What it Takes to Eliminate a Counter-productive Behavior Pattern

QUESTION: You say that repetition and reinforcement cause brain cells to grow together to form a network that establishes a behavior pattern. You also say that because the connections are physical, the behavior pattern is permanent. If there’s no delete button for a behavior pattern, how can we replace a bad habit with a good one, if the bad habit has been reinforced over a lifetime?

ANSWER: This question spotlights the biggest challenge in leadership development. Leadership skills consist mostly of people skills, which are initially learned in life, not in a classroom. So by the time people get involved in leadership development, their people skills—both counterproductive habits and effective ones—have been reinforced for decades. And no, you can’t erase or delete the physical neural networks that enable these old patterns. The only thing that can remove them is aging. If a pathway isn’t activated over a period of years, eventually it will atrophy.

What works is not to eliminate the old pattern, but to stop using it. Leadership development programs introduce new patterns or skills that are so effective and deliver such positive results that an individual is motivated to use the new patterns instead of the old ones. At first, doing something differently may seem awkward and frustrating, but with enough reinforcement, a new neural pathway will establish itself and the new pattern will become familiar, easy and automatic.

At this point two pathways—each enabling two different ways of doing the same thing—have been established in the brain. The old pathway still exists, but the person stops using the old way in favor of the new one. It’s like when a superhighway is built alongside an old country road. The old road still exists, but it’s not the most effective way to get where you’re going, and eventually it falls into disuse and disrepair.

The key is to persist during the awkward, frustrating phase of initial development, to continue practicing and reinforcing the new skill until the new pathway establishes itself—a period that could last many months. It's a hard thing to do alone. Success usually depends on whether the individual's environment supports his or her efforts with an extended, structured program of ongoing learning, ongoing feedback, coaching and accountability.

Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com

Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.

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