How much will awareness affect your motivation to change behaviours?
1 star health ratings on your Coco Pops – off putting, but is it enough to make you swap them for some healthier Weetbix?
A gruesome image on the side of a cigarette packet – shocking, right.
Is it enough to stop you from buying that next packet?
Will awareness into health implications increase your motivation to change your behaviour?
Much of the research into the motivational factors contributing to behavioural change is associated with health.
I saw an interesting article out recently from ABC calling for an update of the smoking warning labels featured on cigarette packets. They quote research which has found less than a third of Australians are aware of a whole host of additional diseases that smoking can cause, other than widely acknowledged issues such as heart disease and lung cancer.
It’s an interesting proposition to consider – the research saw that most people know smoking causes 13 key diseases – but they don’t know that it affects another 10 diseases. If they did have more awareness around these extra diseases – would it make any difference?
I’d hazard a guess it wouldn’t – with perhaps the notable exception of erectile dysfunction! I have a feeling this might prompt guys into behavioural change more than the risk of kidney disease.
It really is fascinating that people already know that smoking is increasing their chances of death and yet they continue. The question is – what could we leverage to help them really shift their behaviours? What are the fears, needs, thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs that drive the behaviour to smoke? And in fact this goes way beyond smoking, to any poor health choice, poor decision-making, poor leadership – you name it.
Last year Dustin DiTommaso introduced me to work being done at the Centre of Behavioural Change, UCL London – and specifically to their BCT taxonomy, with much of the research being undertaken in the areas of health. I think we can learn a lot from the health field in terms of behavioural change. And of course, with this type of behavioural change, longevity of life frequently depends on it.
Awareness may be enough to support behavioural change to a degree, but real behavioural change goes way beyond awareness. This is particularly true when it’s something that’s so habitual.
Of course this pertains to corporate learning too. Whether you are trying to achieve transfer, retention, embedding, or reinforcement of learning, awareness of knowledge and the expectation of application is great, but it’s not enough.
Ensure that you do create awareness for learners by defining what you want to see or observe people doing differently as a result of this initiative back in their day to day role. And then go a step further. Support learners to change their behaviours with accountability, and reflection, in much the same way that motivational interviewing is being introduced into the health field.
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