date, maybe next new years. We'll talk about that. But instead, we're going to talk about kind of the anatomy of change. And this is a psychological model. We're going to talk about something called the trans theoretical model, the trans theoretical model. It's a behavioral model. It shows you how we change and more specifically how we change when we elect to change. In other words, when I decide that I want to change my behavior, this is often associated with things like quitting smoking or stopping another addictive behavior or perhaps weight management. These are things that the trans theoretical model applies to you in most literature that you're going to find online. But certainly, this can apply to anything that you elect to change or you elect to create a new habit. And that's because it is a general model that provides for you different stages, different stages of your change. And that's why we're calling it the anatomy of your behavioral change. These stages are in order pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Once again, that's pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. If you end up falling off the bandwagon, this is something that we've talked about, obviously, already on today's episode. If you end up not following through or somehow going back into a behavior that you had once stopped, or if you have discontinued a habit that you had intentionally started, then you've hit a stage called relapse. This is something that you've probably heard once again when referencing addictive behaviors and a drug abuse and that kind of thing. These different stages you go through pre-contemplation is before you're even thinking about making the change. This is the stage where you haven't really even considered making any particular change. Now, the thing that marks this stage or the beginning of this stage is that you are beginning to learn about the benefits of a potential change. Let's say that the change that you want to make this year is that you want to wake up 30 minutes earlier every day in order to write. You want to write in a blog or maybe you want to write in a personal journal, but you've decided that you want to wake up 30 minutes every day, 30 minutes early every day and write. At some point, you had to gain some kind of knowledge that started you down the path of thinking about the benefits of waking up early and writing. Whether you heard it from someone on a podcast like Developer Tea, maybe you read it, maybe you saw someone else do it through observation or maybe you even came up with it on your own. You somehow intuitively knew that this would help your career maybe. There is a stage that is happening where you haven't made the decision and you actually aren't even considering making the decision, but you are gaining knowledge about this. You're learning about the potential benefits of a particular behavior change. The second stage contemplation, this occurs when you start thinking about making the change. You are more aware of the benefits than you ever have been before and you're starting to imagine more specifically what your life would look like if you indeed did make those changes. Now, there's some key markers between the pre-contemplation and the contemplation stage that you need to understand. During pre-contemplation, you will tend to have a pros and cons war. You're considering the change, how it would affect your life very, very distantly. You're starting to become educated on whatever that change would do to your life, but you're generally overestimating the cons of that change in pre-contemplation. During the contemplation phase of the trans-theoretical model, you're actually equalizing the pros and the cons. You're starting to recognize that the pros list is a little bit bigger than you thought it was and the cons list is a little bit smaller than you thought it was. Once again, at this stage, you haven't really made a decision. You haven't really weighed the odds completely in such a way that you see the pros outwanging the cons. You're still kind of in limbo, still balancing whether or not it's a good idea in the contemplation phase. That's exactly why it's called the contemplation phase. A lot of people end up staying at the contemplation phase. They stay at the contemplation phase about many different changes that they could make in their life. A lot of the time, the cons list that they have could actually be diminished by a different behavior change. This primary decision that you're trying to make, you have a cons list. There are many ways to get around those cons, but a lot of the time we use that cons list. We use that balance between the pros and cons as an excuse for not executing, not moving into the next phase, which is, of course, preparation. During the preparation phase, you are kind of leaning up to the action phase. The whole point of the preparation phase is to allow your life to accommodate the new changes that you are about to make. For example, waking up early in the morning, you might start by waking up 30 minutes early, when really your long-term goal is to wake up two hours early. You start integrating this change. You start adjusting your lifestyle a little bit. Perhaps you start going to bed a little bit earlier. Maybe you move a TV out of your bedroom into the living room so that you aren't tempted to stay up and watch TV. Instead, you can go to bed at the time that you chose to go to bed at. Tons of different things that you could be doing in the preparation phase that are not actually necessarily directly accomplishing the resolution that you've made, the change that you specifically decided to do, which is wake up early and start writing. Other examples of preparation phase may be saving up money if you need money for your particular resolution. If you are looking to lose a little bit of weight, maybe you buy different foods, you clean out your pantry of unhealthy foods, you may go to the gym and buy a gym membership, and a lot of people, once again, in the early part of the year, they get to the preparation phase and maybe a few steps into the action phase and then they fall off. Once again, the preparation phase is leading up to the action phase. It's preparing your life, adjusting some of the pieces and parts of your life to accommodate for that new behavior. The next phase is perhaps the hardest phase of all, and part of the reason it's the hardest phase of all is because it quite often becomes the most boring phase of all. During preparation, you are actually experiencing some of the parts and pieces of the change that you are trying to make occur. But during the actual action phase, you've changed a behavior and you may not see the results that you were looking for right away. That change is very often uncomfortable, for example, in our previous discussion about waking up early and writing. On day one, you may feel very uncomfortable writing. You may be groggy and tired. You may not be able to get the right words out onto the paper. In fact, that could last for three or four months even. The feedback mechanism that we're looking for as humans, we're looking for the change to affect something a lot of times it takes longer than we expected to. The excitement of making a decision to change and the excitement of preparing to make that change and all of the pros that we weighed against the cons in the contemplation phase, very often, especially early in the action phase, we don't see those pros coming to light. In fact, it's often very boring, very dull and difficult and painful to go through the action phase. This is where most of your energy and resolve, once again, going back to that word resolution, this is where that comes into play. I want you to go back and listen to this episode any time that you're in that action phase in the upcoming months and perhaps even in the upcoming week. Come back and listen to this episode, remind yourself that the action phase is difficult. It's not easy. It's not even exciting most of the time. That's what it's like to be in the action phase. It can be boring. It can be difficult and it takes a lot of energy and resolve to stick to your resolution. I'm not going to give you any hacks to get around that today. I'm not going to give you any mental games to play to stick to your resolution because sometimes the things that we resolve to do are not easy. Sometimes quite simply, you have to deal with the fact that it's hard. It's difficult. A person who sticks to their resolutions on the other side of that, they are rewarded. Keep that in mind. Unfortunately, I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you today because the reward isn't in the process. It's on the other side. The pros and cons that you weighed, the only way to get those pros is to stick to your resolutions to go through the hard parts. Once again, the action phase, that's the hard part. Stage five, the next stage is maintenance. People at this stage have typically experienced some kind of victory or they've hit some kind of milestone. They've gotten to a place where they made a change. They went through that action phase and they reached a goal. There's some really good things. There's some good feelings that go along with the maintenance stage. There's also the potential of a bad situation occurring. Specifically, the good habits that you built up, now that you have accomplished something, it may feel like you can quit. It's crossing a finish line and suddenly slowing away down. This can be kind of a sneaky situation where you end up relapsing. That's exactly what that next phase is, relaps, because you end up in a situation where you feel like you've accomplished what you set out to accomplish and now you are lacking direction or perhaps you're lacking the same conviction that you had in the action stage. It's important to not take for granted that the maintenance phase is very, very fragile and very important to maintaining all of the things that you resolved to change permanently about your own behavior. There are some goals that are not necessarily permanent. There are some goals that do have finish lines where your behavior can revert to a different version of what you were for that specific period of time. There are some things that you can consider a stage or just for a period of time. If you are indeed trying to make a permanent change, then you have to realize that the remainder of your life is going to be a maintenance phase for some of those changes that you've made. So stay vigilant about maintaining those behaviors. Stay vigilant about building your environment in such a way that you're not tempted to go back to what you were doing before. Don't bring the TV back into your room if you do want to wake up 30 minutes early every day and write. So in recap, the five stages of the trans-theoretical model, pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Of course, if you fall into relapse, then you go back into the action phase or perhaps to the preparation phase, depending on how deeply you relapse. I hope today's episode has been valuable. I hope it's been helpful to you if you are planning new resolutions for your year just like last year. Doing something new, making change is difficult. And a lot of the things that I challenge you to do on the show, they're going to be difficult. Becoming a good person or becoming the person that you want to be. Let's put it that way. That's not an easy task. It's not something that you can just flip a switch and start being the way that you want to be because your body, your brain, all of those emotions that are jumbled up inside of that, all of those habits, all of those things are difficult to change. They have seemingly a mind of their own, but really it's more that they take more than just a decision. It takes action and it takes continuous follow-up. It takes an explicit understanding of what your goals are. So I hope that you were challenged by this in a good way and I hope that you were energized for the new year. I hope also that if you were challenged by this episode in a good way and if you found it valuable, that you will take a moment to subscribe to the show. There's more content like this coming this year and I'm more excited about this year than any year previous because we're really going to be focused on these three kind of core pillars of Developer Tea, the principles, the practices and the purpose. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.